[4] The novel deals with themes of betrayal, faith, family, marriage, Imperial Russian society, desire, and the differences between rural and urban life.

The story centres on an extramarital affair between Anna and cavalry officer Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky that scandalises the social circles of Saint Petersburg and forces the young lovers to flee to Italy in a search for happiness, but after they return to Russia, their lives further unravel.

The story takes place against the backdrop of the liberal reforms initiated by Emperor Alexander II of Russia and the rapid societal transformations that followed.

A parallel story within the novel is Konstantin Levin, a wealthy country landowner who wants to marry Kitty, sister to Dolly and sister-in-law to Anna's brother Stepan Oblonsky.

The novel details Levin's difficulties managing his estate, his eventual marriage, and his struggle to accept the Christian faith, until the birth of his first child.

Some of these topics include an evaluation of the land and agricultural system that existed in Russia at the time as well as politics, not only in the Russian government, but also at the level of the individual characters and families, religion, morality, gender, and social class.

The novel begins with one of its most oft-quoted lines: Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.Vse schastlivyye sem'i pokhozhi drug na druga, kazhdaya neschastlivaya sem'ya neschastliva po-svoyemu.Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.Prince Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky ("Stiva"), a Moscow aristocrat and civil servant, has been unfaithful to his wife, Princess Darya Alexandrovna ("Dolly").

Stiva informs the household that his married sister, Anna Arkadyevna Karenina, is coming to visit from Saint Petersburg in a bid to calm the situation.

Meanwhile, Stiva's childhood friend, Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin ("Kostya"), arrives in Moscow with the aim of proposing to Dolly's youngest sister, Princess Katerina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya ("Kitty").

Kostya is a passionate, restless, but shy aristocratic landowner who, unlike his Moscow friends, chooses to live in the country on his large estate.

As the family members are reunited and Vronsky sees Anna for the first time, a railway worker accidentally falls in front of a moving train carriage and is killed.

Anna returns to her husband, Count Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, a senior government official, and her son, Seryozha, in St. Petersburg.

Kitty, humiliated by Vronsky and tormented by her rejection of Kostya, upsets her sister by referring to Stiva's infidelity, saying she could never love a man who betrayed her.

Vronsky, a keen horseman, takes part in a steeplechase event, during which he rides his mare Frou-Frou too hard—his irresponsibility causing him to fall and break the horse's back.

Influenced by Varenka, Kitty becomes extremely pious and concerned for others, but when her father joins them she becomes disillusioned after learning from him that Madame Stahl is faking her illness.

When Dolly visits Anna, she is struck by the difference between Kostya and Kitty's aristocratic-yet-simple home life and Vronsky's overtly luxurious and lavish country estate.

Meanwhile, after a long and difficult labor, Kitty gives birth to a son, Dmitri, who goes by the nickname Mitya and Kostya is paradoxically both horrified and profoundly moved by the sight of the tiny baby.

The clairvoyant apparently had a vision in his sleep during Stiva's visit and gives Karenin a cryptic message that he interprets in a way such that he must decline the request for divorce.

A group of Russian volunteers, including the suicidal Vronsky, depart from Russia to fight in the Orthodox Serbian revolt that has broken out against the Turks, more broadly identified as the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878).

However, after speaking at length to a peasant, Kostya has a true change of heart, concluding that the meaning of life is to serve God, and that he does believe in the Christian principles taught to him in childhood and no longer questions his faith.

[8] Anna Karenina is commonly thought to explore the themes of hypocrisy, jealousy, faith, fidelity, family, marriage, society, progress, carnal desire and passion, and the agrarian connection to land in contrast to the lifestyles of the city.

"[10] Translator Rosemary Edmonds wrote that Tolstoy does not explicitly moralize in the book, but instead allows his themes to emerge naturally from the "vast panorama of Russian life."

the purist will be pleased to see Kent & Berberova give all the Russian names in full, as used by the author; any reader will be grateful for the footnotes that elucidate anything not immediately accessible to someone not well acquainted with imperial Russia.

There is occasional awkwardness ... and imprecision ... but Magarshack understands the text ... and even when unable to translate an idiom closely he renders its real meaning ...

On Wettlin's Soviet version she writes: "steady but uninspired, and sounds like English prose written by a Russian who knows the language but is not completely at home in it.

"[19] He states his recommendations in the last two pages of the survey: "None of the existing translations is actively bad ... One's choice ... must therefore be based on nuances, subtleties, and refinements.

Kent and Berberova did a much more thorough and careful revision of Garnett's translation than Gibian did of the Maude one, and they have supplied fairly full notes, conveniently printed at the bottom of the page.

"[22] Reviewing the translations by Bartlett and Schwartz for The New York Times Book Review, Masha Gessen noted that each new translation of Anna Karenina ended up highlighting an aspect of Tolstoy's "variable voice" in the novel, and thus, "The Tolstoy of Garnett... is a monocled British gentleman who is simply incapable of taking his characters as seriously as they take themselves.

Vladimir Nabokov explains: "In Russian, a surname ending in a consonant acquires a final 'a' (except for the cases of such names that cannot be declined and except adjectives like OblonskAYA) when designating a woman.

Larissa Volokhonsky, herself a Russian, prefers the second option, as did Aylmer and Louise Maude, who lived in Russia for many years and were friends of Tolstoy.