Anna Karenina (Readings Classics)

Trapped in a suffocating marriage, Anna Karenina is swept into an affair with the dazzling officer Count Vronsky. Scandal makes them pariahs. They leave St. Petersburg for Italy, where the glamour thins and Anna's world contracts to a single, exacting love. Can passion alone sustain a life stripped of reputation, family, and belonging? In counterpoint, Levin seeks a more ordinary happiness in work, marriage, and faith, testing whether steadier commitments can answer the same needs. Tolstoy sets this intimate drama against a vast social canvas of ballrooms, nurseries, estates, and railways, tracing how institutions and gossip shape private feeling. With psychological precision and sweeping reach, he charts the human heart as it tries to reconcile freedom with responsibility, desire with duty. Anna Karenina is at once romantic and unsparing where love promises transcendence, exacts a cost, and finally asks what kind of life remains when society turns away from it all.