🚨 Spoilers ahead. That's the whole point. If you wanted to be surprised, you should have read the book.
Anna Karenina, married to the official Karenin, meets Count Vronsky in Moscow and falls for him. She leaves her son, has Vronsky's child, and Karenin refuses an easy divorce. Society shuts her out. Meanwhile Levin, a landowner, is rejected by Kitty, then marries her after Kitty's romance with Vronsky collapses. Anna, jealous and isolated, grows convinced Vronsky is drifting away. She throws herself under a train. Vronsky leaves for war in Serbia. Levin, now a husband and father, ends the book working out how to live. Nobody gets a tidy moral, only consequences and a farm.
- Tolstoy's editor refused to print the ending. Mikhail Katkov, editor of The Russian Messenger, objected to Part Eight's skeptical take on Russian volunteers going to fight in Serbia. Tolstoy took the finale elsewhere and published it separately in 1878.
- Anna was inspired by a real death. Anna Pirogova, a neighbor's mistress, killed herself under a freight train near Tolstoy's estate in January 1872. Tolstoy saw her body, and he began the novel not long after.
- Levin proposes using only initial letters. In the novel, Levin chalks the first letters of words on a card table to ask Kitty, and she reads them. Tolstoy proposed to Sofya Behrs the same way in 1862.
- “It ends when Anna dies.” Hold the funeral. Anna dies in Part Seven of eight. Part Eight follows Levin, Kitty and the aftermath, so the book closes on his thoughts about faith, not on the train.
- “Vronsky dumps Anna for someone else.” Wrong theory. Vronsky never takes another lover. Anna only becomes convinced he is slipping away, and after her death he leaves to fight in Serbia.
- “Karenin divorces her right away.” Karenin was slower. First he demands she keep up appearances, then he forgives her at her sickbed, and he never gives her a clean divorce.
- If they say: “Isn't it just a book about a woman having an affair?”
You say: “Not really. Half of it follows Levin, a landowner wrestling with farming, marriage and death, and the novel closes on his thoughts, not hers.” - If they say: “The train is just how she dies.”
You say: “I'd say it starts earlier. A railway worker is killed at the Moscow station the day Anna and Vronsky meet, so trains bookend her story.”
🍸 Your Bar Line
Anna Karenina is the one where she dies under a train in Part Seven, and then Levin spends Part Eight sorting out God on a farm.
