Since Anna Karenina is a novel (indeed, English literary critic F. R. Leavis called it “the European novel”) the focus on the family is part of a wider social critique. The family idea is both anxious and troubled, as the novel’s opening sentence announces: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (p. 5). The novel opens with a domestic crisis in the Oblonsky family, but this is only a frame for or introduction to the more insidious destruction of the Karenin family and the eponymous heroine that constitutes the main narrative of the novel. The larger backdrop of the novel is the reconstructionist period of Russian history following the sweeping reforms of the 1860s: the emancipation of the serfs, the restructuring of regional and local government, the institution of reforming committees, church and estate reform, the opening of the universities and professions to non-nobles and to women. Heavy censorship of the Russian press had pushed critical debates of government policy into the pages of novels. Anna Karenina is, therefore, more than a novel of adultery: It is topical and philosophical, and therefore has much in common with the works of Charles Dickens and George Eliot. The character who navigates the social and political dangers of the novel and connects the public sphere with the private family arena is Constantine Levin, whose efforts at estate management, agricultural reform, and the establishment of family happiness strongly echoes the life experiences of Count Leo Tolstoy himself.

The “family idea” was a constant ideal for Tolstoy throughout his life. His mother had died shortly after his birth, and his father in his tenth year. Later he would write that his childhood imagination dwelt on radiant images of a romanticized and harmonious, unbroken family life predating his birth. The four orphaned Tolstoy brothers developed an exceptionally close relationship, as demonstrated in their game the “Ant Brothers.” In Russian, the word for “ant” is similar to that for “Moravian,” and the boys, having heard about the Moravian brethren (a Christian sect that emphasized brotherly love), misconstrued the name. Clinging together in a long huddle, the boys became the “Ant Brothers,” bonded in their love. The death of two of his beloved brothers later in life would be extremely traumatic for Leo, precipitating the philosophical and religious crisis that absorbed him by the time he wrote Anna Karenina.

As a young man and beginning author, Tolstoy touched on ideas of “family happiness,” even writing a short novel by that name. Even so, like many of his contemporaries, he lived an immoderate life that involved gambling, drinking, and venereal disease. But when he finally married Sophia Behrs in 1862, he immediately began putting into practice the dreams and plans for domesticity he had fostered in his fantasy for so long. Like Konstantin Levin in Anna Karenina, Leo had been a friend of his wife’s family for many years and had been infatuated, in sequence, with each of the three daughters. The description of Konstantin Levin’s courtship of Kitty Scherbatsky incorporates in the pages of Anna Karenina many actual episodes from the Tolstoy courtship and marriage.

It was an early marriage for Sophia and a late marriage for Leo. His discovery that actual family life bore little resemblance to his dreams and anticipations became a chronic source of psychological distress. Although in his family letters Tolstoy fancifully describes his wife as having turned into a china doll, Sophia was, in fact, a separate individual, and a sense of the strain in the Tolstoy marriage is evident in the couples’ diaries and letters. Initially the marriage was successful: Tolstoy began work on War and Peace with Sophia serving as amanuensis; she recopied the lengthy manuscript seven times, in addition to fulfilling her duties as housewife and mother. However, by the time Leo was completing his second masterpiece, Anna Karenina, he describes himself as experiencing great inner turmoil and torment. In the last year of the novel’s composition, he turned to the study of religion and philosophy, which led him to a dramatic conversion experience, related in the novel’s final pages. This was the final wedge exacerbating the estranged relations of the Tolstoy family; the children chose up sides while the numerous earnest disciples of Tolstoy’s innovative ideas about faith and life overran the family estate. Any fiction of marital harmony was finally shredded in the notorious public scenes that brought the Tolstoys’ married life to its close. In his last weeks, at age eighty-two, Leo fled from his home, concealing his plans from Sophia. When he collapsed and lay dying at the Astapovo train station, she was refused entry. A chilling photograph was taken of Countess Tolstoya, peering anxiously through a tiny window in an effort to glimpse her husband before his death. She was admitted only when Leo was past all point of recognition or response.

