This version of Anna Karenina was created in 2020 well before the advent of artificial intelligence. It was translated and thoughtfully modernized by a human hand, with the goal of preserving Tolstoy’s original prose while making the language and pacing more accessible to today’s reader.

Leo Tolstoy stands as one of the greatest voices in Russian literature. Born into aristocracy, he dropped out of school and spent much of his early life on his family estate, gambling heavily on cards and sports. After racking up significant debts, he joined the army with his brother during the Crimean War. There, the mass suffering deeply disturbed him, and his disillusionment with violence and institutional power began.

His fiction reflects the society he lived in and the personal philosophies that consumed him. A baptized Christian who believed in God, Tolstoy was never at ease with organized religion. His vocal criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church eventually led to his excommunication, after which people in Moscow would reportedly line the streets and cheer when he passed by.

Tolstoy began Anna Karenina in 1875, thirteen years into his marriage to Sophia, the woman he both adored and struggled to understand. Their recovered diaries show a man tortured by lust and spiritual guilt, confessing to Sophia that he often felt “not in control of himself.” Despite these tensions, they had thirteen children and remained together until the end of his life.

At 82, Tolstoy quietly left home one night, desperate for peace and solitude. He boarded a train bound for a remote monastery but fell ill with pneumonia and died at a small station days later. Sophia, despite years of strain and sorrow, remained devoted to him. In her final reflections, she said simply: “The truth is, I have much love.”

Chapter 1

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

There was chaos in the Oblonsky household. Dolly Oblonsky had discovered her husband, Stepan, was having an affair with a French girl who had once been the family’s governess. Dolly announced she could no longer live under the same roof with him. Three days had passed since then, and everyone in the house felt it. The mood was heavy. No one saw the point of pretending anymore. Strangers thrown together at a roadside inn seemed to have more in common than the Oblonskys did now.

Dolly stayed locked in her room. Stepan hadn’t been home in three days. The children ran wild through the house. The English governess got into a fight with the housekeeper and began searching for new work. The cook quit just before dinner.