The clash of values: imported, Western values.Shifting social attitudes towards divorce and the family.The changing nature of marriage: Princess Shcherbatskaia does not know how to arrange her daughter’s marriage.Polemic with the radical/nihilistic thinking about free love.Opening sentence states the theme: happy and unhappy families.description of Obolensky at the restaurant) is clearly felt by the reader to be that of Tolstoy.

The invisible narrator-author shines through in Levin – cf Nikolenka in Childhood.

Clearly autobiographical figure: shares details of Tolstoy’s own life.

Position of Tolstoy the conservative thinker expressed by Levin.

Railway as symbol of the new industrialized Russia in the making.

The creation of zemstvos: local democracy.

The rise of a new business class – partly Jewish.

The liberation of the serfs: the emergence of the future “kulaks”.

Complication of the situation of the Russian nobility (дворянство).Period of rapid change in Russian society.Definitive book version appeared in 1879.Refused mainly because of Tolstoy’s sarcastic depiction of the Russian volunteers going to fight in Serbia. Journal refused the last part, so that the instalment version ended with Anna’s suicide.Novel written and published from 1873 to 1877 in “thick journal” Russky vestnik (The Russian Messenger).In fact a complex interweaving of themes and characters.Commonly seen simply as a novel about an extra-marital affair that ends in suicide (cf Flaubert, Madame Bovary).Opening sentence famous, frequently quoted: “All happy families are alike each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”.At least nine film and TV film versions, plus theatrical dramatizations.Considered one of the world’s greatest novels.

Instal Anna Karenina free