“Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its way.”
This starting line of the novel promised and provided many more single line marvels that followed the life stories of different families, relatively connected to one another.
Adultery is beautifully communicated as it developed as a theme and gave way to a young passionate romance. The characters are original and the feelings are deeply articulated and engagingly expounded. Leo Tolstoy may have ultimately punished the affair with the force of his pen but one’s heart does ache for the deplorable Vronsky, more than Anna’s husband.
Tolstoy’s writing provides learning to literary minds. Discussions on a plethora of subjects including war, communism, love, religion, and death, ensure that the reader is not enclosed within the trying walls of a singular aspect; that he is liberated to float freely and touch the varied boundaries of the shore.
The voluminous pages may test the patience of some who find the text unnecessarily elaborated but if read in leisure, each page gives a glimpse of the hidden psychology that operates with the story, pushing the characters to action. Every word feels necessary and engaging. Considered to be the greatest novel ever written with a magnificent heroine, the latter part does make me think twice as the protagonist has been centred around unreasonable love.
Women should be strong and self-assertive and this is where Anna lacked but Elizabeth from ‘Pride & Prejudice’ fairly won. Though she is audacious to go after love but is feeble and perceptively mean to end her life. Levin, Kitty, Oblonsky including many others have been given no lesser attention than Anna, and this smooth manner of simultaneous narration is the nosegay for the engaged mind.