Tolstoy’s literary works express his perplexity and anxiety about the relationships between men and women: He would return in his writings time and again to the paradoxes of sexuality, maternity, and conjugality. His first literary experiment, “A History of Yesterday,” portrayed the silent discourse of sexual attraction; an adulterous flirtation is carried out entirely in a dialogue of unspoken speeches. Later, in “Family Happiness,” sexual love is exposed as destructive of family life—it must be suppressed and evicted from the marital relationship, which is reduced to a well-modulated partnership of coparenting. Toward the end of his authorial career, Tolstoy would savage all notions of a licit human sexuality and urge continence and abstinence on a bewildered public. In his irascible short novel The Kreutzer Sonata, he would describe a man who claims to have been driven to murder his wife; his self-defense consists of blackening all social institutions, especially marriage, as unnatural and perverse. Following what the author himself admitted to be a bizarre yet logical sequence of thought, marriage is denigrated as institutionalized and socially acceptable prostitution; even the procreation of the species—the traditional religious sanction for conjugal relations—is dismissed as an inadequate reason for licensed cohabitation. No one should dare to give birth, rants the narrator, while destitute and needy children may be adopted. The only escape from the prison cell of the passions in this desultory philippic is into the monk’s cell of celibacy.

Yet Tolstoy had at the time of his greatest creative prowess dedicated his art to what are perhaps the most elegiac and successful literary descriptions of family happiness in all literature: the magnificent closing scenes of War and Peace. The heroes and heroines who began the novel as children and youths have survived war and chaos, and now ripen and mature into the new masters of their parents’ estates, rebuilding postwar Russia and raising a new generation of children, who, plentiful and playful, fill the final pages of the story with laughter, games, and hopes for the future—powerful images of regeneration and vitality, a commitment to life in earnest. This was Tolstoy’s best, and certainly most valiant, literary strategy for combating his besetting demons, sexual anxiety and the fear of death. It was not a conclusive victory, but for the time being it was enough.

The immense success of War and Peace transformed Tolstoy from a fairly well-established author to Russia’s leading novelist, outpacing his contemporaries Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Yet in the years that followed, Tolstoy began to experience considerable professional and personal discomfort. His next novel was to be another historical fiction, this time based in the age of Russia’s most colorful tyrant, Peter the Great. The research and writing for this project failed to captivate and inspire Tolstoy, and he found himself increasingly disenchanted with the life of the literary professional. Canceling his subscriptions to newspapers and the “thick journals” that were the main connection of the isolated, rural Russian intellectual to the urban culture of his day, Tolstoy secluded himself on his country estate, Yasnaya Polyana, and with a quirkiness that was to become characteristic, began studying Greek. He also devoted himself for a space of several years to the study of children’s education, and to compiling sayings, parables, and fables for his Primer for schoolchildren. He was by this time himself the father of a growing family; turning his literary talents in this direction reminds us endearingly of Charles Dickens, who drafted a laconic life of Jesus for his own children.

In a family photograph taken at the time Tolstoy began writing Anna Karenina, his erect embracing posture—along with the presence of his wife and children, who surround him—reveals a fierce possessive pride in his family and home life, at the same time that his facial expression betrays a chronic preoccupation with deeper doubts and ambivalence. His strongly held opinions about family life met with resistance from his wife, most notoriously in the matter of breastfeeding and child rearing. Bouts of illness and depression, difficulties in estate management, and the illness of his wife and children were constant drains on his equanimity. In addition, his sister’s marriage was failing and Leo became involved in the divorce negotiations; his familiarity with the legal aspects of divorce and custody and his firsthand experience with his sister’s difficulties most certainly informed his treatment of these subjects in Anna Karenina.

We have only family hearsay about how Tolstoy began to write the novel. According to Countess Sophia Tolstoya, her husband had begun thinking about a novel concerning a woman of high society and her fall through adultery: “He said that his problem was to make this woman only pitiful and not guilty.” This theme may have been suggested to Tolstoy by a distressing incident occurring at about that time. The cast-off mistress of a neighbor, whose name was Anna Pirogova, committed suicide by jumping under a train. Tolstoy viewed the mangled body as it was laid out at the station.

