Anna Karenina, by Leopold Tolstoy

My favorite quotation from Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, 1877) is the description of a man as ”good-humored, and therefore stupid.”

To say that a novel is a great novel, one of the greatest novels ever written, is a statement of personal taste. If I make such a statement, I’m basing it in part on all the other novels I’ve ever read, and there are certainly a large number I have not read. It’s a statement therefore that is made both from knowledge and from ignorance and therefore is flawed. I’d also base it on literary standards that I’ve developed from my readings in literature and from criticism and scholarship about novels. All of those sources have shaped my way of judging how good or bad a novel is. As the years have passed, I’ve grown increasingly hesitant to make statements about what my favorite novels are, what the great novels ever written are. My judgments, I’ve realized, are not only haphazard, but variable. But sometimes I’m moved to pass judgment.

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read.

One of its virtues is its portrayal of a broad swath of Russian society during the 1860s. The point of view is mostly that of the Russian upper class, the aristocracy, and all of its social and moral standards, pretenses, and behaviors. But in spite of that relatively narrow focus it covers multiple subjects: the position of women, the political and social climate of Russia, the bloated and privileged aristocracy, the condition of the serfs, agriculture, depression and suicide, the Serbian revolt, nationalism, adultery, marriage, morality, sex, mortality, life’s meaning. Tolstoy is especially interested in the separate social lives of men and women: men are free to do as they will within relatively wide bounds, while women are constrained, trapped by the social expectations of motherhood, of fidelity to their husbands, of devotion to their children.

Another virtue is its portrayal of character. Literary characters are fabrications. They’re inventions, delusions. They are a set of behaviors and statements and virtues and defects configured in a certain way. The good novelist shows the characters in part as formed by the society in which they live. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy convinces me that his characters are real. He describes them with compassion and understanding and yet objective clinical removal. He goes deep into their lives, and deep into their ways of thinking and feeling, because he’s doing something more than merely dramatizing their existence, he is always analyzing and passing judgment and offering his opinions about what they do right and what they do wrong, but he does this not in a didactic or overbearing way but rather in a way that contributes to the overall creation of the character, of the living beings in this novel.

Anna Karenina is the central character. Tolstoy’s portrayal of her is complex. We begin by admiring her as a gracious inhabitant of her world, a paragon of beauty and elegance and propriety. More than halfway through the novel, however, she’s a bundle of contradictions and mistakes and deceptions--the deceptions of others as well as of herself. She’s a fallen woman, almost a social pariah. One reason why it’s difficult to judge her is that while Tolstoy wrote this novel in the 1870s we’re reading it in 2018. We judge it by the standards that we use to judge people in our own time. Adultery in our society is, perhaps, frowned upon but it’s nonetheless widespread. Marriages often survive in spite of it, or they collapse, people are forgiven, or not, life goes on. In most cases a divorced woman suffers no special stigma.  The same for the man. Unless one or the other has behaved egregiously. In 19^th century upper-class Russia, divorced women are ruined.  The reputations of divorced men may be damaged, but at least they can continue to live their lives.  Divorced women without a settlement have no source of support unless family or friend takes them in. Women who violate the marriage vows cannot continue in “society,” while men can. This is the basic and fatal source of tension in Anna Karenina’s relationship with Vronsky.

The novel certainly has its moments of sentiment, equal to those you find in Dickens or in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  But they are the intense sorts of moments that come with the normal rhythms of life: Levin’s discovery that Kitty still thinks well of him and would welcome a second offer of marriage; the death of Levin’s brother; Anna’s illness; her brief reunion with her son, the birth of Kitty’s first child, Anna’s last hours, Levin’s great revelation--these are among the great scenes in literature.

Although the novel spends much time with Kitty (Princess Ekaterina Alexandrovna Scherbatskaya), she is not a complicated character.  As the daughter of Dolly and Stiva, she willingly accepts and prepares herself for marriage to a suitable man when she reaches the age of 18.  She knows she must marry well, but she perhaps confuses this obligation with love.  Courted by Levin, a successful farmer and landowner whom she does care for, she is blinded by the attentions of Vronsky, and when Levin proposes she turns him down, expecting a proposal from Vronsky. It never comes.  This causes a crisis in her life far greater than it might cause for woman today.  Yet she does have a force of character. She has her own mind and will, and she resists the will of Levin once they are married in what is, for the most part, an ideal pairing.

Dolly (Princess Darya Alexandrovna Obionskaya) is 33 years old, but the novel describes her as if she is old and faded and no longer attractive to her husband. She is the archetypal upper-class Russian wife, a child bearer, the head of her household, the willing servant of her husband, though she exhibits an independent streak after learning that Stiva has betrayed her.

