Parallels to Destruction and Conflict in Anna and Vronsky's Love Story as Evinced From Their First Meeting Umme Ferva Raza College

Anna Karenina is a story of split, conflict, schism and divide. Anna’s battle for love, her struggle between what she needs and what she desires, her hatred of lies and her usage of them, her vacillation between libre penseur – liberal values- and old patriarchal and moral values – all reinforce the theme of internal conflict that leads to inevitable destruction. Leo Tolstoy, however, in a brilliant stroke of genius, uses the seemingly insignificant remark made by a passerby on the death of a guard in the first section of the book to elicit the overarching theme of brutal divide in Anna’s struggle for love. By using a death to gain insight into a love affair, Tolstoy reveals his ability to weave apparently isolated and disconnected instances into the cloth of the overall work in a style so unique that it makes Matthew Arnold’s tribute for the novel ring true: “We are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life.” Indeed, Tolstoy creates life in a book, transforming it into a place full of vitality and strength.

The fascinating nature of the work lies in the way Tolstoy binds the novel together through an intrinsic and subtle thread of organization, where apparently delineated ideas are...