By: Leo Tolstoy Translation: Sayah Al-Jahim Dar Al-Fikr Al-Lubnani / Beirut First Edition 1998 Novel Age: 28 years Volume One: 672 pages Volume Two: 564 pages Like new Tolstoy opens the novel Anna Karenina with the famous sentence: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Anna Karenina (in Russian: Анна Каренина) is a timeless global and human literary masterpiece, translated into most of the world's languages and reprinted hundreds of times. Critics' opinions on this novel have varied, with many studies ranging from complete admiration to relative rejection, if not complete rejection. Those who admired it did so because they saw in it the essence of Tolstoy's art and the culmination of his major works. Those who criticized it did so because they saw artistic flaws and significant secondary events that accompanied the main plot and almost overshadowed it. Diverse human models float on the surface of the novel's events, most of them suffering from the disease of class, the disease of nobility, the disease of heavy inheritance. These human models are often unstable and abnormal, with many internal conflicts, most notably between heart and mind, or between love and duty, between the superficial and the essential, and between the backwardness of the clergy and the Enlightenment movement among Russian intellectuals. What is unique about Tolstoy's writings is that, as a reader, you will not be influenced by Tolstoy's completely neutral writing in his opinion of each character. Instead, the author leaves you the space to determine your own opinion and stance, thus provoking discussion among everyone who reads the novel. Anna Karenina is not like all novels, where the reader is usually influenced by the author's opinion of the character, unlike Leo Tolstoy's writings. Tolstoy's rational mind also realized that there is no character who speaks only good, and another who embodies evil in everything they do in the novel. Rather, Tolstoy believed that everyone has a heart, a mind, and a supreme interest; no one does anything without their own justification, which may or may not align with the higher ideals that novelists usually seek to promote in societies. Everyone in the novel is pitiable, and they are all selfish, and they all had convincing and logical justifications for what they did. Also, as a novelist, Tolstoy did not refrain in his writings from emphasizing the importance of adhering to religious teachings as the best way out of all the challenges an individual faces. This may be a result of his belief that divine wisdom and religious teachings transcend all human positive solutions and wisdom, and this is what the reader perceives in the novel. This novel is considered one of the most controversial novels to this day, because Tolstoy discusses one of the most important social issues that faced all human societies, especially European societies, after the Industrial Revolution, and the resulting focus on materialism, and the emergence of financial-related ailments among the aristocratic classes.