Tolstoy published Anna Karenina in serial installments from 1873 to 1877. It is the second of his two great novels (after War and Peace) and, by his own private estimate, the better one. The opening sentence — All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way — is the most-quoted opening in Russian literature.
Two parallel stories run side by side and barely touch. Anna Karenina, the wife of a senior Petersburg official, falls in love with a cavalry officer named Vronsky at a Moscow train station. Over the next four years she leaves her husband, has Vronsky's child, is shut out of Petersburg society, follows him to the country, becomes increasingly jealous, and eventually walks onto the platform at a small station called Obiralovka. In counterpoint, a country landowner named Konstantin Levin proposes to a young woman named Kitty (refused, then accepted years later), spends a famous afternoon mowing his fields alongside his peasants, marries Kitty, and tries to figure out, slowly and painfully, what a meaningful life looks like. Anna does not appear in Levin's life until almost the last chapter.
Tolstoy's Russian is direct, lived-in, and almost transparent at the sentence level. The B1 adaptation collects the great set-pieces — the train station meeting, the steeplechase, Levin's mowing, the deathbed forgiveness, Anna's return to Moscow, the platform at Obiralovka, Levin's quiet final epiphany on the porch — across twenty-five chapters.
Tolstoy wrote with an almost engineer-like clarity. He distrusted ornament. The Russian is plain in a way few major nineteenth-century European novelists ever attempted. The B1 adaptation lands where the original already lives: simple narrative past tense, dialogue that drives every scene, vocabulary anchored in concrete objects (the train, the dress, the field, the lamp, the snow). The book is long because the lives are long; the sentences themselves are not.
Intermediate. You read narrative past tense fluently, handle dialogue, and understand short novellas. Vocabulary around 3,000 words. Subordinate clauses no longer slow you down.
Yes — every book in the Storica catalog is available in all seven supported languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. Anna Karenina was originally written in Russian, but you choose your reading language when you start.
B1. Intermediate. You read narrative past tense fluently, handle dialogue, and understand short novellas. Vocabulary around 3,000 words. Subordinate clauses no longer slow you down.
About one month at fifteen minutes a day. The adaptation runs to 25 short chapters — short enough to read before bed, long enough to actually move your level.
No. Storica's adaptation is the version you read. We keep the characters, plot beats, and tone of the original — and rewrite the language to fit the level. If you've read the original before, you'll recognise the story; if you haven't, the adaptation is a complete reading of the book.
Pick up where you left off. There are no streaks, no penalties, and no notifications begging you back. Day 12 is still Day 12 a week later.
Anna Karenina is rated B1, so we'd suggest starting with one of our A0 or A1 books first if you're brand-new to your target language. Check our shelf at /library/ — the readers there are short, gentle, and built specifically for week one.
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