A Reading on Space and Literature: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

Architecture has always been an integral part of literature. Literature is not just about character description or case narration. In literary works, many elements such as space, cultural accumulation, sociological changes, and political orders reflect the characteristics of the related era and convey a whole culture to the future. From this point of view, literature is intertwined with many disciplines and is an effective communication tool in interdisciplinary interaction.

In literary works, disciplines that include space set-ups, such as architecture, interior design, and urban planning take on different meanings and dimensions. In fiction, the spaces and structures that accompany the heroes become concrete in the dream and are made visible in the reader’s world.

From this point of view, by choosing L. N. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and considering the social and political environment of Tsarist Russia depicted in the novel, we examine in this study, within the discipline of architecture, the space set-ups of that period in detail. Accordingly, based on the novel, pressures created on individuals by society and the powers-that-be, helplessness, and despondency that these individuals fell into are explained through spatial and architectural metaphors. The aim here is to reveal the relationship between literature and the architecture discipline through spatial set-ups in literary works.

Keywords: Analysis, Anna Karenina, Architecture, Aristocracy, Count, Depondency, Infidelity, Interior design, Literature, Moscow, Novel, Russia, Society, Space, Spatial, St. Petersburg, Station, Train, Tolstoy, Vronsky.