Anna Karenina
- Downloads
- 100+
- First published
- 1877
- Pages
- 837
About this book
Two lives, cut against each other for eight hundred pages. Anna walks out of a cold marriage and away from her son for Vronsky, and finds that Petersburg minds the openness far more than it ever minded the affair. Levin stays on his land, fumbles a proposal, marries Kitty, and cannot stop asking what the point of any of it is.
Tolstoy refuses to let the two halves settle into a lesson. He is savage about the etiquette that grinds Anna down and oddly gentle with nearly everyone working it, her humiliated husband included. The line about happy families has been quoted into meaninglessness, and the book under it is untouched by that. The passage where Levin spends a day mowing with his peasants and loses track of himself is where the whole thing cracks open.
From the opening pages
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.
Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky—Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable world—woke up at his usual hour, that is, at eight o’clock in the morning, not in his wife’s bedroom, but on the leather-covered sofa in his study. He turned over his stout, well-cared-for person on the springy sofa, as though he would sink into a long sleep again; he vigorously embraced the pillow on the other side and buried his face in it; but all at once he jumped up, sat up on the sofa, and opened his eyes.
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Book facts
- Author
- Leo Tolstoy
- First published
- 1877
- Reading time
- About 25 hours
- Pages
- 837
- Language
- English
- Genre
- Russian Classics
- Formats
- PDF, EPUB, Read online