Anna Karenina was begun in 1873, seven years after the publication of War & Peace , and appeared in installments from 1875-1877. Its one of Tolstoys masterpieces, written at the height of his power and reflecting almost every aspect of his method and attitudes. Set in the period following the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861, a time of intense social change, its the Anna Karenina was begun in 1873, seven years after the publication of War & Peace , and appeared in installments from 1875-1877. Its one of Tolstoys masterpieces, written at the height of his power and reflecting almost every aspect of his method and attitudes. Set in the period following the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861, a time of intense social change, its the story of a woman who refuses to be fettered by social conventions, the wife of a government bureaucrat who falls in love with a rich army officer and leaves husband and child for her lover: As Matthew Arnold wrote, We are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life.