Anna Karenina - Pinnacle in Realist Fiction

“Anna Karenina”s great ideological and artistic value, made this masterpiece, cause a great social repercussion when it was published.  Tolstoy didn’t simply write a story of men and women, but reveals the status of women in the Russian society to show it is unreasonable.  The story describes the conflict between the personal emotional needs and the moral of the society.  In year 1877, the novel was released for the first time.  Recorded by the people of the same generation, the work ignites “a true social big bang”, and every chapter of the story is read and faced endless “discussions, criticisms and arguments”.

But soon, the society acknowledged that it was a great masterpiece, it reached to a height that the Russian literature has never reached before. Writer Dostoevsky commented excitedly of the work, believed that it was a perfect work of art, and no other work of the same time can be comparable to it.  He even called Tolstoy “Art of God”.  And the female protagonist Anna Karenina became one of the most beautiful women in the world’s literature.  This pioneer of the liberation for women, used her own ways to pursuit the liberation of individuality and true love, although failed in the end due to the shackles of the system.   Her inner life experience and sincere feelings vibrate with her exciting vitality and tragic fate.  The most attractive part of the work - her bold moves, with beautiful text and tensions at the right place, give this piece of work life.  Also, we don’t need a lot of reasons to remember it.

“Anna Karenina”’s concept began in 1870, but Tolstoy only began to write three years after.  That period of time was the time of his spiritual hardship.  At the beginning, Tolstoy planed to write a story with an upper-class married women, but as the story goes, the original idea was modified constantly.  The original work only took a short time of 50 days.  But Tolstoy was not satisfied; he used ten times more time to revise it.  After around 12 times of major changes, 4 years later, the work was finally published.  At this time, the abandoned manuscript reached a height of 1 metre!  Clearly, “Anna Karenina” was not written out, was rewritten out.

Due to the harsh pursuit of the author, the center of the novel has shifted greatly.  Anna started with an image of a flirty, misbehave woman, and changed to an elegant character that dare to seek true love and happiness, thus becoming one of the most rebellious image in the world’s literature.

“Anna Karenina” used Anna’s tragedy of pursuiting love, and Levin’s modification and search for the changes to help the rural reform, to describe the beautiful Russian countryside.  The most prominent feature of this work is the first successful use of two parallel line in one work, the “arch” structure; and the exquisite epical psychological description.  The large sections of the inner monologue are the model for realistic artists.

Around the hundred years, the great success of “Anna Karenina” is affirmed and highly respected by people.  It pushes the 19th-century work to a new peak, and became monument.  On the other hand, people use “Anna Karenina” as a textbook of 19th century Russian – many people understand the society of Russian in 70s.

Hundred years Anna was moved onto stages and screens by various people in their own understanding. The image of the artistic vitality that Anna is immortal.