1. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In Leo Tolstoy’s, Anna Karenina , begins with the Oblonsky Family being torn apart by adultery. Anna Karenina then arrives to mend the family issues and convince Dolly to not get a divorce. Kitty, Dolly’s younger sister has two men who both are potential suitors for her. Vronsky, the man Kitty chose, soon falls in love with Anna instead of Kitty. Kitty then becomes ill, and Anna returns to St. Perersburg and wit in that move, she decided that her and Vronsky just had a fling that was simply just an infatuation with one another. Vronsky Follows Anna and expresses his love for her, and once again she dismisses him. Years later, Vronsky participated in a horse race in which Anna and her husband Karenin , attended. This is when Anna admits to her husband that she is having an affair with Vronsky and he is the man she loves. Kitty and Levin rekindle their love at a dinner party, and they become engaged and marry. When Anna attempts to divorce Karenin, he rejects it due to the reflection of a divorce on their social status in society. Therefore, Anna just leaves, its not until Karenin caught Vronsky at the Karenin country home one day, he agrees to a divorce. Anna and Vronsky go to Italy, where they lead an aimless existence. Eventually, the two return to Russia, where Anna is spurned by society, which considers her adultery disgraceful. Anna and Vronsky withdraw into seclusion, though Anna dares a birthday visit to her young son at Karenin’s home. She begins to feel great jealousy for Vronsky, resenting the fact that he is free to participate in society while she is housebound and scorned. Anna becomes depended on sedatives to sleep, while she still awaits a divorce. Levin and Kitty move to Moscow to await the birth of their baby, and they are astonished at the expenses of city life. When Anna and Levin meet, they immediately become enchanted with one another which confused them both. Anna picks a fight with Vronsky and after saying goodbye to Dolly, agrees to meet him at a train station after his errands. At the station, despairing and dazed by the crowds, Anna throws herself under a train and dies. Levin was depressed but then becomes transformed by faith. And after a thunderstorm, Levin feels real love for his son, and Kitty is pleased. Levin reflects again that the meaning of his life lies in the good that he can put into it.
2. A Christian's first duty is to abstain from living by the work of others and from participating in the organized violence of the state. While all forms of violence are evil, any government compulsion shares this taint, since the individual must be free to follow his own inner goodness, seeking for himself what is right and wrong. These as yet unformalized doctrines motivate Levin's disinterest in the "Slavonic question" and make him challenge why Russian soldiers should murder Turks.
3. The narrator maintains an impersonal yet sympathetic tone. He focuses on both facts and feelings but without authorial commentaries on the fates of characters. Anna Kareninadoes not include explicit philosophical generalizations, except in the opening sentence of the novel.
a.) “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It is not a narrative beginning that tells a story about particular characters and their actions. Rather, it is a generalization, much like a philosophical or scientific argument.
b.) “Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be. But if you don’t love me, it would be better and more honest to say so.” Anna makes an irrational connection between Vronsky’s mother in the first sentence and herself in the second. Anna refers to the lack of love Vronsky must feel for his mother and then immediately—saying “But” as if continuing the same thought—refers to his lack of love for herself. Anna’s contrast between respect and love is startling, even illogical.
c.) “. . . [M]y life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!” Levin’s gain corresponds precisely to Anna’s loss, in a symmetry typical of Tolstoy’s careful structuring of the novel.
4. Five literary elements used in the novel are interior monologue, stock epithets, symbolism, recurrent phrases, and structure.
a. Interior monologue: gives verbal definition to the semi-articulate processes of a character's consciousness. Anna's soliloquy as she drives to the place of her suicide is an example of this dramatic device.
B and C. Stock epithets and recurrent phrases: Anna's "dark curls" and "light step" appear frequently. Stiva's "handsome, ruddy face," Kitty's "truthful eyes," and Karenin's "deliberate, high-pitched voice" provide a few examples of this device.
D. Symbolism: the storm corresponding to the stormy state of one's soul; the symbolic value of the train station; the horse race as a working model of the Anna-Vronsky affair; the symbolism of the ball and the theater; Anna's "drooping eyelids" as the first sign of her witchery; her symbolic state of having a "double soul;" the "little man" of death in Anna's dream which echoes the ill-omened railway accident.
E. Structure: “. . . [M]y life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!” Levin’s gain corresponds precisely to Anna’s loss, in a symmetry typical of Tolstoy’s careful structuring of the novel.
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