Anna Karenina (Full Version)

Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is a monumental novel of love and conscience set against the elegance and scrutiny of imperial Russian society. It begins in domestic upheaval and expands into an unforgettable portrait of intertwined lives—most famously Anna’s luminous, perilous romance and the social judgment it provokes, alongside other relationships that reveal marriage as both sanctuary and constraint.

With psychological precision and moral breadth, Tolstoy examines passion and loneliness, motherhood and reputation, money and class, and the restless search for purpose in a modernizing world. His scenes move from drawing rooms and theaters to estates and railway stations, capturing both the seductions of high society and the quieter demands of work, family, and belief. Revered for its realism, emotional power, and philosophical depth, the novel remains a defining masterpiece of world literature—at once intimate tragedy and sweeping social epic.

• Listeners who want a richly immersive classic that balances romance, social satire, and moral inquiry
• Readers drawn to psychologically complex characters and the quiet, devastating consequences of everyday choices
• Fans of long-form literary epics—where family life, politics, faith, and desire are woven into one grand design

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a Russian novelist, moral thinker, and one of literature’s greatest realists. Born into the aristocracy, he served in the army before achieving fame with works that combined social observation with profound psychological insight. Alongside Anna Karenina, his major novels include War and Peace and Resurrection, as well as influential shorter fiction such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich. In later life Tolstoy pursued spiritual and ethical questions with radical intensity, critiquing violence and hypocrisy and reshaping modern ideas about conscience, art, and moral responsibility.