Tolstoy’s laboratory of marriage: from family happiness to Anna Karenina

Abstract

This thesis examines how, in "Family Happiness" and "Anna Karenina," Leo Tolstoy represents the experience of living within marriage across time. Rather than treating marriage as a stable institution or narrative resolution, Tolstoy portrays it as a condition in which emotional life is reshaped through domestic routine, social life, and continuous interaction between spouses. The thesis argues that marital instability in these texts emerges not simply from external social conditions but from the gradual mismatch between imagined love and the realities of shared domestic life, particularly when romantic idealization is subjected to duration, reflection, and routine. Introducing the concept of Tolstoy’s “laboratory of marriage,” the thesis defines marriage as a narrative environment in which relationships are tested under changing conditions and shifting perspectives. The thesis traces the development of this experimental method from the single retrospective consciousness of Masha in "Family Happiness" to the comparative and multi-perspectival structure of "Anna Karenina." In the latter, Tolstoy expands this narrative method through four major marriages, namely those of Stiva and Dolly, Anna and Karenin, Anna and Vronsky, and Levin and Kitty, each revealing a different attempt to reconcile desire, domesticity, and morality. Through shifting focalization and refracted perspectives, marriage is differently imagined, experienced, justified, and judged by multiple consciousnesses occupying conflicting moral and psychological positions. Drawing on narrative theory, feminist criticism, and scholarship on Tolstoyan temporality, the thesis argues that narration itself becomes central to the representation of marital instability. Together, the texts trace the movement from imagined love to lived marriage and from emotional idealization to accommodation, imbalance, endurance, or collapse, revealing how emotional life in Tolstoy’s fiction is never immediate or transparent but mediated through memory, interpretation, perspective, and social observation.