Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy, 1878
Held by Standard Ebooks, PG 1399read here
Read it here about 25 h of reading
Add to a shelf
Anna Karenina, a Petersburg statesman's wife, travels to Moscow to mend her brother Stiva Oblonsky's marriage and meets the cavalry officer Count Vronsky. Their affair scandalises society and ends their old lives. Beside it runs a second plot: the landowner Konstantin Levin courts and marries Kitty, who first turned him down for Vronsky, and tries to work out how to live on his land and what he believes. Anna's fall comes through jealousy and isolation. Levin's story ends in a quieter search for faith and purpose.
Where it happens
Through time
Who is in it, and behind it
Leo Tolstoy author
Russian writer, 1828 to 1910, author of War and Peace and Resurrection as well as this novel.12
Constance Garnett translator
Translator of the 1901 English version used here.3
Anna Karenina character
Stepan Oblonsky's sister, Karenin's wife and Vronsky's lover.1
Count Vronsky character
Cavalry officer and Anna's lover.1
Alexei Karenin character
Senior statesman and Anna's husband, twenty years her senior.1
Kitty Shcherbatskaya character
Dolly's younger sister and later Levin's wife.1
Stepan Oblonsky character
Anna's brother, a civil servant and man about town whose unfaithfulness opens the book.1
Dolly Oblonskaya character
Stiva's wife, who has discovered his affair with a former governess.1
What it is about
Happy and unhappy families
The first line sets the book's question: why each unhappy family differs, as the Oblonskys' crisis shows.1
Vengeance is mine
The epigraph, from Romans, hangs over the judgement of Anna by herself and by society.1
City against land
The novel sets Petersburg and Moscow society against the life of a landowner tied to his farm.1
In its own words
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
Vronsky drove to the station of the Petersburg railway to meet his mother, and the first person he came across on the great flight of steps was Oblonsky, who was expecting his sister by the same train
Levin lost all sense of time, and could not have told whether it was late or early now. A change began to come over his work, which gave him immense satisfaction. In the midst of his toil there were moments during which he forgot what he was doing, and it came all easy to him, and at those same moments his row was almost as smooth and well cut as Tit’s
Do you know Madame Karenina? We are traveling together. I am going to see her now,” he said in French, carefully scrutinizing Golenishtchev’s face
Where am I? What am I doing? What for?” She tried to get up, to drop backwards; but something huge and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back
God save the Tsar,” then shouts of “hurrah!” and “ jivio! ” One of the volunteers, a tall, very young man with a hollow chest, was particularly conspicuous, bowing and waving his felt hat and a nosegay over his head
The shape of the book
239 chapters, 350,257 words. Point at a bar.
How it came to be here
Tolstoy published the novel in installments from 1875 to 1877 in The Russian Messenger, and as a book in 1878. He called it his first true novel, and by the last installments he had come to hate it and finished it unwillingly. It is set in the years of Alexander II's liberal reforms and rapid social change, and trains recur through the plot. Many readers take Levin to be Tolstoy's alter ego. The site carries Constance Garnett's 1901 English translation in the Standard Ebooks edition.
Free to read elsewhere
- Standard Ebooks this edition
- Open Library search editions you can borrow or read
- HathiTrust search full-view scans
- Project Gutenberg search
Sources
- Anna Karenina (Wikipedia)
- Leo Tolstoy (Wikipedia)
- Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett (Standard Ebooks)
Text: PG 1399 | translator: Constance Garnett. CC0 (Standard Ebooks).