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The novel's famous scene involving Vronsky in a horse race can be seen as a metaphor for his relationship with Anna: Instead of letting the horse take charge, Vronsky imposes his will on it, with tragic results - for the horse. The characters argue about educating women, and Anna and other female characters suffer in large part because their lives are restricted to being wives and mothers. Tolstoy is careful to make his feminist themes a thread that runs throughout the novel. She finds herself ostracized and powerless, she's cut off from her beloved son, and she's ultimately driven to suicide. As explained by Book Riot, Anna has the opposite experience - she loses everything. The man Anna has an affair with, Vronsky, suffers some minor embarrassment over their affair but remains wealthy and accepted by society. Author Jilly Cooper points out that the consequences of infidelity and sexuality are starkly different for the men and women in the novel: Anna's brother has an affair with the nanny hired to care for his children but is forgiven. Most obviously, Tolstoy carefully notes the tragic double standards faced by his characters. That gives the characters and their motivations a timeless quality and makes all of their decisions - even when self-destructive - believable. Even though the reader is allowed into the private thoughts of the characters, the technique conveys the impression of simple truth-telling, that the narrator is simply reporting facts about people he knows intimately. The use of both an omniscient narrator and a stream-of-consciousness approach to the characters' inner lives effortlessly captures every detail.Ī s noted by author Debashish Sen, the realist approach in "Anna Karenina" extends to the narrator and the characters.

He goes inside the heads of his characters and lets the reader know what they are thinking. As critic James Meek points out, Tolstoy eschews metaphors and similes and simply tells the reader what things are, what characters are doing, in simple but beautiful language. By the time Leo Tolstoy sat down to work on "Anna Karenina," realism was a well-established movement.