What is Anna Karenina about?

Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina follows two interwoven storylines set in 1870s Imperial Russia. In the main plot, the married aristocrat Anna Karenina begins a passionate affair with the cavalry officer Count Vronsky, defying the expectations of St. Petersburg society and ultimately losing everything — her marriage, her son, her social standing, and her life. Running parallel to this tragedy is the story of Konstantin Levin, a restless country landowner who courts and eventually marries Kitty Shcherbatskaya and finds meaning through family life, farm work, and a late-arriving religious faith. Together the two storylines form an argument: passion pursued at others’ expense leads to ruin, while humble devotion to family and work leads to a life worth living.

What are the main themes of Anna Karenina?

The central themes of Anna Karenina include marriage and infidelity, social hypocrisy, the search for meaning and faith, and the tension between rural authenticity and urban corruption. Tolstoy presents two contrasting paths: Anna and Vronsky pursue romantic passion, and their love destroys everything around it; Levin and Kitty build a life on patience and honesty, and it holds. The novel also dissects the hypocrisy of Russian high society, which tolerates male infidelity while punishing women like Anna for identical behavior. On a philosophical level, Levin’s spiritual crisis — and his eventual conversion to a simple peasant faith — reflects Tolstoy’s own moral searching. The railway appears throughout as a symbol of modernity’s destructive force, most powerfully in Anna’s final act.

Who are the main characters in Anna Karenina?

The main characters in Anna Karenina are: Anna Karenina, the beautiful, intelligent, and passionate protagonist whose affair with Vronsky drives the central plot; Count Alexei Vronsky, the charming cavalry officer who pursues Anna and ultimately cannot save her; Alexei Karenin, Anna’s cold but complicated husband, a high-ranking government official; Konstantin Levin, the landowner-philosopher who serves as the novel’s moral counterweight to Anna and is widely considered Tolstoy’s alter ego; Kitty Shcherbatskaya, who first loves Vronsky, is heartbroken when he chooses Anna, and eventually becomes Levin’s wife; and Stepan Oblonsky (Stiva), Anna’s charming, feckless brother, whose own adultery opens the novel.

What does the train symbolize in Anna Karenina?

The railway is the novel’s most powerful symbol. Anna and Vronsky first meet at a Moscow train station — and at the same moment a railway worker is crushed to death, immediately casting their attraction under a shadow of doom. Throughout the novel, trains mark every significant turn in Anna’s fate: her journeys between Moscow and St. Petersburg, her increasingly desperate state of mind in the later parts, and finally her suicide, when she throws herself beneath the wheels of a freight train. For Tolstoy, the railway also represented Western modernization — impersonal, mechanical, and destructive of old Russian values. The train is simultaneously the instrument of Anna’s death and a metaphor for the unstoppable momentum of her self-destruction once it begins.

How does Anna Karenina end?

In the final chapters of Anna Karenina, Anna’s mental state has deteriorated badly. Consumed by jealousy and convinced that Vronsky no longer loves her, she sends him a note demanding to meet, then — in the grip of despair — makes her way to a railway station. On the platform, she recalls the railway worker who died the day she met Vronsky and throws herself beneath an oncoming train. Vronsky, grief-stricken and purposeless, volunteers for service in the Russo-Turkish War. The novel does not end with Anna’s death, however — it closes on Levin, who, in the same weeks Anna is unraveling, has a quiet spiritual awakening that gives him the sense of meaning he has spent the entire novel searching for. The contrast is deliberate: Anna’s story ends in destruction; Levin’s ends in hope.

Why did Tolstoy write Anna Karenina?

Tolstoy began Anna Karenina in 1873 and published it in serial installments between 1875 and 1877, completing the book form in 1878. He was partly inspired by a real event — the suicide of a woman named Anna Pirogova, the mistress of a neighbor, who threw herself under a train. But the novel also grew out of Tolstoy’s own deepening moral and spiritual crisis during these years. The character of Levin is a thinly veiled self-portrait, working through Tolstoy’s questions about faith, the meaning of labor, the corruption of the aristocracy, and Russia’s relationship to Western modernity. Tolstoy himself described Anna Karenina as his first true novel, distinguishing it from his earlier epic War and Peace, which he considered more of a historical panorama than a novel proper.

What is the significance of the opening line of Anna Karenina?

