Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is still strikingly relevant in today’s world

Two years ago, I was walking through the bookshelves of Barnes & Noble, grazing through the various selections of European literature. I had been writing my own novel about a Ukrainian girl in the Cold War era who loved to read, and I was eying works of legendary Slavic authors such as Dostoevsky and Pasternak for inspiration. After skimming through almost too many summaries on Wikipedia, I eventually settled on a novel written by perhaps Russia’s most famous writer: Leo Tolstoy. It was called Anna Karenina, and I immediately could tell by its 800-page thickness that it would take me a long time to conquer. But after a solid two months, I did, and I couldn’t help but notice how situations in the novel could not only be applied to societal issues happening during the time my own story took place, but also today in the 21st century.

The story revolves around Anna Karenina, a socialite who falls in love with a calvary officer named Count Vronsky, even though she’s married to Alexei Karenin, a high-ranking government official in Imperial Russia. A similar affair occurs with Anna’s brother, Stiva, although his is much less publicized and excused as being a private indiscretion.

Meanwhile, Anna’s romance with the Count brands her as being immoral: in other words, a whore. Tolstoy clearly shows the hypocrisy: the same elites that tolerate men’s affairs mercilessly condemn women for doing the same thing.

Now, I’m not excusing any types of adultery by any means, but I can’t help but draw similarities to today’s society. Women are blamed for so much more than men are, even by doing the same thing as them, or even nothing at all. For example, women in high-profile roles in the media may be labeled as “homewreckers” or “unfit mothers” for the same behavior that earns men little more than day-long tabloid curiosity, out of the news cycle by the following week.

My mind goes to Princess Diana and Prince Charles, two people of political and cultural significance whose scandalous romantic lives were at a similar level of notoriety and publicism as Anna Karenina and Alexei Karenin’s would have been. After Diana’s separation from Charles, her new romance with Dodi Fayed was seen as being much more problematic than her ex-husband’s long-lasting affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. He had been in love with Camilla even before he and Diana got married. The affair became public in the early 1990s, and although Charles still got criticism, it was often dismissed because of poor Charles’ personal tragedies or the pressures of royal duty.

Meanwhile, the press painted Diana as being unstable, manipulative, and even unfit to be a mother to her children. The paparazzi turned every one of her personal choices into tomorrow’s headline, and it was these people who had firsthand responsibility in the car crash that killed her in 1997.

The public scrutiny of Anna Karenina results in tragedy at the end of the novel. I’ll invite you to read the book and figure it out yourself.

As I read the novel, I considered the ways in which I could echo the struggles of Anna in my own story and how my main character, Alisa, were to react, but I fell short. When I finished reading Anna Karenina, I instead quietly shut the cover and sighed. It became bigger than relating the piece to my own novel. It caused me to think about how society approaches women, and I still think about the fate of Anna when I see women trending on social media or in the news. How much have we really changed in the way we judge women, and how many “Anna Kareninas” are still living among us today?