Anna Karenina characters

Appears from the start

A beautiful, intelligent, and charming aristocrat, married to the senior government official Karenin and mother to a young son. Warm and vivid where her husband is cold and formal, she is admired throughout high society. Introduced traveling to Moscow to help reconcile her brother's troubled marriage, she is a woman of strong feeling constrained by a passionless marriage and by the rigid expectations of her class.

Appears from the start

Anna's husband, a high-ranking St. Petersburg statesman many years her senior. Reserved, methodical, and preoccupied with duty, propriety, and his career, he is emotionally remote and uneasy with intimacy. He values the appearance of order in his household and public life above open feeling.

Appears from the start

A wealthy, handsome cavalry officer, confident and popular in fashionable society. Accustomed to easy conquests and a life of pleasure and ambition, he is drawn into a powerful attraction that unsettles his careless self-assurance. Charming and well-mannered, he pursues what he wants with single-minded intensity.

Appears from the start

An earnest, awkward landowner who prefers country life and honest work on his estate to the artificial world of the cities. Thoughtful, idealistic, and often ill at ease in society, he searches restlessly for meaning, purpose, and a life of integrity. He is deeply in love with the young Kitty Shcherbatskaya.

Also known as Ekaterina Shcherbatskaya

Appears from the start

A pretty, sheltered young woman of good family, on the threshold of adult life and courtship. Sincere and tender-hearted, she is initially dazzled by the glamour of society and its most eligible admirers, and must learn to distinguish real devotion from flattering illusion.

Also known as Stiva

Appears from the start

Anna's genial, easygoing brother, a Moscow official who loves comfort, good food, and pleasure. Warm and well-liked but weak-willed and unfaithful, he has strained his marriage through an affair, and his cheerful irresponsibility sets the novel's opening crisis in motion.

Also known as Dolly

Appears from the start

Stiva's careworn wife and Kitty's older sister, devoted to her many children and worn down by her husband's carelessness with money and fidelity. Kind, practical, and long-suffering, she embodies the burdens and quiet endurance of married domestic life.

Appears from the start

Levin's older half-brother, a celebrated intellectual and writer absorbed in public questions and abstract ideas. Composed and self-assured, he represents the life of the mind and civic reputation that Levin both respects and finds hollow.

Appears from the start

Levin's estranged older brother, a proud, self-destructive man who has ruined his health and prospects through dissipation and radical enthusiasms. His troubled life weighs on Levin and confronts him with poverty, illness, and mortality.

Appears from the start

Anna and Karenin's young son, a sensitive boy deeply attached to his mother. His well-being and the question of who will keep him become a source of anguish as the adults' lives grow entangled.