A novel set in Russia in the early 1870s: written and published between 1874 and 1877.
by Leo Tolstoy
Synopsis
Anna Karenina, a married woman of the upper class, falls in love with Count Vronsky, a dashing young army officer. After having a child by Vronsky, Anna supposes he does not love her and commits suicide. Her story is balanced by that of Konstantin Levin, a rural nobleman who finds joy in his marriage and comes to realize that the answers to life's most profound questions lie in a happy family life.
The Novel in Focus
Events in History at the Time of the Novel
Count Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born into a noble family in 1828. Tolstoy's youth was spent among the world of the upper-class gentry during the last decades of serfdom in Russia. Throughout his life, Tolstoy felt torn between his own conflicting attitudes regarding the future of Russia and those of his noble class. By the time Tolstoy was in his early thirties he had discarded most of the trappings of gentry life and was spending much of his time working with and teaching the peasants of his estate, not unlike his character Levin in Anna Karenina. The writer also became concerned about other pressing social issues of his period, many of which appear in the pages of this novel.
For More Information
Dukes, Paul. A History of Russia: Medieval, Modern and Contemporary. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974.
Engel, Barbara Alpern. Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia. London: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Hall, Sharon K., ed. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 4. Detroit: Gale Research, 1981.
Tolstoy, Leo, Anna Karenina. Translated by David Magarshack. New York: Signet Classic, 1981.
Troyat, Henri. Tolstoy. New York: Doubleday, 1967.
Wagner, William G. Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Literature and Its Times © 1997 Joyce Moss and George Wilson © 2007 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
