Anna Karenina Analysis

Trains are the most important symbols in the story of Anna Karenina, due to their prominence in the Anna/Vronsky story line. More specifically, trains are a destructive element throughout the novel...

First and foremost, Anna Karenina is a Russian novel. It's not just that the characters happen to be Russian, dress in furs, eat caviar, and drink vodka. More than that, the characters we meet are...

In the world of Anna Karenina, the eyes of Leo Tolstoy see all and know all. In other words, this novel is told from the perspective of an omniscient, or all-knowing third-person narrator. The stor...

Look in the dictionary next to "Family Drama," and you'll probably find a picture of Anna Karenina. This is all about the dramas that families get into, including issues such as adultery, battles o...

Tolstoy is insanely good at sketching character traits in just a few lines. We know who these characters are almost immediately... just from teensy, tiny clues. And his accounts of Petersburg hypoc...

Tolstoy's style seems to have a crush on coordinating conjunctions—you know, and, but, or and so on. If you look at any extended passage in Anna Karenina, chances are you'll see piles of sentence...

Based on the title of the novel, you'd probably assume that the whole book is about Anna Karenina. Ha! Tolstoy is way too crafty for that.While Anna is one focus of Tolstoy's intense psychological...

"Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord." – Romans 12:19There are two ways we can try to get at this epigraph—the first is to think about revenge in the novel. The subject of revenge d...

Anna Karenina's such a masterful novel that it's got two complete main plots for the price of one. We're going to outline them both here. We can't help but notice that the plots are in a lot of way...

The thing about Anna Karenina is there are (at least) two plot lines here. And each corresponds to a different classic plot. So we're going to distinguish between Anna's story, a Tragedy, and Lev...

The first act of a story is the beginning, which stretches until the moment when the characters have gone to the point of no return. At the outset of the novel, Anna is bored with her husband, who...

Tolstoy called Anna Karenina the first novel he ever wrote, even though he started War and Peace first. (Source: Pevear, Richard. Introduction. Anna Karenina.)Anna Karenina was an Oprah Book Club r...

Parts of this novel might make you tempted to go have a spicy affair with a hot married woman or a dashing officer... but ultimately Tolstoy's novel is more lust-killing than a bath filled with ice...

Shakespeare: King Lear—Levin and Nataly attend a concert where one of the main pieces is a fantasia entitled King Lear on the Heath (7.5.2).John Stuart Mill (3.29).