** spoiler alert ** While reading this novel, I often found myself somewhat bored with the content even though I recognized the exceptional character study that was being constructed. However, in the course of the final 200 or so pages, all of the previous development became coherent, proving that the end does in fact justify the means. When taken as a whole, the society that Tolstoy presents his reader is built on a foundation of false propriety and empty, largely meaningless, relationships. Individually, each of the characters has a different view of life. Some of them, like Oblonsky, live for carnal delights and social promotion. Likewise, Karenin, Anna's cuckolded husband, becomes wrapped up in a form of "holier than thou" Christianity, which ironically leads him into an affair of his own and an inability to forgive his cheating wife.
Levin, with whom I (and perhaps Tolstoy) most identified, and who is probably the true protagonist of the novel, sees through all of the social moors, distancing himself from high society and politics while attempting to live honestly as a rural landowner and champion of the peasants. He is a learned man, constantly studying philosophy and science, who prides himself on his reason. The book that he writes, about a new system of agriculture that should maximize yields by giving the laborers a share of the profit, is evidence of his reason triumphing over the social conditioning of the aristocracy. He marries Kitty, his dream girl, and even has a son. However, he finds himself extremely unhappy, like a man who has "exchanged his warm fur coat for a muslin garment and realizes that he is as good as naked and must inevitably parish." Although he has always lived selflessly, and thus happily, his intellect will not save him from this fate. He must either find a reason behind life or die.

Anna, the antagonist and foil to Levin's character, runs the gamut of human emotions. Anna is often fleetingly happy, yet even in moments of bliss, her suffering seems to shine through. This is because her character is selfish, always choosing to provide for herself without much thought about the fate of others. She chooses Vronsky over Karenin and her son, then even takes her own life to spite Vronsky without much thought about the other repercussions. In the beginning she is saving Dolly's marriage with her reasoning, but by the end, that same reasoning has led her to the conclusion that "the struggle for existence and hate are the only things that hold men together...that we are all created in order to suffer, and that we all know this and try to invent means for deceiving ourselves." Anna's insight in these moments right before her suicide is depressingly honest. Her morbid views of both societal and individual motives are erudite in a novel where nearly all of the other characters never even consider the meaning of their lives. This point of view reminds me of "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," in which Tolstoy volubly explores death, and thus the meaning of life.

After toiling through most of the novel unsatisfactorily, the grand edifice that Tolstoy had constructed, which illustrates humanity in all of its disturbing and doomed glory, is suddenly apparent. Each character's ruminations on the meaning of life and of death are our own or those of someone we know. Of particular note is the final juxtaposition of Levin and Anna. Both take their own path to arrive in a position of utter misery - Anna eventually isolates herself by means of her egocentric decisions and jealousy, while Levin struggles to justify life with no rational reason for existence. Anna finishes her downward spiral with a typically self-absorbed suicide and Levin embraces Christianity, defying his own rationale. Both decisions left me feeling cheated, as if each had taken the easy way out. In typical Russian fashion, the answer that Tolstoy seems to suggest is that there isn't one...only death will save us.