I was sitting on a beach in San Francisco the other day talking with someone about how most philosophy converges to the same conclusion (or rather, lack of a conclusion). The fog was doing what fog does there, erasing the horizon line between certainty and void, and perhaps this is what turned our talk toward Nietzsche, Camus, Kierkegaard, Hesse. I kind of realised how each of them (although admittedly not Hesse, as this was proffered by the other participant in the conversation), by different paths through different darknesses, arrives at essentially the same clearing: Look, we cannot reason our way out of the fundamental absurdity of being thrown into existence. We didn’t discover, backing out from first principles, the algorithm for how to live. So instead, you circle the question like a sculptor circling marble, you attack the space around it with all the resolve you can muster, and you learn (if you’re lucky / brave enough) to make of that very absurdity a kind of home.
This conversation, dissolving as it did into the larger dissolution of surf and mist, made me think about the greatest work I’ve encountered that also holds this terrible question without answering it, or rather, that makes of the question itself a living thing. Anna Karenina is nothing if not an eight-hundred-page meditation on the impossibility of reconciling our need for transcendence with our need for belonging. Tolstoy doesn’t give us philosophy’s abstract comfort of accepting absurdity; instead, he gives us human bodies moving through drawing rooms and train stations, trying and failing and trying again to solve the unsolvable equation of how to be both authentic and connected, both free and loved. The novel becomes a kind of proof by exhaustion; not that there is an answer, but that the question penetrates every gesture of our lives, from the way we butter our bread to the way we throw ourselves under trains. It offers clarity not on the answer but on the ubiquitousness of the asking.
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy’s opening line has become so familiar that we risk overlooking its radical proposition: that happiness is singular while suffering is infinite. Yet as the novel unfolds across its vast canvas of interconnected lives, we discover something more unsettling: that even happiness itself contains the seeds of its own particular anguish. Tolstoy’s method is not to tell us that existence is absurd, but to show us characters living inside that absurdity, each attempting their own desperate geometry around the unanswerable question. Anna Karenina does not merely chronicle the destruction of its titular character; it interrogates the fundamental impossibility of reconciling our hunger for transcendent love with our need for earthly stability, our yearning for authentic selfhood with our dependence on social meaning. The novel’s true subject is not adultery or passion, but the terrible question of how to live when every path toward fulfillment simultaneously leads away from it.
Here’s what those philosophers on the beach understood that Tolstoy also knew: the alternative to engaging with life’s unanswerability—choosing nihilism, suicide, protective cynicism—is itself just another arbitrary answer to the question, and an aesthetically impoverished one at that. It’s like that meme of someone standing in the corner at a party, thinking “They don’t know that all this partying and socialising is meaningless,” while everyone else could just as easily think, “He doesn’t know that his withdrawal is just as arbitrary as our engagement, and far less beautiful.” Camus explicitly rejects suicide as philosophical cowardice, Nietzsche scorns the last men who have given up on greatness, Kierkegaard mocks those who think they’ve found easy answers in either faith or doubt. They’re all blind men touching different parts of the same elephant: Camus more egalitarian in his rebellion, Nietzsche more aristocratic in his will to power, Kierkegaard more indirect in his faithful leap, but they’re all insisting on the same thing: keep touching, keep groping in the dark, keep attacking the space around the question even though you’ll never answer it. The act of engagement itself becomes the only non-arbitrary response to arbitrariness.
The conventional reading of Anna Karenina positions Anna and Levin as opposing answers to this question: passion versus duty, destruction versus creation, the city versus the land. But this binary collapses under scrutiny. Anna and Levin are not opposites but variations on the same theme: both are seekers circling the same impossible marble, both attempting to make of absurdity a kind of home. Both cannot accept the given world, both experience moments of suicidal despair, both glimpse something beyond the veil of ordinary existence that renders that existence simultaneously precious and unbearable. The difference lies not in their choices but in their circumstances, not in their morality but in what they do when they realise there’s no right answer. Levin keeps attacking the space despite his doubts; Anna, tragically, stops.
Consider Anna’s first appearance at the Moscow railway station, where she successfully reconciles Dolly and Stiva after his infidelity. Here is Anna at her most vital—a force of restoration, mending the very kind of breach she will later create. Yet even in this moment of social triumph, death announces itself through the worker crushed beneath the train. “It’s a bad omen,” Anna says, and we tend to read this as foreshadowing her own death. But the omen runs deeper: it suggests that the very rails that connect us such as the structures of marriage, family, society that make civilisation possible, are also the machinery that crushes us. This is the absurd made metal and steam: we need these structures to live, yet they are what destroy us. The train that brings Anna to Moscow to heal one marriage will carry her into the affair that destroys her own symbolic marriage to Karenin and ultimately her life. The rails are the question itself, inescapable and dangerous, but the only way forward.