Sometime later, Tolstoy picked up a volume of the prose of Russia’s greatest poet, Aleksandr Pushkin, while searching through Pushkin’s collected works to find something suitable to read aloud to his ten-year-old son. The two literary fragments he happened upon encapsulate the entire story of Anna Karenina. Tolstoy expressed himself as captivated by Pushkin’s masterful use of the literary technique of in medias res—that is, he plunges directly into the action without the lengthy introduction more usual for the novel form, in which family history, a description of the local setting, and a brief biography would generally precede the action. However, Tolstoy himself had opened his magnum opus, War and Peace, in much the same way, so that critics of the novel’s first installments demanded to know who the main characters were and where the action was tending. Abandoning his plans for a novel set in the time of Peter the Great, Tolstoy wrote with enthusiasm to his friends and editor that he had begun a new novel that he expected to complete in a matter of weeks. It was instead to take almost four years and would cost him so much effort that he became “sick and tired” of his heroine Anna, who, he grumbled, was like an adopted daughter who had turned out badly: “If only someone else would finish (the novel) for me!” he complained. His distress in the creative process was considerable; he even canceled the first printing in order to start over from scratch, although he was forced to assume the publication costs for the aborted production himself.

The literary fragments by Pushkin that inspired Tolstoy to sit down and begin writing Anna Karenina were sketches for a novel about an adulteress who is ultimately cast off by her lover and society. The plot of adulterous love, the story of a doomed impossible passion, is common in Western European literature and typically creates a narrative that links love and death. Indeed Tolstoy had in his library that most famous nineteenth-century culmination of the literary tradition of adulterous love and death, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Yet Russian literary history had no native tradition comparable to Troubadoran love poetry, the cult of courtly love, the idea of the liebestod, or the novels of adulterous passion that capped the poetic tradition. Despite early sentimental prose accounts of young girls drowning themselves for unrequited love, like Nikolai Karamzin’s Poor Liza, Russian literature as it matured in the nineteenth century tended to invert and caricature European prose forms rather than directly imitating them. Indeed in his article “Some Words about War and Peace,” Tolstoy insisted that his work was not a novel, pronouncing with characteristic national pride and eccentricity that Russians did not even know how to write novels in the European sense of the word.

Tolstoy’s characterization of Russian literature as resistant to European literary shapes and narrative trajectories is certainly apt. The founding work of the nineteenth-century Russian novelistic tradition was Aleksandr Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin. The idea of a novel in verse is itself unusual, and Pushkin’s experimental form includes the invention of a new verse pattern, the Onegin stanza. Furthermore, he stages a narrative reversal of the liebestod by evacuating his love story of desire and thereby eliminating the fuel that fires the Western European romance. In the case of classic European star-crossed lovers, from Tristan and Isolde to Romeo and Juliet, the impossibility of their union generates a heated desire that only increases in response to obstacles. The lovers desire nothing so much as to perpetuate their longing for one another, a yearning that betrays its metaphysical dimension and shades into death—a death of the body that releases the ardent spirit.

In the earliest drafts of Anna Karenina, the heroine is named for Pushkin’s heroine, Tatiana, a naive country girl who, addicted to French novels and infatuated with the literary representation of ruinous love, projects a romantic silhouette onto the novel’s eponymous protagonist, Eugene. He not only refuses, rather discourteously, to sexually ravish and ruin the heroine, but he apparently has no desire to do so; instead he turns his disordered impulses against his poet friend, Lensky, whom he eliminates in a duel before his departure for Western Europe. In Onegin’s absence, Tatiana peruses the stacks of his personal library to discover that her beloved is an empty cloak, a mere parody, a “paper bullet of the brain.” Years later, returning to Russia, Eugene discovers the same young girl who once made love to him in the person of a society grande dame, the wife of a military grandee. But Tatiana has lost her desire for Eugene at the moment he discovers his desire for her; spurned, he rushes from the pages of the novel to seek his death.

It is fairly clear that in taking up the well-used plot of adulterous love in response to Pushkin’s sketches, Tolstoy intended to quiz the ethos of love and death that spiritualized into tragedy the adulterous love stories of Western European literature. Initially he sketches his heroine satirically : She is fat, vulgar, and obvious; she chomps on her pearl necklace and flirts openly with her lover in her husband’s face. But these omens of overindulged physicality vanish in the final characterizations of Anna Karenina, whose grace, vitality, maternal warmth, and beauty are instead slowly and painfully extinguished over the inexorable course of the novel. It is her lover who becomes coarse: An artistic, sensitive man in the earlier drafts, by the final version he is a dilettante and a poor sportsman, riding his lovely racehorse to death through his own corpulence and clumsiness. He becomes a corporeal “hunk of beefsteak” who runs to fat and loses his hair and teeth. In similar fashion, the husband, a more sympathetic type in the first versions of the novel, becomes physically grotesque in the novel as we read it, with his huge ears, stammer, and unpleasant habit of cracking his knuckles.

