It has no organic plot--simply a succession of pictures. The plot does not develop--but the characters do, thus resembling our own individual human lives. It has no true unity, such as that shown, for example, by the "Scarlet Letter." Our interest is largely concentrated in Anna, but besides the parallel story of Kitty, we have many other incidents and characters which often contribute nothing to the progress of the novel. They are a part of life, however, so Tolstoi includes them. One might say there is an attempt at unity, in the person of that sleek egotist, Stepan--his relation by blood and marriage to both Anna and Kitty makes him in some sense a link between the two couples. But he is more successful as a personage than as the keystone of an arch. The novel would really lose nothing by considerable cancellation. The author might have omitted Levin's two brothers, the whole Kitty and Levin history could have been liberally abbreviated, and many of the conversations on philosophy and politics would never be missed. Yes, the work could be shortened, but it would take a Turgenev to do it. Although we may not always find Art in the book, we always find Life. No novel in my recollection combines wider range with greater intensity. It is extensive and intensive--broad and deep. The simplicity of the style in the most impressive scenes is so startling that it seems as if there were somehow no style and no language there; nothing whatever between the life in the book and the reader's mind; not only no impenetrable wall of style, such as Meredith and James pile up with curious mosaic, so that one cannot see the characters in the story through the exquisite and opaque structure,--but really no medium at all, transparent or otherwise. The emotional life of the men and women enter into our emotions with no let or hindrance, and that perfect condition of communication is realised which Browning believed would characterise the future life, when spirits would somehow converse without the slow, troublesome, and inaccurate means of language. I believe that the average man can learn more about life by reading "Anna Karenina" than he can by his own observation and experience. One learns much about Russian life in city and country, much about human nature, and much about one's self, not all of which is flattering, but perhaps profitable for instruction. This is the true realism--external and internal. The surface of things, clothes, habits of speech, manners and fashions, the way people enter a drawing-room, the way one inhales a cigarette,--everything is truthfully reported. Then there is the true internal realism, which dives below all appearances and reveals the dawn of a new passion, the first faint stir of an ambition, the slow and cruel advance of the poison of jealousy, the ineradicable egotism, the absolute darkness of unspeakable remorse. No caprice is too trivial, no passion too colossal, to be beyond the reach of the author of this book.