The novel’s architecture reinforces this paradox through its parallel plots. While Anna descends into jealous obsession with Vronsky, Levin ascends toward spiritual revelation through marriage to Kitty. Yet Tolstoy subverts our expectation of moral judgment. Levin’s happiness is not a reward for virtue any more than Anna’s destruction is punishment for sin. Rather, Levin succeeds because he maintains his commitment to attacking the space around the question, even when he finds no answers. His religious revelation at the novel’s end isn’t a solution (he admits he’ll continue doubting) but a decision to continue engaging despite the doubt. Anna’s tragedy is that she believed a right answer existed, and when she couldn’t find it, when the contradictions became unbearable, she chose the withdrawal into death. She becomes the nihilist in the corner of the party, convinced that non-engagement is somehow more honest than arbitrary engagement.
Anna faces an impossible equation. To live authentically and follow her heart toward Vronsky she must destroy not just her marriage but her motherhood, not just her reputation but her very ability to exist in society. The novel’s cruelest insight is that Anna’s mistake is not loving Vronsky but believing that love could be enough, that one could solve the absurd rather than simply inhabit it. She exchanges one form of incompleteness for another: the sterile respectability of life with Karenin for the fevered isolation of life with Vronsky. Neither allows her to be whole. When she realises there’s no configuration that works, no answer that satisfies, she stops trying. And this surrender, not her adultery, is her true tragedy.
This impossibility of wholeness extends beyond romantic love to encompass all forms of human connection in the novel. Tolstoy shows us character after character struggling to bridge the gap between self and other, between inner truth and outer expression, each attempting their own sculpture around the void. Karenin cannot access his own emotions except through bureaucratic formulations. Vronsky cannot understand Anna’s anguish because he has never had to choose between love and social existence; as a man, he can have both. Even Kitty and Levin, the novel’s happiest couple, experience moments of profound disconnection. But the crucial difference is that some characters accept this incompleteness as the condition of being human and continue engaging, while others, like Anna, demand resolution and, finding none, choose destruction.
The novel suggests that this isolation is not a failure of love but its very condition. We can only love what is separate from us, yet love seeks to eliminate that separation. This paradox reaches its apotheosis in Anna’s final hours, when her need for Vronsky’s love becomes so consuming that it destroys the very thing it seeks to preserve. Her jealousy is not mere possessiveness but an epistemological crisis, because she cannot know Vronsky’s inner life, cannot be certain of his love, and this uncertainty becomes unbearable precisely because she has sacrificed everything else for it. She has attacked the space around the question with such violence that when she finds no answer, she has no ground left to stand on. She becomes the philosopher who, having deconstructed everything, has nothing left but the deconstruction itself.
Yet Tolstoy does not counsel resignation. The novel’s most luminous moments come when characters briefly transcend their isolation through acts of spontaneous compassion or understanding, momentary successes in the attack on the marble. Levin’s day mowing with the peasants, where he loses himself in physical rhythm and communal labor. Anna’s morphine-induced insight into the hatred she and Vronsky share, which paradoxically allows her a moment of clarity and pity. Karenin’s forgiveness of Anna at what he believes is her deathbed, when artificial social emotions give way to genuine spiritual feeling. These moments show us what it looks like to properly engage with the absurd: not seeking permanent answers but finding beauty in the temporary connections, meaning in the movements between states.
These moments cannot last, which is part of Tolstoy’s harsh wisdom. Karenin returns to his emotional rigidity, Levin cannot remain among the peasants, Anna’s clarity dissolves into renewed torment. But their transience does not negate their truth. They suggest that meaning exists not in permanent states but in the ongoing engagement, not in answers but in the quality of our questioning. The sculpting itself, not the sculpture, is what matters. This is what the philosophers were trying to tell us, but Tolstoy shows us through the weight of lived experience.
This is why the novel’s ending with Levin’s religious revelation feels both necessary and insufficient. His realisation that good exists despite his inability to rationally prove it mirrors the novel’s own method, an accumulation of lived experience that yields wisdom without dogma. “But my life now, my whole life… has a positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.” The qualification is everything: not that life has meaning, but that we have the power to put meaning into it, moment by moment, despite everything. Levin hasn’t answered the question; he’s simply decided to keep asking it, to stay at the party despite knowing it’s all arbitrary. He has learned what those philosophers knew: that the choice to continue engaging is the only non-arbitrary response to arbitrariness.
