The History of Mentality and Literature. How the Novel Anna Karenina was received in Russia at the End of the 19th Century

Anna Karenina is not only a novel about the family, but also a seismograph of its time. In particular, it shows the crisis that the institution of arranged marriage was going through in the second half of 19th century. The novel offers a new possible model for how a couple might behave, and anticipates the future bourgeois marriage that Tolstoy will depict in The Kreutzer Sonata. In a literary-centric society like that of Russia, there is no doubt that Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina, influenced readers’ mentalities, but what emerges from an analysis of the literary criticism of that time is that the message of the novel was not immediately perceived. Critics were too engaged in liberal or conservative questions to understand the thoroughly subversive message of the novel concerning family matters. In any case, what the history of ideas shows us is that some representations do penetrate the lower levels of our consciousness only to emerge on the surface years later. In fact they surface in the Eighties when an international debate bursts open about The Kreutzer Sonata.