Reading Order
Anna Karenina Reading Order
Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1878) is a complete standalone novel. It follows two parallel narratives: Anna Karenina, a married Russian aristocrat who begins an affair with the cavalry officer Count Vronsky and is destroyed by it; and Konstantin Levin, a landowner who courts and marries the young Kitty Shcherbatskaya and tries to find meaning in work, marriage, and finally faith. Set in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the Russian countryside in the 1870s, it is widely considered one of the greatest novels ever written.
Where to start
Anna Karenina
Complete Anna Karenina Book List
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Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy·1878·Standalone — Anna's affair with Vronsky and its consequences; Levin's search for meaning through work, love, and faith; two of the greatest fictional portraits of a marriage and a love affair in any literature; very long but compulsively readable - Buy
War and Peace
OptionalLeo Tolstoy·1869·Tolstoy's other great novel — four families across the Napoleonic Wars; much longer than Anna Karenina and more epic in scope, less concentrated on the domestic and psychological; the companion to Anna Karenina in his career - Buy
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
OptionalLeo Tolstoy·1886·Tolstoy's novella — a high court judge dying in middle age who confronts the fact that he has wasted his life; one of the greatest and most concentrated pieces of fiction in any language; can be read in a single sitting
Anna Karenina — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Anna Karenina a standalone?
Yes — Anna Karenina is entirely self-contained and has no sequel. Tolstoy's other major works — War and Peace (1869), The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Resurrection (1899) — are independent works.
What is Anna Karenina about?
Anna Karenina follows two interwoven stories. Anna Karenina is a beautiful, spirited married woman in Moscow and St. Petersburg society who leaves her husband for the cavalry officer Vronsky, and who finds that Russian society will not forgive her while tolerating the same behavior in men. Konstantin Levin is a landowner in the Russian countryside who loves the young Kitty Shcherbatskaya and spends the novel trying to understand what a good life requires — through farming, through marriage, and finally through a conversion experience that gives the novel its ending. Tolstoy once said that he loved Levin more than Anna.
Is Anna Karenina too long?
Anna Karenina is very long — approximately 800–900 pages in most translations — but it is not slow in the way that very long nineteenth-century novels can be. Tolstoy moves quickly between his characters and between social registers, and the novel is notably free of the padding that afflicts Dickens or Thackeray. Most readers who attempt it find it compulsive. The Levin sections, which some readers initially find less gripping than the Anna and Vronsky sections, are generally considered the more profound half of the novel by the time it ends.
Which translation of Anna Karenina should I read?
The two most widely recommended translations are the Penguin Classics edition by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2000) and the Oxford World's Classics edition by Rosamund Bartlett (2014). Pevear and Volokhonsky are known for staying close to Tolstoy's rhythms and syntax; Bartlett's translation is considered more idiomatic. The older Constance Garnett translation (1901) is readable but dated. All three are available in print; the Pevear/Volokhonsky is probably the most widely available in bookshops.
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