Satirical impulses are directed at every other character in the novel: the bon vivant (Anna’s brother, Stiva), the sanctimonious religious hypocrite (Countess Lydia Ivanovna), the society flirt (Countess Betsy Tverskaya), the careerist (Karenin). The heroine, Anna, is protected from the broad brushstroke of social critique, but whether she is meant to be portrayed as a victim or a participant in the book’s destructive social machinery is the highly debated question the novel puts to us.

The moral transgressions of adultery and the violations of social proprieties as understood by nineteenth-century Russian high society can hardly come under censure by today’s reader: Anna Karenina remains as sympathetic and compelling as any heroine in literature. Writers like D. H. Lawrence claim for Anna and her lover the role of sympathetic martyrs, crushed beneath the wheels of an implacably conventional and hypocritical society; but Tolstoy was to be condemned for “putting his finger in the balance” to bring the novel to a moralistic conclusion. Yet Anna’s suffering may not be entirely due to her moral transgressions and afflicted conscience, just as her experience of social ostracism and rejection cannot fully account for the growing sense of explosive inner turmoil, psychological conflict, and distress she undergoes.

Once the novel was well underway, Tolstoy introduced a second leading character, one completely uninvolved with Anna’s story, Konstantin Levin. The name Levin is clearly derived from Tolstoy’s own first name Leo (Lev, in Russian). Tolstoy’s family nickname, Lyova, suggests that the name Levin might best be pronounced “Lyovin.” The details of Levin’s courtship, marriage, and family life are frankly and obviously poached from Tolstoy’s own personal experiences, while Levin’s ideas and struggles with agricultural theory and religious philosophy duplicate Tolstoy’s intellectual preoccupations at the time he was writing Anna Karenina. It is always dangerous to impute the role of authorial “mouthpiece” to a character in a novel; however, there is no question that Levin voices many of Tolstoy’s most cherished values. Early on, Anna’s brother (a bon vivant whose own carefree violations of morality and family values merely add to his joie de vivre) compares Levin to a “Dickensian gentleman,” one Mr. Podsnap, who, by his signature gesture, appears to fling life’s problems over his right shoulder. Levin is indeed Dickensian in more than his eccentric habit of roughly dismissing complex matters; his yearnings are the same as those of the hero of the English novel Anna reads during the nightmarish train ride on which she can escape neither her lover, who pursues her, nor her own fears and passions.

The quest of the hero of the nineteenth-century social novel is for estate, patrimony, a suitable marriage, and an intact inheritance; the only dragons to be slain are social ones. In Anna Karenina, these are exactly Konstantin Levin’s goals: He wishes to marry and father a large brood of children, and he wishes to build up his family estate successfully. He is challenged from the opening pages of the novel in both aspirations: The girl he proposes to refuses him, and his estate, like most in Russia after the emancipation of the enslaved serfs in 1861, was no longer profitable. Much of Levin’s story is focused on his efforts to establish the new foundation on which the Russian estate could prosper, and he dreams of writing a book of great genius—even comparing himself to Benjamin Franklin—that will settle the agricultural question once and for all.

Many readers of the novel find that Levin’s story hardly pays its way through the hundreds of pages it generates: The great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky dismissed the character as uninteresting, commenting that “Russia has hundreds of Levins,” while Tolstoy’s wife observed trenchantly that Levin was an “impossible man,” the perfect picture of her husband but lacking his great talent. Yet Anna’s story, that of a doomed love affair and a woman’s conflict over remaining with her husband and son or abandoning her family to elope with her lover is, if anything, even more of a novelistic cliché than the story line of the country squire and his estate. Tolstoy himself referred to his novel as “low” and “banal” in its focus on the quotidian. It is one aspect of Tolstoy’s great genius that his literary pictures of the everyday and the commonplace open effortlessly onto another, more transcendent dimension.

