Originally conceived of as a dumpy and vulgar housewife, Anna evolved in successive versions of Tolstoy’s manuscript into the beautiful, passionate, and educated woman we know in the novel. Tolstoy’s increasing sympathy for this adulteress suggests the mixed feelings he harbored toward her: she is guilty of desecrating her marriage and home, but is noble and admirable nonetheless. The combination of these traits is a major reason for the appeal of this novel for more than a century. Anna is intelligent and literate, a reader of English novels and a writer of children’s books. She is elegant, always understated in her dress. Her many years with Karenin show her capable of playing the role of cultivated, beautiful, society wife and hostess with great poise and grace. She is very nearly the ideal aristocratic Russian wife of the 1870s.

Yet we are ultimately impressed less by Anna’s ideal attributes than by her passionate spirit and determination to live life on her own terms. Anna is a feminist heroine of sorts, riding on horseback in an era when such an activity was deemed suitable for men only. Disgraced, she dares to face St. Petersburg high society and refuses the exile to which she has been condemned, attending the opera when she knows very well she will meet with nothing but scorn and derision. Anna is a martyr to the old-fashioned Russian patriarchal system and its double standard for male and female adultery. Her brother, Stiva, is far looser in his morals but is never even chastised for his womanizing, whereas Anna is sentenced to social exile and suicide. Moreover, Anna is deeply devoted to her family and children, as we see when she sneaks back into her former home to visit her son on his birthday. Anna’s refusal to lose Seryozha is the only reason she refuses Karenin’s offer of divorce, even though this divorce would give her freedom.

The governing principle of Anna’s life is that love is stronger than anything, even duty. She is powerfully committed to this principle. She rejects Karenin’s request that she stay with him simply to maintain outward appearances of an intact marriage and family. Anna’s greatest worry in the later stages of her relationship with Vronsky is that he no longer loves her but remains with her out of duty only. Her exile from civilized society in the later part of the novel is a symbolic rejection of all the social conventions we normally accept dutifully. She insists on following her heart alone. For Tolstoy, this mindset smacks of selfishness, contrasting with the ideal of living for God and goodness that Levin embraces in the last chapter. But for many readers, Anna’s insistence on the dictates of her heart’s desires makes her an unforgettable pioneer of the search for autonomy and passion in an alienating modern world.

Levin was originally a marginal character in the novel, but by the final version he had grown into its co-protagonist, as central as Anna herself. Levin is a veiled self-portrait of the author: his name includes Tolstoy’s first name (Lev in Russian), and many of the details of his courtship of Kitty—including the missing shirt at the wedding—were taken straight from Tolstoy’s life. Levin is thus a spokesman for Tolstoy’s own views and desires, such as his dogged search for the meaning of life. Levin’s confession of faith at the end of the novel straddles the line between art and morality—half fiction, half philosophy lesson—and parallels Tolstoy’s turn to religion after writing Anna Karenina.

Independent-minded and socially awkward, Levin is a truly individual character who fits into none of the obvious classifications of Russian society. He is neither a freethinking rebel like his brother Nikolai, nor a bookish intellectual like his half-brother Sergei. He is not a socialite like Betsy, nor a bureaucrat like Karenin, nor a rogue like Veslovsky. Levin straddles the issue of Russia’s fate as a western nation: he distrusts liberals who wish to westernize Russia, rejecting their analytical and abstract approach, but on the other hand he recognizes the utility of western technology and agricultural science. In short, Levin is his own person. He follows his own vision of things, even when it is confused and foggy, rather than adopting any group’s prefabricated views. Moreover, Levin prefers isolation over fitting in with a social set with which he is not wholly comfortable. In this he resembles Anna, whose story is a counterpart to his own in its search for self-definition and individual happiness.

Despite his status as a loner, Levin is not self-centered, and he shows no signs of viewing himself as exceptional or superior. If Tolstoy makes Levin a hero in the novel, his heroism is not in his unique achievements but in his ability to savor common human experiences. His most unforgettable experiences in the novel—his bliss at being in love, his fear for his wife in childbirth—are not rare or aristocratic but shared by millions. Anyone can feel these emotions; Levin is special simply in feeling them so deeply and openly. This commonality gives him a humanitarian breadth that no other character in the novel displays. His comfort with his peasants and his loathing of social pretension characterize him as an ordinary man, one of the Russian people despite his aristocratic lineage. When Levin mows for an entire day alongside his peasants, we get no sense that he is deliberately slumming with the commoners—he sincerely enjoys the labor. Tolstoy’s representation of Levin’s final discovery of faith, which he learns from a peasant, is equally ordinary. In this regard, Levin incarnates the simple virtues of life and Tolstoy’s vision of a model human being.

A government official with little personality of his own, Karenin maintains the façade of a cultivated and rational man. He keeps up with contemporary poetry, he reads books on Roman history for leisure, and he makes appearances at all the right parties. He is civil to everyone and makes no waves. Originally, Tolstoy conceived of Karenin as a saintly figure, a forgiving husband endlessly tormented by his wife’s roving search for passion. But in the final version of the novel we feel the hollowness of Karenin’s façade: he is less a saint than a bland bureaucrat whose personality has disappeared under years of devotion to his duties. He reads poetry but rarely has a poetic thought; he reads history but never reflects on it meaningfully. He does not enjoy himself or spark conversations at parties but merely makes himself seen and then leaves. Karenin’s entire existence consists of professional obligations, with little room for personal whim or passion. When first made aware of Anna’s liaison with Vronsky, Karenin briefly entertains thoughts of challenging Vronsky to a duel but quickly abandons the idea when he imagines a pistol pointed his direction. This cowardice is an indicator of his general resistance to a life of fervent emotion and grand passions.

