In brief
A married woman in Petersburg society falls in love with a cavalry officer, leaves her husband and son, and in mounting isolation throws herself under a train. That is half of the book. The other half follows a landowner called Levin, who wants to marry, to farm well and to know why he should go on living, and who gets the first two and comes within reach of the third. Tolstoy runs the two stories side by side for eight parts and lets them touch only a few times.
The title misleads anyone expecting a tragedy of adultery alone. It is closer to a census of how people in one class at one moment try to live: in marriage and outside it, on the land and in ministries, by faith, by habit and by appetite. What makes it great is less its scale than its attention. No novelist has been more exact about what a person notices in the second before they stop being honest with themselves.
The argument
The first sentence has become a proverb, and it is a slightly misleading one: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Levin’s marriage is full of jealousy, muddle and rage, and the novel’s happiest pages are as particular as its saddest. The sentence is better read as the voice of a society that likes epigrams, placed just before a chaotic household shows what it leaves out.
The real argument starts from Tolstoy’s epigraph, which says, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” The verse has been read both ways: as God’s judgement on Anna, and as a warning that judging her belongs to God and not to the people in the opera boxes. I think the second reading is the stronger, because of how the book spends its moral energy. Her brother Stiva deceives his wife in chapter one and is forgiven by chapter twenty, with Anna’s help. Vronsky, equally guilty by any honest count, goes on being received, sits at dinners and is courted at elections. Anna, when she appears at the opera, is publicly insulted by Madame Kartasova, and the insult sticks. Society’s rule is not chastity. It is discretion, and it falls harder on a woman who refuses to lie.
Yet Tolstoy will not make her simply a victim. Passion cannot do the work of a whole life. She cannot see her son, cannot love her daughter as she loved him, has no standing, no work and no company but one man, and she watches him for signs of boredom until she has produced them. By the end she has an account of the world to match her state: “Aren’t we all flung into the world only to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and each other?” That is not Tolstoy’s conclusion, but the novel makes you feel how convincing it is from inside.
Against that stands Levin’s discovery, which arrives after a period in which he hid a cord so as not to hang himself. A peasant remarks that one man lives for his belly and another “for his soul”, and the phrase breaks the deadlock. Levin concludes that the knowledge of good cannot come from reason at all: “If goodness has causes, it is not goodness.” He expects no transformation, and the book’s last words are careful about it. He will still lose his temper and quarrel, but his life now has “the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”
The shape of the book
There are eight parts and 239 short chapters, which is one reason the book reads faster than its length suggests. Part One sets everything moving in a few days of Moscow winter: Kitty refuses Levin because she expects Vronsky to propose, Anna arrives to mend her brother’s marriage, a railway guard is crushed at the station as she steps off the train, and at a ball Kitty watches Vronsky’s attention go to Anna. Part Two brings the affair and, at the steeplechase, the moment when Vronsky’s mistake breaks his mare’s back and Anna’s reaction gives her away. That same evening she tells her husband: “I love him, I am his mistress; I can’t bear you; I’m afraid of you, and I hate you.”
The centre of the novel is its false resolution. In Part Four, Anna, near death after childbirth, begs Karenin’s forgiveness, Karenin gives it and is transformed, and Vronsky shoots himself and survives. For a few pages all three are better than they have ever been. Then she recovers, and nobody can live at that height. Part Five takes the lovers to Italy and back. Part Six shows their estate through Dolly’s eyes. Part Seven brings the only meeting between Anna and Levin, the birth of Levin’s son and Anna’s death.
Part Eight is what readers often resent and what the book cannot do without. Anna is dead, the world is talking about the Serbian war, her name barely comes up, and Vronsky leaves to fight with a toothache and no wish to come back. The indifference is the point: the plot that had seemed to be the whole of the novel turns out to be one event among many.
The voice
Tolstoy’s narrator seems to have no style, which is a style achieved by very hard work. He tells you what happened and what each person was thinking, without visible strain, and moves between minds inside a scene as easily as a person looks from one guest to another. He even gives part of a snipe shoot to Levin’s dog Laska.
His great technical resource is the small physical detail that changes everything. When Anna comes back to Petersburg after meeting Vronsky, the first thing she sees of her husband is his ears: “Oh, mercy! why do his ears look like that?” Nothing has happened yet, and the marriage is already finished. When the lovers first sleep together, the chapter skips the act and goes straight to the aftermath, with an image that sets the tone for all that follows: “He felt what a murderer must feel, when he sees the body he has robbed of life.” And on the train home from Moscow, Anna cannot read her English novel because “She had too great a desire to live herself.”
Against this control stands the last journey. For two chapters before her death, Anna’s thoughts run on past shop signs and strangers, every sight turning into evidence of a universal hatred. It is an extraordinary passage for its date. The end is flat and fast: “Where am I? What am I doing? What for?” Then the novel allows itself its single sustained metaphor for a life, “the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil”, which flares up and goes out.
Two plots, one vault
The educator Sergei Rachinsky complained to Tolstoy that it had no architecture: two magnificent stories laid side by side with nothing to connect them. Tolstoy replied that this was the part he was proudest of. The vaults had been brought together so that nobody could see the keystone, and the connection did not lie in plot or in the relations between the characters. He said something similar to the critic Nikolai Strakhov: the meaning could not be drawn out of the book as a set of ideas, because it lay in the way everything was linked.
You can test this as you read, and the test rewards you. Levin mows with his peasants and enjoys those “moments of unconsciousness” in which the scythe seems to cut of itself; the same part has Karenin writing a calculated letter. Nikolay Levin’s death from consumption comes in the part where Anna and Vronsky are playing at art in Italy, and it is followed soon after by Anna’s secret visit to her son on his birthday. Kitty, who knows what to do at a deathbed when Levin can only look away, stands opposite Anna at her own childbed. In each pairing the book asks the same question from a different side: what does a person do when the part of life that cannot be arranged comes into the room?
