Anna Karenina Trivia
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49 free Anna Karenina trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Anna Karenina trivia for anyone who has read all eight parts or just knows how it ends. The quiz opens with the book itself: who wrote it, when and where it was serialised, the first sentence about happy families, the epigraph from Romans, and Tolstoy's own bleak feelings as he finished. Then the cast: Stiva and the governess, Dolly and Kitty, Levin's two proposals, Vronsky's cavalry commission, Karenin twenty years Anna's senior, Betsy Tverskaya, Koznyshev and Agafya Mikhailovna. The plot questions follow the story from the railway worker's death to the freight train at Obiralovka: the ball, Frou-Frou's broken back, the German spa, Karenin's threat over Seryozha, Russian divorce law, Vronsky's suicide attempt and pretentious painting, the ninth-birthday visit, morphine, Veslovsky's flirting, Nikolai's consumption, the Serbian volunteers and Levin's peasant epiphany. It closes with reception and afterlife: Dostoevsky's essay, Faulkner's answer, Garnett versus Pevear and Volokhonsky, the Karenin/Karenina debate, Garbo's two versions, Vivien Leigh, Sophie Marceau in Russia, Joe Wright's theatre stage and its costume Oscar, and Jared Diamond's principle. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the novel, its film adaptations and the Anna Karenina principle, with the supporting sentence attached to each question. Easy questions suit anyone; the expert tier reaches Zheleznodorozhny and the Mussolini Cup.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which earlier work did Tolstoy publicly refuse to call a novel, leaving Anna Karenina as his 'first'?
War and Peace
War and Peace was 'not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle', Tolstoy wrote, arguing that the best Russian books had never fitted European forms.
Q 02What does Levin give Kitty to read before their wedding?
His diary
His diary lays bare his past affairs and his lack of faith; Kitty weeps bitterly over it but marries him all the same.
Q 03What news does Anna give Vronsky shortly before he rides in the steeplechase?
That she is pregnant
That she is pregnant with his child; Vronsky urges her to leave her husband, and hours later her open panic when he falls in the race gives the affair away.
Q 04According to Anna Karenina's famous opening line, all happy what are alike?
Families
Families: 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' The line inspired the Anna Karenina principle, that success needs everything to go right while any one flaw is enough to fail.
Q 05What is Anna Karenina's epigraph, taken from Romans 12:19?
'Vengeance is mine; I will repay'
'Vengeance is mine; I will repay' sounds like a threat, but in Romans Paul quotes it to tell believers not to take revenge themselves and to leave judgment to God.
Q 06Which task does Levin do all day beside his own peasants?
Mowing
Mowing the meadow with a scythe works off his irritation after an argument with his half-brother; he loses track of time and comes home in high spirits.
Q 07What is Anna's lover Vronsky's profession?
Cavalry officer
Cavalry officer Vronsky lets a promising army career go for Anna: he turns down a posting to Tashkent and leaves the army to go abroad with her.
Q 08What is the occupation of Anna's husband, Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin?
Senior statesman
Senior statesman Karenin fears scandal more than betrayal: when Anna admits the affair, he demands only that she keep up appearances in public.
Q 09Which actress played Anna in the 2012 film of Anna Karenina, with Jude Law as her husband?
Keira Knightley
Keira Knightley had been Elizabeth Bennet in director Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice, and here he cast her Mr Darcy, Matthew Macfadyen, as Anna's brother instead of her lover.
Q 10Anna's brother opens the novel in trouble with his wife over an affair with whom?
The family's governess
The family's governess was his lover; when his wife finds out, the household falls into chaos until Anna arrives and persuades her to forgive him.
Q 11Which character is Anna's brother?
Stiva Oblonsky
Stiva Oblonsky is forgiven once Anna has talked his wife round, and it is he who later plays matchmaker, inviting Levin and Kitty to the same dinner party.
Q 12Where does Levin go to find Kitty on the day he arrives in Moscow to propose?
A skating rink
A skating rink at the Zoological Gardens suits the country-bred Levin: he is a fine skater, and shows off by copying another man's run down the steps in his skates.
Q 13Why does Kitty first refuse Levin's proposal?
She hopes to marry Vronsky
Q 21Which drug does Anna admit she can no longer sleep without?
