Анна Каренина (Anna Karenina)

Joe Wright's film is Tolstoy's novel, adapted by Tom Stoppard, and it keeps the double plot the book is built on: Anna and Vronsky set against Levin and Kitty, the affair that destroys a woman beside the marriage that makes a man. The staging is its one large departure. Nearly everything set in Russian society is played inside a decaying theatre, and the scenes that leave it are the scenes on Levin's land. That is an argument about the novel rather than a break from it: society as performance, the countryside as the only place anything is real.

Tolstoy knew Flaubert's novel, and Anna Karenina is the argument with it: a wife, an affair pursued against a society that will forgive the man, and a railway. The difference is the moral frame and it is deliberate. Flaubert refuses to judge Emma or to offer an alternative; Tolstoy sets Anna's ruin against the Levin chapters and makes the novel argue for what she did not have. Filed MEDIUM. They are the canonical pair of the nineteenth-century adultery novel and Tolstoy was working in a form Flaubert defined, but he never named it as a model.