Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878) is a novel obsessed with judgment. Its characters judge one another ceaselessly—across drawing rooms, dinner tables, and the pages of their own diaries—and the novel invites its readers to do the same, only to make that judgment increasingly difficult to sustain.

This course reads Anna Karenina as a moral laboratory, tracing Tolstoy’s treatment of desire and self-deception, freedom and determinism, guilt and forgiveness, and the competing claims of passion and duty. Students will be invited to reflect upon their own judgments of the main characters, using the characters as a mirror to their inner selves.

No secondary reading will be required; instead, a slow, close reading of the novel will be the key ingredient to a fruitful seminar. While the instructor will provide questions for reflection, students are encouraged to bring to seminar discussion their own questions that emerge while reading.

Image: Pavel Fedotov, Major’s Marriage Proposal, 1848

Dr. Moreland on What We Learn from Dolly in Anna Karenina

Faculty

Anna Bonta Moreland

Anna Bonta Moreland is Professor of Theology in Villanova University’s Department of Humanities and director of the University Honors Program. Her teaching and scholarship range across theology, interreligious dialogue, Thomas Aquinas, comparative theology, and questions of human flourishing.

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