By Ann Wang ‘26
I finally finished all 962 pages of Anna Karenina last month, and I’m still reeling from it. It’s a book that’s so despairing yet beautiful at the same time—or perhaps beautiful precisely because of the despair it evokes. There is so much I want to touch on in this book review, but here are some of the big points that I picked out in my first read.
Relationships:
Tolstoy gives us all kinds of relationships to think about: Levin and Kitty’s awkward but sincere love, Oblonsky and Dolly’s messy marriage, and of course Anna and Vronsky’s all-consuming affair.
Levin and Kitty’s relationship shows how marriage can be successful and that love can survive imperfection. Dolly and Oblonsky, on the other hand, represent the exhausted, pragmatic side of marriage. Even from the start, Oblonsky’s infidelity is a wedge that frustrates Dolly, but she chooses to stay as a result of her sense of duty and fear of deviating from the norm. Anna and Vronsky’s relationship, though, is inarguably the most explosive and impulsive. Vronsky loves her passionately at first, but we see that love slowly fade as he intentionally blinds himself to her mental decline. He avoids acknowledging her internal turmoil as if he loves the idea of her more than the real, struggling person she becomes. Anna, weighed down and isolated by the ignominious label society gives her, becomes increasingly jealous and paranoid of abandonment from Vronsky, not as in his presence, but his love towards her.
Duty vs Justice:
Another notable character in this novel is Karenin, Anna’s husband. At first glance, Karenin seems to embody restraint, dignity, and moral uprightness, the very opposite of Anna’s passionate impulsiveness (when Anna’s affair with Vronsky becomes public, he reacts with an unnatural stoic composure). However, like Anna, he too is trapped by societal expectations, but his struggle lies between duty and justice. Ultimately, his sense of duty to his position and the moral code of society outweighed his compassion for Anna. Through Karenin, Tolstoy critiques society in its values of outward propriety over inner goodness.
Anna’s Suicide:
Despite the novel being called Anna Karenina, we actually get few chapters from the perspective of Anna herself. Thus, much of the image we glean of Anna in the book is from the perspectives of others. This narrative view puts us into the mindset of Anna herself; Anna has always been a woman defined by others: first as the perfect wife, then as the fallen mistress.
What truly pushes her from despair into self-destruction is indeed much more complex than heartbreak. It may be the sting of feeling shame from those who once respected her, like Dolly and Kitty; or maybe the realization that the life she once dreamed of—divorcing Karenin, beginning anew with Vronsky, and reclaiming her son—has not only slipped away but led her into emotional and social ruin. In the end, Anna’s tragedy is that her pursuit of freedom became another form of captivity, where the only escape she could imagine was death.
Social hierarchy:
I actually read this novel around the same time as Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, which both take place in Russian society but in extremely different social classes. What struck me is the similarities in breaking points for the two heroes in each story. In Crime and Punishment, isolation in his dingy room and denying the intense guilt building up from his act of murder destroy Raskolnikov; in Anna Karenina, isolation from society to avoid gossip and an intense paranoia about Vronsky’s intentions destroy Anna. The cages are on opposite sides of Russian society—one impoverished and the other living in luxury—but they’re cages all the same.
General thoughts:
In my opinion, you could almost compare this book to a (dark) reality TV show of Russian society; you get to see through the eyes of almost all the characters, giving you a multifaceted perspective and blurring the line between who is good and evil. I highly recommend reading it, especially if you enjoy exploring philosophical ideas and nuanced characters. However, you also might also want to clear your reading calendar for the next two months.