In the Library
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy, 1877
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 25 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Constance Garnett
- Original
- Original ru
- Chapters
- Chapters 239
- Length
- Length 349k words
£1.99
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Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
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- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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If you like this, try
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Leo Tolstoy
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Middlemarch
George Eliot
Eliot studies marriages straining against social expectation with the same patient realism, but spreads her sympathy across a whole English town instead of one tragic heroine.
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About the book
A train pulls into a snowbound Moscow station, a carriage door opens, and Anna steps down into the one glance that will undo her. She has everything the world counts: beauty, wit, an important husband, a place at the centre of Petersburg society. What takes it all from her is not love and not scandal alone but the exact arithmetic of both, a world that winks at a husband's affairs and bolts every drawing-room door against a wife who dares the same. Tolstoy lays a second life alongside hers, Levin out on his estate, scything hay beside his peasants, groping toward a God he cannot name and a happiness he half-distrusts. The wonder of it is the mercy: no one is a villain here, everyone is right inside their own pain. You will dread the final hundred pages and turn them anyway, unable to look away from where the train is going.