Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina is Leo Tolstoy’s second novel, following War and Peace (1869). Serially published in 1877, Anna Karenina depicts the efforts of its titular character to escape an unhappy marriage to her older, civil servant husband and pursue a love affair with a young and dashing count, Alexei Vronsky. The novel is a sweeping family drama exploring Tolstoy’s interest in marriage, family, agrarian politics, and gender roles. The work is also a portrait of Russian society after the emancipation of serfdom, depicting the nobility’s changing social role in a world where peasants were free laborers and increasing numbers of wealthy Russians lived urban lives far from their estates. For these reasons, it is frequently assigned not only in surveys of Russian literature, but also in history and cultural studies courses.

Tolstoy was born to an aristocratic family in 1828 and lived at his family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, which he inherited. Later, his short fiction focused on religious issues; he was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. Anna Karenina has been frequently adapted for film.

This guide refers to the 2000 translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which received the PEN/Book-Of-The-Month Club Translation Prize.

Content warnings for this work include descriptions of opioid use, suicidal thoughts and death by suicide, childbirth descriptions, postpartum illness, and mentions of child death.