I fell in love with “Anna Karenina” because of how clearly it showed that no character was wrong—that even the unreasonable-seeming people were doing what appeared right to them, based on their own knowledge and experiences. As a result of everyone’s having different knowledge and experiences, they disagreed, and caused each other unhappiness. And yet, all the conflicting voices and perspectives, instead of creating a chaos of non-meaning, somehow worked together to generate more meaning.

When I learned that some critics considered “Anna Karenina” to be a continuation of Pushkin’s verse novel, “Eugene Onegin,” I decided to read that next. It opens with the title character, a world-weary cosmopolitan, inheriting a large country estate. There, he meets Tatiana, a provincial, novel-obsessed teen, who writes him a declaration of love.

It had started in 2017, the year I turned forty, began identifying as queer, published “The Idiot,” and went on a book tour amid the swirling disclosures of #MeToo. Like many women, I spent a lot of 2017 rethinking the story of my own romantic and sexual formation.

(..) Rich identifies a tendency in Western literature to suggest “that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal . . . it is still an organic imperative.”

I thought back to “Anna Karenina” and “Eugene Onegin.” How clearly Tolstoy and Pushkin had shown that, by falling in love with men, Anna and Tatiana foreclosed their already direly limited life choices! And yet, that ruinous, self-negating love was made to seem inescapable and glamorous. Anna dies, but looking fantastic,