The opening sentence of Anna Karenina — “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” — is one of the most quoted lines in world literature, and it functions as a thesis statement for the entire novel. It immediately tells the reader that Tolstoy is not interested in happiness as a subject — happiness, he suggests, is uniform and therefore uninteresting. Unhappiness is where human variety lives. The line also sets up the novel’s structural contrast: Levin’s family, built on honesty and faith, moves toward the ordinary happiness the opening line dismisses with a wave; Anna’s household disintegrates in its own spectacular, specific way. Every major family in the novel — the Oblonskys, the Karenins, the Shcherbatskys — illustrates a different mode of dysfunction, confirming the opening proposition across 800 pages.

Where can I read Anna Karenina online for free?

You can read the complete text of Anna Karenina free online at American Literature, with all 239 chapters across eight parts available in a clean reading experience — no registration required. The text is presented chapter by chapter, making it easy to follow along with class assignments or pick up where you left off. Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilych and his epic War and Peace are also available in full on the site, along with dozens of his short stories and fables.

Anna Karenina

Name: Anna Karenina
Author: Leo Tolstoy

by Leo Tolstoy

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

The novel Anna Karenina starts with one of its most often quoted lines. It's a story of the tragedy of infidelity; those committed and those imagined.

The book opens with Anna arriving on a scene of family chaos which has been brought about by her brother's unbridled womanizing. The story revolves around the married Anna's romance with the wealthy Count Vronsky and the trouble it brings them. Illustration for 1919 edition by Helen Mason Grose

We feature Tolstoy's novel in our guide to Russian Writers.

