In an interview on Moral Philosophy

Why have you chosen Anna Karenina?

Part of the genius of Tolstoy is his remarkable insight into so many very different people, so that he can portray a whole society and at the same time seem to get inside most of the people he depicts (eg, the description of Kozynyshev and Varenka and the way things went wrong for the proposal of marriage). Although he set out to write a moralizing novel showing the evils of Anna’s adultery, his human empathy pushed him in a very different direction, and the reader sees every step towards the final tragedy from Anna’s point of view and sees how difficult – perhaps impossible – any of the alternatives would have been. There is the feeling that if God wrote novels they might be like this.

Tolstoy’s own values come across in the way he treats many different people in the novel. He dislikes careerists and people who say or do things to impress or because they are fashionable, and the people he admires are often inarticulate but deep. (Inarticulate: there is a contrast with the values of Socrates here.) What the people he admires have in common is a certain kind of seriousness. (Anna and Levin are both serious in a way that Vronsky is not.) Part of this is giving thought to what your life is about and how you should live. Part of it is pushing through small talk to express things that really matter to you. This can make Levin, for instance, quite clumsy and gauche on social occasions, but reading Tolstoy makes you see how utterly unimportant this is.