DISCUSSION QUESTIONS Anna Karenina |
1. How
are we to understand the epigram "Vengeance is mine, I will repay"?
Should Anna's fate be considered the result of God's vengeance? Is
Anna's desire to take vengeance on Vronsky being condemned?
2. When
Vronsky first meets Anna, "it was as if a surplus of something so
overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will..." (p.
61). What is this something? Why is it expressed beyond her will?
3. Why
is Anna able to reconcile Stiva and Dolly?
4. We
are told that it is unpleasant for Anna to read about other people's
lives because she "wanted too much to live herself" (p. 100). Why are
reading and living placed in opposition to one another?
5. When
Anna and Vronsky have satisfied their desire for one another, why does
Tolstoy compare Vronsky to a murderer?
6. After
telling her husband about her affair, why does Anna feel that
"everything was beginning to go double in her soul" (p. 288)?
7. Why
does Tolstoy counterpose Levin and Kitty's marriage with Anna and
Vronsky's relationship?
8. Why
does Levin continually imagine his future in such detail, only to have
his actual experience differ from what he had expected?
9. What
keeps Dolly from having an affair like Anna's, even though she imagines
one "parallel to it, an almost identical love affair of her own" (p.
609)?
10. While
explaining her affair to Dolly, Anna says, "I simply want to live; to
cause no evil to anyone but myself" (p. 616). Does the novel present
these two objectives as compatible or incompatible?
11. Why,
as she later admits to herself, did Anna want Levin to fall in love with
her when she met him?
12. Why
does Anna kill herself? Why does everyone and everything seem so ugly to
Anna just before she does so?
13. Is
it Anna herself or the society in which she lives that is more
responsible for her unhappiness?
14. Why
are the consequences of Stiva's adultery so insignificant relative to
those Anna faces?
15. Why
does Vronsky go to war as a volunteer after Anna's suicide?
16. Of
all the novel's characters, why is it only Anna and Levin who
contemplate suicide?
17. Why
does Levin believe that he must keep the revelation in which he comes to
understand faith a secret from Kitty?
18. Why
does Tolstoy end the novel with Levin's musings about the nature of
faith and his embrace of morally justifiable actions as the basis for
the meaning of life? * Some questions from Reading Group Guides
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