Anna Karenina

::For the former M/S Anna Karenina, see M/S Regina Baltica

Thematic overview

The novel, set among the highest circles of Russian society, is generally thought by the casual reader to be nothing more than the story of a tragic romance. However, Tolstoy was both a moralist and severe critic of the excesses of his aristocratic peers, and Anna Karenina is often interpreted overall as a parable on the difficulty of being honest to oneself when the rest of society accepts falseness.

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Anna is the jewel of St. Petersburg society until she leaves her husband for the handsome and charming military officer, Count Vronsky. By falling in love, they go beyond society's external conditions of trivial adulterous dalliances. But when Vronsky's love cools, Anna cannot bring herself to return to the husband she detests, even though he will not permit her to see their son until she does. Unable to accept Vronsky's rebuff, and unable to return to a life she hates, she kills herself.

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A common way to interpret Anna's tragedy, then, was that she could neither be completely honest nor completely false, showing a Hamlet-like inner conflict that eventually drives her to suicide.

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But the novel contains the parallel and contrasting love story of Konstantin Levin. Levin was a wealthy landowner from the provinces who could move in aristocratic circles, but who preferred to work on his estate in the country. Levin tries unsuccessfully to fit into high society when wooing the young Kitty Scherbatsky in Petersburg; he wins her only when he allows himself to be himself.

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The joyous, honest and solid relationship of Levin and Kitty is continually contrasted in the novel with that of Anna and Vronsky, which is marked by constant upheaval, backbiting, and suspicion. So by the time Anna throws herself under a train at the end of the story, Tolstoy supposedly did not want readers to sympathize with her supposed mistreatment, but rather to recognize that her inability to truly commit to her own happiness or self-truth led to her ignominious end.

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Other themes

Anna Karenina is filled with themes and imagery that illustrates Tolstoy's disdain of his aristocratic peers, and of a litany of human weaknesses.

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Tolstoy skewers religious hypocrisy and insincerity in several characters, especially Karenin, Anna's husband, and the moralizing Countess Lydia Ivanovna. He also draws contrasts between the peace and wholesomeness of the country and the decadence of urban society. But one of the most prominent themes Tolstoy expounds upon in the novel is the relationship between love and honesty, both the different varieties of them as well as the different degrees to which they coexist, and the happiness that does or doesn't result.

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In many ways, Anna Karenina was the most personal novel Tolstoy wrote up to that point. The character Levin is recognized as a stand-in for Tolstoy himself, whose first name in Russian is "Lev." He incorporated other details of his life into the character, such as Levin's insistence that Kitty read his journals before they marry, something Tolstoy made his own wife do. Thus scholars usually assume that Levin's thoughts reflect Tolstoy's own.

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Anna Karenina and Tolstoy's Confession

Many of the novel's themes can be found in Tolstoy's Confession, his first-person rumination about the nature of life and faith, written just two years after the publication of Anna Karenina.

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He describes his real-life dissatisfaction with the hypocrisy of his class:

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Every time I tried to display my innermost desires – a wish to be morally good – I met with contempt and scorn, and as soon as I gave in to base desires I was praised and encouraged.

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Tolstoy also details the acceptability of adulterous "liaisons" in aristocratic Russian society:

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A dear old aunt of mine, the purest of creatures, with whom I lived, was always saying that she wished for nothing as much as that I would have a relationship with a married woman. 'Rien ne forme un jeune homme comme une liaison avec une femme comme il faut.'

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(Another theme in Anna Karenina is that the aristocratic habit of speaking in French instead of Russian is another form of society's falseness.)

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There is even one passage that could possibly be interpreted as a sign of Anna's eventual redemption in Tolstoy's eyes:

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For in the end what are we, who are convinced that suicide is obligatory and yet cannot resolve to commit it, other than the weakest, the most inconsistent and, speaking frankly, the most stupid of people, making such a song and dance with our banalities?

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The Confession contains many other autobiographical insights into the themes of Anna Karenina. A public domain version of it is here.

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