Leo Tolstoy

Literature has always endeavoured to bring to surface the turmoil’s and travails faced by an individual. It also delineates without over moralizing what is true and what is false, what is authentic and what is unauthentic. The spiritual crisis and existential anguish of man is sensitively depicted by profound artists. Whether they are Greek tragedians such as Aeschylus or Sophocles or renaissance dramatist such as Marlowe or Shakespeare or Victorian bards such as Tennyson or browning or a modern poet such as Eliot, everyone has asked vital questions that are crucial to an individual and society. No artist can absolve himself from his responsibility of showing truth to common man. Tolstoy is such an artist who delineates in his work his search for spiritual fulfillment. He created hordes of characters who either lead an artificial life marked by shallow relationships self interest, and materialism or the ones who want to get at the true meaning of life. They create meaningful relations which expand life not limit it. Anna Karenina is such a novel in which Tolstoy has depicted his grave spiritual and moral crisis of his life. A brief survey of Anna Karenina has been attempted in this book with the sole aim to focus on continuous quest for spiritual perfection as embodied in various characters of the novel. The novel is human to the core and sublime in its reaching out to ideals which alone sustain human existence in the bewildering and harsh ironies of life.