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The question of judgment and sympathies in Anna Karenina is one that, every time I have read the novel, seems to become more complicated and slung with obfuscation. The basic problem with locating the voice of judgment is that throughout the novel, there are places where we feel less than comfortable with the seemingly straightforward, at times even didactic presentation of Anna and Vronsky's fall into sin alongside Levin's constant moral struggle. As Anna's story …

…a better writer than he was true moralist, I'm not sure that Tolstoy ever reconciled the novel's judgment of Anna with his own sympathy and love for her. The result is a novel divided, uneasy with the Oevengefulness' of its own condemnation, perhaps proud of its over-riding message of living for truth and "the good"(817) in life, but ultimately unable to fully convince us that it gravitates toward its own confused and forced moral center.