Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

It takes place in imperial Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century, among the aristocratic drawing rooms of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, the country estates, and the trains that connect them. It is a novel about what it costs a person — especially a woman — to dare to live according to her own desires in a society built on appearances and convention. Anna Karenina is the wife of Alexei Karenin, a senior official of the tsarist government: respected, cold, incapable of true love. Their marriage is proper, stable, and empty. When Anna meets the young and handsome Count Vronsky at a train station, something awakens in her that she can no longer ignore. The two fall in love with an intensity neither of them can control, and Anna makes the decision to leave her husband and her son in order to live that love openly.