Anna Karenina: Differences in Parallels Anonymous 12th Grade

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy is, in many aspects, a story of love and relationships. Two couples, Kitty and Levin, and Anna and Vronsky, find some form of love and passion throughout the course of the novel, yet their personalities determine the success of their relationships. In Part VI of the novel, the two couples are both spending the summer in their country estates, and their behaviors in and reactions to parallel circumstances reflect the ultimate fates of their romances. Kitty and Levin are able to have a more secure and emotionally fulfilling relationship than Anna and Vronsky because they understand each other and because, despite this, each has genuine preoccupations of his or her own.

The contrasting manners in which Kitty and Anna treat their domestic roles reflect the stability of their respective relationships. At a gathering of the women in the family on the balcony, Kitty is “introducing [a] new way” of making jam, “which [was] employed in her old home,” (502) to Agatha Mikhaylovna, who had run Levin’s household before his marriage. Kitty, upon moving into Levin’s home, has almost immediately concerned herself with the running of the household and taken over Agatha’s job. Though the scene in which they make jam...