All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Thus Leo Tolstoy sets the scene for one of the most dramatic love stories in literature - that of the adulterous affair between Anna, the doomed heroine, and a glamorous bachelor, Count Vronsky. The central characters are drawn from the upper echelons of a society enjoying the luxurious and glittering lifestyle of late nineteenth century Tsarist Russia; but the broad sweep of the novel contrasts this rarefied world with the plight of the common people, whose lives after centuries of serfdom, deprived of education and condemned to appaling working ocnditions, seem devoid of hope. Within a few years, however, this outrageous system was to be toppled by the revolution which brought the complacent Tsarist regime to an abrupt end. Victim of her conditioning, Anna is constrained from fulfilling her love for Vronsky by the presures of society, her husband, the Church, and her own insecurities. Her frustrations and paranoid fears result in uncompromising tragedy.