The exact words
The sentence and the scene it opens
Anna Karenina begins with a rule and then immediately breaks it with an example. After the line about happy and unhappy families comes a plain, almost comic report: “Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house.” The wife has discovered that her husband has been carrying on an intrigue with the family’s former French governess, she has told him she cannot go on living in the same house with him, and this has now lasted three days. Servants, children and relatives are all painfully aware of it.
That is the first unhappy family, and the sentence about it is deliberately specific. Tolstoy does not say why unhappy families differ; he shows one and then, over the course of the novel, shows several more. Anna’s marriage fails one way, the Oblonskys’ fails and mends another way, and the marriage of Levin and Kitty, the novel’s happiest, turns out to be neither easy nor identical to anyone else’s.
What the line claims, and what it doesn’t
Read quickly, the sentence sounds like a boast about cleverness: happy families have nothing interesting to say. Read slowly, it says something more precise. Happiness depends on many things going right at once, such as love, money, health, honesty and some luck, so happy families end up looking alike because they have all of those. A family can lose happiness by failing at any one of them, so unhappy families fail in countless different ways.
This is why scientists borrowed it. Jared Diamond used the line in Guns, Germs, and Steel to describe why only a few wild animals could be domesticated: an animal needed many separate traits, and lacking any one of them was enough to rule it out. The “Anna Karenina principle” has since been applied to everything from ecology to business failure. It is a good example of a literary sentence that works as a general pattern.
A note on translations
English readers meet Tolstoy through a translator, and the first sentence is one place where translators differ. The version on this page is from Constance Garnett’s translation, the one most widely available in the public domain. Other translators word the same idea differently, for example with “resemble one another.” If you are putting the line in a speech or a published essay, say which translation you are quoting.
How to use it
The line suits an anniversary toast, a wedding speech, or an essay on family. It is more interesting used with a twist than as a flat statement: you can agree with it and say what the alikeness consists of, or push back and say that happy families are alike only from the outside. Quote only the first sentence unless you need the Oblonskys, and name the book, since the line is so often repeated without its source.
What people get wrong
A statement that all happy families have the same story, or that unhappy families are more interesting.
The sentence is a setup, not a law. Tolstoy follows it at once with a particular unhappy family, the Oblonskys, and then spends hundreds of pages on three marriages that go different ways.
Timeline
- 1875–1877Anna Karenina appears in installments in a Russian magazine before being published as a book.
- 1878The novel is published in book form in Russia, opening with the sentence about happy and unhappy families.
- 1901Constance Garnett's English translation, the one quoted here, begins to circulate in the English-speaking world.
- 1997The scientist Jared Diamond names a general rule after the line, the “Anna Karenina principle,” in Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Use it in a speech
Questions people ask
Where does “Happy families are all alike” come from?
It is the first sentence of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, published as a book in 1878. The wording here is from Constance Garnett's English translation.
What does the sentence mean?
That families who are happy share the same basic ingredients, so there is little to tell about them, while each unhappy family has its own particular trouble.
Is the wording different in other translations?
Yes. Translators render the Russian differently, so you will see versions that say happy families “resemble one another.” The meaning is the same. Always name the translator when you quote it.
What is the Anna Karenina principle?
A name later given to the idea that success needs many things to go right, while failure can come from any one thing going wrong. It takes its shape from Tolstoy's first line.
Cite this quote
These cite the original source directly, so you can use them in an essay or paper. Always check your teacher's required style.