Anna Karenina

Author: (Russia) Tolstoy
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-05-01
Features: Anna Karenina has two seamlessly integrated and mutually responsive parallel mainlines. These two mainlines, centered around Anna and Levin, respectively, address two aspects of issues. In the main mainline, the central figure is Anna, with characters related to her including her husband Karenin, her lover Vronsky, her brother Oblonsky's family, as well as the three circles of St. Petersburg's upper class and some aristocrats in the military. The characters in Anna's storyline are mostly involved in moral and ethical issues. In this storyline, the author primarily aims to show the intense changes in the moral and ethical concepts of the aristocracy in the upper class at that time due to the influence of bourgeois thought in family, marriage, and other aspects. Anna Karenina is a novel named after the character Anna Karenina. In the novel, Anna's character indeed occupies the central position. Anna is a young woman with natural beauty, sincere emotions, and a rich inner world. She was married off by her aunt to a conservative and much older bureaucrat, Karenin. For many years, she endured the life of a virtuous wife and mother, but her encounter with Vronsky rekindled her pursuit of life and love. In the upper class at that time, extramarital affairs were not uncommon, but Anna refused to deceive her husband for a long time and resolutely exposed her ambiguous relationship with Vronsky, which led to her rejection by the upper class and retaliation from Karenin. She struggled desperately but could not escape her tragic fate, finally taking her own life by lying on the tracks.