Anna Karenina—Leo Tolstoy

So how does everyone feel today?

Movie poster for the 2012 film, Anna Karenina

I began the Decade Project on January 3, 2008, by emailing a short (500-word) reflection on Anna Karenina to friends and family. Two years and over a hundred books later, I paused the Project, because attending to my dear students, colleagues, and university consumed all my time. Retirement, however, let me rekindle that love affair with the greatest works of literature, and, thanks to Substack, I’ve also found a thriving, worldwide community of readers equally smitten by the world’s finest works. One cohort in the Substackean world, a plucky group of readers led by Henry Eliot, has just this week begun a slow reading of the magnificent work of Tolstoy’s that started me on my Project in the first place. I hope you will look into this read-along at Read the Classics. Between the time I first read Anna Karenina and now I’ve forgotten much, so I reread it last week, and I now feel prepared to get into the weeds and look for an answer to my main question: How the heck did Tolstoy do it?

Anna Karenina came out in book form in 1878, but most of it already had appeared as a serialization in the Russian Messenger, from 1875 to 1877. Unlike the historical narrative of War and Peace, Anna Karenina unfolds in the 1870s, drawing upon contemporary events of its time. In the final section, for example, several Russian volunteers set off to participate in the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878), which at that time would have been at the forefront of many reader’s minds. So, nostalgia does not mar Tolstoy’s descriptions. He shows us his own world with the a sharp and sometimes amused eye of a contemporary critic, and, although he may capture some movements off to the side that in hindsight we now recognize as ominous, no clouds hang over the Russian landscape. The empire lives in these pages, colorful, and seemingly unconcerned for its own mortality.

Three plots involving seven characters intertwine throughout the novel. Anna (Anna Arkadyevna Karenina), trapped in an unsatisfying marriage to the older Karenin (Alexey Alexandrovich Karenin), falls in love with a rich, dashing young man, Vronsky (Count Alexey Kirillovich Vronsky), and runs off with him. They eventually get on each others nerves, and things don’t work out so well for them. Kitty (Princess Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya) loves Vronsky and expects him to propose to her, but, after he doesn’t, she ends up marrying Levin (Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin). They have some rough spots due to Levin’s jealousy, but their marriage holds together. Dolly (Princess Darya Alexandrovna Oblonskaya) and her husband, Oblonsky (Prince Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky), almost break up at the beginning of the novel because of Oblonsky’s romantic dalliance with a French governess, but they reconcile and stay married. The fireworks promised by their connubial crisis fizzle out, and they quickly settle into a dull, supporting role for the dramas exploding all around them.

So there you have it. I doubt that anyone reads the nearly one thousand pages of Anna Karenina for these meager plots. Most people who give up probably do so because they expect more action. I mean, plotwise, it could use a Battle of Borodino or two. But I thought that the sheer genius of this amazing book lay in its ability to sweep aside my present reality and repopulate it with dozens of people, from princesses to peasants, who flourished in the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire. Tolstoy escorts me from one setting to another, pausing to let me savor many facets of that world, long since inundated in bloody revolutions.

The first time I read this novel, I likened it to the Mandelbrot set. If you’ve ever seen one of those videos that move around on a graph of the set, picking one location after another to enlarge, revealing startlingly beautiful patterns, you’ll understand what I mean. Without repeating any scenario, Tolstoy gave me an imaginative experience of a world far different from my own. He sent me racing on horseback, or pushing through a crowded platform at a railroad station, or choking on cigar smoke during provincial elections, or wielding a scythe alongside peasants at harvesting time. Every new location lived for me, every conversation sparkled, every emotion gripped me with a crisp realism that I found utterly convincing. How, I repeat, did he do it?

Tolstoy stitched together 239 chapters to make Anna Karenina. Unlike more modern novels, though, this one does not have a choppy feel to it. He takes several chapters at a time to explore one piece of the story, before moving on to another—but always before the narrative starts to drag. I did appreciate him resisting the urge of so many magazine writers to end such segments with annoying cliffhangers. Instead, he initiates a line of action and carries it through forty pages or so to a good stopping place before changing scenes. Thus, the new scene never feels like an interruption of the previous one but a natural development of all that has come before. He had an unerring sense of when to dig deeper and when to move on.

In a work of this size, if you don’t want to repeat yourself, you have to find not just a lot of scenery to describe but also a lot of interesting topics for the characters to talk about. So Tolstoy lets us listen in on a mosaic of conversations, some of which I feel certain he included merely as excuses to express his own thinking on a pet topic. For instance, he sends Anna and Vronsky to an artist, Mikhailov, to have Anna’s portrait done. This gives Tolstoy a chance to illustrate some themes he will take up later in his book, What is Art?, such as the need for art to infect others with feelings and to avoid recycling elements from other works. Here, Mikhailov briefly shows a major work in progress to the prospective clients.