From the moment Tolstoy introduced the character of Levin into the work, he began structuring the novel dualistically. Early titles like “Two Marriages” and “Two Couples” emphasized the doubled structure, and he toyed with aphoristic openings for the novel that would establish this essential thematic contrast. Before he settled on the famous opening line contrasting happy and unhappy families, he had crafted a similar apothegm : “Some think marriage a game; for others it is the most serious business of their lives.” The novel appeared in installments, so that Anna’s adulterous love story and final break from her family alternates with Levin’s struggle to forget the girl who has refused to marry him and to master the agricultural conundrum posed by his estate. Other essential oppositions that structure the work reflect a very real ideological polarity, so that the values debated in the novel are mapped dichotomously: city versus country, society versus family, St. Petersburg, the window onto Europe, versus Moscow, the ancient Russian capital.

The double construction of the novel and its insistent and repeated oppositions reflect a very real polarity in the Russian intelligentsia of the day, so that both plots of the novel—the adulterous love story and the acquisition of family and estate—articulate contemporary cultural anxieties. These concerns may be summarized in the still-ongoing debates about Russia and the West. These debates were hardly theoretical—the Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century was confronted with a series of pressing social problems in the wake of the midcentury reforms. These problems, known as the “accursed questions,” covered every aspect of private and political life, from the “agricultural question” to the “woman question” to the “sexual question.” Leading ideological positions among the intelligentsia were polarized according to whether one believed that social problems should be solved by retaining traditional, native Russian mores and practices, or trusted that theoretical and technologically advanced approaches, derived from Western Europe, could be imported and adapted to local Russian conditions. Adherence to the latter position seemed to emerge from an uncomfortable sense of Russian inferiority vis à vis the more advanced West, and thinkers advocating the adoption of Western techniques were dubbed Westernizers. Those who supported traditional Russian folkways, like Konstantin Levin, and who ascribed a heartless inhumanity to Western-derived technology celebrated the compassion and sublimity of the Russian soul, the communal traditions of the Russian village, and the Orthodox Church, while exalting the folk wisdom of the Russian peasant over the scholastic hairsplitting of Western political philosophy. Such thinkers came to be known as Slavophiles. In Anna Karenina, Vronsky’s management of his estate according to the English model is contrasted unfavorably to Levin’s efforts to adjust technological innovations to native Russian practices. Levin himself refuses for a time to wear European-style clothing and, as Tolstoy did, dresses in Russian peasant garb and works among the peasants in the fields. The goal of his agricultural reforms is to create an equal partnership between landowner and peasant in the form of a cooperative.

The ideological separation of Westernizer versus Slavophile maps easily onto Russia’s twin capital cities, so that, when characters travel from St. Petersburg to Moscow, it is a journey rendered symbolic by one of Russia’s earliest political novels, Aleksandr Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. The Russian reader easily understood that this is a metaphysical and sociopolitical journey across terrain torn by ideological battles for the soul and future of Russia and her people, just as in Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls (1842) journeys through the muddy and inaccessible Russian countryside acquire the mythological shape of Dante’s Inferno.

St. Petersburg is a highly mythologized urban space. It was designed by utopian urban planning experts—the best Europe could provide—at the decree of Czar Peter the Great, and built on the uninhabitable swamps of the Gulf of Finland at the cost of many lives. It was meant to be the ultimate in modern, Western-styled urban and architectural construction, a sparkling gem and Russia’s only Western seaport. St. Petersburg casts shadows over Moscow, the ancient capital of medieval Russia and the heart of the Russian countryside, whose birch groves and fertile fields tended by simple peasants of simple faith were endlessly romanticized in the pages of Russian literature portraying the dreadful plight of the peasants with compassion. The oppressive cruelties of the landed gentry form the center of works like Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, a work that can be compared in its social impact at the time of the emancipation of the serfs to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the time of the American Civil War.

In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy emphasizes these essential geographical and ideological contrasts through Levin’s recognition of his social class’s exploitation of the Russian countryside and its peasants and workers. The city-dwellers, in their constant attendance at concerts, clubs, and cabarets, are exposed as hemorrhaging the heart’s blood of the countryside, where inhabitants engage in honest toil and lovingly tend the earthen treasure only to witness urbanites despoiling it for expenditures on frivolous luxuries. Levin indulges in a fit of savage ill humor as he watches his brother-in-law sell off a stand of virgin forest in order to subsidize his lifestyle of dinner parties and expensive mistresses, never mind supporting his wife and numerous children. Yet once Levin finds himself living in town, he is sucked into the same habit of excessive spending, and wastes his patrimony to sustain an extra carriage and coachmen. Later in the nineteenth century, the doctor and writer Anton Chekhov would elaborate on this theme in his play The Cherry Orchard. At the opening of the twentieth century, Tolstoy’s concern for Russia’s countryside and his recognition of the noble class’s exploitation of peasant labor would be praised by the founder of the Soviet government, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who dubbed Tolstoy the “mirror of the Russian Revolution.”

