This page discusses the novel's complete plot, including its ending. Readers who have not yet finished the book should be aware that all major events are described below.
Plot Overview
Part One
The novel opens in the Oblonsky household, thrown into disorder because Dolly has discovered her husband Stepan Arkadyevitch's affair with the French governess. Into this crisis arrives Stepan's sister, Anna Karenina, travelling from Petersburg to help broker a reconciliation. Meanwhile, the landowner Konstantin Levin comes to Moscow with a single purpose: to propose to the young Kitty Shcherbatsky. He is refused. Kitty has fixed her hopes on the dashing Guards officer Count Vronsky, who has been paying her conspicuous attention without any intention of marrying her. Anna succeeds in reconciling Dolly and Stepan, but at the ball that closes Part One, Vronsky ignores Kitty entirely and dances the mazurka with Anna. Kitty's humiliation is total. Anna, alarmed by what she feels stirring in herself, flees Moscow the following morning. On the overnight train Vronsky appears at a station stop and confesses he has followed her simply to be near her. When Anna arrives home in Petersburg, the sight of her husband Alexey Alexandrovitch — specifically his protruding ears beneath his hat — produces in her, for the first time, a sharp and unfamiliar revulsion. Levin, rejected and shaken, returns to his country estate and attempts to rebuild his life through work.
Part Two
Kitty falls gravely ill and is sent abroad to a German spa, where she befriends the selfless Varenka and undergoes a spiritual convalescence. In Petersburg, Anna and Vronsky are drawn steadily closer through Princess Betsy Tverskaya's fashionable salon. Karenin attempts to warn Anna that her conduct is attracting notice; she deflects him with contemptuous ease. Their first sexual union takes place, and Anna is overwhelmed by shame. Vronsky, in the aftermath, feels like a murderer contemplating his victim. A recurring nightmare haunts Anna in which both men are simultaneously her husbands. At the military steeplechase, Anna's public anguish when Vronsky falls — his mare Frou-Frou breaks her back through his own error — forces a confession from her in the carriage home. Karenin, receiving her declaration with rigid stillness, demands only that external propriety be maintained. Back in the country, Levin learns from Oblonsky during a shooting trip that Kitty is dangerously ill, and the news shocks him even as he suppresses it.
Part Three
Levin's half-brother Sergey Ivanovitch visits the estate, and their philosophical differences are dramatised through arguments about the zemstvo, civic duty, and the peasantry. Levin escapes into a full day of mowing alongside his peasants, entering states of absorbed, almost unconscious physical joy. He visits Dolly at the run-down Ergushovo estate, where she tells him Kitty will spend the summer nearby. He cannot bring himself to act on this. Karenin, returning to Petersburg, composes a cold letter to Anna demanding she maintain appearances and cease contact with Vronsky. Anna, after a night of terror, resolves to leave — then receives Karenin's letter and collapses back into paralysis. She goes to a croquet party at Betsy's and meets Vronsky there, telling him she has confessed everything to her husband. Vronsky urges her to leave Karenin; Anna cannot bring herself to abandon her son Seryozha. Karenin, having weighed a duel and a divorce, rejects both and settles on keeping up appearances. Levin, spending a night on a haycock watching the peasants, resolves to abandon his educated life and live simply — and then sees Kitty pass in a carriage and all his resolutions dissolve.
Part Four
Karenin consults a lawyer about divorce, recoiling from the sordid practicalities. Vronsky escorts a vapid foreign prince around Petersburg and recognises in the man an uncomfortable reflection of his own shallowness. Anna gives birth to a daughter and nearly dies of puerperal fever. In her delirium she begs Karenin to forgive Vronsky; overwhelmed, Karenin kneels and weeps, experiencing a genuine spiritual transformation. He forgives both of them completely. Vronsky, shattered by Karenin's magnanimity, shoots himself in the chest and survives. Levin and Kitty meet again at Oblonsky's dinner party, their reunion charged with suppressed emotion. That same evening, in a scene of wordless intimacy, they confess their love by writing initial letters in chalk on a card table. Levin spends the night in sleepless elation and proposes formally the next morning. Karenin, two months after his bedside forgiveness, finds his domestic position increasingly untenable. Oblonsky brokers a conversation in which Karenin agrees to a divorce, taking the disgrace upon himself. Vronsky, recovering, abandons his posting to Tashkent and resigns his commission. He and Anna depart abroad together.
Part Five
Levin and Kitty marry in a ceremony rendered with comic and spiritual detail — Levin nearly misses the service because his shirt has been mislaid. The honeymoon is, for both, the bitterest period of their lives, easing only in the third month. Abroad, Vronsky and Anna settle in Italy, where Vronsky takes up painting and they befriend the intellectual Golenishtchev. They visit the Russian painter Mihailov, whose portrait of Anna captures her so perfectly that Vronsky quietly abandons his own canvas. Life in the palazzo grows oppressive, and they return to Russia. In Petersburg, Vronsky's family and social world remain open to him but closed to Anna. Anna visits her son Seryozha secretly on his birthday, a reunion of devastating tenderness cut short when Karenin's arrival is announced. Karenin, now under the influence of the pious Countess Lidia Ivanovna, will not let her see the boy again. Her attempt to attend the opera then ends in public humiliation when Madame Kartasova, in the next box, makes an insulting scene. Anna and Vronsky depart together for the country.
