All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

All was confusion in the house of the Oblonskys. The wife had discovered that her husband was having an intrigue with a French governess who had been in their employ, and she declared that she could not live in the same house with him. This condition of things had lasted now three days, and was causing deep discomfort, not only to the husband and wife, but also to all the members of the family and the domestics.

Basic set-up:

This is the famous opening of Leo Tolstoy's novel, which tells of the tragic fate of Anna, a Russian aristocratic lady who falls in love with a man who isn't her husband (gasp!).

Tolstoy's novel opens in the domestic sphere—which is a fancy word for somebody's home. Dolly is unhappy with Stiva, her cheating husband (and Anna Karenina's brother): she's not talking to him, and it's causing a lot of havoc in the household.

This is the stuff of everyday life. Who isn't familiar with the battles that take place within the family? By opening with this scene of domestic strife, Tolstoy's doing what Realists do best: focusing on the trials and tribulations of quotidian life.

Anna Karenina is a great example of the use of the omniscient narrator. Tolstoy's narrator jumps from one character to the next, from one scene to another, moving freely amongst different members of Russian society. And this narrator knows pretty much everything each of these characters thinks and feels.

We can detect the narrator's omniscient perspective from the very first sentence: "All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." That's a pretty big statement, but Tolstoy's narrator can handle it—and the rest of the novel seems to prove this narrator right.