For a few seconds, as the visitors looked at the picture, Mikhailov also looked at it, and looked with an indifferent, estranged eye. […] He forgot everything he had thought before about his picture during the three years he had been painting it; he forgot all its virtues, which for him were unquestionable – he saw it with their indifferent, estranged, new eyes and found nothing good in it. […] The dearest face of all, the face of Christ, the focus of the picture, which had delighted him so when he discovered it, was quite lost for him when he looked at the picture through their eyes. He saw a well-painted (or even not so well-painted – he now saw clearly a heap of defects) repetition of the endless Christs of Titian, Raphael, Rubens, with the same soldiers and Pilate. All this was banal, poor, and even badly painted – gaudy and weak. They would be right to speak falsely polite phrases in the artist’s presence, and to pity him and laugh at him when they were done.

Tolstoy liberally uses third-person omniscient narration. He doesn’t consistently tap into the mind of any one character, leaving others a mystery. Nor does he open all the characters’ minds to us in every scene. In fact, he sometimes lets us see the world from the perspective of a horse or a dog. He confidently picks and chooses, but I can’t yet figure out how he knows when to let us eavesdrop on someone’s thoughts and when to shut us out. Whatever instinct guides him, though, works perfectly.

After a few hundred pages, I finally noticed that when Tolstoy chooses to give an interior view of some character, he usually focuses on their emotional life, not their intellectual life or their calculations and schemes. But he uses even this technique inconsistently, since Levin’s views on economics, religion, and the meaning of life fill many pages. Nevertheless, the attention he pays to emotions eventually struck me as highly unusual. I don’t even do a good job of noticing my own emotions, so this precise conveyance of the emotional state of his characters creates an odd feeling of a type of both identification and omniscience that I don’t usually get from most omniscient narrators. An example might help. In this scene, Levin and Kitty, recently married, have come to the bedside of Levin’s dying brother. Levin can’t bear to look.

…It did not even occur to him to look into the details of the sick man’s state, to think about how this body lay there under the blanket, how the emaciated shins, legs, back lay bent there and whether they could not be laid out better, to do something, if not to improve things, at least to make them less bad. A chill went down his spine when he began to think of these details. […] To be in the sick-room was torture for him, not to be there was still worse. And on various pretexts, he kept going out and coming back again, unable to stay alone.

But Kitty thought, felt, and acted quite differently. At the sight of the sick man, she felt pity for him. And pity in her woman’s soul produced none of the horror and squeamishness it did in her husband, but a need to act, to find out all the details of his condition and help with them. As she did not have the slightest doubt that she had to help him, so she had no doubt that it was possible, and she got down to work at once.

Oh my. I don’t know of any scene in literature that has made me cringe as much as that scene. By laying bare the feelings instead of the thoughts, Tolstoy brings Levin and Kitty to life in my imagination.

A hundred and fifty years after the book first appeared, we non-Russian readers need the judicious mixture of footnotes and endnotes the translators (Pevear and Volokhonsky in my copy) have provided. Because the novel appeared as installments in a magazine, and because Tolstoy set it in his present day, he had no need to invent tricks to explain the highly forgettable local controversies to a foreign or future audience. If he had initially written this story to appear in book form, he would have needed some device like a naïve visitor or a patronizing narrator to elucidate the social or historical context. However, a typical reader of the Russian Messenger in the 1870s would surely have found it all quite familiar. Did Tolstoy not expect the story to have a life beyond its serialization?

I finished my second reading of this masterpiece with more questions than answers. Thus, I look forward to learning a lot more about Tolstoy and what he did to create such an amazing work of art. Maybe some of Tolstoy’s magic will rub off on me.

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What to read next? Besides Anna Karenina, I think I’ve seen Dostoevsky’s The Idiot mentioned most often. I’ve never read that one, so I’ll give it a go this week. I won’t publish a reflection on the weekend, however, since you’ll find me in Houston for the Museum of Fine Art’s exhibition, Gauguin in the World.

Thank you for reading the Decade Project. It cheers me greatly to think that someone else enjoys or benefits from these reflections. If you have not already subscribed, please consider doing so. I don’t think I will ever hide these reflections behind a paywall, but if you were to support my efforts with a paid subscription anyway, I would appreciate it.

Works mentioned in this post

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

What Is Art?, by Leo Tolstoy

The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky