Just Finished Reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

I've just finished reading Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, published in 1878 and considered in literary circles to be among the very best novels ever written.  Its setting is primarily in Russia of that time period, specifically in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and the countryside around them.  The main characters are of the noble class, still separated to a great degree from the peasantry and working class and with their own society and customs.  Naturally, the chief protagonist is the title character, a young woman named Anna Karenina, who is suffering through a marriage to a man much older than her, and for whom she feels no love.  Onto the scene strides young Count Vronsky, a free spirit with the habit of seeing women as potential conquests, and the two fall head over heels in love with each other...of course, placing her in a precarious situation with her marital infidelity.  But instead of continuing their affair confidentially, Anna decides to openly reveal everything to Karenin, her husband...which turns out to be a critical mistake.  For, it seems, extramarital affairs are quite commonplace among the Russian nobility...but the participants follow certain rules of discretion that serve to protect themselves with their marriages and social standing.  Because of Anna's outspokenness, though, she instead suffers public disgrace from her affair.  Vronsky wants to marry her, and eventually she also desires a divorce from her husband with the same aim...but by that time Karenin has changed his mind about granting her one.  What happens next? I leave that to you, good reader, to discover for yourself...

Although Anna Karenina is the "official" main character in this story, I feel rather that a rural land-owning nobleman named Constantin Levin truly fits that role.  I also believe that the author spoke his own philosophical beliefs and questions through this character.  I had earlier written on this blog that I could find no character in Anna Karenina with whom I could empathize.  Well, I did come to appreciate Levin, a character strongly reminiscent in his awkwardness regarding Russian noble society to Pierre, Tolstoy's protagonist in his earlier work War and Peace. Levin has his own love interest in young Kitty, who happens to be Anna's brother's niece (ultimately, it seems, everyone in nobility is related). One of the more humorous parts of the novel is when Levin, invited to participate in the government's nobility-run legislative assembly, finds himself completely baffled by the political process, stumbling through different proceedings without knowing what he is doing.

In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy explores in depth the feelings of his characters and their inner motivations for what they say and do.  So this is a psychological novel of the first order.  But also covered is the Russian society contemporary to Tolstoy's writing...not only the inner social dynamics of the nobility, but also the sometimes changing, sometimes stagnant relationship between that nobility and the "lower" classes, complete with the misunderstandings and mistrust separating them.  And on still another, and very significant level, religion and God's role in people's lives are discussed through various characters...mainly from Levin himself at the story's end.

I don't know whether Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is the best novel ever written, but I did enjoy it and recommend it.  But as for my own preferences, I liked his War and Peace more...