| Anna Karenina: |
| Tragic heroine of the great Russian novel of the same name (1873-76) by Leo Tolstoy. Beautiful, charming, generous,intelligent, Anna is married to Karenin, a humorless man and a rather rigid conventional but important bureaucrat. Anna is drawn reluctanly, but inexorably into a passionate affair with the dashing army officer Count Vronsky. Deeply in love with Vronsky and pregnant with his child, she leaves her husband. Vronsky sacrifices his brilliant career in the army and his friends and devotes himself exclusively to Anna. Society, in it's hypocrisy, turns against Anna, not because she is having an adulterous affair ,but because she has violated society's cardinal rule in such matters: Be Discreet! Anna and Vronsky become totally dependant on each other's love. Anna becomes febrile, demanding, possessive, jealous, demanding and obsessive. Finally, fearing that Vronsky is about to leave her for another woman, Anna throws herself under the wheels of a train. Vronsky is left desolate. Tolstoy intended Anna Karenina to be an object lesson in the deterioration of a woman who transgresses the moral law,but Anna remains a towering tragic figure who inspires us with pity and terror. For more of Tolstoy go here: Leo Tolstoy |
| "All happy families are alike, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way".
So begins Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina then follows a story filled with unhappy families. This sentence has stuck in my mind for years; indeed many critics have cited it as the best first sentence in literature. This famous sentence is often used to make the point that that unhappy families or people are inherently more interesting than happy ones. |
 |