Who Killed Anna Karenina?
Investigation on the white murders in nineteenth-century novels
Published for the first time in 1974, Who Killed Anna Karenina? is at the same time a pamphlet on femicide in literature, a critical essay that has profoundly innovated the reflection on gender, and a text that has not only survived to the passing of time but that demonstrates, today, a disconcerting relevance.
The great heroines of the nineteenth-century novel and theatre, from Anna Karenina to Effi Briest, from Emma Bovary to Nora in A Doll's House, are united by the ability to highlight the crisis of social roles and laws, upsetting for first and foremost the institution of the family. And precisely for this reason their end is doomed: they must die, so that the repressive and reactionary power of ma(husband/lover/master) is reaffirmed. That power which the historical situation did not yet allow to see overthrown and trampled, despite its cruelty and its anachronism.
A short yet enlightening text, in which Nadia Fusini has distilled that clarity of analysis and brilliance of writing that have made her, for almost fifty years now, a luminous presence in the intellectual debate, both Italian and international.