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What is the first sentence in Anna Karenina by Tolstoy?
Why is the opening sentence of Anna Karenina a thesis?
Why did Tolstoy write Anna Karenina?
What tense is Anna Karenina in?
Feb 5, 2020 · While the novel is told in past tense, this first line is in present tense—a declaration that holds through time. Because of this, the opening sentence of Anna Karenina can also be read as a thesis for the story to come. In this way the line takes on qualities of a greater philosophical statement.
- II. Love and Fate: Anna Karenina’s Theory F Love and Life vs Tolstoy’s Own
- III. Omens: Is Anna Karenina’s Ending Foreshadowed by Tolstoy Or by Anna?
- IV. What We Do Not See: Tolstoy Hidden Clues
- V. Tiny Alterations: What Makes Anna Karenina So True to Life
- VI. Open Camouflage: What Most Anna Karenina Reader (and Critics) Miss
- VII. Gold in Sand
- VIII. Stiva
- IX. Self-Deception
- X. Views
- XI. Daily Miracles
We tend to think that true life is lived at times of high drama. When Anna Karenina reads a novel on the train, she wants to live the exciting incidents described. Both high literature and popular culture foster the delusion that ordinary, prosaic happiness represents something insufferably bourgeois, a suspension of real living. Forms as different...
Anna Karenina feels that fate has marked her out for a special destiny, perhaps tragic, but surely exalted. When we first see her at the St. Petersburg train station in the book’s opening sections, a trainman is accidentally crushed. With a shudder Anna tells her brother Stiva: “It’s an evil omen,” and she means, “an evil omen for me.” This comment...
Anna interprets the dream of the hideous peasant as a sign from the future, but Tolstoy subtly shows us how it results from ordinary causality operating from the past. The images of the dream derive either from previous dreams or from events connected with meeting Vronsky. Some occur at the train station where she first sees him, others on the trai...
In an essay about War and Peace, Tolstoy evokes the image of a man seeing nothing but treetops on a distant hill and concluding fallaciously that the hill contains nothing but trees. Of course, had the man actually visited the hill and seen it up close, countless houses and people might have presented themselves. In much the same way, historians co...
As if to demonstrate how we often overlook key facts right before our eyes, Tolstoy often places them in subordinate clauses of long sentences or in the middle of paragraphs primarily about something else. Having forgiven Anna, her husband Karenin dotes on the daughter she has borne to Vronsky, and in the middle of a long paragraph we read, but eas...
Anna Kareninainterweaves two major stories—the story of the destruction of Anna’s marriage and life and the making of Levin’s life and marriage. But it is the novel’s third story, concerning Anna’s brother, Stiva, and his wife, Dolly, that provides the book’s moral compass. If by the hero or heroine of a novel, we mean not the one who occupies the ...
If Dolly represents what goodness is, then her husband Stiva represents what evil—most, if not the worst, evil—truly is. And the first thing to notice about evil is that it is not as ugly as sin but as attractive as pleasant company. That is why there is so much of it. We have met the enemy, and he is us. Evil is not alien but resembles us, because...
Families in Tolstoy’s novels are not collections of individuals who happen to be related but distinct miniature cultures. Each family appreciates the world in its own way. The Shcherbatskys—Dolly’s family—understand the world in terms of family life. The Oblonskys are quite different, and the first thing to understand about Anna is that she was bor...
Unlike the book’s other educated characters, the agrarian intellectual Levin thinks for himself. Instead of just adopting approved enlightened opinions, he actually learns both sides of an issue. When the progressive theories he adopts to modernize his farm and improve the peasants’ lot fail, he does not change the subject or seek some ad hoc justi...
Levin’s experience, and the book he is writing, teach him that in the social and moral worlds, abstract thought tends to mislead. One must give precedence not to theory, as intellectuals typically do, but to what might be called the wisdom of practice. Theory properly serves as a sort of mnemonic device, a set of provisional generalizations from ex...
It is Tolstoy’s version of the Christian idea of original sin: what makes us unique and human is also that which exiles us from happiness. Explanation of the famous quotes in Anna Karenina, including all important speeches, comments, quotations, and monologues.
Need help with Part 1, Chapter 1 in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina? Check out our revolutionary side-by-side summary and analysis.
Sep 14, 2020 · The first line in Anna Karenina, an 1878 novel written by Russian author, Leo Tolstoy, reads: All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
The first sentence of Anna Karenina is one of the best-known openings of any novel: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Such a pronouncement, with the appearance of thoughtfully dispensed wisdom, holds the promise of a narrator who will illuminate all that follows.
The novel’s first sentence, which indicates its concern with the domestic, is perhaps Tolstoy’s most famous: “All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Anna Karenina interweaves the stories of three families, the Oblonskys, the Karenins, and the Levins.
