“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So begins Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, first published in 1878, the year Russia’s imperial war against the Ottoman Empire concluded – a war that had prompted international alarm about Russian expansionism and fomented internal unrest.
The Mighty Red, the new novel by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Louise Erdrich, arrives at a moment with some uncanny historical parallels. Several of her characters read Anna Karenina, and her fiercely political book, like Tolstoy’s, offers its own sweeping canvas of unhappy families, infidelity and farming in an imperial nation.
