“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So begins Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the story of a beautiful, married woman of Petersburg society who falls into a consuming love affair with the cavalry officer Count Vronsky. For his sake Anna leaves her husband, the cold statesman Karenin, and her beloved son — and discovers that a world which winks at discreet adultery will not forgive a woman honest enough to live openly with the man she loves. Cut off and increasingly desperate, Anna is carried toward catastrophe.

Beside her tragedy Tolstoy sets a second, quieter story — that of Konstantin Levin, an awkward, earnest landowner who courts the young Kitty, wins her at last, and tries to build an honest life and a good marriage on his estate while wrestling without rest over how to live and what to believe. Levin is Tolstoy's self-portrait, and his stumbling search for faith is the book's answer to Anna's despair.

First serialized between 1875 and 1877 and published complete in 1878, Anna Karenina is one of the supreme achievements of the novel — a vast panorama of Russian society rendered with the most intimate psychological truth, threaded through with the recurring image of the railway and presided over by its stern epigraph, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” Dostoevsky called it flawless; many readers since have judged it the greatest novel ever written.

This edition pairs the complete public-domain English translation with an editor's foreword on the novel's composition and meaning, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.