>>24651876
Are these women in the room with us right now?
The women I've talked to about it think the story is a train wreck (ha, ha). Seriously, the story is deliberately unsexy in the extreme. Anna's sex life with her husband is bland and unpleasant. Vronsky is at first alluring, but that lasts for maybe a quarter of the book and the rest of it is hundreds of pages of slow, grinding misery. Vronsky and Anna are barely touching by the end of it. And even in the first section, the whole affair is less of a spark and more of sheer desperation.
All of this is obviously by design. It's a cautionary tale from a conservative Russian. "Hey, you know all those French stories about how hot it is to cheat? Well, here's a story about cheating for you. Have fun." Hidden subtext: Tsar Alexander missed his chance to wipe out the frog menace once and for all.