What is the famous opening line of Anna Karenina?

The novel opens with one of literature's most quoted lines: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." It sets up the novel's central concern with what makes a marriage and a family work, or fail.

When was Anna Karenina first published?

Leo Tolstoy serialized the novel in the literary journal The Russian Messenger between 1875 and 1877, then published it complete as a book in 1878.

Anna Karenina

Reader reviews of Anna Karenina

Myriam Akrout · 2026-03-10T15:40:37.000000Z

Can't believe I never wrote a review about one of my ultimate favorite books! I don't intend on writing one though. But if you ever plan on reading it, be patient, be very very patient, I promise you it's worth it.

(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Classics Drama

Pages: 865
Published: 1878
Language: English

Synopsis

One of the greatest novels ever written, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina opens with one of literature's most famous lines and unfolds into a panoramic portrait of Russian society in the 1870s. At its center is Anna, a beautiful, intelligent aristocrat trapped in a respectable but loveless marriage, who risks everything for a passionate affair with the dashing cavalry officer Count Vronsky — and finds that society will forgive the man but destroy the woman.

Woven against Anna's tragedy is the parallel story of Konstantin Levin, a landowner searching for meaning in work, faith, family and the soil, whose quiet, hard-won contentment stands in luminous contrast to Anna's ruin. Between them, Tolstoy assembles a vast cast — husbands and wives, lovers and children, city and country — to examine marriage, fidelity, class, and the search for a life worth living.

Sweeping yet intimate, morally searching and psychologically exact, Anna Karenina is a masterpiece of realism that asks how, and whether, we can be both honest and happy.