The people who connect the plots on the surface are the Oblonskys, and I think this is Tolstoy’s best joke. Stiva is Anna’s brother and Levin’s friend, and it is he who brings about the only meeting of the two protagonists, taking Levin to see Anna one evening in Part Seven. The most irresponsible man in the book is the hinge on which it swings. His wife Dolly is the conscience that passes between both worlds; her drive to Anna’s estate in Part Six, spent thinking about what her own life of childbearing has cost her, is one of the most honest chapters in nineteenth-century fiction about what motherhood involves. It comes shortly before Anna tells her, of the means of having no more children, “I shall not, because I don’t wish it.”
The people
Anna
Her brilliance is not just reported to us; we see it, in how she settles Dolly’s crisis in an afternoon and in how the sour old world of Moscow warms when she enters. Her talent for managing what others feel is the same gift that later turns inward.
Vronsky
Easy to underestimate. He gives up a career for her, keeps faith with her when it costs him and is capable of real shame. What he lacks is an occupation for his days, and the book is hard on him for it: when he gets his wish, it gives him “no more than a grain of sand out of the mountain of happiness” he expected. His painting, his hospital and his estate are all attempts to fill the gap.
Karenin
Comic and chilly, with his cracking fingers and bureaucratic speech, he then does the most Christian thing anyone does in the book, at Anna’s bedside. His later collapse into Lidia Ivanovna’s spiritualism is one of Tolstoy’s cruellest turns.
Levin
Tolstoy’s closest self-portrait; even the name comes from Lev. He proposes to Kitty through the initial letters of words chalked on a card table and gives her his diary to read before their wedding, both of which Tolstoy did himself with Sofia Behrs.
Kitty
The girl who is ill with humiliation at the start becomes the only character with a practical gift for life. Her handling of the dying Nikolay, who frightens her husband, is the moment when she becomes more than a prize.
Stiva and Dolly
Stepan Arkadyevitch “was a truthful man in his relations with himself”, which is to say that he never pretends to repent. Dolly pays for him in worry and sold forests, and she does not condemn Anna.
How it was made
Two moments are usually given for the start. In January 1872 Anna Pirogova, the housekeeper and mistress of Tolstoy’s neighbour Bibikov, threw herself under a goods train at Yasenki station after he turned to another woman, and Tolstoy went to see the body. In March 1873, after glancing at Pushkin’s fragment that begins with guests arriving at a country house, he started writing, reportedly remarking to his wife that this was the way to begin. His wife’s diary shows the idea of a woman of high society who loses herself was already in his mind a couple of years earlier.
It took until 1877, with Sofia Tolstaya copying drafts, and he came to hate it in the closing stretch, a time when he too put away ropes and guns for fear of himself. The novel appeared in instalments in Mikhail Katkov’s Russian Messenger from 1875. Katkov, who supported the war in the Balkans, refused Part Eight because of its sceptical treatment of the volunteer movement, and printed a note in its place. Tolstoy brought out the last part separately, and the whole appeared as a book in 1878.
The Project Gutenberg text linked here is Constance Garnett’s translation, first published by Heinemann in 1901. It is complete, with all eight parts and every chapter, though this electronic edition leaves out Tolstoy’s epigraph.
Readers and critics
Dostoevsky, who disagreed with Tolstoy about the war, still wrote in 1877 that the book “as an artistic production, is perfect”. In English, Matthew Arnold’s essay of 1887 praised its “sense of the absolute reality of his personages and their doings”, and his listing of Karenin’s eyebrows and cracking joints is still a good account of how the realism works. Faulkner is reported to have named the book three times over when asked for the three greatest novels, and Nabokov taught it as one of the great love stories.
The main disagreement is over structure. Readers in Rachinsky’s line find the Levin chapters a digression; I would argue that the book is unintelligible without them, since only Levin’s plot shows what Anna’s lacks. The other quarrel is whether she is condemned or vindicated. The novel gives the evidence for both and refuses to act as a jury.
Afterlives
Few novels have been filmed so often. Silent versions date from 1911. Greta Garbo played her twice, in Love (1927), which had an alternative happy ending for American audiences, and in Clarence Brown’s film of 1935. Vivien Leigh followed in 1948 and Sophie Marceau in 1997. Joe Wright’s film of 2012, with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard, stages much of the action in a decaying theatre, an idea that suits a world in which everyone is watching. Most films nearly cut Levin out, which tells you what they are adapting. There are also ballets by Prokovsky, Eifman and Possokhov, and operas by Iain Hamilton and David Carlson.
How to read it
- Do not skip the farming. The mowing chapters in Part Three are among the happiest in fiction, and the economics chapters around them show what Levin is actually trying to do.
- Read Part Seven’s last chapters in one sitting. From her quarrel with Vronsky to the platform, they gather speed as her thinking narrows.
- Consider a newer translation. Garnett is free and readable. Hugh McLean, comparing seven versions, preferred the Kent and Berberova revision of Garnett and the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (2000). Rosamund Bartlett (2014) and Marian Schwartz (2015) are also worth trying, and the Maudes (1918) knew Tolstoy personally.
Read next
- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857). The other great novel of adultery, colder than Tolstoy and far less willing to enter its heroine’s mind without irony.
- Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886). Levin’s terror of death given a whole short book with no escape.
- Leo Tolstoy, A Confession (1882). The crisis at the end of the novel told without any fiction to soften it.
- George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–72). Written in the same decade, with the same interest in how many separate lives make a society, and more trust in the narrator’s voice.