Anna Karenina: Story, Characters, Structure, and Major Themes

Geoffrey Chen

100 Works of World Literature · Article 9

# Anna Karenina: Story, Characters, Structure, and Major Themes

This factual guide introduces the context, characters, structure, and major themes of Anna Karenina. It does not replace the original or claim a single correct interpretation. The one-minute introduction avoids the ending; the complete guide that follows contains major plot details and the ending.

One-minute introduction

Leo Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina between 1873 and 1877. It begins in a Moscow household disrupted by a husband’s affair. Anna arrives to reconcile her brother Stiva Oblonsky with his wife Dolly, but on the journey she meets the young officer Vronsky. In a parallel story, the landowner Konstantin Levin proposes unsuccessfully to Kitty and repeatedly seeks a basis for life in work, family and faith. City society, rural reform, trains, horse racing, balls, childcare and illness connect the two plots. The novel neither celebrates passion as simple freedom nor accepts society as an innocent moral judge. It asks how marriage, gendered double standards, desire and possession shape choice. Tolstoy’s mobile narration can make a character look selfish in one moment, then expose loneliness and fear in the next.

Essential facts

  • Original title: Анна Каренина. Russian surnames change with gender: Anna is Karenina, while her husband is Karenin.
  • Author: Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910), commonly called Leo Tolstoy in English.
  • Composition: 1873–1877.
  • Publication: parts 1–7 appeared in The Russian Messenger from 1875 to 1877. After an editorial dispute over part 8, including its treatment of the Serbian conflict, Tolstoy published the conclusion separately. The first complete book edition appeared in 1878.
  • Structure: eight parts alternating and interweaving the Anna–Vronsky and Levin–Kitty plots.
  • Setting: elite Russian society in the 1870s, amid post-emancipation agriculture, local government, rail expansion, education debates and the “woman question”.

Writing and publication context

After War and Peace, Tolstoy turned to the private life of his own time. He began Anna Karenina in earnest in 1873, revising during serial publication. Part 7 ended with Anna’s death and a promise of continuation. The editor Mikhail Katkov objected to the final part’s reservations about Russian volunteers joining the war in Serbia, so Tolstoy issued the ending elsewhere. Treating Anna’s death as the last word removes questions about mourning, public enthusiasm, family and faith.

Tolstoy’s wife Sofya recorded him saying that what he loved in the novel was the “idea of family”. That does not make the book a formula for domestic happiness. Dolly preserves the Oblonsky household by absorbing Stiva’s infidelity; the Karenin marriage is trapped by law, reputation and failed intimacy; even Levin and Kitty experience jealousy, misunderstanding, dangerous childbirth and petty quarrels. Family is a network in which affection, property, labour, gender, children and social recognition act together.

Story, characters, and ending

Stiva Oblonsky’s wife Dolly discovers his affair with the former governess. Stiva is warm and likeable, but his ease depends upon other people carrying consequences. His sister Anna travels from St Petersburg to mediate. At the Moscow station she meets Count Alexei Vronsky and witnesses a railway worker’s death. The accident is read as an omen. Trains thereafter signify modern connection and speed while repeatedly approaching separation, lost control and self-destruction.

Dolly’s younger sister Kitty expects Vronsky to propose and therefore refuses the country landowner Konstantin Levin. At a ball, Vronsky devotes himself to Anna instead. Kitty becomes ill and travels abroad, where friendship with Varenka and care for sick people reveal a life not organised by social victory. Levin returns to his estate, mows with peasants and experiments with agricultural management, but discovers that theory, physical labour and class interest do not easily agree. Neither character matures through one lesson; their experiences make a later marriage possible without guaranteeing it.

Anna returns to her husband Alexei Karenin and son Seryozha in St Petersburg, and Vronsky follows. Karenin initially cares chiefly for convention, official reputation and outward order. Anna and Vronsky begin an affair, and she becomes pregnant. During an officers’ race Vronsky makes a riding error that fatally injures his mare Frou-Frou, while Anna cannot conceal her horror in the stands. The episode compresses passion, control and responsibility: intensity of feeling does not prevent a mistaken action from imposing irreversible harm on another body.

Anna confesses. Karenin refuses an immediate divorce, seeking to preserve appearances and control the terms. After giving birth to a daughter, Anna nearly dies and asks forgiveness. Karenin forgives her and Vronsky at the bedside; overwhelmed by shame, Vronsky shoots himself but survives. Compassion briefly becomes possible, yet cannot repair the relationships automatically. Anna recovers and leaves with Vronsky for Italy, while Karenin cares for both children. Travel frees the lovers from Petersburg etiquette but supplies neither stable status nor a shared vocation.

Back in Russia, Vronsky can still move within male society, whereas Anna is publicly excluded. She is humiliated when she attends the theatre and secretly enters her former home to see Seryozha. Influenced by Countess Lydia Ivanovna and a religious adviser, Karenin refuses divorce and restricts contact between mother and son. He is not simply a monster: he can forgive and suffer, then turn morality, procedure and the child into means of control. Anna both endures injustice and becomes increasingly dependent on every journey, message and inflection of Vronsky’s voice.