Levin’s efforts at constructing a happy family life and an estate are counterbalanced in the novel with the catastrophe of Anna’s loss of family and social position. The separation of these two stories left Tolstoy open to critical censure when the first installments of the book appeared. This criticism provoked his famous defense of the novel’s integrity and architecture. The book’s two parts were connected through its architecture, but the key to the arch was deftly and subtly concealed; the ideas of the novel were linked together by a labyrinth of connections that could only be understood through implicit but unstated interactions. The connection between Anna and Levin is to be sought, Tolstoy argued, outside the elements of the story line. However, he did bring his two protagonists together in one memorable scene. Levin, who has voiced very strong opinions on woman’s role in society and the “woman question” throughout the novel, is brought face to face with the suffering of a unique and complex woman living out the terms of that question in a manner that becomes increasingly intolerable.

The “woman question,” which is discussed at length in an important dinner-party scene in Anna Karenina, was an import from England, where the question was forced by the large number of “superfluous,” or unmarried, middle class women without means of support or access to suitable employment. Although Tolstoy generally refused to read the journalistic press, he did encounter the Russian publication of John Stuart Mill’s landmark treatise on the role of women in society, The Subjection of Women, and wrote an extensive commentary on that work, although it was not published in his lifetime. In that commentary he argues that the solution to the “woman question” was in matrimony and maternity. Indeed motherhood acquires mythological proportions; “a true woman, even after one thousand pregnancies, would welcome yet another.” He also endorses the institution of prostitution, though he would later reverse his views completely on that subject, just as Levin in Anna Karenina completely changes his position in the course of the dinner party debate. The recognition that unmarried women must either be demeaned through dependency or degrading types of employment, or accept an uncongenial marriage, leads to a more compassionate understanding of adultery. Anna’s brother, Stiva, offers precisely this defense of his sister, who had married a man without understanding the meaning of love, then had the misfortune to love a man who was not her husband. According to Stiva’s views, the solution was simply divorce, although the narrator observes that in promoting the divorce, Stiva was wrong. A different response to adultery is evoked in the early drafts of the novel by reference to a more troubling treatise on the “sexual question,” the work of Alexandre Dumas fils, who in L’homme-femme raised the question of how an adulterous wife should be punished. His answer was identical to that enacted by one of Tolstoy’s later literary creations, the cantankerous narrator of The Kreutzer Sonata: “Kill her!”

The support for the execution of the adulterer or adulteress derives from prescriptions in the Old Testament of the Bible; an alternative response to the guilty adulteress is articulated in the New Testament, John 8:7, in Christ’s exhortation: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” a statement that is echoed at several junctures in Anna Karenina. The epigraph of the novel, “Vengeance is mine,” may be harmonized with this idea that punishment is not for people to enact but is reserved to God. However, there are readers of the novel who maintain that the enactment of a divine retribution upon Anna, however delivered, expresses the author’s condemnation of his heroine.

It is certainly the case that, of the two marriages depicted in Anna Karenina, it is Anna‘s, the woman’s, marriage that fails. The sanctification of motherhood so exalted by Tolstoy in the closing pages of War and Peace is in this new novel no longer the guarantor of family happiness. Anna is a loving mother, and beloved of children. In the opening passages of the novel, Dolly’s children cannot get enough of her. The scene of Anna’s reunion with her son after their separation is considered by many to be the greatest love scene of the novel. The character of Dolly, married to Anna’s brother, who routinely and casually cheats on his wife, reveals the darker underside of maternity. Her looks ruined by numerous pregnancies, her resources unequal to the task of raising a large brood of children, she embraces her role with admirable enthusiasm, yet she is in many ways the most abject of characters. And despite her commitment to the demands of motherhood, she is no stranger to the craving for sexual fulfillment. On her way to visit Anna she indulges herself in fantasies about taking a lover and especially delights in picturing the look on her philandering husband’s face when she informs him of this fact.