Vronsky (Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky) is one of the most deluded characters in literature. His straight teeth are a defining trait that in the imagination make him seem craven and predatory.  Yet on the surface he is the perfect young Russian gentleman. He courts and seduces Anna without any thought to her position in society, to the disgrace that would befall her, and to a lesser extent himself.  He has little self-awareness.  He’s driven by ambition. Yet he does have his moments of conscience, especially when Anna, delirious and seemingly about to die after the birth of their child, persuades her husband to forgive Vronsky. He doesn’t understand Russian society and its rules and convinces himself that after a while his life with Anna will be overlooked.  He’s morally weak.  His character is weak.  Even though he has an awareness of Anna’s difficult position after she leaves her husband and they live together, he at the same time enjoys the life of a gentleman—when they live in Moscow, he rents an apartment for himself separate from hers.  He has little understanding of how she feels about her son, whom she has given up in order to be with him.  He is described as almost suicidal after she throws herself beneath the wheels of the train, yet guilt must be a major component in his depression.

Anna’s husband, Count Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, twenty years older than she, treats Anna with the same sort of respect one would pay a business associate.  Before he learns of her affair, he treats her with a distant sort of kindness, patronizing her, never seeing her as something more than an appurtenance to his life.  When he does suspect the affair, he implores Anna not to behave in a way that would disgrace either of them and insists that they must continue to live together and give no external signs of a problem.  After her illness, when she deliriously forgives him and asks for forgiveness, and at the insistence of the women who keeps house for him, he becomes a Christian.  He regards himself as alone and disgraced, a cuckold and a coward (he lacks the strength of character to challenge Vronsky to a duel and thinks of himself as a coward).

The adultery of Dolly’s husband, Prince Stepan “Stiva” Arkadyevich Oblonsky, is revealed early in the novel and leads to the first example of a marriage in crisis.  Tolstoy is often highlighting examples of the double standard in Russian society.  Men can have affairs, and their wives are, after an appropriate space, expected to forgive them.  Women on the other hand, with Anna as the main example, once strayed are disgraced and forever fallen.  His marriage to Dolly, like many Russian marriages, was more a matter of social conveniences than of love.  Every man is expected to marry, and every woman at a certain age is expected to marry as well.  Love is fortunate but not required.

Levin (Konstantin Dmitrievich Lëvin), sometimes called Kostya, is an old fashioned romantic. He is socially awkward, awkward in general, shy.  Throughout the novel he reads constantly, especially in agricultural and cultural theory, later in religion and philosophy.  He believes in serving the poor and wants to better the condition of the serfs on his farm.  After working for several days in the fields with his serfs, he decides to form a collective of serfs to whom he gives land that he expects them to run on their own. This fails because the serfs have never faced such a responsibility and had no experience in administering land, selling crops, and so on. At times Levin seems emotionally shallow, but his shallowness is actually innocence, simplicity.  He is a man without major flaws, though he is temperamental and impatient.  Marriage is not what he expects, but he adjusts to it easily and happily. Especially after his marriage, he begins to wonder about the purpose and point of his life.  He doesn’t believe in God, though he exemplifies many of the Christian virtues.  He comes to the point of believing that if he doesn’t know what the purpose of his life is, if there isn’t a God, he should kill himself.  But the birth of his child, the love of his wife, and a moment of revelation under a tree on the side of the road give him what he needs.  I cared for Levin above all other characters in the novel. Yet his concern with finding a reason to live, a way to believe in God, even to end his life, is a freedom only a man can have.  Women have duties, roles, to keep them occupied.  Anna’s suicide is an expression of despair—she thinks she has nothing to leave behind.

As I read the later sections of the book concerned with Levin, I wondered if there were a connection between him and Tolstoy.  Post novel readings confirmed that the two had much in common.

I “read” Anna Karenina” via audio mainly in my car.  The reader was Maggie Gyllenhaal, and she did a superb job.  She didn’t act out the book, as the reader of Bleak House did (another excellent audio book).  She just read it, with clarity and energy.  As a result, it felt closer to a reading experience than many other audio books I’ve “read.” Some friends and close relatives tell me that listening to a book isn’t the same as reading it.  I don‘t agree.   I’ve felt in the past that listening to an audio book denies the listener the finer nuances of a “read” book—the finer details, moods, linguistic rhythms, and so on.  After listening to this novel, I wondered whether I’d missed major plot points, so I read a section by section summary of the novel and discovered that I’d pretty much retained everything.  The summary did help with the pesky Russian names, which change when one is addressing an intimate, a family member, a friend, and a stranger or member of a different social class. Listening is a different kind of reading experience than the physical act of holding and ingesting the words of a book line by line, page by page. The Constance Garnett translation that Gyllenhaal read has fallen from favor. I'd be interested in reading a translation regarded as more faithful to the Russian language and Tolstoy's intentions.  However, opinions constantly change.