Between Passion and Duty: The Enduring Power of Anna Karenina
I can still picture myself in my twenties, hunched over Constance Garnett’s translation of Anna Karenina, convinced that I was finally going to conquer one of the great monuments of world literature.
What I encountered instead was prose that felt like stone walls: heavy, impenetrable, and resistant to my eagerness. Garnett’s version has a kind of Edwardian elegance, but for me it blurred the edges of Tolstoy’s Russia, sanding away its textures until the voices sounded distant, the air too still. I read on stubbornly, but the novel remained out of reach, a country I could not yet enter.
And yet Anna herself had already found me, not in print but in cinema. I had seen Vivien Leigh in the 1948 film—her Anna tragic and exquisite, draped in fur and sorrow. There was something in the way Leigh’s eyes carried both fragility and defiance that stayed with me. Before I understood Tolstoy’s words, I had already absorbed Anna as an image: the woman who dares, who suffers, who pays the price for love in a society ruled by judgment. For years, that image stood in place of the novel, a phantom that haunted me more than any page I had read.
“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.””
It wasn’t until I discovered Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation that the door finally opened. Their version felt like a gust of air—colder, sharper, but alive. Suddenly the world within Anna Karenina was immediate: the chatter in drawing rooms, the heaviness of winter fields, the quiet desperation behind polite gestures. Pevear and Volokhonsky gave me not a polished relic but something raw and close, Tolstoy’s voice unvarnished. It was as if the characters had been waiting all along, and at last I could meet them face to face.
Since then, the novel has become something of a companion ritual. Each autumn, as the days shorten and the first hints of frost appear, I return to its pages.
There is something in its rhythms that belongs to this time of year: the melancholy beauty of falling leaves, the gathering weight of dark, the way the world seems to prepare itself for endings. Reading Anna Karenina in autumn feels less like study and more like inhabiting a mood—a descent into winter that is both sorrowful and strangely comforting.
What strikes me most, year after year, is how the novel shifts with me. In my younger readings, Anna’s passion consumed me. I saw in her a mirror of every restless desire, every yearning that seemed impossible to reconcile with duty. Later, Levin became the center: his struggle to find meaning in the everyday, to believe in love and labor as pathways to truth, spoke to a different season of my life. Kitty, too, has grown in stature for me—her resilience, her quiet strength, her ability to live through heartbreak and return to herself. Each character carries a different light depending on where I stand, and Tolstoy seems to anticipate that we will change, that the book itself will not remain fixed.
That is, I think, part of its greatness. Anna Karenina is not just a love story, or even a tragedy. It is a study of how people move within the invisible structures of society—marriage, gender, money, religion—and how those structures bend and break under the weight of human desire.
It is also a meditation on the fragility of happiness: the “happily ever after” that proves impossible when the world demands sacrifice, when passion collides with custom, when love itself cannot shield us from consequence.
Reading it each autumn, I find myself less interested in the certainty of Anna’s fate and more drawn to the questions the novel never resolves. What does it mean to live truthfully? What do we owe ourselves, and what do we owe others? Can love be both transformative and survivable? The answers change with the years, and perhaps that is why I keep returning.
For me, Anna Karenina is no longer just a book. It is a season, a ritual, a way of entering into the questions of life with the same openness that Tolstoy gave his characters. Vivien Leigh first gave me the tragic beauty of Anna’s face, but Tolstoy—through Pevear and Volokhonsky—has given me a companion for the long turn of the year, a reminder that love and loss, longing and meaning, are not problems to solve but landscapes to inhabit.
In the end, Anna Karenina teaches us something essential about life and love: that both are fragile, expansive, and often contradictory. To love is to risk heartbreak, but to refuse love is to starve the soul. Tolstoy does not offer resolution—only the truth that to be human is to live in the tension between desire and duty, freedom and consequence. And so, as autumn fades into winter, I return again, knowing that within those pages are not just characters, but lessons for how to live, how to love, and how to endure.
