“All happy families are alike,” begins Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy’s masterpiece, Anna Karenina. It continues, “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

This quotable maxim launches the double storyline of Anna Karenina and Konstantin Levin. At first glance, they are characters who have little in common. Anna is an upper-class woman in 1870s Petersburg who causes scandal when she tries to impose her adulterous affair on society; Levin, the novel’s second hero, is an eccentric and idealistic landowner who wants to change how farming is done in Russia.

Having rarely encountered happy families in life, or in Anna Karenina, I can’t say which qualities they might share. But having met happy people, experience suggests to me that what they have in common is benevolent detachment paired with a quiet insistence on comfort. Maybe that’s what Tolstoy meant? It describes his character Stepan Oblonsky (Stiva), brother of Anna Karenina and the only consistently chipper character in the story.

As for each unhappy family being singular in its misery, anyone wanting to test Tolstoy’s theory might look to psychology, which is quick to cite disagreements over money, religion, and sex as the main drivers of domestic discord. Looking at the “unhappy families” of Anna Karenina, these three are found in abundance.     

In the first scene, Stiva has been caught having an affair with a French governess. Throughout the novel, his adultery and lavish spending impoverish the rest of his family, despite their being part of aristocratic society.

The gentleman farmer, Levin, has his own woes wrought by sex, religion, and money. He marries his longtime love interest, Kitty, but not before letting her read the personal diaries where he admits to being an atheist and goes on to detail his many sexual exploits. (Tolstoy famously did the same before marrying his wife, Sofiya.)

Kitty, a devout orthodox Christian, is devastated. She marries Levin anyway but prefers city life over her new husband’s country estate. To appease her, they live for a time in Moscow, a penitential decision that causes Levin a great deal of financial strain.

The watermark drama of the narrative is the disintegration of Anna’s marriage to Alexei Karenin, a dull, high-ranking bureaucrat. Here again, we see domestic trouble brewing over the Big Three. Meeting Count Vronsky, a gallant young officer, at the train station, Anna begins an inappropriate liaison, followed by a full-on affair that results in her leaving Karenin to live openly with her lover.

The church allowed divorce, but not readily. Worrying she will lose her son, Seryozha, Anna hesitates in pursuing an official split from Karenin. (She loses the boy anyway, because Karenin refuses to let her see him.) Later, when she wants Stiva to ask Karenin for consent to dissolve their marriage, Karenin refuses, wishing his wife to suffer through the “criminal” situation she and Vronsky have created. By now, they have a daughter, who is illegitimate by church law and legally Karenin’s. 

Things do not get easier for Anna. Vronsky is now financially responsible for a “wife” and child. As such, he leaves a promising career as a cavalry officer to make a living from court and industry connections. As he becomes occupied with business meetings and dinners that Anna cannot always attend — she has tumbled out of favor with the highest ranks of society — tensions fester in their relationship. 

In the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Pevear writes that Tolstoy received some “hate-mail” about Anna Karenina from a friend. This friend complained that Anna’s and Levin’s stories, while brilliant, had no meeting point. The book, he said, was without structure.

(In fact, Levin and Anna meet once at a dinner party, where he is enchanted by her.)  

Tolstoy fired back, telling his friend the keystone between Anna and Levin is hidden. “Look well and you will find it,” he wrote, implying that only intelligent people can understand his book.

In search of that keystone, one finds an interesting possibility in part III, when Levin attends the harvest at his sister’s estate. Sitting atop a bale of hay, he watches the peasants as they work. He admires the unconscious physicality of their labor and feels moved when they break into song. Levin falls asleep on the bale and wakes the next morning vowing to give up his “useless knowledge” and embrace the “simplicity, the purity, the legitimacy of this life he wished to live now.”

He wants to become a peasant.

“Well, what am I to do then?” he muses. “How am I to do it?”

Twenty pages later, Anna has her own epiphany. She admits to herself that she has traded a coveted spot as a society wife for the shameful role of mistress. Simultaneously, she has sacrificed contact with her son for the chance at a romance that’s now unraveling.

