Anna Karenina Summary

Leo Tolstoy’s *Anna Karenina*, first published in serial installments between 1875 and 1877, is a novel of parallel lives set in imperial Russian society. It opens with the famous line about happy and unhappy families, then splits its attention between two central figures: Anna Karenina, a married aristocrat who begins an affair with Count Alexei Vronsky, and Konstantin Levin, a landowner who courts Kitty Shcherbatskaya after being rejected by her. The novel moves between Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Levin’s rural estate, contrasting city salon culture with country labor and family life. Tolstoy structures the book around several recurring frameworks rather than a single plot. One is the institution of marriage and its double standards: Anna’s adultery is socially punished while her brother Stiva’s infidelity is treated lightly. Another is Levin’s search for meaning through agricultural work, his book on estate management, and his eventual embrace of faith and peasant life. The novel also explores the tension between individual desire and social duty, and between urban modernity and rural tradition. Major set pieces include the Moscow ball where Anna and Vronsky dance, the horse race in which Vronsky falls, and Levin’s mowing scene with peasants. The book’s title character is not its only protagonist; Levin’s parallel story gives the novel its philosophical counterweight.