Investigating Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina Under the Lens of Derrida’s Deconstruction

Anna Karenina is Leo Tolstoy’s realistic novel, focusing on prevailing issues in nineteenthcentury Russia. For years, his book has been a perfect research source for feminism because of its subject matter. However, what makes this work to be a controversial book is its power of deconstruction. Accordingly, this study aims to examine Anna Karenina through the lens of Derridean “deconstruction.” “Deconstructive reading” is the structural investigation of a text to find where it loses its coherence. For its purpose, the study uses three concepts of deconstruction to depict Anna Karenina’s incoherence. They are “signifier and signified,” “decenterism,” and “binary opposition.” Tolstoy desires to present Anna and her miserable life as a moral lesson for other women in society, but she becomes the actual hero of the novel. Hence, through the lens of deconstruction, the researcher will prove that text is made of language and that language is ultimately unstable. It can destroy a text’s unity, question its meaning, and change its arguments.