ABSTRACT
Women novelists, just as much as Tolstoy, act towards their characters with a fierce and avenging moral sense if the character deviates from the path of true righteousness. Although Anna Karenina is a novel deeply rooted in nineteenth-century pre-revolutionary Russia and in the nineteenth-century narrative tradition of the novel, it is also entirely contemporary in the emotional aspirations which the male characters hope for in their wives and sexual partners. The major female characters of Anna Karenina Kitty, Dolly, and Anna herself are all identified with particular forms of marriage and sets of expectations. If Anna Karenina emerges as a didactic novel, informed chiefly by patriarchal values, then Anna is, in a paradoxical sense, a heroine, since what she does is struggle against the boundaries and constraints of conventional bourgeois morality. Ideals of womanhood, of masculinity, of love, and of conjugal relations are all, in one way or another, reduced to ashes in Anna Karenina.
