Key themes
- Love, society and its punishments
- The search for meaning
- Parallel fates and moral counterpoint
About this book
A passionate affair against the grain of high society, threaded with one of fiction's most honest portraits of an ordinary good life.
Published serially between 1875 and 1878, Anna Karenina draws on the social world Tolstoy observed at close range and his own profound spiritual restlessness.
Discussion questions
- Anna and Levin are parallel protagonists — one destroyed by society, the other who finds a way to live within it. What is Tolstoy saying by keeping these two stories alongside each other?
- Is the novel fair to Anna? The society that destroys her is hypocritical and cruel — but Tolstoy also implicates Anna herself in her fate. How do you read that tension?
- Levin's spiritual crisis and eventual epiphany take up much of the novel's second half. How did you respond to this — as essential to the book's meaning, or a digression from the main story?
- The famous opening — 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way' — does it hold up? Does the novel prove or complicate this claim?
- The novel was written in the 1870s about a society beginning to crack under modernisation. What feels historically remote, and what feels like a study of pressures still very much alive?
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