Anna Karenina
1878
Anna Karenina arrives at a train station in St. Petersburg and changes everything. She is married, respectable, the mother of a young son and the wife of a powerful government official. Then she meets Count Vronsky, a cavalry officer with devastating eyes, and the carefully constructed world she has built around herself begins to collapse. Tolstoy traces her affair with unsparing precision: the thrill of new love, the desperate flight to Italy, the slow poisoning jealousy, and the unraveling that follows when she returns to a society that has sealed its judgment. But Anna is no simple cautionary tale. Tolstoy understands her completely, and so will the reader. Flanking her story is the tender romance of Kitty and Levin, whose journey toward honest love offers a quieter counterpoint. Together these narratives dissect what it means to live authentically in a world that demands conformity. The novel dismantled the rules of fiction when it appeared, and nothing has replaced it since.
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“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.””
— Leo Tolstoy
“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.””
— Leo Tolstoy
“I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.””
— Leo Tolstoy
“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.””
— Leo Tolstoy
“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.””
— Leo Tolstoy
“Spring is the time of plans and projects.””
— Leo Tolstoy
“Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?””
— Leo Tolstoy
“Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.””
— Leo Tolstoy
“I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.””
— Leo Tolstoy
