Tolstoy's novel, serialised between 1875 and 1877, follows two parallel narratives. Anna, married to a senior official, begins an affair with Count Vronsky, leaves her husband and son, is excluded from society, and eventually kills herself. Konstantin Levin, a landowner, courts and marries Kitty, works on his estate, struggles with agricultural reform and with the question of how to live, and reaches an uncertain religious resolution.
The structure sets the two against each other. Anna's story runs on passion, social judgment and the impossibility of her position under the double standard applied to men and women. Levin's runs on work, family and the search for meaning, and is largely autobiographical.
The opening line, that happy families are all alike and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, has produced what is now called the Anna Karenina principle, which states that success requires avoiding every one of several possible failures while failure requires only one. Diamond used it in Guns, Germs and Steel and it has been applied widely in business and in statistics.
The agricultural chapters contain Tolstoy's arguments about labour, land ownership and the failure of imported Western management methods in Russian conditions, which readers frequently skip and which carry the book's economic thinking. The novel is long and the Levin sections lose many readers. Tolstoy's moral position on Anna is debated, since the narration is sympathetic while the plot is punitive. Translations vary considerably. Its business readership comes mainly through the principle in the first line rather than through the novel itself.
Readers who want the novel behind a principle widely cited in business, and a nineteenth-century treatment of work, meaning and social constraint.
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