Levin and Kitty, meanwhile, understand one another through initials written in chalk and marry. Levin is ashamed when Kitty reads his premarital diary, and domestic life includes quarrels. His brother Nikolai dies, with Kitty displaying practical competence in nursing that Levin lacks. She later survives a difficult labour and bears a son. Marriage does not end Levin’s fear of death or demand for meaning; it repeatedly tests abstraction against care, duty and another person’s immediate needs.

Anna and Vronsky settle at a country estate. He manages a hospital project and participates in local elections; she reads, writes and supports girls’ education, but without divorce she has little legal or social position. Fearing that he no longer loves her, she uses morphine to sleep and interprets his independent activities as betrayal. Vronsky feels trapped by continual conflict. The narration moves close to Anna’s increasingly rapid and hostile associations without reducing her crisis to innate jealousy. Isolation, loss of her son, legal uncertainty, medication, shame and relationship conflict accumulate.

After another quarrel, Anna leaves by carriage and train. Her thoughts jump among advertisements, strangers, streets and memories. At the station she throws herself beneath a train, imagining both punishment for Vronsky and an end to pain; a final impulse of regret comes too late. Part 8 shows Vronsky numb with grief and leaving with volunteers for Serbia. Levin, in a crisis of belief, has feared that he may kill himself. A peasant named Fyodor speaks of living for the soul and for God, prompting a change. Levin receives no theory that explains all suffering. He remains capable of irritation but decides that daily life can be directed towards goodness. His continuation does not compensate for Anna’s death; it asks what the living can do after the irreparable.

Dual plot and narrative method

Anna and Levin meet only once, late in the novel, but their stories are not independent. Both detest hypocrisy, seek reality and confront death. Their different outcomes depend partly on available relationships, social permission and ways of handling doubt. Levin’s plot is not a model answer, and Anna’s is not merely a negative example. The Oblonskys, Karenins and other households further unsettle a simple division between happy and unhappy families.

Narration moves between minds, sometimes within one scene, allowing a glance or sentence to acquire incompatible meanings. During Anna’s last journey, external details and inner association flow almost continuously, anticipating later stream-of-consciousness techniques. Recurring bodily images connect the whole: the railway worker, a shared dream of a peasant hammering iron, the horse race, candles, mowing and childbirth turn ideas into actions with consequences.

Major themes

Family rather than romance alone. The novel compares arrangements of marriage and kinship, asking who cares for children, controls property, moves freely and cleans up after another person’s desires. Passion, habit, honesty and responsibility can each sustain or damage a household.

Gendered double standards. Stiva and Vronsky retain access to social life after affairs, while punishment concentrates on Anna. Social exclusion is not the only cause of tragedy; control and dependence within intimacy also produce harm.

Truth and self-deception. Characters detect hypocrisy in others while creating explanations for themselves. Mobile point of view forces readers to revise moral judgement rather than occupy a permanently superior position.

Labour, reform, and class. Mowing gives Levin a temporary sense of fellowship but does not erase differences between landowner and peasants. Agriculture, local government and elections place private happiness within Russia’s changes after emancipation.

Faith, death, and meaning. Anna, Nikolai and the railway worker’s deaths surround Levin’s questions. His final insight is a practical orientation, not logical proof: a finite life may receive meaning through action towards the good. It remains Levin’s answer, not a conclusion imposed uniformly on every character.

Common oversimplifications

First, summarising the novel as an adulterous woman’s punishment completes society’s judgement and ignores men’s impunity. Second, making Anna a pure hero of freedom romanticises possession, deception and damage within her affair. Third, treating Levin as Tolstoy’s mouthpiece erases his awkwardness, limits and unfinished change. Fourth, equating city with corruption and country with purity ignores estate power and conflicting class interests. Fifth, stopping at Anna’s death misses part 8 and its scrutiny of war fever, grief and continued life.

Literary significance

Anna Karenina combines marriage plot, social novel, psychological fiction and narratives of agriculture and faith. Its mobile perspective, bodily detail and associative thought profoundly influenced the modern novel. Adaptations often compress Levin’s story and make the work appear to be Anna’s romance alone. Reading all eight parts reveals her fate within a larger field of households, class change, law and modern transport, without a single stable moral centre.

Reading suggestions

First distinguish the two Alexeis: Anna’s husband Alexei Karenin and her lover Alexei Vronsky. Russian characters have given name, patronymic, surname and nicknames, so a cast list helps. Track each shift between Anna and Levin, along with returning trains, dreams, candles, racing and labour. Ask whose perception governs a scene and what that person does not know, rather than only whether the author approves. When choosing a translation, compare names, French dialogue, agricultural terms and narrative tone, and ensure that part 8 is included.

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