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The stories and their theme
The reader of Anna Karenina soon discovers that he is being told not one story but two, and that, as the novel progresses, these two stories go quite separate ways. Even more remarkable is the fact that the novel's heroine, Anna, appears in only one of these stories, while the novel's hero, Levin, appears only in the other; they meet once, in a scene of seemingly no great consequence. If singleness of plot and dénouement are as fundamental to a novel as Tolstoy apparently believed, then he has once again written a rather different kind of narrative, though not as strikingly so as in War and Peace. The title leads us to expect that this will be essentially Anna's story, and though half of the book does not treat of her at all, her death does finally determine the novel's ending, after which the second story too is quickly drawn to a close. We find also that the two plots have been woven together here and there, and, even where they merely stand side by side or alternate, we sense that they are contributing to one another in important ways. So what is the reason for their combined presence in the novel, and what is their combined effect? Did something in Anna's story inspire the seemingly quite separate story of Levin? May the development of Levin's story have helped to make possible the full realization of Anna's tragic fate?
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