Anna Karenina is often interpreted as a story about female rebellion, social repression, and historical constraints. However, I find it hard to believe that Tolstoy’s intention was a manifesto against society.

Anna Karenina is one of the greatest books by Leo Tolstoy. The story is about a woman who commits infidelity within her marriage, which might be regarded as an attempt to rebel against the social restrictions of that time.

The book takes place around the 1870s, when divorce was a sin, let alone infidelity.

Everyone regards the book as ahead of its time—a dive into older generations where women were repressed, etc., etc.—and as the story of how Anna dared to be a controversial woman.

However, the way I understood it was that Anna was, in fact, a great portrait of how much we rationalize our sins, making the wrong right only when we are the ones attempting it. When emotion becomes our only filter of perception, we put ourselves in a cycle of trying to prove what cannot be proven, because it is simply false.

Another thing many have ignored is that Anna, despite having her way multiple times without clear punishment, was tortured by society—through scandal, humiliation, and ostracism.

I would say this subtle punishment was far more damaging than one that is clear. However, the most tormenting aspect was the misery she felt when she was finally reunited with her beloved.

Once Anna’s reputation had been ruined, her sole moral compass became her desire. Temporary emotions directed her decisions as she attempted to rationalize them through society’s hypocrisy, justifying them as rebellion and freedom, therefore leading to her inevitable fall.

The thing she fought so hard for was, in fact, something that made her miserable—a portrait of how we overestimate our fantasies, believing that reality will follow, only to find that reality, in fact, does not.

Anna had an epiphany when she realized that her sacrifices, her devotion to pursuing what she desired, did not come to fruition. She was more miserable than before. When she travelled with Count Vronsky, she had no place, no control, no say in anything that happened in her environment. While, on the other hand, in St. Petersburg, she had a place in society as well as in her household.

That is something everyone experiences at a certain point in their life: the realization that our desires did not fulfill us as we had imagined—or that we simply placed so much weight on a desire that it became the sole purpose of our existence, only to leave us more miserable than before.

If Anna’s intention was to rebel against society, she found herself alienated from it; if she were to disappear, no one would care. Nevertheless, the real conflict was not between Anna and society, nor between Anna and Count Vronsky, but rather between Anna and her internal guilt.

She swung between two extremes: one that justified her desire as freedom, and the other an internal guilt that simultaneously sabotaged every attempt at joy, thus making every decision a tragedy.

Anna, driven by her temporary emotions, eventually jumped in front of the train, believing it somehow made her poetic—searching for meaning, trying to fulfill something even in the way she chose to end her life.

Anna did not wish to die; she wished to be alive, to feel alive.