"Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy

In Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina", the characters of Levin and Anna are devoured by their doubts and their inability to derive meaning from their lives. Their means of dealing with this existential doubt differ, however. Where Anna sees her life as a novel, a structured series of events that has form and in which she is in the hands of fate, Levin grapples with his inability to find any form at all to the disordered, and seemingly meaningless nature of his life which he nevertheless lives in a determined and resolute fashion. …