Anna Karenina - Anna Karenina in Literature

Anna Karenina in Literature

• The novel is referenced in Vladimir Nabokov's Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.
• Repeated reference is made explicitly to Leo Tolstoy and Anna Karenina in Muriel Barbery's Elegance of the Hedgehog
• Anna Karenina is also mentioned in R. L. Stine's Goosebumps series Don't Go To Sleep, in which the lead character has trouble pronouncing Kitty's name.
• Mikhail Bulgakov makes reference to the Oblonsky household and Tolstoy in The Master and Margarita.
• In Jasper Fforde's novel Lost in a Good Book, a recurring joke is two unnamed "crowd-scene" characters from Anna Karenina discussing its plot.
• In the short-story "Sleep" by Haruki Murakami, the main character, an insomniac housewife, spends much time reading through and considering "Anna Karenina". Furthermore, in the short story "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo", by the same author, the character of Frog references "Anna Karenina" when discussing how to beat Worm.
• Martin Amis's character Lev, in the novel House of Meetings, compares the protagonist with Anna Karenina's Vronsky.
• In the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Anna Karenina is compared with the novel-like beauty of life, and Tereza arrives at Tomas's apartment with a copy of the book under her arm. In addition, Tereza and Tomas have a pet dog named Karenin, after Anna's husband.
• Anna Karenina plays a central role in Nilo Cruz's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Anna in the Tropics (2002), set in 1929, as a new lector, Juan Julian, reads the text as background for cigar rollers in the Ybor City section of Tampa, FL. As he reads the story of adultery, the workers' passions are inflamed, and end in tragedy like Anna's.
• In "The Slippery Slope", the 10th book in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket, the Baudelaire orphans, Violet and Klaus, and the third Quagmire triplet, Quigley, need to use the central theme of Anna Karenina as the final password to open the Vernacularly Fastened Door leading to the V.F.D. Headquarters. Klaus remembered how his mother had read it to him one summer when he was young as a summer reading book. Klaus summarized the theme with these words: "The central theme of Anna Karenina is that a rural life of moral simplicity, despite its monotony, is the preferable personal narrative to a daring life of impulsive passion, which only leads to tragedy." Esme Squalor later said she once was supposed to read the book over the summer, but she decided it would never help her in her life and threw it in the fireplace.
• Guns, Germs, and Steel (by Jared Diamond) has a chapter (#9) on the domestication of large mammals, titled "Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle." This chapter begins with a variation on the quote above.
• in Nicholas Sparks's book The Last Song, the main character, Ronnie, reads Anna Karenina and other Tolstoy books throughout the story.
• in Anton Chekhov's The Duel, there are two references. In Chapter II: "And he remembered that when Anna Karenin got tired of her husband, what she disliked most of all was his ears, and thought: 'How true it is, how true!'", and again in Chapter XII: "It's not for nothing they whistle. The fact that girls strangle their illegitimate children and go to prison for it, and that Anna Karenin flung herself under the train,..."
• in Allison Bechdel's graphic-novel Fun Home. Tolstoy's book is featured on the first page and is the first of many books mentioned throughout the narrative. Bechdel suggestively depicts father Bruce Bechdel reading the novel.
• In Cynthia Voigt's book A Solitary Blue, Voigt quotes Anna Karenina's opening line:Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
• In Emily Perkin's short story, "Circles", the book is referenced heavily and parallels are drawn between Anna Karenina's emotional loss of Vronsky and a teenaged girl's loss of a family member.
• In Howard Jacobson's novelComing from Behind Anna Karenina is the main topic of competitive discussion among rivals for the Disraeli Fellowship at Cambridge University, a rivalry won in a backhanded sort of way by the protagonist, Sefton Goldberg.