Levin anticipates easy marital bliss, as none of us do now. We do not need Levin's experience of post-marital readjustment to advise us that no cohabitation is stress-free. Certainly, the revulsion which some of us feel at Americanisation (its materialism, triviality, and contempt for individual and cultural age) echoes Levin's and the novel's dislike of Westernisation as represented by America's 19th-century counterpart. The novel's references to English fashions, goods, sports and names (such as Betsy) are nearly all connected to morally suspect, Westernising modernity. 

But where Levin is likely to retain the strongest interest is in his construction of his own problems. Anna seems to herself and us to be passive to her problems. She falls for Vronsky despite herself; she leaves Karenin because she feels that she can do no other; she declines helplessly into neuroticism. Levin, by contrast, struggles with how to live because of the enormous historical, moral and metaphysical significance with which he invests his choices. In this he is the opposite of Oblonsky — who denies significance to any of his decisions — and in this is likeable. If he ties himself in mental knots of his own making, there is something sympathetic and admirable as well as ludicrous in him doing so. He keeps changing his mind — wanting to improve his estate, marry Kitty, marry a peasant, marry Kitty again, wanting to die, wanting to live — but only because he embraces each position so firmly that he is temporarily blind to its limitations, and thereby reveals these limitations to us.

His lurch at the novel's end into a perception of the meaninglessness of a finite life will be familiar to many people living in a society from which God has retreated further than from 1870s Russia. Those of us who have known it get around it in our different ways. Levin's intellect almost prevents his attainment of faith, and his eventual compromise with it — that Orthodoxy is that form of truth which God has made accessible to him, as a Russian — is familiar to many people of faith today. Many of us have known religious joy, and have known its passing. Tolstoy kindly drops the curtain on his novel before Levin's can pass. F.R. Leavis rightly found "that the breakdown of Tolstoy into the old Leo is here portended". Tolstoy decisively rejected Orthodoxy, although, crucially, not Christianity, after finishing Anna Karenina.

In Russia, the novel — which was in its own time judged to be conservative, and was only tolerated in the Soviet literary canon on sufferance as a work of realism, now has little appeal. Modern Russian society resembles Tsarist society still less than does modern Britain, in that its class structure has been smashed, and divorce rates are even higher than those here.

If there is one thing that still appeals, it is Levin's quest for how to live. It is as though the whole Soviet period represented Levin's young adulthood, in which he turned atheist and ridiculed the Church. In the tough post-Soviet years, when secular society promoted nothing but Westernisation and wealth accumulation, many people returned to Orthodoxy, and its implicit patriotism. One does not know how long this will last. Levin's perception was that the Russian people, and their perception of truth, would endure; and the post-Soviet revival of Orthodoxy might be evidence of that. But, as we feel at the ending of the passionate, anti-romantic, conflicted novel that is Anna Karenina — it is too early to tell.