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War and Peace , Crime and punishment and The Idiot

Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia

The only thing written in it is: There is an inevitability about the tragic fate that hangs over the adulterous love of Anna and Vronsky. "Vengence is mine, I will repay" is the leitmotiv of the story. Anna pays not so much because she transgresses the moral code but because she refuses to observe the proprieties exacted in such liaisons by the hypocritical high society to which she belongs.

A “Labyrinth of Linkages” In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (641411)

A book by Gary L. Browning, it is 133 pages and full of symbolism rather than structure. It has a long list of bibliography at its end, almost all of which is purely about Anna Karenina (11 books, about 2/3). The full text can be found by searching the book's name here.

The book is divided into seven parts:

Introduction

middle of page 12: However, at the height of his creative powers and in what is generally considered preeminent among his finest realistic works, Tolstoy includes significant elements of symbol and allegory.
end of page 12: Tolstoy overlays Anna Karenina’s realism with symbol and allegory to a degree entirely unknown in the author’s other works.
middle of page 13: definitions of allegory and symbol
end of page 15: Tolstoy went through a transformation writing Anna Karenina, using features of both allegory and symbol. In many other works published after the novel, his allegory is essentially devoid of symbolic aspiration or pretention.

Symbolism: The Train Ride

from the introduction (15): In Anna Karenina, a cluster of symbolic images forms around Anna’s train ride from Moscow back to St. Petersburg after Anna has smoothed over the Oblonsky marital discord. Regarding aspects which combine to constitute the symbolic dimension of the train itself, at least three principal levels are discernable.
First: the realistic level, the level outside of the author, observable and understandable in everyday life. Thus, the train in Anna Karenina is a means of convenient and swift conveyance.
Second: this level is metaphysical and above the author, or beyond and transcending the realistic level. Here the train may further suggest the means through which one passes across traditional boundaries and moral restraints, a looming danger, and an instrument of harm or even death.
Third: this level is personal or within and characteristic of the author. It emanates from the author’s own experience, perceptions, and preferences or biases. On this level the train may find affiliation with forces that enable immoral behavior and, in a related sphere, facilitate random, unrestrained movement, the growth of cities and factories, and the undermining of a traditional, comparatively wholesome agricultural economy (484).

Tolstoy: Anna Karenina

There are 4 chapters named:

• "The stories and their theme" (11 pages)
• "The composition of the real" (18 pages)
• "Beauty" (10 pages)
• "Love" (15 pages)
• "Married life" (12 pages)

The stories and their theme

page 11: The noval is actually two stories, both Anna and Levin appear only in one. If singleness of plot and denouement are as fundamental to a novel as Tolstoy apparently believed, then he has once again written a rather different kind of narrative, though not as strikingly so as in War and Peace. Althought half of the book does treat her at all, her death makes the novel end and the second story end as well. The plots are woven one into the other. *Leaves a Bunch of unanswered questions* end11 - start13: The personal separateness of Anna and Levin marks a fundamental difference between the social worlds they each inhabit. It is in the first place a difference of location. While Anna lives in 'the top circle of Petersburg society', Levin lives in the country, where he devotes himself to the farming of his estate *writes about the importance of location and the mindsets of Anna and Lennin. The majority of 12 is what Levin thinks*. "For, although Tolstoy gives him such space and place in the novel as will attract the reader's attention to him as hero, he does not give him much in the way of plot. (...) The seriousness of Levin's story is of a more unworldly and philosophic kind." page 13 first half: "To notice this separation of interest in Anna Karenina is to begin to wonder how Tolstoy has contrived to bind his immensely diverse material together."

The composition of the real

page 23: Tolstoy's writings have a sense of familiarity because of the "eternal characteristics of human nature". humans are very familiar with cause and effect. the "scope of its material" adds to its realism and produces a "complex unity" without which the bok is lifeless.
page 24: Tolstoy himself talking about the importance of "the endless labyrinth", saying "each idea expressed in words on its own is terribly reduced when it is taken alone out of the linking in which it is found." He also adds "it can only be expressed indirectly, by words describing images, actions, situations." Another letter shows the subtlety: "the structural links do not rest on the plot or on the relationship of the characters, but on internal linking" (27 Jan. 1878). The quote indicates that one should focus on more than "broad thematic and moral connections", but on the "basic composition of Tolstoy's realism", on which "the tragic effect of novel" rests.
start of page 25: At the beginning, we see something else is needed to turn events into action. A component of action is the role particular people in it, whose story it becomes. of Tolstoy chooses to make the story of these events the husband's rather than the wife's, and the moment when they become similar to actual experience is when Stiva Oblonsky wakes up and remembers what has happened.
pages 25-26: The scene looks simple enough, but in the number of elements it combines and relationships it sets up it is a most subtle display of novelistic effects. As if to emphasize the composite character of reality, Tolstoy assembles two of the biggest components in slow motion, indicating the gap which doubtless always exists, though it is mostly overlooked, between external fact and internal experience. Oblonsky has been dreaming and his mind is still preoccupied with his dream; he has not yet realized where he is - in his study instead of in his wife's bedroom - nor remembered what has happened. The dream is everything Freud, some decades later, might have expected of a man who does not want to remember, who would prefer to be somewhere else, who wishes unconsciously and without neurotic complication for wine, women, and song. After that, there is a reality which Tolstoy continues to represent subjectively: the events take place entirely within Oblonsky's mind. As he recalls them, they exist again purely as mental effects; nothing else 'really' happens here and now in the study where this scene is set.

Anna Karenina in Our Time: Seeing More Wisely

Chapter One. Tolstoy and the Twenty-first Century

Chapter Two. Dolly and Stiva: Prosaic Good and Evil

Happiness, Two bad lives, Overcoming the bias of the artifact, Retraining perception, The third story, The prosaic hero, Dolly's quandary, Habits, Arriving at a question (Part Six, chapter 16), Looking is an action, Work, Stiva and the Russian idea of evil, Negligence and negative events, The forgettory, Honesty, Fatalism and blame, He had never clearly thought out the subject.

Chapter Three. Anna

Part One. Anna and the Kinds of Love

Part Two. Anna and the Drama of Looking

Part Three. Anna's Suicide and the Totalism of Meaning

Chapter Four. Levin

Part One. Why Reforms Succeed or Fail

Part Two: Levins Idea, Its Corollaries and Analogues: Self-improvement,

Christian Love, Counterfeit Art, and Authentic Thinking

Part Three. Meaning and Ethics

It has a chapter called "Part One Anna and the kinds of love" (15 pages, two pairs missing) and then a lot of info about symbolism

The Anna Karenina Companion

It has a chapter called "Themes and Motifs" that has many short sub-chapters, each about a different theme/motif

Reflecting on Anna Karenina

Judging by the short length (106 pages), the existence of only 4 chapters TOTAL, and the dullness of their names, I think this book doesn't have much to contribute.