Morphine
Morphine quiets the question she cannot settle, whether to seek a divorce and remarry: 'When I think of it, I can't sleep without morphine,' she tells her sister-in-law.
Q 22How does Anna die?
She throws herself under a freight train
She throws herself under a freight train at a station outside Moscow; on the day she met Vronsky a railwayman had been crushed at another station, and she had called it 'an omen of evil'.
Q 23Which future James Bond played Vronsky opposite Claire Bloom in the BBC's 1961 Anna Karenina?
Sean Connery
She hopes to marry Vronsky, and her mother has encouraged her; at the ball he dances with Anna instead, and Kitty is left heartbroken.
Q 14What is the name of Vronsky's mare, whose back is broken when he blunders in the steeplechase?
Frou-Frou
Frou-Frou falls at a ditch when Vronsky shifts clumsily in the saddle; he walks away unhurt, but the mare has to be shot.
Q 15Where does Kitty go to recover after Vronsky's rejection ruins her health?
A German spa
A German spa puts her under the spell of the saintly Varenka, until her father arrives and hints that Varenka's pious guardian, Madame Stahl, only plays the invalid.
Q 16What does Karenin threaten to take from Anna if she continues her affair?
Their son Seryozha
Their son Seryozha is the one hold he has over her: his letter warns her to think what awaits 'you and your son', and when she leaves he keeps the boy.
Q 17What does Vronsky do after Karenin forgives him at Anna's sickbed?
Tries to shoot himself
Tries to shoot himself: crushed by the wronged husband's generosity, he fires at his own chest, misses his heart and recovers.
Q 18What does Vronsky tell Anna's sister-in-law he lacks while Anna is still another man's wife?
A legal heir
A legal heir: by law, he says, any child of Anna's is Karenin's while she is still his wife, so a son could inherit neither Vronsky's name nor his property, and his work would die with him.
Q 19What hobby does Vronsky take up in Italy, without realising he lacks talent?
Painting
Painting is his new calling until a real artist, Mikhailov, paints Anna's portrait; Vronsky then abandons his own picture of her.
Q 20What does Countess Lidia Ivanovna tell Karenin's young son about his absent mother?
That she is dead
That she is dead, and that his father is a saint; the boy quietly refuses to believe it, and on his birthday Anna slips into the house to see him.
Sean Connery played Vronsky a year before Dr. No made him 007; the recording was thought lost until a copy turned up in 2010.
Q 24Where does Vronsky go to fight at the end of the novel, after Anna's death?
The Serbian revolt against the Turks
The Serbian revolt against the Turks gives him a cause to die for: he sets off as a volunteer, taking with him a squadron raised at his own expense.
Q 25What does Levin conclude after talking to a peasant?
That the meaning of life is to serve God
That the meaning of life is to serve God comes to him when a peasant praises a neighbour who 'lives for his soul'; it ends a despair so deep that Levin had hidden a rope for fear of hanging himself.
Q 26Of what illness does Levin's brother Nikolai die, nursed by Kitty?
Consumption
Consumption kills him slowly in a provincial hotel, where Kitty takes over the sickroom that Levin can hardly bear to enter; straight after the death, a doctor tells her she is expecting a child.
Q 27What does the jealous Levin do when a young visitor flirts openly with his pregnant wife?
Asks him to leave the house
Asks him to leave the house: young Veslovsky is driven to the station that day, and promptly turns up at Anna and Vronsky's estate, where he flirts with Anna too.
Q 28Which American novelist, asked to name the three greatest novels, reportedly answered 'Anna Karenina' three times?
William Faulkner
William Faulkner's quip now helps to sell the book: Penguin's Pevear and Volokhonsky edition opens its cover copy with his verdict that it is the best novel ever written.
Q 29Which fellow Russian novelist published the 1877 essay 'Anna Karenina as a Fact of Special Importance'?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky told his readers it was perfect as a work of art, and that nothing in the European literature of the day could compare with it.
Q 30Whose 1901 English translation of Anna Karenina was later revised by Kent and Berberova for the Modern Library?
Constance Garnett
Constance Garnett had met Tolstoy in person, visiting him at home on her first trip to Russia in 1894, and went on to put some seventy volumes of Russian writing into English.