Anna Karenina Flashcards
Anna Arkadyevna Karenina
A beautiful, aristocratic married woman from St. Petersburg whose pursuit of love and emotional honesty makes her an outcast from society. Anna’s adulterous affair catapults her into social exile, misery, and finally suicide. Anna is a beautiful person in every sense: intelligent and literate, she reads voraciously, writes children’s books, and shows an innate ability to appreciate art. Physically ravishing yet tastefully reserved, she captures the attentions of virtually everyone in high society. Anna believes in love—not only romantic love but family love and friendship as well, as we see from her devotion to her son, her fervent efforts to reconcile Stiva and Dolly Oblonsky in their marital troubles, and her warm reception of Dolly at her country home. Anna abhors nothing more than fakery, and she comes to regard her husband, Karenin, as the very incarnation of the fake, emotionless conventionality she despises.
Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin
Anna’s husband, a high-ranking government minister and one of the most important men in St. Petersburg. Karenin is formal and duty-bound. He is cowed by social convention and constantly presents a flawless façade of a cultivated and capable man. There is something empty about almost everything Karenin does in the novel, however: he reads poetry but has no poetic sentiments, he reads world history but seems remarkably narrow-minded. He cannot be accused of being a poor husband or father, but he shows little tenderness toward his wife, Anna, or his son, Seryozha. He fulfills these family roles as he does other duties on his list of social obligations. Karenin’s primary motivation in both his career and his personal life is self-preservation. When he unexpectedly forgives Anna on what he believes may be her deathbed, we see a hint of a deeper Karenin ready to emerge. Ultimately, however, the bland bureaucrat remains the only Karenin we know.
Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky
Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky
A wealthy and dashing military officer whose love for Anna prompts her to desert her husband and son. Vronsky is passionate and caring toward Anna but clearly disappointed when their affair forces him to give up his dreams of career advancement. Vronsky, whom Tolstoy originally modeled on the Romantic heroes of an earlier age of literature, has something of the idealistic loner in him. Yet there is a dark spot at the core of his personality, as if Tolstoy refuses to let us get too close to Vronsky’s true nature. Indeed, Tolstoy gives us far less access to Vronsky’s thoughts than to other major characters in the novel. We can never quite forget Vronsky’s early jilting of Kitty Shcherbatskaya, and we wonder whether he feels guilt about nearly ruining her life. Even so, Vronsky is more saintly than demonic at the end of the novel, and his treatment of Anna is impeccable, even if his feelings toward her cool a bit.
Konstantin Dmitrich Levin
A socially awkward but generous-hearted landowner who, along with Anna, is the co-protagonist of the novel. Whereas Anna’s pursuit of love ends in tragedy, Levin’s long courtship of Kitty Shcherbatskaya ultimately ends in a happy marriage. Levin is intellectual and philosophical but applies his thinking to practical matters such as agriculture. He aims to be sincere and productive in whatever he does, and resigns from his post in local government because he sees it as useless and bureaucratic. Levin is a figurehead in the novel for Tolstoy himself, who modeled Levin and Kitty’s courtship on his own marriage. Levin’s declaration of faith at the end of the novel sums up Tolstoy’s own convictions, marking the start of the deeply religious phase of Tolstoy’s life that followed his completion of Anna Karenina.
Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya (Kitty)
Kitty A beautiful young woman who is courted by both Levin and Vronsky, and who ultimately marries Levin. Modeled on Tolstoy’s real-life wife, Kitty is sensitive and perhaps a bit overprotected, shocked by some of the crude realities of life, as we see in her horrified response to Levin’s private diaries. But despite her indifference to intellectual matters, Kitty displays great courage and compassion in the face of death when caring for Levin’s dying brother Nikolai.
Stepan Arkadyich Oblonsky (Stiva)
Anna’s brother, a pleasure-loving aristocrat and minor government official whose affair with his children’s governess nearly destroys his marriage. Stiva and Anna share a common tendency to place personal fulfillment over social duties. Stiva is incorrigible, proceeding from his affair with the governess—which his wife, Dolly, honorably forgives—to a liaison with a ballerina. For Tolstoy, Stiva’s moral laxity symbolizes the corruptions of big-city St. Petersburg life and contrasts with the powerful moral conscience of Levin. However, despite his transgressions, the affable Stiva is a difficult character to scorn.
Darya Alexandrovna Oblonskaya (Dolly)
Stiva’s wife and Kitty’s older sister. Dolly is one of the few people who behave kindly toward Anna after her affair becomes public. Dolly’s sympathetic response to Anna’s situation and her guarded admiration for Anna’s attempt to live her life fully hint at the positive aspects of Anna’s experience. Well acquainted with the hardships of matrimony and motherhood, Dolly is, more than anyone else in the novel, in a position to appreciate what Anna has left behind by leaving with Vronsky. The novel opens with the painful revelation that Dolly’s husband has betrayed her, and her even more painful awareness that he is not very repentant.