The terror and beauty of Anna Karenina lie in its refusal to resolve the contradictions it exposes. But here’s where Tolstoy transcends the philosophers: he doesn’t offer us another meta-answer about how to live with absurdity. Instead, he offers us something more precious: the company of others who are also struggling with the question. The novel doesn’t tell us how to attack the space; it shows us that everyone is already doing it, badly and beautifully, failing and trying again. This is a fundamentally different gift than philosophy’s. Where Camus gives us the myth of Sisyphus, where Nietzsche gives us the Übermensch, where Kierkegaard gives us the leap of faith, Tolstoy gives us the messy, contradictory, irreducible experience of other human beings trying and failing to solve the same unsolvable equation we face.
In the years since first reading Anna Karenina, I have come to understand that the question is not whether we will face the choice between authenticity and belonging, passion and stability, but only when and in what form. We all carry within us both Anna’s capacity for destructive absolutism and Levin’s capacity for continued engagement despite uncertainty. The novel’s ultimate achievement is not warning us away from Anna’s path or pointing us toward Levin’s, but showing us that the very act of struggling with these impossibilities is what makes us human. Anna’s tragedy is not that she chose wrong but that she stopped choosing, stopped engaging, became the nihilist in the corner convinced that her withdrawal was more truthful than everyone else’s arbitrary dance.
Perhaps this is why we return to Anna Karenina at different stages of life and find different novels waiting for us. In high school, I read it as a passion play, thrilling to Anna’s rebellion or judging her weakness. Later, we might read it as social criticism, noting Tolstoy’s dissection of aristocratic hypocrisy and the position of women. But ultimately, I read it as a mirror of our own struggle to keep engaging with life despite its fundamental unanswerability. We see ourselves both in Anna’s desperate search for the right answer and in Levin’s grudging acceptance that he must continue without one.
The train that kills Anna is heading somewhere, toward the modern world where such total destruction for love seems almost quaint, where we have learned to compartmentalise our passions, to manage our rebellions, to live with what James called “the habit of our losses.” Yet the questions Tolstoy raises remain urgent because they are not historical but existential. How do we live when meaning and happiness diverge? How do we love when love itself is what isolates us? How do we maintain faith in goodness when goodness provides no protection from suffering? These are the same questions those philosophers were circling, but Tolstoy gives them flesh and blood and railway tickets.
What Tolstoy offers is not answers but something more valuable: the consolation that our confusion has been felt before, our specific struggles with the universal question have been lived by others. If there is redemption in Anna Karenina, it lies not in Levin’s faith or Anna’s passion but in the novel’s proof that we are not alone in our asking. This is categorically different from philosophy’s gift. Philosophy tells us how to think about the question; Tolstoy shows us that everyone else is asking it too, in their own broken, beautiful ways. The novel becomes not a guide but a companion.
The novel ends with Levin fearing he will continue to doubt, continue to struggle, continue to fail at the very faith he has discovered. This is Tolstoy’s honesty: even our decisions to keep engaging are temporary, must be renewed each day, each moment. Anna could not sustain this renewal, or rather, the world would not let her sustain it (As a woman in nineteenth-century Russia, her options for continued engagement were brutally limited.) But we who read her story are offered the chance to hold both truths simultaneously: that life is impossible and that we must live it anyway, that love destroys us and that without it we are already destroyed, that the question has no answer and that we must keep asking it.
I am not a philosopher. I am also not an English major (although in another life I would have liked to be). But walking away from that beach conversation, I realised upon saying it that this is the gift of Anna Karenina and perhaps many great works of art: not to provide another philosophical framework for approaching the unanswerable, but to show us the human faces of everyone else who’s wrestling with the same impossible question. The novel teaches us that the space between contradictions, that very tension the philosophers identify, is not a problem to be solved but the place where human life actually happens. As someone who usually works in the realm of the objective and quantifiable, this is initially difficult to accept. But the novel makes you feel the truth of it through eight hundred pages of human beings being human, failing and trying, destroying themselves and continuing anyway.
We close its pages not with answers but with a sharpened sense of the questions, not with clarity but with the courage to continue despite confusion. The horizon line remains erased, the fog keeps doing what fog does, but if you sit with it long enough, you learn that everyone else is also stumbling through the same fog, attacking the same marble, dancing at the same arbitrary party. And maybe this knowledge—not that there’s an answer, not even that we should keep looking for one, but simply that we’re all in this impossible position together—maybe this is the only wisdom that matters. If philosophy teaches us that we must imagine Sisyphus happy, Anna Karenina shows us Sisyphus in all his particular human detail: sometimes happy, sometimes miserable, sometimes giving up, sometimes pushing again, always achingly, specifically human. Others have walked this path before us and found, if not light, then at least the words to name the darkness. And in that naming, in that shared recognition of our common predicament, lies the only answer that isn’t arbitrary: we are not alone in our not knowing.