Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina, married to the cold, correct senior official Karenin, falls into a consuming affair with the cavalry officer Count Vronsky, and the two of them abandon any pretense of discretion, a choice that a society built on hypocrisy rather than honesty never forgives her for even as it tolerates far quieter infidelities all around her. Tolstoy sets her story beside that of Konstantin Levin, an awkward, sincere landowner who proposes twice to Kitty Shcherbatskaya, is refused once, and eventually marries her, spending the rest of the novel working his own land and wrestling toward a faith he can actually live by. As Anna's isolation from society deepens and Vronsky's devotion cools under the strain, her jealousy and despair tighten until, in the novel's most famous scene, she throws herself under a train, the same means of death that opens the book in a minor incident she witnesses years earlier. Levin, meanwhile, reaches his own hard won resolution far from Anna's tragedy, accepting his own imperfection and finding, after his brother's death and a long private crisis of belief, a working, unglamorous faith to live inside.

Tolstoy gives Anna and Levin roughly equal weight across the book's eight parts, and the contrast is the point: one plot shows a woman destroyed for choosing honest desire over social performance, the other shows a man slowly, unglamorously building a life worth living. The novel runs long, but its scenes, a horse race, a harvest, a society ball, a birth, are so exactly observed that the length rarely feels like padding, and Tolstoy's psychological detail into how his characters deceive themselves has few rivals in fiction.

Levin's proposal to Kitty closely mirrors Tolstoy's own proposal to his wife, and the name Levin derives from Tolstoy's own first name, Lev.