— Anna Karenina (1878), Part 1, Chapter 1
About this quote
हिन्दी में
सुखी परिवार सब एक जैसे होते हैं; हर दुखी परिवार अपने ही ढंग से दुखी होता है।
What it means
The sentence performs its own claim in its grammar. The first half is plural and collective — happy families, all alike, no one named — and the second drops into the singular: every unhappy family, its own way. Twelve words in, Tolstoy has announced what the following eight hundred pages will attend to, and it is not the household where things are fine.
Read closely, it is less flattering than the consolation it usually gets offered as. It does not say your unhappiness is special and interesting; it says happiness is uniform to the point of being unremarkable, which is a novelist’s judgement about what is worth writing rather than a finding about what is worth living. The underlying logic has since been borrowed well outside fiction, as a name for any outcome that needs many separate conditions to hold at once and collapses when a single one does not.
What it teaches you
When something is not working — a marriage, a team, a morning routine — stop hunting for the missing ingredient that the successful versions supposedly have, and instead write out the conditions that all have to hold and find which one is failing. The structure of the sentence predicts that studying a functioning family or a functioning company teaches you very little, because what is visible in them is the absence of problems, and absences do not transfer.
अर्थ और सीख
वाक्य की बनावट ही उसका दावा है: पहला हिस्सा बहुवचन में सबको एक जैसा बताता है, दूसरा एकवचन में हर परिवार को अलग। इसे अक्सर इस तसल्ली की तरह पढ़ा जाता है कि ‘मेरा दुख ख़ास है’, जबकि असल बात यह है कि सुख के लिए बहुत-सी शर्तें एक साथ ठीक होनी पड़ती हैं और दुख के लिए एक का बिगड़ना काफ़ी है। सीख: बिगड़ी हुई चीज़ सुधारनी हो तो सफल उदाहरणों की नक़ल मत कीजिए, यह खोजिए कि आपकी कौन-सी एक शर्त टूट रही है।
Where it comes from
The first sentence of the novel, and one that readers have argued with for a century and a half. Nabokov thought it was wrong; plenty of others have pointed out that happy families are not remotely alike.
Tolstoy’s claim is structural, not sentimental: happiness requires everything to go right at once, so it looks the same everywhere, while there are a thousand distinct ways for one thing to go wrong.
