ABSTRACT
Anna Karenina is one of the most famous women in fiction. Anna's love for Vronsky is a complex mixture of heterosexual desire and need, which today just as much as in nineteenth-century Russia raises questions about all relationships between women and men, people of the same-sex, and parents and their children. Anna Karenina can be read as a novel about Tsarist Russia, a novel about social convention and its crushing effect on emotional life, a moral tale about the danger of loving outside socially accepted and agreed boundaries, or as a discussion not merely about love, but also about life, and how to live it. The relationship of Anna to her living children, and to those prospective children which she might have with Vronsky, portrays an assumptive world that exactly matches the arrangements of the bourgeois family in both the nineteenth and the twentieth century.
