Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877)

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Anna Karenina's passionate, destructive affair with Count Vronsky unfolds against the backdrop of Russian aristocratic society — a novel Dostoyevsky called "flawless as a work of art."

Historical Significance:
Tolstoy serialized Anna Karenina in The Russian Messenger from 1875 to 1877. The novel was inspired by a real event: in 1872, a woman named Anna Pirogova threw herself under a train at a railway station near Tolstoy's estate after being abandoned by her lover. Tolstoy attended the autopsy.

The novel interweaves Anna's tragic love story with Levin's search for meaning through farming and family — Levin being Tolstoy's autobiographical portrait of himself. Faulkner, Nabokov, and Thomas Mann all named it the greatest novel ever written. In 2007, Time magazine's list of the 10 greatest novels placed it at number one.

This public domain classic was originally published in 1877. Free to read and share.