Anna Karenina

Together with Levin, Anna is the text’s most significant character. Her decisions shape most of the novel’s major narrative arcs. She is in her late twenties or early thirties, and married in her youth to Karenin, a civil servant much older than she is. Tolstoy’s narrator and other characters make particular note of Anna’s beauty. At the ball, the narrator notes her “shoulders and bosom…as if shaped from old ivory…those willful little ringlets of curly hair that adorned her” (79).

Anna is deeply emotional and compassionate: In the novel’s first part, she is much more sympathetic to Dolly as the wronged spouse than to her own brother, though she does wish to help him mend his marriage. Anna easily charms Kitty with her beauty and air of mystery, but seems not to balk at stealing Vronsky’s attention away at the ball. She reproaches herself afterward, as she does for being swayed by Vronsky’s impassioned speech at the train station; Tolstoy thus suggests she is well aware of what conventional morality suggests, even when she acts otherwise, and is more tormented by this than her brother would be. Anna cries out to God in repentance after fully giving in to Vronsky’s seduction, and feels only “horror” (150) when she considers what her life will become.