"Happy families are all alike," Tolstoy writes as the first words of Anna Karenina, "Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Specifying this generalization the author details the life of a well favored aristocrat. Stepan Arkadyevitch has an excellent post in Moscow, is the head of a loving and smoothly run household. His wife, Darya, Stiva's feminine counterpart in the Russian class system, centers her life on raising the children and tending her husband. But his infidelity shatters their harmonious life and Dolly must confront the problem of how to repair her personal ruin. For Stiva, his marital life is of secondary value; his official duties, his social activities, and his pleasures are primary. Thus we see that the values of men and women in this society are oriented toward different goals and Stiva's affair with the French governess causes these different values to stand in clear relief.
In these chapters Tolstoy has set up a small working model which generates all the subsequent themes of Anna Karenina. Stiva's petty love affair prefigures the adultery of Anna with Vronsky, and serves as a negative comparison with Levin's successful marriage later in the novel. The individual's quest for meaning through personal relationships and through the details of ordinary life begins--though modestly--among the descriptions of domestic life in the Oblonsky household.
