A guide to the great novel by Leo Tolstoy, written by the laureate of the "Big Book" prize for the bestseller "Leo Tolstoy: Escape from Paradise." The start of a new author series "Tolstoy: a new perspective." Bringing together historical, cultural, and social contexts of the second half of the 19th century, nuances of Tolstoy's biography and his family, quotes from letters and publications, Basinsky highlights facts and circumstances that reveal the novel "Anna Karenina" anew. A true philological detective story. From separate words, plot twists, and other "clues," Pavel Basinsky reconstructs the plot and explains the dark spots of this mysterious book. "'Anna Karenina' is a continuous experiment and violation of the rules of the classical novel." The book "The True Story of Anna Karenina" helps to understand why this experiment became one of the peaks of world prose and predetermined the development of the Russian novel for many years. The edition is illustrated with rare photographs and paintings from the archives of the Yasnaya Polyana museum-estate and the State Museum of L. N. Tolstoy.