Karenin’s limp dispassion colors his home life and serves as the backdrop to Anna’s rebellious search for love at any price. We feel that he must have viewed his betrothal to Anna as an act of duty like everything else in his life: it was time to marry, so he chose an appropriate girl who happened to be Anna. He never gives any indications of appreciating Anna’s uniqueness or valuing the ways in which she differs from other women. His appreciation of her is only for her role as wife and mother. Similarly, Karenin’s fatherly interaction with Seryozha is cold and official, focused on educational progress and never on Seryozha’s perceptions or emotions. Karenin wishes to raise a responsible child, as he surely was himself. It is Karenin’s obedience to duty, his pigeonholing of all persons and experiences as either appropriate or inappropriate, that Anna rejects. When Anna leaves, she does not simply dump Karenin the man but also the conventionalism that Karenin believes in and represents. Karenin’s slide into occultism and stagnation at the end of the novel suggests indirectly how much he needed Anna, and how much she was the life behind his façade.

In early drafts of the novel, Vronsky was a poetic hero, a dashing officer of great passion but little reliability. He was intended originally as a larger-than-life symbol of the Romantic values of independence, whim, and disobedience toward civilized society. In his final incarnation, Vronsky is a more moderate figure, less wildly rebellious and more socially conforming. He is still somewhat idealized: depicted as a handsome, wealthy, and charming person who is as willing as Anna is to abandon social standing and professional status in the pursuit of love. His commitment to his hospital-building project shows a Romantic passion for carrying out an individual vision of good. But despite his glories, Vronsky shows realistic faults and imperfections. His thinning hair, his error in judgment in the horse race, his thwarted ambitions of military glory all remind us that Vronsky is not a Romantic hero but a man like any other. He does not symbolize escape from social pressures, for he suffers from these pressures himself. He is an exceptional man, but he is only a man. This human limitation in Vronsky is Anna’s greatest disappointment: we feel she yearned for a total escape into a dreamy love and that she simply cannot accept the reality of Vronsky’s earthbound, limited passion. It is significant that Tolstoy gives Vronsky the same first name as Karenin, as if Anna’s yearning for another Alexei only leads her to a disappointing repetition of her first one. Vronsky’s inability to offer Anna a real alternative to conventional life may be the great tragedy of her later life.

Though we may feel a waning in Vronsky’s devotion in the later chapters of the novel, we must be wary not to buy into Anna’s paranoid fears too much. There is no sure indication that Vronsky loves Anna any less at the end. Certainly he cares for her more than ever: he outfits his country home with unheard-of luxury and elegance, largely (we feel) in an attempt to make Anna happy. His commissioning of Anna’s portrait and his prominent display of it in their home suggests that he is still enraptured by her. Vronsky occasionally feels the pang of thwarted ambition, especially after meeting his school chum who is now highly successful, but this is only natural, and there is no sign he holds it against Anna. He bends over backward to accommodate her whims and endures her paranoid fits with patience. These actions may be mere solicitude—or “duty,” as Anna calls it—on Vronsky’s part, rather than true love. But since Tolstoy rarely shows us Vronsky’s thoughts as he shows us Anna’s, we simply cannot know for sure.

Stiva sets the novel in motion, not only in terms of plot—as the domestic upheaval caused by his infidelity brings Anna to Moscow, and thus to Vronsky—but also in terms of theme. Stiva embodies the notion that life is meant to be lived and enjoyed, not repressed by duties. He lives for the moment, thinking about responsibility only later, as his constant financial problems remind us. His dazed reaction to being chastised for adultery is not so much regret at his wrongdoing but rather regret at being caught. Indeed, even after Dolly forgives Stiva, he does not stop carrying on with other women. He does not feel any duty toward his wife and family that constrains his freedom.

Despite his actions, Stiva is not an objectionable character. His morality is so blithe and clueless, his belief that somehow he has a right to enjoy sex with whomever he pleases so sincere, that he almost converts us to his own pleasure-based philosophy. We may not go so far as to consider adultery justifiable, but at least we are led to ask questions about the relation between sexual pleasure and marital commitments, and between love and duty.

This questioning of love and duty sets the stage for Anna’s much larger enactment of the same conflict between private passion and social obligation. Like Anna, Stiva cares little for the voices of conventional morality, preferring to seek out love and satisfaction in any way that is personally meaningful for him. But the similarity ends there. Stiva is far shallower than his sister, and lacks her emotional self-reflection and passionate intensity. His love affairs are trifles to him, whereas Anna’s becomes a matter of life and death to her. Stiva is not a dynamic character in the novel—he does not change. He is never punished for his sins and never improves his behavior. In short, Stiva’s constancy brings into relief the extraordinary changes—moral, spiritual, and psychological—that Anna undergoes.