Read the full summary of Anna Karenina →

Part One: Chapter 1

Part One: Chapter 2

Part One: Chapter 3

Part One: Chapter 4

Part One: Chapter 5

Part One: Chapter 6

Part One: Chapter 7

Part One: Chapter 8

Part One: Chapter 9

Part One: Chapter 10

Part One: Chapter 11

Part One: Chapter 12

Part One: Chapter 13

Part One: Chapter 14

Part One: Chapter 15

Part One: Chapter 16

Part One: Chapter 17

Part One: Chapter 18

Part One: Chapter 19

Part One: Chapter 20

Part One: Chapter 21

Part One: Chapter 22

Part One: Chapter 23

Part One: Chapter 24

Part One: Chapter 25

Part One: Chapter 26

Part One: Chapter 27

Part One: Chapter 28

Part One: Chapter 29

Part One: Chapter 30

Part One: Chapter 31

Part One: Chapter 32

Part One: Chapter 33

Part One: Chapter 34

Part Two: Chapter 1

Part Two: Chapter 2

Part Two: Chapter 3

Part Two: Chapter 4

Part Two: Chapter 5

Part Two: Chapter 6

Part Two: Chapter 7

Part Two: Chapter 8

Part Two: Chapter 9

Part Two: Chapter 10

Part Two: Chapter 11

Part Two: Chapter 12

Part Two: Chapter 13

Part Two: Chapter 14

Part Two: Chapter 15

Part Two: Chapter 16

Part Two: Chapter 17

Part Two: Chapter 18

Part Two: Chapter 19

Part Two: Chapter 20

Part Two: Chapter 21

Part Two: Chapter 22

Part Two: Chapter 23

Part Two: Chapter 24

Part Two: Chapter 25

Part Two: Chapter 26

Part Two: Chapter 27

Part Two: Chapter 28

Part Two: Chapter 29

Part Two: Chapter 30

Part Two: Chapter 31

Part Two: Chapter 32

Part Two: Chapter 33

Part Two: Chapter 34

Part Two: Chapter 35

Part Three: Chapter 1

Part Three: Chapter 2

Part Three: Chapter 3

Part Three: Chapter 4

Part Three: Chapter 5

Part Three: Chapter 6

Part Three: Chapter 7

Part Three: Chapter 8

Part Three: Chapter 9

Part Three: Chapter 10

Part Three: Chapter 11

Part Three: Chapter 12

Part Three: Chapter 13

Part Three: Chapter 14

Part Three: Chapter 15

Part Three: Chapter 16

Part Three: Chapter 17

Part Three: Chapter 18

Part Three: Chapter 19

Part Three: Chapter 20

Part Three: Chapter 21

Part Three: Chapter 22

Part Three: Chapter 23

Part Three: Chapter 24

Part Three: Chapter 25

Part Three: Chapter 26

Part Three: Chapter 27

Part Three: Chapter 28

Part Three: Chapter 29

Part Three: Chapter 30

Part Three: Chapter 31

Part Three: Chapter 32

Part Four: Chapter 1

Part Four: Chapter 2

Part Four: Chapter 3

Part Four: Chapter 4

Part Four: Chapter 5

Part Four: Chapter 6

Part Four: Chapter 7

Part Four: Chapter 8

Part Four: Chapter 9

Part Four: Chapter 10

Part Four: Chapter 11

Part Four: Chapter 12

Part Four: Chapter 13

Part Four: Chapter 14

Part Four: Chapter 15

Part Four: Chapter 16

Part Four: Chapter 17

Part Four: Chapter 18

Part Four: Chapter 19

Part Four: Chapter 20

Part Four: Chapter 21

Part Four: Chapter 22

Part Four: Chapter 23

Part Five: Chapter 1

Part Five: Chapter 2

Part Five: Chapter 3

Part Five: Chapter 4

Part Five: Chapter 5

Part Five: Chapter 6

Part Five: Chapter 7

Part Five: Chapter 8

Part Five: Chapter 9

Part Five: Chapter 10

Part Five: Chapter 11

Part Five: Chapter 12

Part Five: Chapter 13

Part Five: Chapter 14

Part Five: Chapter 15

Part Five: Chapter 16

Part Five: Chapter 17

Part Five: Chapter 18

Part Five: Chapter 19

Part Five: Chapter 20

Part Five: Chapter 21

Part Five: Chapter 22

Part Five: Chapter 23

Part Five: Chapter 24

Part Five: Chapter 25

Part Five: Chapter 26

Part Five: Chapter 27

Part Five: Chapter 28

Part Five: Chapter 29

Part Five: Chapter 30

Part Five: Chapter 31

Part Five: Chapter 32

Part Five: Chapter 33

Part Six: Chapter 1

Part Six: Chapter 2

Part Six: Chapter 3

Part Six: Chapter 4

Part Six: Chapter 5

Part Six: Chapter 6

Part Six: Chapter 7

Part Six: Chapter 8

Part Six: Chapter 9

Part Six: Chapter 10

Part Six: Chapter 11

Part Six: Chapter 12

Part Six: Chapter 13

Part Six: Chapter 14

Part Six: Chapter 15

Part Six: Chapter 16

Part Six: Chapter 17

Part Six: Chapter 18

Part Six: Chapter 19

Part Six: Chapter 20

Part Six: Chapter 21

Part Six: Chapter 22

Part Six: Chapter 23

Part Six: Chapter 24

Part Six: Chapter 25

Part Six: Chapter 26

Part Six: Chapter 27

Part Six: Chapter 28

Part Six: Chapter 29

Part Six: Chapter 30

Part Six: Chapter 31

Part Six: Chapter 32

Part Seven: Chapter 1

Part Seven: Chapter 2

Part Seven: Chapter 3

Part Seven: Chapter 4

Part Seven: Chapter 5

Part Seven: Chapter 6

Part Seven: Chapter 7

Part Seven: Chapter 8

Part Seven: Chapter 9

Part Seven: Chapter 10

Part Seven: Chapter 11

Part Seven: Chapter 12

Part Seven: Chapter 13

Part Seven: Chapter 14

Part Seven: Chapter 15

Part Seven: Chapter 16

Part Seven: Chapter 17

Part Seven: Chapter 18

Part Seven: Chapter 19

Part Seven: Chapter 20

Part Seven: Chapter 21

Part Seven: Chapter 22

Part Seven: Chapter 23

Part Seven: Chapter 24

Part Seven: Chapter 25

Part Seven: Chapter 26

Part Seven: Chapter 27

Part Seven: Chapter 28

Part Seven: Chapter 29

Part Seven: Chapter 30

Part Seven: Chapter 31

Part Eight: Chapter 1

Part Eight: Chapter 2

Part Eight: Chapter 3

Part Eight: Chapter 4

Part Eight: Chapter 5

Part Eight: Chapter 6

Part Eight: Chapter 7

Part Eight: Chapter 8

Part Eight: Chapter 9

Part Eight: Chapter 10

Part Eight: Chapter 11

Part Eight: Chapter 12

Part Eight: Chapter 13

Part Eight: Chapter 14

Part Eight: Chapter 15

Part Eight: Chapter 16

Part Eight: Chapter 17

Part Eight: Chapter 18

Part Eight: Chapter 19

Anna Karenina

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