Anna Karenina: The Tragic Heroine of a Liquid Society

Abstract

In Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy creates a unique heroine--a tragic heroine of love. However, his depiction of Anna's "love-at-any-cost" approach reveals her inability to reflect on the various facets of love and friendship. In telling the story in this way, Tolstoy is not merely conveying a powerfully tragic story about one individual, he is depicting a profound weakness of modern, cosmopolitan society itself. In essense, Anna's story is a conceptually "liquid society" that turns her into a tragive victim of forces much larger than herself.