Anna Karenina Summary: Tolstoy's Great Novel of Love, Marriage and Society
What Anna Karenina is about
Leo Tolstoy published Anna Karenina in book form in 1878, after serialising it between 1875 and 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger. All but the final part appeared there. Tolstoy called it his first true novel, and it is widely held to be among the greatest works of world literature. He did not enjoy finishing it. By the time he was writing the last instalments he had come to hate the book and completed it unwillingly.
The story runs on two tracks. One follows Anna Arkadyevna Karenina, the wife of a senior government official in Saint Petersburg, and her affair with the cavalry officer Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky. The affair scandalises Petersburg society and drives the couple to flee to Italy in search of happiness. When they return to Russia, their lives unravel further. The second track follows Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin, a shy, restless, passionate landowner who lives on his country estate rather than in the city, and his pursuit of the young Princess Kitty Shcherbatskaya.
The novel opens in Moscow with a household in chaos. Prince Stepan Oblonsky (Stiva) has been unfaithful to his wife Dolly with the family governess. Dolly has found out. Stiva sends for his married sister Anna to come from Petersburg and calm things down. At the railway station, Anna and Vronsky meet for the first time, and a railway worker falls under a moving carriage and is killed. Anna reads it as an evil omen. Everything that follows grows from those two meetings.
The main characters
Anna is beautiful, warm and persuasive. She talks Dolly into forgiving Stiva with real feeling, which makes her own later choices sharper. She is married to Karenin and has an eight-year-old son, Seryozha. Count Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin is a senior government official, concerned above all with the couple's public image, and he at first believes his wife is above suspicion. Count Vronsky is a cavalry officer and a keen horseman. He pays court to Kitty for amusement, then abandons that entirely once he sees Anna.
Kitty is eighteen and in her first season as a debutante, expected to marry well within her class. She refuses Levin's proposal because she believes Vronsky will offer for her, encouraged by her mother, who thinks Vronsky the better match. Her father favours Levin. At the ball, Vronsky dances with Anna instead, and Kitty understands at once what has happened. Her health fails afterwards and a specialist advises a health spa abroad.
Levin is Stiva's childhood friend and in many ways the counterweight to the Petersburg world. He goes back to his estate after Kitty's refusal, giving up on marriage. Dolly is the quiet moral centre of the Moscow household, wounded and practical.
The themes
Tolstoy works through betrayal, faith, family, marriage, desire, Imperial Russian society and the gap between rural and urban life. The novel is built on comparison. Stiva's infidelity is forgiven and absorbed by the family. Anna's is not. The difference is not moral but social, and Tolstoy lets the reader sit with that. Society punishes the woman and shrugs at the man.
Class and appearance run through everything. Karenin's first instinct is reputation. Kitty's mother calculates matches. Betsy, a fashionable socialite and Vronsky's cousin, presides over a circle where an affair is tolerable as long as it stays discreet. Against this, Levin's life on the land offers a different set of values.
Trains are the novel's governing motif. Major turning points happen on passenger trains or at stations in Petersburg and elsewhere in Russia. Anna and Vronsky first see each other at a station. Vronsky confesses his love on an overnight journey. The death at the station in Part One hangs over the book.
The epigraph is "Vengeance is mine; I will repay", from Romans 12:19, which itself quotes Deuteronomy 32:35. It warns that judgement is not for the characters, or for society, to hand out.
Why it still matters
The novel is set against the liberal reforms of Emperor Alexander II and the fast social change that followed. That backdrop gives it an unsettled quality that still reads as modern. The book runs to eight parts and 239 chapters, and it moves between a marriage, an estate, a government office, a racecourse and a ballroom without ever losing its grip.
Its first line is among the most quoted in fiction. It has been adapted for theatre, opera, film, television, ballet, radio drama and even figure skating. The reason is simple enough. Readers keep recognising these people: the husband who minds what others think, the sister who forgives, the young woman who chooses wrong, the man who wants an honest life and cannot work out how to build one.
It suits readers who want a long novel with real weight, who are drawn to stories about marriage and its costs, and who do not need the moral tidied up at the end.
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