Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" opens with one of the most famous lines in world literature — "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" — and then proceeds to prove the point across eight hundred magnificent pages. The novel tells two parallel stories: Anna Karenina, a beautiful, intelligent, married woman who begins a passionate affair with the dashing Count Vronsky, and Konstantin Levin, a landowner struggling to find meaning in work, faith, and marriage. Anna's story is a devastating downward spiral; Levin's is a difficult, uncertain ascent toward something like grace. Together, they form Tolstoy's complete vision of human life.

What makes "Anna Karenina" extraordinary — what makes many readers and writers consider it the greatest novel ever written — is Tolstoy's almost supernatural ability to render the texture of lived experience. No other writer has ever captured the way human beings actually think, feel, and behave with such comprehensive fidelity. A horse race, a country harvest, a conversation over dinner, the first moment of holding a newborn child — Tolstoy makes every scene feel as if it is happening to you, right now, in your own body.

Anna herself is one of fiction's most complex and sympathetic characters. Tolstoy does not judge her affair — he makes us understand it completely, feel its intoxicating pull, and then shows us, with terrible inevitability, the social machinery that grinds her down. Her tragedy is that she lives in a world that grants men the freedom it denies women, and she is too honest and too passionate to pretend otherwise.

"Anna Karenina" belongs on this list because many of the world's greatest writers — from Dostoevsky to Nabokov to Faulkner — have called it the greatest novel ever written, and having read it, it is very difficult to disagree. Tolstoy's achievement here is not a matter of a single brilliant technique or a single powerful theme; it is the sheer totality of the vision. This novel contains everything — love, betrayal, politics, farming, horse racing, philosophy, parenthood, death, faith — and renders all of it with equal mastery and equal attention.

The dual structure of the novel is its greatest innovation. Anna's passionate tragedy and Levin's quiet spiritual search are not merely parallel plots; they are Tolstoy's argument about the two fundamental approaches to life. Anna seeks meaning through romantic passion and finds it leads to destruction. Levin seeks meaning through work, family, and faith and finds something that might be called happiness — not ecstatic, not dramatic, but sustainable and real.

The novel also matters because of its unflinching treatment of a woman trapped by a society that punishes her for the same behavior it condones in men. Anna's fate is not the result of moral failing but of a social order built on double standards, and Tolstoy's sympathy for her — even as he clearly believes she has made a fatal mistake — gives the novel its moral complexity and its emotional power.

"Anna Karenina" was published serially from 1875 to 1877 and was immediately recognized as a masterwork. Dostoevsky called it "flawless as a work of art." It has been translated into virtually every major language and has never been out of print. The novel has been adapted into more than a dozen major film and television versions, including a celebrated 2012 film directed by Joe Wright starring Keira Knightley. Its opening line is one of the most quoted in all of literature. The novel profoundly influenced the development of literary realism worldwide and is a standard text in university literature courses around the globe. Tolstoy's exploration of Anna's psychology is considered a landmark in the literary depiction of female consciousness, and the novel has been claimed by feminist critics as a key text in understanding how patriarchal societies police women's sexuality and autonomy.