Anna Karenina was first published serially in The Russian Messenger from January 1875 to April 1877 (the final installment was published separately due to a dispute over Tolstoy’s views on the Russo-Turkish War), then in book form in eight parts in 1878. Tolstoy considered it his first true novel (War and Peace, he said, was “not a novel”). The famous opening sentence — “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” — announces both the novel’s subject and its method: the anatomy of unhappiness in all its particular, irreducible forms.
The Novel
The novel traces two parallel stories. Anna Karenina — beautiful, intelligent, passionate — leaves her cold, hypocritical husband Alexei Karenin for Count Vronsky, a dashing cavalry officer. Their affair is initially ecstatic; society’s ostracism, her separation from her son, Vronsky’s growing restlessness, and her own jealous paranoia gradually destroy her. She throws herself under a train — one of the most famous deaths in literature.
Konstantin Levin — a landowner, intellectual, and skeptic — pursues Kitty Shcherbatsky (whom Vronsky had previously courted and abandoned), marries her, works his land, and struggles with the question of life’s meaning. His story ends not in tragedy but in a tentative, hard-won faith: “I shall still get angry with Ivan the coachman… but my life now, my whole life, independently of anything that can happen to me, every minute of it, is no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an unquestionable meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.”
The novel’s genius lies in its psychological exactitude — Tolstoy renders the interior lives of his characters with an accuracy that makes other novelists seem approximate. Anna’s progressive jealousy and despair; Vronsky’s discomfort as passion fades into obligation; Karenin’s mixture of genuine suffering and bureaucratic pettiness; Levin’s inarticulate spiritual hunger — each is rendered with total, devastating precision.
Collecting Anna Karenina
Russian first edition (1878): Eight parts.
- Complete set in original bindings: $15,000–$40,000
- Extremely rare in any condition
First English translation (1886, Thomas Y. Crowell, New York):
Value trajectory (2016–2026): Approximately 1.5× for Russian-language first editions. Supply is extremely limited; institutional demand is strong.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this better than War and Peace? Many readers prefer Anna Karenina — it is more concentrated, more emotionally intense, and structurally tighter. Tolstoy himself considered it his better novel. The two works are complementary rather than competitive.
Is Anna punished for adultery? The novel resists this moralistic reading. Anna’s destruction is caused not by sin but by society’s hypocrisy (men commit adultery without consequence), by her own psychological instability, and by the impossibility of living authentically within a dishonest social order. Tolstoy’s sympathy for Anna is evident even as he charts her disintegration.
What is the Levin plot doing? Levin’s story provides the novel’s counterweight — if Anna represents passion that destroys, Levin represents the possibility of meaningful life through work, family, and faith. The two plots are in constant dialogue, reflecting and commenting on each other.