Sergei Alexeich Karenin (Seryozha)
Karenin and Anna’s young son. Seryozha is a good-natured boy, but his father treats him coldly after learning of Anna’s affair. Anna shows her devotion to Seryozha when she risks everything to sneak back into the Karenin household simply to bring birthday presents to her son.
Nikolai Dmitrich Levin
Levin’s sickly, thin brother. The freethinking Nikolai is largely estranged from his brothers, but over the course of the novel he starts to spend more time with Levin. Nikolai is representative of liberal social thought among certain Russian intellectuals of the period; his reformed-prostitute girlfriend, Marya Nikolaevna, is living proof of his unconventional, radically democratic viewpoint.
Book Summary
Book Summary
Part 1
A crisis develops in the Oblonsky household when Dolly finds out about her husband’s affair. Stiva’s sister, Anna Karenina, arrives to reconcile the couple and dissuades Dolly from getting a divorce. Konstantin Levin, Stiva’s friend, arrives in Moscow to propose to the eighteen year old Kitty Shtcherbatsky. She refuses him, for she loves Count Vronsky, a dashing army officer who has no intentions of marrying.
Meeting the lovely Madame Karenina, Vronsky falls in love and begins to pursue her. He and Anna are so involved with each other at the grand ball that Kitty’s hopes for Vronsky are shattered. Anna, followed by Vronsky, returns to her husband and son in St. Petersburg, while the disappointed Levin returns to his country estate.
Part 2
Kitty falls ill after her humiliating rejection by Vronsky. At the German spa where she takes a rest cure she tries to deny her womanly nature by becoming a religious do-gooder. Realizing the hypocrisy of this new calling, Kitty returns to Russia cured of her depression and ready to accept her ultimate wifehood.
Consummating her union with Vronsky, Anna steps into a new life with much foreboding for the future. By the time she confesses her adultery to the suspecting Karenin, she is already pregnant with Vronsky’s child.
Part 3
Devoting himself to farming, Levin tries to find life meaningful without marriage. He expends his energies in devising a cooperative landholding system with his peasants to make the best use of the land. Seeing his brother Nicolai hopelessly ill with tuberculosis, he realizes he has been working to avoid facing the problem of death. He also realizes he will always love Kitty.
Vronsky’s career ambitions rival his love, and as he has not chosen between them, he is still uncommitted to Anna. Having rejected her husband, but still unable to depend on Vronsky, Anna finds her situation desperate. Her life is in a state of suspension.
Part 4
Kitty and Levin are engaged to marry. Karenin, who has tried to maintain appearances of domestic tranquillity, finally builds up enough anger to hire a divorce lawyer. Anna is confined of a daughter, but dangerously ill from puerperal fever. At her deathbed, Karenin forgives her and feels sanctified by this surge of humanity and Christian charity. At this sudden reversal of their roles Vronsky feels so humiliated he attempts suicide. These incidents form the turning point of the novel. After Anna’s recovery, the lovers go abroad and Anna refuses divorce (though Karenin agrees to it) for fear of giving up her son.
Part 5
Levin and Kitty, after some initial difficulties, adjust to being married. Nicolai’s death affects Levin deeply, and he realizes that emotional commitment, not reason, enables one to overcome life’s problems. As if to underscore his life-affirmation, they learn Kitty is pregnant.
After they honeymoon in Italy, Anna and Vronsky return to Petersburg. Violently affected from seeing her son again, Anna’s love for Vronsky becomes more desperate now that she has no one else. Despite his objections, she boldly attends the theater as if to affirm her love before conventional society. Humiliated at the opera, she blames Vronsky for lacking sympathy with her suffering, while he is angry at her indiscretion. This keynotes the decline of their relationship, although it is temporarily restored as they go to live in the country.
Part 6
Among Levin’s summer visitors is a socialite who pays so much attention to Kitty that Levin asks him to leave. Visiting Anna at Vronsky’s estate, Dolly finds her own drab life preferable to the formal luxury and decadence of Anna’s. Complaining that Vronsky is eager for independence, Anna tells Dolly she must rely on her beauty and her love to keep his interest. Vronsky feels especially burdened by the demands of Anna’s love when she calls him home from a refreshing political convention.
Part 7
Kitty gives birth to a son. Karenin, under the influence of his fanatically devout friend, Countess Lydia Ivanovna, becomes religious and uses his hypocritical faith as a crutch to overcome his humiliation and loneliness.
Anna, seeing the irreversible decline of her love affair, has no more will to live and commits suicide.
Part 8
Vronsky volunteers for service in the Russo-Turkish war. Tolstoy uses this part of the novel to express his pacifist principles. Levin discovers salvation” when he resolves to “live for his soul” rather than for selfish goals. He realizes the meaning of life consists in living according to the goodness inherent in every individual. Understanding death as part of a reality-oriented life, Levin is at peace with himself.
