“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So reads the famous first line of Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece of love and society. Its juxtaposition of universal verity with particular insight sets the tone for the eight hundred pages that follow. Anna Karenina is intimate—a tale of families and lovers, their obligations to one another, the costs of both betraying and upholding unspoken codes of behavior. The novel is a gloriously detailed and absorbing portrait of the lives of the nineteenth-century Russian aristocracy, but that’s not why it’s so popular: Its power over readers endures because Tolstoy’s sympathy for men and women and his stunning psychological acuity are without rival. Legend has it that when he was asked to name the three greatest novels of all time, William Faulkner, whose fiction could not be less like Tolstoy’s, answered, “Anna Karenina. Anna Karenina. Anna Karenina.” You’ll see why.
Really two main stories. It's not just about Anna. It's also about Levin. I like to think about how Anna would have faired in the 21st century. Things would have been a lot different for her!
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