It appears that the story for "Anna Karenina" came out of an episode in which Leo Tolstoy arrived at a railway station shortly after a young woman had committed suicide. She had been the mistress of a neighboring landowner, and the incident stuck in his mind...
As Tolstoy biographer writes, "A dreadful lesson was brought home to him... He tried to imagine the existence of this poor woman who had given all for love, only to meet with such a trite, ugly death."
A couple of years later “Anna Karenina” came to life.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
And thereby rolls out the colourful life of Anna, the most beautiful and charming of women, caught in a loveless marriage, finds herself swept off her feet by the dashing and playful Count Vronsky. Her yearning for happiness only brings more tragedy upon her as she is cast aside from the society and separated from her own son.
In the meantime ‘Kitty’, who was first led on by Vronsky but later ignored with the arrival of Anna, finds love in a very different “Levin” whose struggle for life, for labour, and the understanding of life and death brings another dimension of life to the story.
Tolstoy has masterfully interwoven these two stories without confusing or boring the reader, and has left any judgement (if any is needed) for the reader.
This is truly a masterpiece! It’s beautifully written! I haven’t read Tolstoy before and now I know why he’s regarded as a Great in the literary world.
The only thing that irritated me was the aristocratic life style (which of course has nothing to do with Tolstoy, for it’s the way the Russian societal structure works!). Maybe he was trying to portray its absurdity through the character of the down-to earth Levin.
It’s not at all possible to sum up the book in a few paragraphs, for the book itself was 850+ pages! But to put it in two words, an “Epic Masterpiece”.