Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy 1878

Devastation Rating

Emotionally Ruined
love loss literary fiction historical

Our Take

Society as killing machine, and Anna walks into it willingly, beautifully, catastrophically. Tolstoy gives her desire and fire, then watches the world crush it. The train was always coming. The tragedy is not the ending but the slow suffocation that made the ending feel like relief.

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