Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina (Russian: Анна Каренина) is an immortal global literary and human work, translated into most of the world’s languages, and reprinted hundreds of times. Critics’ opinions on this novel have varied, and many studies have been written about it, ranging from complete admiration to relative rejection, if not complete rejection. Those who admired it admired it because they saw in it the essence of Tolstoy’s art and the conclusion of his major works, and those who criticized it and attacked it did so because they saw in it an artistic flaw, and saw major secondary events that accompany the main event and almost overshadow it.

Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina with the famous sentence: “All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family has its own way of being unhappy.”

The novel’s events feature diverse human models, most of whom are sick with the disease of class, the disease of nobility, the disease of heavy inheritance, and human models, these are often unstable and abnormal models, within which many conflicts interact, most notably between the heart and the mind or between love and duty, between the shell and the core, and between the backwardness of the clergy and the Enlightenment movement among Russian intellectuals.

What is unique about Leo Tolstoy’s writings is that you, as a reader, will not be affected by Leo Tolstoy’s writings, which are completely neutral in his opinion of each character, but the writer leaves you the space to determine your opinion and position, which provokes discussion among everyone who reads the novel. Anna Karenina is not like all novels, where the reader is usually affected by the author’s opinion of the character, unlike Leo Tolstoy’s writings. Tolstoy’s rational mind also realized that there is no character who speaks only good, and another who uses evil in everything he does in the novel, but Tolstoy believed that every person has a heart, a mind, and a higher interest; No one does anything without his own justification, which may or may not be consistent with the ideals that novelists usually seek to promote in societies, where everyone in the novel is pitiful and all are selfish, and all had a convincing and logical justification for what he did. Tolstoy, as a novelist, was not accustomed in his writings to moving away from the importance of adhering to religious teachings as the best way out for all the events that an individual faces, perhaps as a result of his belief that divine wisdom and religious teachings are superior to all solutions and human wisdom, and this is what the reader senses in the novel.

This novel is one of the most controversial novels to this day, because Tolstoy discusses in it one of the most important social issues that faced all human societies, especially European ones after the Industrial Revolution, and the resulting interest in material things, and the diseases related to money that appeared among the aristocratic classes at that time.