ABSTRACT
When Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina he was attempting to move towards a state of moral and emotional equilibrium in his own life. Anna Karenina is a deeply autobiographical and subjective work in which Tolstoy explores those problems, social and emotional, which concerned him in his own life. Tolstoy is, at least in War and Peace and Anna Karenina, an intensely moralistic author who deals harshly with human vanities and the frailty of ideals. Anna personifies the woman who is entirely at the mercy of dominant patriarchal values. But to Tolstoy, Anna is the original Eve of the nineteenth-century bourgeois male mind. Anna herself is the most pathetic victim of these nineteenth-century marriages in which feeling is identified with women and rationality with men. To the nineteenth-century male, Anna would have been, as she was to Tolstoy a 'hysterical' woman, a woman driven mad by her sexuality and her emotional needs.
