7. Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina

Book

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Penguin (Non-Classics) (2004), translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, ISBN: 0143035002

Program Description

How is it possible to live an authentic life when society seems to condone, and even to promote, falseness? In Anna Karenina, set against the turmoil and hypocrisy of 1870’s Russian upper-class society, Tolstoy addresses this question by interweaving the stories of characters whose struggles to live more fully lead to sharply contrasting ends. While Anna Karenina seeks meaning
in a passionate affair that seems to offer an escape from her arid marriage, Konstantin Levin, Tolstoy’s fullest self-portrait in his fiction, engages in a spiritual quest to live in harmony with the land and moral law. As Anna, Lenin, and the five other major characters struggle to understand themselves and their society, Tolstoy takes up a range of issues confronting the Russia of his day – the Russo-Turkish wars, reform of the relationship between landowners and peasants, the place of women, and the role of religion. His pioneering use of interior monologue brings the characters’ internal battles vividly to life, leading critics to
acclaim Anna Karenina as one of the greatest psychological
novels. To read Anna Karenina is to be confronted with the universal questions voiced by the anguished Lenin: “Who am I? And where am I? And why am I here?” The combination of such searching philosophical inquiry with a powerfully moving story led F.R. Leavis to call it “surely, the European novel.”

Discussion Leader

Nancy Carr is drawn to Anna Karenina by its complex, often confused characters, who seem so real and whose choices and fates raise universal questions about how best to live.