
Most obviously, Tolstoy carefully notes the tragic double standards faced by his characters. That gives the characters and their motivations a timeless quality and makes all of their decisions - even when self-destructive - believable. Even though the reader is allowed into the private thoughts of the characters, the technique conveys the impression of simple truth-telling, that the narrator is simply reporting facts about people he knows intimately.


The use of both an omniscient narrator and a stream-of-consciousness approach to the characters' inner lives effortlessly captures every detail.Ī s noted by author Debashish Sen, the realist approach in "Anna Karenina" extends to the narrator and the characters. He goes inside the heads of his characters and lets the reader know what they are thinking. As critic James Meek points out, Tolstoy eschews metaphors and similes and simply tells the reader what things are, what characters are doing, in simple but beautiful language. By the time Leo Tolstoy sat down to work on "Anna Karenina," realism was a well-established movement.
