A married Petersburg aristocrat's passionate affair with Count Vronsky destroys her social standing and life, counterpointed by Levin's earnest search for meaning in love and land.
Books mentioned in Anna Karenina (1)
King Lear by William Shakespeare: “One was a fantasia, _King Lear;_ the other was a quartette dedicated to the memory of Bach.”
Books that mention Anna Karenina (38)
Zero to One by Peter Thiel: “Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.””
The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather: “The book was a poor translation of "Anna Karenina."”
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “I’ve read ‘Anna Karenina’ and the ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ of course”
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell: “With these fateful words, Count Leo Tolstoy opened the novel of the spiritual dismemberment of his modern heroine, Anna Karenina.”
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides: “the pages about agrarian reform in Anna Karenina”
Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger: “And there came over Levin a new feeling of love for this man... - 'Anna Karenina.' (quotation copied on Seymour and Buddy's door)”
Babel Tower by A. S. Byatt: “Listed among the novels Frederica teaches and later sees burned.”
The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai: “The book was Anna Karenina, from the Lynton library.”
The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin: “From its very first sentence—“Happy families are all alike...”—Tolstoy's Anna Karenina confronted Theodore in an intensely personal fashion and his comments upon it illuminate his own nature more brightly than Tolstoy's novel.”
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine: “The book she is dismantling page by page and hiding throughout the novel”
How to Be a Heroine by Samantha Ellis: “She’s not tormented like the old adulteresses of fiction – and when Goodlove leaves, she doesn’t throw herself under a train like Anna Karenina or poison herself like Madame Bovary.”
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri: “he had read pages of The Brothers Karamazov, and Anna Karenina, and Fathers and Sons.”
How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom: “Tolstoy (who loved her) is not Anna Karenina, and Philip Roth is not "Philip Roth"”
The Every by Dave Eggers: “You’d have a generation that not only was assigned Anna Karenina, but actually read it.”
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera: “"It was Anna Karenina." — the book Tereza is carrying under her arm when Tomas first meets her; it recurs as her private emblem throughout the novel.”
The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante: “That night, when Mario left, I read again the pages in which Anna Karenina goes toward her death, leafed through the ones about women destroyed.”
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante: “"And so I pushed on, in my speculations, from the first and second Biblical creations to Defoe-Flanders, Flaubert-Bovary, Tolstoy-Karenina..." — Elena's own narrative reflection on literary heroines.”
Against Interpretation and Other Essays by Susan Sontag: “Anna Karenina may be treated as an investigation of the problems of love, marriage, and adultery.”
The Art of Fiction by Ayn Rand: “Take Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the novel most typical of the Naturalistic school.”
In Search of a Character by Graham Greene: “Short notice prevented me getting Gibbon and Anna Karenina.”
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari: “Global politics thus follows the Anna Karenina principle: successful states are all alike, but every failed state fails in its own way.”
China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan: “Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, from Kitty's assigned reading list.”
Deception by Philip Roth: “If Tolstoy had imagined himself in love with Anna Karenina, had Hardy imagined himself in an affair with Tess”
Exit Ghost by Philip Roth: “Anna Karenina habe ich mit Fünfzehn gelesen.”
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond: “Just make a few changes, and you have the famous first sentence of Tolstoy's great novel Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."”
On Literature by Umberto Eco: “'Anna Karenina commits suicide' will remain true for eternity”
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose: “Having read the ballroom scene in Anna Karenina, or the wild party that winds through so many pages of William Gaddis's The Recognitions.”
Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan: “That still doesn't give you any excuse to be Anna Karenina!”
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk: “The great literary novels—such as Anna Karenina, In Search of Lost Time, The Magic Mountain, and The Waves”
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood: “On my private shelves I've arranged my personal selection of proscribed books... Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Paradise Lost, Lives of Girls and Women”
A Life's Work by Rachel Cusk: “Instead he wrote Anna Karenina, excavating the woman extant in the mother”
Whistler by Ann Patchett: “The AP girls read Anna Karenina and Moby-Dick last semester”
Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang: “'Anna Karenina,' declares Johnson. 'Only Anna wouldn't kill herself.'”
A New Life by Shimazaki Tōson: “From the war before his eyes, Kishimoto began to read the hearts of the people moving within it. Like Vronsky's departure at the end of Anna Karenina, he could easily imagine young Frenchmen going willingly to the front to save themselves. [auto-translated]”