Dušan Jovanović’s stage adaptation (2015) of Tolstoy’s famous 1878 novel Anna Karenina mostly maintains the complexity of the novelistic plot, yet creates a drama with an extremely modern effect on stage. This tale of great uncontrollable love, encountering numerous exterior and some interior obstacles, is a story about an individual and a society with no room for those who do not comply with the rules. The love colliding with the life of a gentlewoman, the wife and mother Anna Karenina, is too big for the society and its double standards, its rigid (including unwritten) laws, its narrow-mindedness and inconsiderateness. The short-lived fulfilment of the forbidden relationship is “punished” by every possible restriction. Anna Karenina loses the right to her son and the society of her class rejects and ostracises her. The isolation, deprivation and all manner of doubt makes her misfortune escalate into agony, from which she sees but one escape.
Anna Karenina is a great love story of world literature, but simultaneously an uncompromising image of a cruel world in which love is defeated by vengefulness and moralising.