How Anna Karenina drew on Madame Bovary
A documented line of influence: Leo Tolstoy demonstrably engaged Gustave Flaubert’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert · 1856
The Age of the NovelThe influenced
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy · 1877
The Age of the NovelRelevance
8/10
On Anna Karenina’s page
- The book Anna Karenina is arguing with — Tolstoy owned Madame Bovary (bound with Othello, both pinned to the adultery question) and called it, in 1892, justly famous
- Scholarly consensus reads Tolstoy's novel as a deliberate response to Flaubert's
- Read Madame Bovary first and Anna's tragedy reads as a rebuttal — the same act, weighed by a wholly different moral measure
On Madame Bovary’s page
- The adultery novel Tolstoy answered back — he owned a copy bound together with Othello, the two filed under the same question
- He wrote his wife in 1892 that Madame Bovary "has great merits and is, not without reason, famous"
- Scholars read Anna Karenina as a deliberate polemic with Flaubert: the same fall, judged on entirely different terms