2330 words | 5 Pages
Constantine Levin, a hero of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, longs to discover some harmonious part of himself through experiencing the peasant way of life. He believes there to be something profoundly rewarding in the simple act of working as one’s needs dictate. By working with and...
1067 words | 2 Pages
“All happy families are alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (1.1.1) In this famed first sentence of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy alludes to the two kinds of familial happiness, almost comically simplifying the idea of ‘family’. However, this formula cannot be tested...
1476 words | 3 Pages
Throughout the course of Leo Tolstoy’s iconic tragedy Anna Karenina, the presence of trains is essential both in terms of symbolic resonance and as a way to communicate social commentary and setting. Tolstoy employs train imagery as a way to talk about movement in terms...
1490 words | 3 Pages
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy is, in many aspects, a story of love and relationships. Two couples, Kitty and Levin, and Anna and Vronsky, find some form of love and passion throughout the course of the novel, yet their personalities determine the success of their...
2175 words | 5 Pages
Nothing exists to hinder an individual’s pursuit of happiness besides the shackles built from the expectations of others. Societal norms become ironclad laws, and those who do not accept these constraints often find themselves lost, ostracized, and abandoned by their peers. Society’s current obsession with...
1752 words | 4 Pages
The question of judgment and sympathies in Anna Karenina is one that, every time I have read the novel, seems to become more complicated and slung with obfuscation. The basic problem with locating the voice of judgment is that throughout the novel, there are places...
1089 words | 2 Pages
Sexual relations have different social implications depending on the society in which they take place. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is a 19th century novel and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s Envy is a 20th century novel. Both novels portray the imperfect realities of coupling, yet in very different...
1382 words | 3 Pages
Facial expressions and body language communicate one’s intentions and emotions far better than words. Leo Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina, describes a plethora of physical descriptions, enabling the reader to more completely understand the characters’ emotional state of mind. Other characters and the narrator frequently describe...
1499 words | 3 Pages
Though a majority of the characters in Leo Tolstoy’s momentous novel Anna Karenina are members of the nobility, the reforms Czar Alexander II put in place for the lower classes had profound effects on them. The time of his rule was an era of change...
3840 words | 8 Pages
Two clashing movements existed within Russia in the 19th century. In the rural areas existed a movement that could hardly be called a movement. It was, in fact, more of a planted fixture. The indigenous foundation that had existed for time immemorial kept alive the...
1621 words | 3 Pages
Constantine Levin’s pair of pivotal experiences contribute significantly to Anna Karenina’s psychological tapestry because these moments of crisis draw out and highlight the subjectivity of the protagonist’s life experience. The novel’s overarching theme of emergent moral consciousness is thus foregrounded in these scenes that feature...
3618 words | 8 Pages
Anna Karenina is a story of split, conflict, schism and divide. Anna’s battle for love, her struggle between what she needs and what she desires, her hatred of lies and her usage of them, her vacillation between libre penseur – liberal values- and old patriarchal...
991 words | 2 Pages
The idea of seeing a widely loved, magnificent woman go from the envy of St. Petersburg to the deranged, self-obsessed person that made the rash decision to jump underneath a train to get revenge on her husband sounds like a crazy thought. Knowing this, it...
1714 words | 4 Pages
In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy clearly values characteristics such as spontaneity, honesty, vitality, and liveliness. He makes this obvious to the reader through narratives that indicate that he values forms of naturalness over forms of artificiality. In the novel, Tolstoy’s exoteric message is that...
3516 words | 7 Pages
In 1898, Tolstoy wrote in a Letter on Suicide that “suicide is immoral.” He vehemently condemned the act of it, by qualifying it as unreasonable and wrong. However, in his earlier books, such as War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy treats suicide, along with...
1158 words | 1 Page
Ivan Ilych is dead. His death is hardly what one would call “mourned”, and his family and friends think only of how they can profit from his timely demise. He has led a terrible life, and suffered through a generally meaningless existence. One might wonder...
2382 words | 1 Page
Poor Ivan Ilych is plagued by not one, but two diseases. While his “floating kidney” ends his life, it is a temporal disease – which is actually healed as his kidney disease progresses – that ruins his life. Ivan spends his life in a small...
2342 words | 1 Page
Ivan Ilych’s funeral, like all funerals, is not his own. While it is held in his honor, and he provides the token corpse for the occasion, each person experiences his funeral in the same self-centered way that they experience his death. Pyotr Ivanovich, one of...
788 words | 1 Page
In his novella The Death of Ivan Ilych, Count Leo Tolstoy offers readers a glimpse into the life and death of a socially ambitious Russian gentleman, Ivan Ilych. During the story, Ivan’s character is revealed in several different ways: firstly, oddly enough, at his funeral,...
514 words | 1 Page
Tolstoy uses The Death of Ivan Ilyich to show his readers the negative consequences of living as Ilyich did. Ivan Ilyich made decisions based on what others thought and what would benefit him monetarily. As death approaches, Ilyich realizes that he squandered everything pure and...
851 words | 1 Page
“It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up. And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is...
1505 words | 1 Page
The concept of the “superfluous man” began appearing in Russian literature in the 19th century. It refers to a man who often has superior intellect, leading him to feel misunderstood and victimized in a society that does not give him the opportunity to fulfill his...
380 words | 1 Page
In the first chapter, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy gives the reader almost all the problems of society and human nature, which it hurt in those days, is sick now, and we will not disassemble – it will continue to hurt. Indifference – the first human...
883 words | 2 Pages
There are many philosophical questions that humans have been trying to answer since the birth of our species. What is my purpose on earth? Is there divine beings? Who created me and this world? The short story The Death of Ivan Ilych tactfully incorporates two...
1333 words | 3 Pages
Human Morality’s Presence Through Ivan Ilych’s Death Leo Tolstoy eloquently weaves together the lackluster life tale of a dying man who lived for vanity in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”. Tolstoy bluntly portrays the agonizing awareness of death growing within Ilyich, while Ilyich is recognizing...
887 words | 2 Pages
The tell-tale heart begins on the eighth night as he was peering in at midnight, and perhaps the old man heard it because he startled awake. He wonders if anyone was there. After waiting a long while, he decided to open the lantern and a...
621 words | 1 Page
Leo Tolstoy, a Russian Writer known for his stories involving subject matter of isolation and societal class, further elicits these common themes in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Throughout the story, the main character, Ivan Ilyich, struggles immensely with society and class. It is something...
2447 words | 5 Pages
Strangeness helps us break apart our old eyes and to see the world in a slightly new way. Seeing things in an unfamiliar way will let us to look more closely at things that people assumed that something is true without questioning because they stigmatize...
2721 words | 6 Pages
In Kholstomer – The Story of a Horse, Leo Tolstoy uses an animal’s point of view as a method to increase the exquisiteness of the piece wherein Kholstomer (Strider) suffered an unfortunate life as a horse because he was being physically and emotionally tormented. This...
890 words | 2 Pages
Anais Nin said, “People living deeply have no fear of death.”Ivan Ilyich it terrified of dying and has rather spent his whole life focussing on his status in society. He has an accident, falling from a ladder, because he is trying to make society happy,...