Nor is the sacrament of marriage, gilded and glorified as Tolstoy makes it in the luminous church-wedding scene, sufficient to prevent the stresses and fractures that eventually divide the family and destroy the home. As Dolly, tearfully watching the ceremony, meditates: “Among the brides that came back to her memory, she thought too of her darling Anna, of whose proposed divorce she had just been hearing. And she had stood just as innocent in orange flowers and bridal veil. And now? ‘It’s terribly strange,’ she said to herself” (p. 424). The family idea is inseparable from the fact of sexuality, with its uncanny coursing toward death, either through the traditional linking of love and death in the romantic literary tradition of adulterous love, or through the punitive violence that extinguishes that anarchic tendency. Tolstoy’s dream of family happiness had to come to terms with the narrative of sexual passion. The novel where this contest of ideas takes place is Anna Karenina.

The tragic conflict in Anna’s story appears to the modern reader to hinge on the impossibility of obtaining a divorce, and too many characters in the novel, divorce appears to be the way to resolve the difficulties of Anna’s position and reconcile her to society. Without the divorce, she could not be received in proper society, but would sink to the demi-monde of courtesans and social outcasts. In earlier drafts of the novel, Karenin poses as the adulterer, enabling Anna to divorce him and marry her lover; however, Anna’s second marriage also fails. The early title “Two Marriages” may have referred to Anna’s two failed marriages, rather than to Anna’s and Levin’s separate marriages, the one a failure, the other, apparently, a success.

The steps necessary for divorce in nineteenth-century Russia were distasteful: The only grounds for a divorce in ecclesiastical and civil law were adultery, and only the injured party could seek the dissolution of the marriage. The guilty party would not be free to remarry and would automatically lose custody of the children. What was even more unpleasant, the innocent party was required to provide clear, incontrovertible proof of infidelity. This usually meant apprehending the guilty party “in the act” and verifying that fact through the testimony of several reliable witnesses. An expedient approach was devised whereby a fictitious adulterous liaison would be staged by the husband, on whom the stigma of infidelity would rest more lightly. Anna’s husband, Alexei Karenin, was prepared to participate in such a humiliating maneuver.

The scenes leading up to Karenin’s acquiescence in that decisive moment are among the most remarkable in all literature. Tolstoy was certainly the first major author to describe pregnancy and childbirth in any detail, and he does so twice in the pages of this novel. Anna begs Karenin’s forgiveness during her delirium after childbirth. Karenin, who had been hoping guiltily for his wife to die, finds himself unexpectedly reduced to tears and overjoyed by his experience of forgiveness and the exaltation of Christian love that extends even to his wife’s adulterous lover and to her baby daughter, fathered by that lover. In such a state he is willing to procure the divorce for Anna, even as she, returning to health, also returns to her lover. Yet Anna inexplicably and emphatically rejects this offer of divorce.

It is certain that divorce, depicted as rare and scandalous in Tolstoy’s fictional world of Russian society, was actually more widespread and acceptable than Anna’s novelistic experience would suggest. Tolstoy’s final revisions reveal the author’s difficulty in making the divorce impossible so as to create the textual impetus for his heroine’s suicidal despair. Ultimately Anna herself must throw up the roadblock in refusing to accept a divorce when her husband offers it. Endless speculation as to her reasons for so doing has not resulted in any critical consensus. Later in the novel Karenin retracts his offer of divorce, and Tolstoy succeeds in creating a series of events that drives his heroine to consider death as her only valid option.

Traces of Tolstoy’s original plans for his heroine remain in the final version that we read. In the early drafts of the novel, Anna, remarried or not, was to find social acceptance among the nihilist and communist intellectuals who espoused open or group marriages and communal living arrangements, adapted from the sociopolitical principles of the Comte de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier. In the course of the novel, Anna acquires the stereotypical features of the Russian woman intellectual or emancipated bluestocking, intelligentka (a member of the intelligensia) or a nigilistka (nihilist): She smokes, takes opium, voraciously reads heavy nonfiction, sponsors young women protégées of no means, and even takes up the profession of writing.

