Considered by many to be the world's greatest novel, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in the nineteenth-century Russia and of humanity in general. In it Tolstoy uses his intense imaginative insight to create some of the most memorable characters in literature. Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of Karenin, an ageing government official, when she becomes infatuated with the dashing officer Count Vronsky, and turns to him to fulfil her passionate nature - with tragic consequences. Their story presents an immortal drama of personal conflict and social scandal, illustrating 'the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires'.