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.