I first read Anna Karenina as a young women entranced with the milieu of Anna’s character and Tolstoy’s depiction of her romantic and social dilemmas. In the story of Anna Karenina, the conundrums surrounding Anna’s pursuit of an emancipated life with her a chosen lover threatens to consume everything meaningful to her; social position, wealth and family. Yet she remains an enormously sympathetic character as she is borne along by desire.
Anna’s compelling love is wrested from the dreary ruins of an emotionally unsatisfying marriage. The price extracted from her for the experience of romantic fulfillment is destruction of her life. Someone, somewhere once said: “half the sin is scandal.”
Anna’s fate is a great work of archtypal denouement ending in tragedy. Yet importantly, Anna’s demise is not the end of the book, nor is her saga the complete “story.” Anna Karenina’s character embodies the conflict of individual fulfillment in opposition to the obligation we all have to society. Like the world of the late 19th century, the greater world of our day remains painfully unromantic. This what makes Anna Karenina devastating and timeless.
I have read the story of Anna Karenina four times. After finishing the book for the second time, I began to see the deeper parable of Tolstoy’s story. I saw that a second, less obvious story existed in the novel that bears the lesson of Tolstoy’s opening sentence of the book, a great classic among opening lines . . .”Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way…”
The Essay on Anna Karenina Story People Love
... P. Journal for Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy A. Section covered: Part 1 and 2 (pages 17-245) B. Summary: This story first starts ... parts that made the story come to life. A theme in the book is how each family and each character shows their social ... different situations. Part one of this story really introduces the main themes and characters of the book. It describes their relationships and sets ...
The story of Kitty and Levin lend the very human wisdom of this legendary first sentence. Though less dramatic than Anna and certainly more conventional, Kitty and Levin are as much tortured by their desire to find true love as Anna.
In contrast to Anna and Vronsky’s characters, Kitty and Levin choose to stay within prescribed boundaries of their societal positions. Tolstoy accurately portrays Kitty’s severe depression at being jilted by Vronsky for Anna and Levin’s (Tolstoy’s autobiographical character in the novel) frustrated withdrawal after rejection by Kitty takes him into a self-imposed exile where he attempts liberal reform of his country estate. At this point in the story, Levin can been seen as a leading actor in drama of ethics played out in story.
“Anna Karenina’ is a classic study of the human condition, examined from the heart and viewed from within the operation of a society still recognizable to us from the distance of the twenty-first century. Everyone, from loyal family servant to society dame in Anna’s circle is touched by her scandalous affair. While Anna’s husband embodies propriety, he is rigid officious and unsympathetic. Tolstoy shows us how the figures surrounding Anna though separated by temperament, class, and fortune are inextricably linked.
In his great works, Tolstoy is the master of endings. A strong spiritual message exists in the summation of “Anna Karenina” which ends not with Anna’s death, but with the birth of Kitty and Levin’s child. Perhaps Tolstoy’s ultimate message is that suffering is the necessary component of fulfillment. Despite the permissivness of our age, “Anna Karenina” remains a work relevant to our times.
Rereading “Anna Karenina” has allowed me to experience progressively what is surely one of the most profound novels in the Western canon. Each reading has offered up newer and greater meaning. This is why I continue to undertake periodic re-readings of it. Some stories are timeless because they are too profound to ever be completely “read.”
The Essay on Fferent Types Of Criticism And Literary Movements In Short Stories
The short story dates back as early as the 14th Century. It offers what a novel or the equivalent would offer but it has a swiftness and completeness about it. According to Ruby Redinger, the short story is most powerful through graphic narration (752). The short story has captured a diverse group of things from the supernatural to an everyday occurrence. Nearly any situation can be worked into a ...
