Anna Karenina, an 1873 novel by Leo Tolstoy, is set in Russia. During this time, there were some Russians who disagreed with the Czar’s governing, which started to stir about the idea of communism. Going along with these radical social ideas in...

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Such is the dogma that underlies the social and economic theories laid out by German philosopher Karl Marx in his political pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto. In...

Two clashing movements existed within Russia in the 19th century. In the rural areas existed a movement that could hardly be called a movement. It was, in fact, more of a planted fixture. The indigenous foundation that had existed for time...

The question of judgment and sympathies in Anna Karenina is one that, every time I have read the novel, seems to become more complicated and slung with obfuscation. The basic problem with locating the voice of judgment is that throughout the...

Constantine Levin, a hero of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, longs to discover some harmonious part of himself through experiencing the peasant way of life. He believes there to be something profoundly rewarding in the simple act of working as one's...

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...

Though a majority of the characters in Leo Tolstoy’s momentous novel Anna Karenina are members of the nobility, the reforms Czar Alexander II put in place for the lower classes had profound effects on them. The time of his rule was an era of...

Facial expressions and body language communicate one’s intentions and emotions far better than words. Leo Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina, describes a plethora of physical descriptions, enabling the reader to more completely understand the characters’...

Sexual relations have different social implications depending on the society in which they take place. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is a 19th century novel and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s Envy is a 20th century novel. Both novels portray the imperfect...

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...

Over 1300 pages long, Tolstoy's War and Peace presents characters who disappear as quickly as they appeared. But every single one of them has a particular significance in the broader themes that War and Peace displays, whether that theme be love,...

In 1898, Tolstoy wrote in a Letter on Suicide that “suicide is immoral.” He vehemently condemned the act of it, by qualifying it as unreasonable and wrong. However, in his earlier books, such as War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy treats...

“All happy families are alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (1.1.1)

In this famed first sentence of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy alludes to the two kinds of familial happiness, almost comically simplifying the idea of ‘family’....

In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, tracing the muzhik image throughout the novel provides an insight into Anna Karenina’s psyche and subconscious. The peasant is encountered at the time of Anna and Vronsky’s first meeting, a wretched peasant crushed to...

Throughout the course of Leo Tolstoy’s iconic tragedy Anna Karenina, the presence of trains is essential both in terms of symbolic resonance and as a way to communicate social commentary and setting. Tolstoy employs train imagery as a way to talk...

Nothing exists to hinder an individual's pursuit of happiness besides the shackles built from the expectations of others. Societal norms become ironclad laws, and those who do not accept these constraints often find themselves lost, ostracized,...

Constantine Levin’s pair of pivotal experiences contribute significantly to Anna Karenina’s psychological tapestry because these moments of crisis draw out and highlight the subjectivity of the protagonist’s life experience. The novel’s...

The idea of seeing a widely loved, magnificent woman go from the envy of St. Petersburg to the deranged, self-obsessed person that made the rash decision to jump underneath a train to get revenge on her husband sounds like a crazy thought. Knowing...

In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, the concept of privileged motherhood is introduced fairly early in the narrative: ““She stood watching the fair woman walk down the long line of galleries with the grace and majesty which queens are sometimes...

In a polemic against the use of alcohol and narcotics, Lev Tolstoy poses and then answers the question of why men stupefy themselves. He attacks these vices as escapes used to silence the human conscience and allow one to do that which moral...

What a worthwhile life entails remains unknown, but not undebated. For instance, Leo Tolstoy’s 19th century novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich features Ivan Ilyich, a Russian man devoted to living his life in accordance with the wills of his...

Poor Ivan Ilych is plagued by not one, but two diseases. While his "floating kidney" ends his life, it is a temporal disease - which is actually healed as his kidney disease progresses - that ruins his life. Ivan spends his life in a small...

"It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up. And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there is only death."

--The...

Like death or abandonment, alienation is one of the deepest-rooted fears experienced by human beings. As social creatures, humans have the need to identify themselves as one of a group, whether that group is a family, a culture, or a religion. The...