“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

That’s the famous opening line of Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. Which I just spent two days re-reading. Which I re-read every two or three years, actually. My copy is held together by postal tape now, and has highlighted passages and notes scribbled all over the margins, because something new always occurs to me while I read it.

(Confession: I adore re-reading books. You can see more deeply into characters you’ve already met in situations where you’ve already been. Plus, you can skim over passages that no longer apply — like philosophical or political issues of 1875 — without feeling guilty because you’ve already read them once.)

This trip through, what stood out was Anna’s inability to see her own faults. She could see that Karenin was half-dead, or that Vronsky was only interested in his own desires, or that her society was full of hypocrites. She could see the faults in others. But in herself? No way.

She could not accept that she, herself, ever did anything wrong. So the more “wrong” she did, by the standards of her time, the more her psyche split in two. Her charm and beauty morphed into weapons, rather than gifts.  She started refusing to answer hard questions, while looking down and away from the questioner with half-closed eyes.

“The thought of the harm caused to her husband aroused in her a feeling like repulsion, and akin to what a drowning man might feel who has shaken off another man clinging to him. That man did drown. It was an evil action, of course, but it was the sole means of escape, and better not to brood over these fearful facts.”

By the end of the book, Anna is a roaring drama queen who flies into daily rages and relies on morphine to get through the night. Then she kills herself to punish Vronsky for things he didn’t even do. She simply goes nuts.

I  know, I know. She was a young, beautiful woman living in a highly restrictive culture who married a stodgy older man when she was 18 years old. She’d probably never heard of an orgasm until she met Vronsky, much less had one. I cut her slack for all that. I have great sympathy for women whose passions were/are squelched by their cultures while their men lived/live large. Conditions like that make you crazy.

But what would’ve happened if Anna had stopped blaming and cut the drama? What if she’d simply taken the divorce when Karenin first offered it? What if she’d stopped creating untenable situations that were doomed to fail because she couldn’t bear to face her own guilt?

One of the reasons this novel is so famous is that we can all relate to Anna. We’ve all been there, at one time or another. We’ve all gotten dramatic or violent to change the course of a narrative when we should have gotten introspective. We’ve all pretended that there was absolutely nothing else we could have done, when in fact there were several other things we could have done. We’ve all spent a lot of time pointing out what others were up to, to keep from seeing what we were up to ourselves.

Denial? Blame? Substance abuse? Obsessive relationships? Self-destruction? Anna Karenina, written in 1875, is just as compelling, just as true, as ever.