Anna Karenina is widely regarded to be an even greater achievement of tragedy and of the novel form than War and Peace had been the decade before. Tolstoy began it in 1873 and concluded it in 1877. It is the story of a fashionable married woman, Anna Karenina, who arrives in St Petersberg to meet Stepan Arkadyevitch but meets with him another man. This man, Count Vronsky, is strangely attracted to Anna from the outset and she begins to feel for him too. Anna recalls her cold-blooded and cynical husband who is twenty years her senior. He never shows her any affection and considers her to be a trophy. The Count contrives to meet Anna again through his friendship with Stepan, with whom Anna is residing. The novel then follows this liaison as it begin and then ends horribly as Anna’s husband Karenin finds out about the affair. Anna is brought down by others’ passions and power over her and she is driven, after many twists and turns in her fortunes and those of her lovers, to throw herself under the wheels of a train. It is one of the most famous suicides in literary history but to know of its inevitability only makes the tragedy of Anna’s life more cathartic and sad.