Tolstoy's Other Major Works
- War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy, 1869. Tolstoy's other great novel traces five aristocratic families through the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, sharing Anna Karenina's panoramic social vision, its philosophical digressions on history and free will, and its conviction that meaning is found in ordinary domestic life rather than in public glory.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy, 1886. This short novel follows a respectable judge confronting his own dying, and reads almost as a concentrated sequel to the existential questions Levin wrestles with throughout Anna Karenina; it is the ideal next Tolstoy text for a student pressed for time.
- The Kreutzer Sonata, Leo Tolstoy, 1889. A disturbing first-person account of a man who murders his wife out of jealousy, this novella extends Tolstoy's preoccupation with desire, marriage, and moral self-deception into far darker territory than the novel allows.
Historical and Literary Context
- Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, 1857. The other great nineteenth-century novel of an adulterous wife; reading both together illuminates how differently two great realists can handle the same subject of a woman destroyed by romantic illusion.
- A Sportsman's Sketches, Ivan Turgenev, 1852. These linked stories of Russian peasant life established the literary precedent for treating serfs as full human beings, and the rural world they depict — the same world Levin inhabits — was the shared landscape of the generation that shaped Tolstoy.
Critical and Historical Studies
- Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, George Steiner, 1959. A sustained comparison of the two supreme Russian novelists that remains the most intellectually stimulating introduction to what is distinctive about Tolstoy's art, his epic mode, and his moral vision.
- The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin, 1953. Berlin's celebrated essay uses Tolstoy as its central case to argue that great artists are often divided against themselves; its analysis of Tolstoy's relationship to history illuminates the philosophical undercurrents running through both War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
Adaptations
- Anna Karenina, directed by Clarence Brown, 1935. Starring Greta Garbo as Anna, this Hollywood film captures the novel's tragic romantic core with unusual restraint and remains the most celebrated screen version of the story.
- Anna Karenina, directed by Joe Wright, 2012. A stylized British adaptation with Keira Knightley that deliberately stages much of the action inside a theater, making the novel's themes of performance, social spectacle, and self-deception visually explicit and prompting productive classroom discussion.