All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Tolstoy opens with this famous sentence and then proceeds to prove it across eight hundred pages of Russian society, agriculture, philosophy, and devastating emotional precision. Anna's affair with Vronsky unfolds alongside Levin's search for meaning in work and faith, and Tolstoy holds both stories in perfect balance. He wrote it while farming his estate, while questioning everything he believed, while being Tolstoy. The train that appears in the first chapters returns at the end. Dostoevsky called it flawless as a work of art. He was not wrong.