The nihilist dream of group marriage darkens in Anna’s recurrent nightmare of having two husbands who simultaneously lavish their caresses on her. The author insists upon this feature of Anna’s love triangle : Both her husband and her lover are named Alexei, forming a masculine mirror around her. In fact, Anna is framed throughout the novel in actual mirrors, in art works, and in window frames. She is surrounded by duplicates of herself in echoes of her name: Her maid is named Annushka, a nickname for Anna, her daughter’s name is Annie, and she adopts a protégée who is named Hannah, the Hebrew form of Anna. The name Anna is itself a mirror, reading the same forward and backward, an action implied by the Greek prefix “ana-,” which means both upward and downward or both backward and forward. In his early selections of various names for his heroine, Tolstoy continually retained the “ana” component: Tatiana, Nana, Anastasia.

The constant reflection and duplication of Anna throughout the novel subtly creates the sense of textual ripples displaced by the motion of a solid body, one of the subtle means with which Tolstoy evokes the overwhelming sense of his heroine’s embodied presence. In part, her realization is the great victory of Tolstoy’s literary technique. He describes his heroine primarily through the words and perceptions of those who know and consort with her, and through the artistic representation of Anna in three different painted portraits. As the subject of great art and the constant focus of masculine admiration and feminine envy throughout the novel, Anna possesses exquisite beauty and irrepressible vitality that combine with her grace and ingenuous capacity for self-expression to generate a compelling and overwhelming sense of her physical presence. She appears to the reader with the same clarity and power as the apparition Tolstoy is said to have seen in his earliest stages of composition :

At the same time that Anna is so successfully evoked as a vivid and stirring physical presence, the reader is given more immediate access to Anna’s inner thoughts and even to her unshaped, disordered, raw emotional states, than has arguably been the case with any character in previous literary history. Anna’s unspoken thoughts and anarchic emotions distort the world around her, transforming the simple details of everyday reality and the surfaces of apparently realistic fiction into frightening nightmarish sequences that share the darker, ominous hues of the novel’s bleak shape. Once we glimpse the abyss of mental turmoil and inner conflict that tortures Anna more acutely than any difficult external circumstance, her figure becomes profoundly enigmatic, and we can no longer read her story as simply the course of a tragic and doomed love affair.

Tolstoy had apparently written his final chapter and fulfilled his obligation for the agreed number of installments with his publisher when he found himself compelled to write one last additional section of the novel. In part this was a response to Russia’s increasing involvement in the Balkan War, but the deeper motive was his need to express, through the character of Konstantin Levin, his spiritual and philosophical struggle with religious faith. Much to his surprise, his publisher refused to print the final installment. Tolstoy issued the final installment at his own expense, and when the book appeared in novel form these final chapters formed the novel’s conclusion.

The novelistic account of Levin’s turn from the enlightenment-based utilitarian philosophy that had been so helpful for his agricultural pursuits to a more mystically inflected Christianity is probably a fairly accurate description of Tolstoy’s own journey to Christian faith, which he detailed in his later works, Confession and What I Believe. Tolstoy’s struggle with religious faith prompted the writer Maxim Gorky to characterize Tolstoy and God as two bears wrestling. This was a titanic struggle, never comfortably resolved. Although at the end of Anna Karenina Levin determines that his newfound religious faith will enable him to craft a life of goodness and joy, these are the words of the new convert, written in the first flush of enthusiasm. They would be the last literary words penned by Tolstoy for some time to come.

In the years that followed the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy devoted himself to the study of the New Testament and its commentaries, even retranslating and harmonizing the Gospels himself. The publication of his novel was hailed as a major event in world literature; Fyodor Dostoevsky pronounced the novel “sheer perfection as a work of art. No European work of fiction of our present day comes anywhere near it.” From his deathbed, Ivan Turgenev appealed to Tolstoy to return to writing novels like Anna Karenina. But Tolstoy had turned his back on literature and on art. He rejected his great masterpieces and turned instead to the crafting of instructive “stories for the people”—that is, the kind of brief parabolic and gnomic forms he had delighted in when compiling his children’s Primer. When he eventually returned to narrative fiction, he also returned to the pressing problems of his last novel: In “The Devil” and in The Kreutzer Sonata his narrators struggle with the fatalities of sexual passion. In his last novel, Resurrection, his main character sets out to remedy the destruction his own sexual dalliance with a young girl had brought about. This was Tolstoy’s last attempt to write and to right the sexual problem and to explore the darker shapes of the dysfunctional and broken forms of family unhappiness that so absorbed him in Anna Karenina.