I first read Anna Karenina when I was 22. It was some sort of masculine show of what I could do. I loved reading the largest, most difficult books I could find. I'm very glad to have read those books in my youth, but I didn't get much from them.
Now at 35, I decided to re-read it.
Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's masterpiece even though War and Peace is better known. Writing it almost destroyed him. He considered it his first "true novel," and then rejected it later in life. But that's a subject for another time.
The novel is an overwhelming experience the first time through. There are so many plots and subplots; themes and subthemes; essay-length tangents; points of view and time passing; characters and different names of characters; places.
Anna isn't even one of the main characters in my mind for goodness sake!
It's the type of novel that can't be spoiled, because the plot is only a small part of the reading experience. Needless to say, I will be referencing events that happen late in the novel, so be warned if you don't want to see it.
The genius of the novel comes from the two perfectly reversed stories that happen simultaneously of two sets of lovers.
The first is the story of Anna. She falls in love with someone who is not her husband named Vronsky. Their storyline is one of constant decline.
Society shuns them for the adultery, and even though they love each other, the societal pressures mount up more and more. It causes rifts between them and eventually falls apart.
The other love story is of Kitty and Levin. Even the start of their story is reversed. Anna pursues Vronsky in a societal impropriety. Levin pursues Kitty following all social conventions, and it almost leads to them not being together.
As their love story progresses, they rise through society together. Their love deepens and they weather the hardest of times in each others' company.
If it takes you a few months to read the novel, it can be easy to get overwhelmed and miss that these two arcs perfectly mirror each other: one set of lovers destroyed, the other exalted; one set torn apart, the other become one.
Now, many novels have these parallel reversals in them, but few do it in such a thorough way. Tolstoy puts these couples through situations that causes them to experience all the themes of the novel in opposite ways.
For example, they each go through: a death; a spiritual awakening; societal pressures to fulfill certain roles; class division struggles. And even more.
Each of these "themes" of the novel remain unresolved because of the brilliant dichotomy. Tolstoy doesn't force any viewpoint on the reader. It's up to the reader to sort through these paradoxical and difficult ideas themselves.
Tolstoy gets inside everyone's head without ever telling you how to feel about it. I can assure you that reading this and rereading it at different points of your life with different life experiences will constantly open up new interpretations.
And this is only in reference to the two main sets of characters! There is a thorough exploration of all these themes from other viewpoints as well.
Death, the most prominent theme, is something all people must grapple with, and I think everyone will come out of the novel with a deeper understanding of their own relationship to it.
And that is the genius of Anna Karenina.