Part Six
The Levin estate at Pokrovskoe fills with summer guests: Dolly, the old princess, Varenka, and the fashionable Vassenka Veslovsky. Sergey Ivanovitch comes close to proposing to Varenka during a mushroom-gathering expedition but loses his nerve at the last moment, asking about mushrooms instead. Levin's jealousy over Veslovsky's attentions to Kitty escalates until he expels the young man from the house. Dolly visits Anna and Vronsky at their country estate, Vozdvizhenskoe, finding opulence, a nearly completed hospital, and an underlying atmosphere of theatrical effort. Anna shocks Dolly by revealing she has decided never to have more children. Vronsky asks Dolly to persuade Anna to pursue a divorce. Dolly departs relieved to be leaving. Levin attends the provincial nobility elections in Kashin, observing their procedural maneuvers with baffled alienation. Vronsky also attends and finds unexpected satisfaction in provincial politics, but a letter from Anna — reporting their daughter's illness and reproaching his absence — drives him home on the first train.
Part Seven
The Levins are in Moscow awaiting the birth of their child. Levin visits Anna with Oblonsky and is captivated by her intelligence and beauty; Kitty, learning of the visit, is devastated. Kitty goes into labour. Levin rushes through the city at dawn in a state of barely controlled panic, bribing a doctor and enduring the long hours of labour in a surreal half-life between the outer rooms and the sickroom. A son is born. Levin struggles to feel the paternal love he anticipated, experiencing instead a new, acute vulnerability. Meanwhile Anna and Vronsky, stranded in Moscow awaiting a divorce that never comes, descend into a cycle of quarrels, jealousy, and brief reconciliations. Anna becomes convinced that Vronsky's love has faded and transfers her jealousy from one imagined rival to another. After a final, unresolved quarrel, Anna rides through Moscow in Vronsky's carriage, her thoughts spiralling into nihilism. She arrives at the Nizhigorod station, purchases a ticket, and throws herself beneath the wheels of a passing train.
Part Eight
Sergey Ivanovitch's long-awaited scholarly book is met with public indifference; he redirects his energies into the Pan-Slavic volunteer movement. At the Kursk station, he encounters Vronsky, aged and hollow, departing as a volunteer for the Serbian war. Vronsky tells Koznishev that life holds no value for him. Back at Pokrovskoe, Levin undergoes a spiritual crisis and resolution. A conversation with the peasant Fyodor about a righteous man who lives "for his soul" and "in God's way" strikes him with sudden, overwhelming force. Lying beneath an aspen tree, he recognises that he has always lived rightly — on the spiritual truths absorbed in childhood — while thinking wrongly, ignoring those truths through intellectual pride. The novel closes with Levin on his terrace at night, watching the stars reappear after lightning, acknowledging that his new faith will not prevent him from losing his temper or failing in small ways, yet knowing that every minute of his life now carries the positive meaning of goodness.
Structure and How It Works
Serial Publication and the Shape of the Novel
Anna Karenina appeared in the journal The Russian Messenger between 1875 and 1877, published in instalments. This origin is felt in the novel's texture: each part tends to open with a fresh scene or a new character grouping, and the pacing within parts reflects the rhythm of monthly delivery to readers who would wait weeks between episodes. The final section, Part Eight, was withheld by the journal's editor because of its critical treatment of the Pan-Slavic volunteer movement; Tolstoy published it separately, and it retains a slightly different register — more essayistic, more openly concerned with ideas — than the parts that precede it.
The Double Plot and Its Symmetries
The novel's most fundamental structural decision is the interweaving of two plots that are, in the deepest sense, mirror images of each other. Anna moves from a stable, loveless marriage toward passion and destruction; Levin moves from solitude and rejection toward love, marriage, and spiritual resolution. The two trajectories are kept in deliberate counterpoint: when Anna's situation darkens, Levin's typically brightens, and vice versa. The ball in Part One is the hinge on which both stories turn simultaneously — Kitty is humiliated, Anna is awakened, and Levin is rejected, all in the same evening. The railway station recurs as a charged symbolic location: Anna and Vronsky first meet at one, and Anna dies at one.
Point of View and the Narrator
Tolstoy employs a third-person narrator who moves with extraordinary freedom between characters' consciousnesses, sometimes within a single paragraph. The technique is not omniscient in the detached, ironic sense of much Victorian fiction; rather, the narrator inhabits each character's perspective so fully that the reader experiences the world as that character does, only to be shifted without warning into an entirely different subjectivity. Karenin's bureaucratic self-deception, Anna's spiralling paranoia, Levin's philosophical torment, and Kitty's practical composure at Nikolay's deathbed are all rendered from inside. The famous opening sentence — “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” — establishes a narrator who generalises boldly, but this voice quickly dissolves into the particularity of individual minds.
Pacing and the Function of the Parts
Parts One through Three establish the two plots and their central tensions. Parts Four and Five mark the crisis points of each: Anna's near-death and Karenin's forgiveness on one side, Levin and Kitty's marriage on the other. Parts Six and Seven accelerate toward their respective conclusions — the disintegration of Anna and Vronsky's relationship, and the birth of Levin's son — while Part Eight provides a coda that refuses easy resolution. The novel does not end with Anna's death; it ends with Levin on his terrace, still irritable, still imperfect, but newly anchored. This structural choice insists that the novel is not simply a tragedy about Anna but an inquiry into how human beings can live, conducted through two contrasting lives simultaneously.