Hello, I am new to the forum so I'll first introduce myself. I'm Luís, I was born and live in Lisbon, Portugal, so you will have to forgive my english. I am a huge russian literature entusiast. I just finished Anna Karénina and loved it. I read all of the posts of this forum and would like to add just one more insight.
I too liked the Kitty/Lévin chapters the best and think that maybe the book should have been named Konstantine Dimitrchi. Anyway... have you noticed that all the characters in the novel change from respectful and powerfull to deranged and weak when interacting with different characters. **SPOILERS** Take Lévin, for example, while single he felt the need of the love of his life but on the other hand he was passionate for his work on his property and was begining to achieve big things in his life. When he finnaly married Kitty he became a very irritable man, stoped working with passion and forgot the book he was writing. Not to say that Tolstoy wanted to say that marriage (even a lovefull one) was bad, just that an individual is not allways plain morally evil or morally good. We all change when we interact with different people. Anna Karenina is the prime example of this fenomena, she is so powerfull and good in the first chapters of the novel (she helps Stiva in his problem with Dolly), because when in interaction with her brother she stands out. When in interaction with Vronsky or Kitty, she is just a weak and unwise woman. Her husband, Aleksei Karenin, is not the villain of the novel, when he faces Karenina and Vronsky we actually feel pity and compassion for him, but when facing (in the early chapters) Karenina and Society he seems arrogant and unreasonable man.