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Anna Karenina (Russian: Анна Каренина, IPA: [ˈanːə kɐˈrʲenʲɪnə]) [1] is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in book form in 1878. Considered to be among the greatest works of literature ever written, [2] Tolstoy himself called it his first true novel.
Read an explanation of Russian naming conventions here. Anna Arkadyevna Karenina. A beautiful, aristocratic married woman from St. Petersburg whose pursuit of love and emotional honesty makes her an outcast from society. Anna’s adulterous affair catapults her into social exile, misery, and finally suicide.
As you might guess, their father’s Christian name was “Arkady.”. Russians call each other by the Christian name and patronym, rarely by surname. Anna’s surname also changed when she married “Count Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin,” but note that her married surname is “Karenina” because she is a woman.
Anna Karenina, novel by Leo Tolstoy, published in installments between 1875 and 1877 and considered one of the pinnacles of world literature. The narrative centres on the adulterous affair between Anna, wife of Aleksey Karenin, and Count Vronsky, a young bachelor.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Media Adaptations
- Characters
- Themes
- Topics For Further Study
- Style
- Historical Context
- Compare & Contrast
When it was first serialized in the Russian periodical Ruskii Vestnik from 1873 to 1877, Anna Karenina was a powerful and controversial novel. Indeed, to many readers, including Tolstoy himself, it signaled a radical shift in the already impressive history of the novel as a literary form. With its sweeping and complex plot lines, subtle characteriz...
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (known most commonly in English as Leo Tolstoy) was born into a wealthy Russian family on September 9, 1828. He was born on his family's estate in Tula province, and he had three brothers and one sister. His childhood was remarkable in the sense that it was spent enjoying the luxuries of the family estate and the opportunit...
Part One, Chapters 1-34
Anna Kareninais a long, intricately patterned novel divided into eight parts, each consisting of a series of short chapters. It begins with one of the most famous lines in literature: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This statement sets the tone for the complex plot that follows. The novel opens in the home of Prince Stepán Arkádyich Oblónsky, known more commonly as Stiva. His is a household in chaos due, in part, to the discovery that Stiva has b...
The first major film adaptation of Anna Karenina appeared under the same title in 1935, when director Clarence Brown cast Greta Garboin the title role along with Frederic March (Vrónsky), Basil Rat...The story was once again adapted as a film of the same title in 1948, when Julien Duvivier cast Vivien Leighas Anna and Kieron Moore as her lover. This is an almost melodramatic and very loosely ba...Yet another notable film adaptation made with the same title is the 1997 adaptation (directed by Bernard Rose), starring Sophie Marceau and Sean Bean. This was the first Western production of the n...Television adaptations have also made regular appearances on small screens across the world, beginning in 1961 with a production under the same title with Claire Bloom as Anna and Sean Conneryas Vr...Varvára Andréevna
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Betsy
Betsy (Princess Elizavéta Fyódorovna Tverskóy) is Vrónsky's first cousin. She becomes a wealthy and influential friend of the disgraced Anna. Much like Anna herself, Betsy has a propensity for living life to the fullest, which often brings her into conflict with social conventions.
Dolly
Dolly (Princess Dárya Alexándrovna Oblónsky) is Stiva's wife and Kitty's older sister. Her discovery of her husband's adultery opens the novel, and effectively introduces the moral and emotional issues that begin to further unfold with Anna's arrival. Dolly understands the subtleties of social and personal relationships, so when Anna is ostracized by society for her affair with Vrónsky, Dolly is very understanding and supportive. Appreciative of Anna's pursuit of happiness, she is at the same...
Conflict between Personal Emotions and Social Conventions
One of the central concerns of Anna Kareninais the often tragic conflict between the energies of private passion and inner emotions and the social conventions that are put in place to contain or control them. In such characters as Anna and Stiva, readers recognize lives being guided wholly by emotional responses and desires. Anna feels unloved by Karénin, so she responds openly to her feelings for Vrónsky. When she finally confesses her feelings to her husband, nothing really changes. Social...
Given that Tolstoy very carefully marks the idea of vengeance as crucial to his novel (see the epigraph that he has chosen), the idea of avenging oneself is often overlooked in discussions of the n...Select some film or television adaptations of the novel and view them with your class. Afterwards, conduct a discussion contrasting and comparing these adaptations to the original novel. How are th...Construct a journal of works of nineteenth or early twentieth-century art (paintings and photographs, most obviously) that you feel would effectively reflect the various backdrops against which thi...Rewrite one or more parts of Anna Karenina in terms of the culture of your day. Whereas Tolstoy's characters spend a great deal of time discussing agricultural methods and the influence of Western...Literary Realism
Often viewed as a predecessor to modernism, literary realism found its influential beginnings, most critics agree, in the novels of the Russian writer Tolstoy (including Anna Karenina) and the French novelist Honoré de Balzac (La Comédie humaine, 1845), as well as the English writer George Eliot (Middlemarch, 1871) and the American writer William Dean Howells (The Rise of Silas Lapham, 1885). Dedicated to the detailed depiction of life and society as they are rather than as we wish they might...
Interior Monologue
Tolstoy relied heavily on interior monologue as a narrative strategy that brings his characters to life. A type of stream of consciousness writing, interior monologue (sometimes called quoted stream of consciousness) presents a character's thoughts, ideas, impressions, and sensations in the form of a silent inner speech or as a silent form of talking to oneself. It is as if the reader is inside the character's head, and is privy to all that goes on there. The result is meant to mimic the free...
Economic Crisis and Transition
The late nineteenth century was a time of crisis in Russia. Technology and industry continued to develop rapidly, but lagged in substantive ways to the progress being made in Western Europe and even in North America. New markets, technologies, and theories developed on account of the dynamic powers emerging in a unified Germany, a modernized Japan, and a reunified (post-Civil War) United States. Russia was undeniably a powerful presence on the global scene, but it was also a society marked by...
1870s: During the nineteenth century, Russia responds to political and economic pressures with hesitant reforms. The tradition of serfdom is abolished in 1861, which leads to a series of reforms th...1870s: Russian agriculture is under pressure to adjust to new technologies, and this pressure is even greater due to the breakdown of the serf system and competition from expanding European markets...1870s: Novels about adultery are a relatively new phenomenon when Anna Karenina is first serialized. To this point, Russian marriages are frequently arranged by matchmakers, and are built on the as...Sep 5, 2024 · The novel’s first sentence, which indicates its concern with the domestic, is perhaps Tolstoy’s most famous: “All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Anna Karenina interweaves the stories of three families, the Oblonskys, the Karenins, and the Levins.
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Jun 14, 2019 · For the modern reader, "Anna Karenina" (and any 19th-century Russian novel) can seem imposing and daunting. Its length, its cast of characters, the Russian names, the distance between our own experience and more than a century of societal evolution combined with the distance between a long-gone culture and modern sensibilities make it easy to ...
