Reading Order
Anna Karenina Reading Order
Anna Karenina (1878) by Leo Tolstoy is the novel its author described as his first true novel and the work most critics consider the greatest in world literature. It follows two parallel and intertwined stories: the adulterous love affair of Anna Karenina, a beautiful and intelligent married woman of St. Petersburg society, with the dashing cavalry officer Count Vronsky — and the parallel courtship of Konstantin Levin, a landowner and Tolstoy's closest self-portrait, for the young princess Kitty Shcherbatsky. The novel's famous opening sentence — 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way' — announces its central subject: the study of what destroys marriages, families, and individuals, and the parallel investigation of how a life can be well lived. Both stories unfold against the vast backdrop of Russian society in the 1870s.
Where to start
Anna Karenina (1878) — the complete novel; no prequel required. Available in numerous translations: Pevear and Volokhonsky (2000) and Constance Garnett are the most widely read in English
Complete Anna Karenina Book List
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Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy·1878
Anna Karenina — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Anna Karenina about?
Anna Karenina follows two parallel stories. Anna Karenina, a beautiful and intelligent married woman of St. Petersburg society, meets Count Vronsky at a railway station and enters into an adulterous love affair with him that gradually destroys her social position, her relationship with her son, and her mental stability. Meanwhile, Konstantin Levin — an awkward, principled landowner based closely on Tolstoy himself — courts and eventually marries Kitty Shcherbatsky, and the novel follows their marriage and Levin's search for the meaning of a good life. The two stories are structurally parallel: Anna's love leads to destruction; Levin's search leads to a kind of provisional moral clarity. Tolstoy presents both without judgment, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions about what the parallel means.
Does Anna Karenina die?
Yes. Anna throws herself under a train near the end of the novel. This is not a spoiler in the conventional sense — the novel announces the tragedy from the beginning, and readers who come to it knowing the ending (as most Russian readers of 1878 did, since it was serialized) find that the knowledge does not diminish but intensifies the reading. Tolstoy builds the inevitability of the ending over hundreds of pages: Anna's social exclusion, Vronsky's gradual withdrawal, her increasing jealousy and instability, the way the railway — which appears in the novel's first great scene — haunts everything that follows. The ending is not a punishment but a logical consequence of everything the novel has shown.
Which translation of Anna Karenina is best?
The major English translations divide roughly into two camps. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2000) prioritize fidelity to Tolstoy's syntax and Russian idiom — their version is sometimes awkward but preserves the strangeness of Tolstoy's prose, including his deliberate repetitions of words (which earlier translators smoothed away). Constance Garnett's translation (1901) is the most historically influential — it was the version that shaped the Western image of Russian literature for a century — and is more fluent, though it sometimes sacrifices precision. Rosemary Edmonds (Penguin, 1954) and Louise Maude (Oxford World's Classics) are solid alternatives. Most literary readers currently prefer Pevear-Volokhonsky; those reading for the story for the first time may find Garnett easier.
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