“What do I know?” she asks herself in a private moment that mirrors Levin’s night in the hay. “What do I want? What do I love?”

The throughline here is a crisis of downward mobility. Both Levin and Anna reject aspects of upper-class life, its artifice and hypocrisies. Both want to change the rules of society. Levin prefers existing in body more than mind (or so he says), as when he breaks rank and mows the fields with his workers. Likewise, Anna rips up the social contract by going public with Vronsky, a nobleman of lesser rank than her husband.

The consequences of Anna’s “fall” are seen most readily in the disparate positions of her children: Her son, Seryozha, has every advantage of Petersburg society, while her new daughter, Annie, lacks even a family name.  

But Levin’s and Anna’s downward trajectory is more aspirational than economic. No matter how much Levin craves the immediate and “carefree” life of a peasant, he still owns land and an estate, just as Anna still lives in luxury with Vronsky, who does very well for himself after leaving the army.

What they both encounter is something the British have always known and Americans would never believe: You cannot easily change your social class. At least, not without contorting parts of yourself — and certainly not without making enemies among those you leave behind and inspiring suspicion in the ranks you seek to join.  

Levin gets a taste of this when he introduces crop-sharing to help the muzhiks (peasants), and they use the opportunity to cheat him. The day he mows with them — his most serene moment in the book — the workers are uncomfortable and stare at him in surprise. “What do you mean?” says Levin’s brother, letting him have it from the other side, aghast at the idea of a nobleman in the fields. “On par with the muzhiks the whole day?”

When Anna attends the opera after her scandal, a former acquaintance says it is “a disgrace” to sit by her. The judgments roll in from other social classes, too, as when Anna and Vronsky have trouble finding a nanny for their daughter.

Of course, Levin’s anguish is distinct from Anna’s. While structural realities prevent him from being a landowner and a peasant at the same time, Anna’s exile is wholly personal. Worse, her life takes on the paranoid gloom of a self-fulfilling prophecy: If she could abandon her little boy, what is to stop Vronsky from abandoning her?       

Tolstoy was known for his conservative views on women, but in Anna Karenina, one finds compassionate acknowledgment that Anna’s situation is unjustly worse than Levin’s. Near the end of the book, both are contemplating suicide. But Levin has tangible channels for his thoughts and thus can move outward, away from the self: Educate the peasants this, write a theory of agriculture that. (So much for letting go of “useless” knowledge.) He is desperately unhappy and full of contradiction; nevertheless, he is always expanding and is therefore saved.

Anna is confined to the domestic realm by the dictates of sex (money and religion) and has nowhere to go. Her attempt to write children’s literature is not a lifeline, and unlike Levin, she can only go inward, contracting and collapsing until her psyche is as thin, empty, and dark as a shadow. Throwing herself on the train track is tragic, but it comes as a breathtaking relief after several pages of bitter, almost evil, interiority.

Fate has a dark sense of humor. More than three decades after completing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy himself would die at a train station. Not underneath a locomotive like poor Anna, but beside it, in the station master’s quarters. Having fled his passionate but acrimonious marriage after years of rows (over religion, money, and sex), he fell ill and died from pneumonia at the age of 82.

Tolstoy’s fiction is considered the world’s best. His genius shows up in how he treated the strobing ambiguities of life — ambiguities that, in lesser writers’ hands, usually feel unfocused. His stories deftly illustrate how we can love someone in the morning, hate them at lunch, and be indifferent to them by evening. In his hands, human failings become less painful because there’s always something around the corner — a joke, an invigorating idea, a moment of unexpected, transcendent connection. When his characters die, like Anna, Prince Andrei from War and Peace, or even Tolstoy himself, it is sad but never bleak. Readers are left buoyed by the light and heat of people who lived dangerously.

Please share your experience reading Anna Karenina in the comments below. You can join Dorothy in next reading the Icelandic classic, Independent People, by Halldór Laxness, which will be the subject of her column on November 25th, 2024.

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