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Why does Anna Karenina leave Aleksey Karenin and her son?

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Portrait of Leo Tolstoy with a long white beard, wearing a dark shirt and looking slightly to the side. — Leo Tolstoy Russian writer Leo Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the world's greatest novelists. His masterpieces are *War and Peace* (1865–69) and *Anna Karenina* (1875–77).

In Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, Anna leaves her husband, Aleksey Karenin, and her son, Seryozha, because she falls in love with the officer Aleksey Vronsky.1

Anna, who imagines herself the heroine of a romantic novel, begins to view her husband as stiff and unromantic, choosing to focus only on his negative traits. Driven by this romantic ideal, she abandons her family to live with Vronsky. Throughout the narrative, Tolstoy illustrates that this pursuit of romantic passion is incompatible with the deeper, more stable love found in healthy family life.1

As the story progresses, Anna suffers from a guilty conscience regarding her decision to leave her husband and child. She eventually develops a habit of self-deception, which leads to a state of near madness and a total detachment from reality, ultimately culminating in her tragic suicide.1