It's one of the most famous openings in literature: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Leo Tolstoy's novel details the lives of a number of families, but the two most extensively chronicled are the families of Anna Karenina, who has to decide whether to try to get a divorce, and of Konstantin Levin. The character of Levin is believed by scholars to be, essentially, a stand-in for Tolstoy himself, and he gets plenty of space in the novel to declare a series of various opinions about the state of Russia at the time. (The novel runs nearly a thousand pages in total.) It's not exactly clear what Tolstoy meant by his famous opening, though most scholars suggest that he thought that for a family to thrive as a happy unit, it had to successfully manage certain universal principles.
