Book Discussion: Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878), the Ultimate Novel of Men and Women

Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is the great novel of love, marriage, adultery, and family love. It can be described as the greatest example of “the fiction of men and women.” Containing three major plot strands and hundreds of characters and situations, the novel portrays a Russia torn between self improvement and military intervention in other countries, characters torn between the circumstances of their own lives and a quest for something more, and a writer torn between the entertainment provided by the novel form and a more declarative moral mission. Please use the Penguin edition, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.