Anna Karénine

See also: Anna Karénine (homonymy)

Anna Karénine is a Romance of Leon Tolstoï published in 1877. The author opposes to it the calm happiness of an honest household (Levine and Kitty Cherbatski) to humiliations and the vexations which accompany guilty passion (Vronski and Anna Karénine).

This novel is first of all appeared in the form of series in the periodical Ruskii Vestnik ( the Russian mail ), but Tolstoï entered in conflict with the editor Mikhail Katkov in connection with the contents of the last serial. The consequence was that the novel did not appear in its entirety that in the shape of a book.

The novel is universally regarded as one of chief-of works of the realistic literature. The character of Anna would have been partly based on Maria Hartung (1832-1919), the oldest daughter of the poet Alexandre Pouchkine.

Adaptations to the cinema

The novel was adapted on several occasions on television and to the cinema. One can quote:

summary: Russia, 1880. Anna Karénine, is an young woman of the high society of Saint-Pétersbourg. She is married in Alexis Karénine a senior official of the imperial administration, an austere and proud character. They have a eight year old boy, Serge.

Anna Karénine goes to Moscow in his/her brother Stiva Oblonski. While getting out of the train, it crosses the count Vronski, come to the meeting from her mother. The count lets pass this very beautiful woman.

Anna Karénine fall in love with Vronski, this officer brilliant, but frivolous. It is first of all only one flash, and the joy of finding her husband and his son make him believe that it will be a giddiness without a future. But at the time of a voyage by train, when Vronski joined it and its love declares to him, Anna realizes that the fright interfered happiness which it feels at this moment will change its existence. Anna fights against this passion. It however ends up being given up with a guilty happiness with the current which carries it towards this young officer.

Then Anna fall pregnant. Feeling guilty and deeply depressed by its fault, it decides to acknowledge its inaccuracy with her husband. She does not dare to tell in Vronski which she decided to speak with her husband. The love which it carries for her son makes him think one moment to give up husband and lover and to flee with him. But a letter of her husband, left on journeys, in answer to its consent, where he only asks him to respect appearances, decides it to remain. But the pregnancy proceeds badly. After having put at the world a girl, Anna contracts the fever and is likely to die. She sends a telegram to her husband, asking him to return and to forgive him. She repent herself and calls death like a release for all. Moved by the remorse by his wife and his imminent death, Alexis agree to forgive him.

Once cured, Anna which always likes Vronski, refuses to see it. Driven out by it, this one thinks of committing suicide. Then some time later, an unexpected meeting with Vronski is enough to make steal in glares the decision of Anna. It is thrown in its arms and they decide to flee together abroad. It is for Anna, one moment of joy and delivery. She knows during a few weeks a happiness insolate by visiting with Vronski France and Italy.

Then their relation will worsen slowly. Of return in Russia, Anna and Vronski live in margin of the company. They cause at the same time admiration and reprobation to have thus faced conventions of the Russian high society. The fortune of Vronski enables them to have an independent existence and they manage to recreate around them a microphone-company, in margin of the Large World. But Anna does not support to have given up his/her child and to have betrayed her husband. It remains attached to her Serge son whom it does not see any more and it does not love the girl born of its connection with Vronski. On its side, Vronski, given up by its pars, saw with difficulty the effects of this connection. This heavy climate causes a reciprocal incomprehension which darkens their union. Anna, in prey with the sharpest torments, and taken in gears of which it cannot be delivered, puts an end to its life while being thrown under a train.

The tragic history of love of Anna Karénine and Vronski fits in a vast table of the contemporary Russian company.

Simultaneously with their adventure, Tolstoï brushes the portrait of two other couples: Kitty and Lévine, and Daria and Oblonski. It there evokes the various facets of the emancipation of the woman, and draws a critical picture of Russia of the end of the XIXe century: Tolstoï shows that the liberal and progressive ideas of the occident start to sap apparently intact traditional structures

It is first of all the happy love which will end up linking Kitty and Lévine.

Kitty is a beautiful teenager who at eighteen years makes its enters the world. At the time of a ball, the declaration of Levine flatters it because it gives him importance. She answers him however by the negative one because she is in love with Vronski. This last escapes to him at the time of this ball where he succumbs to the fascination of Anna. Kitty sinks then in shame.

Lévine, is to him a generous country squire and progressist. Just like Tolstoï, it is attacked anguishes and interrogations on the direction of the life and dead and on the relation of the human beings with the infinite one…

Several months after this disaster ball, Kitty again meets Lévine auprès of which it then feels a mixture of fear and happiness. It realizes that it liked only him. Kitty and Lévine understand that the past was only one test intended to consolidate their love. They then decide to marry.

This union offers the image of an opened out couple, where female softness and wisdom make it possible the man to be achieved within nature.

Appears then a couple more contrasted: Oblonski, the brother of Anna Karénine, is an inaccurate sensualist. He testifies an extreme indulgence with its similar, undoubtedly founded on the feeling of his own defects. Daria, his wife, it, is subjected and resigned, but is especially exhausted by the tasks of the daily life. In spite of its inaccuracy, Oblonski lavishes on his wife several comforting marks of tenderness…

Through the history of these couples, beyond even of the humanistic ideal that it places in Lévine, Tolstoï evokes in this novel a double search without end: that of the research of the love and the requirement of truth.

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