All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
These famous opening lines of Anna
Karenina hearken back to the genre of the family novel,
a type of work that had been popular in Russia several decades earlier
but was already outmoded by the 1870s. Tolstoy
revisits this old genre in order to give his own spin on family
values, which were a popular target of attack for young Russian
liberals at the time. Moreover, this opening sentence of Anna Karenina sets
a philosophical tone that persists throughout the work. It is not
a narrative beginning that tells a story about particular characters
and their actions. Rather, it is a generalization, much like a philosophical
or scientific argument. It makes a universal statement and is set
in the present tense rather than the novelist’s preferred past tense.
Tolstoy thus announces that he is more than just a novelist, and
that his aims are greater than simply weaving a tale for us. He
wants us to philosophize about happiness, in the grand tradition
set by the philosopher Plato two thousand years earlier.
Yet it is no simple matter to relate this statement about
family happiness to the novel as a whole. It is difficult to test
the validity of the straightforward assertion that all happy families
are alike, as we do not encounter any ideally happy families in Anna
Karenina. The Oblonskys are torn apart by adultery and
financial problems; the Karenins separate in scandal; and even Levin’s
happy marriage suffers jealous fits and frequent quarrels. Moreover,
Tolstoy’s statement produces mixed reactions in us: we want to be
happy but we do not wish to be exactly like everyone else. The only
way to preserve one’s uniqueness—in one’s “own way”—is by accepting unhappiness.
This double bind is the same dilemma that the newly married Levin
feels when he struggles between domestic satisfaction on one hand
and the need for independence and individualism on the other. It
is Tolstoy’s version of the Christian idea of original sin: what
makes us unique and human is also that which exiles us from happiness.