Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy (or Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy), 1828 – 1910

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (or Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy), 1828 – 1910

It is certainly a long, detailed experience. Set in the later half of the 19^th century, the novel follows a web of Russian aristocrats between Moscow, St. Petersburg, and a rural province. Between romances and other family ties, the main characters experience tensions and grief while maintaining their cordial social habits. Anna Karenina is married to Alexei Alexandrovich but engages in an affair with Count Vronsky. Konstantin Levin is another main character who has a romance with a young princess known as Kitty. I am still new to this style of novel – one that moves forward in mundane linearity and favors insight into the characters’ very realistic perspectives over the suspenseful, perhaps heroic spectacle of books I grew up with. The novel contents itself with portraying imperfect people in a truthful manner regardless of whether they are trending towards glory or despair. It is so dense with insightful details that the reader’s mind could go any which way. At the time of this post, I am about 2/3 of the way through, sharing my thoughts to this point.

Anna Karenina focuses primarily on people and the way they perceive the world. There is not as much attention towards setting or physical descriptions of scenes. Characters may be called beautiful but the specifics are not often filled in. While there is some detailing of the landscape of Levin’s country estate and his travels, many books use far more words to describe a natural setting. Anna Karenina presents one world (the real world, or the reader’s world) made up from a half dozen unique viewpoints. Written from a third person omniscient perspective, we enjoy deep insights into the psyche of many characters. Tolstoy acknowledges how the world can be conjured so differently between various people. Some prefer to see this as a filter on reality that varies between individuals while the braver and more romantic among us may enjoy the idea that there is no common truth to be filtered but instead, everyone’s reality is conjured wholly from within. While the novel’s romantic relationships display the discrepancies between characters’ perceptions the most, Tolstoy throws in evidence of competing realities wherever he pleases.

Tolstoy’s writing acknowledges the tension between inner feelings versus what is presented outward (dictated by what is socially acceptable). He displays characters’ biases such as what they choose to confront or dismiss. The first part of the book makes quick work of rounding out several characters. It shows their tendencies, strengths, and areas of ignorance. The development reaches an introductory sort of culmination in a dinner party typical of our Russian aristocratic characters. Because Tolstoy has provided context and perspective for several of the evening’s participants, the scene where they are all together in conversation is enriched. Since the audience is keyed into the characters’ preferences and opinions towards each other, the dinner party is a symphony of feelings.

As an inexperienced reader (especially surrounding Tolstoy) sometimes I would question the significance of written details. The novel is full of verbose descriptions, often capturing one character’s impression of another in a particular moment. Tolstoy has a talent for digging in and conveying sentiments that most of us have difficulty staying conscious of, much less putting into words. In retrospect, I have learned that when a novel does justice so truthfully to the interpretive nature of our world, every detail can be important. For example, when Anna and Vronsky first meet at the train station it feels like the moment is being clung to, as though something important is underway. There is no doubt that Vronsky is impressed with her, but her feelings towards him are murkier. They see each other as she steps off the train past him:

As he looked back, she also turned her head. Her shining grey eyes, which seemed dark because of their thick lashes, rested amiably and attentively on his face, as if she recognized him . . . In that brief glance Vronsky had time to notice the restrained animation that played over her face and fluttered between her shining eyes and the barely noticeable smile that curved her red lips (Tolstoy 61).

This line goes beyond Vronsky’s feelings; if we are to trust his judgement, she may be exuding some good feeling of connection that matches the wavelength of his own feelings. But is this true? Does this mean to say more about Vronsky and how his passion delivers to him what he wants to see, or does it solidify some feeling of intrigue or attraction coming from Anna? Or can the embellished magic of their meeting be attributed to the fact that they have met before and just barely remember each other, as is explained on the following page? This is the sort of uncertainty that I mean. But it’s an uncertainty free of frustration – naturally, I’m happy to savor each tendril of possibility as it crosses my mind. Often, we get to understand the characters more than they do themselves: “Vronsky, not taking his eyes away, looked at her and smiled, himself not knowing at what” (Tolstoy 62).

Culture

Anna Karenina portrays a different time and culture from mine. There were a few aspects of culture that piqued my interest. First, the acknowledgment and role of children. A few of the main characters have children but they feel like an afterthought in the storytelling. They are seldom mentioned, and when they are it’s mostly generic and impersonal. While there are moments when we do learn how much Anna, Dolly or Stepan Oblonsky, for example, do cherish their children, the perspective of the young’uns is not shared. I wonder whether it’s because Tolstoy only wants to prioritize the viewpoints of adults or if it speaks to the day to day proximity of parents and kids in aristocratic culture. The presence of a tutor, governess, and wet-nurse may enable the adults to get lost in their own problems.

Second, I enjoyed the culture’s social pastime of discussing and debating ideas. Each person is expected to have their own individual perspective which is a good exercise in critical thinking. This norm is more common amongst the men, but you see women involved as well. It feels like an expected thing for men that they feel pride in doing, making them feel like they are establishing their worth. Meanwhile, the women sometimes hop in and have qualitative things to say, without the expectation or ego.

Anna Karenina

Anna is a young woman in St. Petersburg who is married to an accomplished government statesman, Alexei Alexandrovich. She has an 8-year-old son, Seryozha, and is the sister of Stepan Oblonsky. She is introduced as a very likeable, quality woman who seems both confident and capable. Though the book is named after her and she occupies a central role, her storyline is not synonymous with the plot of the novel. Levin shares a similar degree of limelight, with Alexei, Vronsky, and Kitty not far behind. Early in the novel, Vronsky becomes infatuated with Anna while she maintains a responsible denial towards his advances. All along, however, there are suggestions that his attraction does interest her in some way. Once she is back with her husband in St. Petersburg and reminded of his romantically sterile nature, she is driven towards Vronsky, and an affair ensues. The situation becomes well known in their social circles. Anna’s husband Alexei Karenin’s reaction to the affair is much more calculated and self-interested than it is passionate or emotional. This makes the whole situation confusing and drawn out for all involved. Anna eventually has a child with Vronsky while still married to Alexei Karenin, and nearly dies from the combination of childbirth and grief surrounding her relationships. In her recovery, she and Vronsky go abroad to Europe for an extended time, which they enjoy.

The most striking thing about Anna’s story is the stark turn her life takes as the affair begins. When Vronsky’s efforts towards her plant a real seed of reciprocated feelings, we learn in parallel that she feels quite unfulfilled by her husband Alexei Alexandrovich. I wonder if her dissatisfaction was deliberately left out before Vronsky came along or I simply failed to realize it. Either way, it feels surprising that she acts in a way to change her life so drastically. In the exposition of her character during her initial visit to Moscow, she feels like a wise woman who makes people feel good things about her without necessarily being able to isolate why. She has a composed, empathetic air about her; it seems that she knows things and understands people more than they do themselves. Over the course of the novel, as her own difficulties develop, we are reminded that no one is perfect and our biggest blind spots are towards ourselves. One of the first things we learn about Anna and her life in Petersburg is how important her son is to her. Countess Vronsky says this explicitly, “ ‘Anna Arkadyevna’, the countess said, explaining to her son, ‘has a little boy of about eight, I think, and has never been separated from him, and she keeps suffering about having left him’ ”(Tolstoy 63). When Anna meets Dolly and Stepan Arkadyevich’s children, some of them remind her of her son and we learn that he is rarely far from her mind. Though it doesn’t specifically address her marriage, the importance of her family is significant. Once the affair and her new state of life is in full force, her son adds difficulty and makes the decisions for her path forward less clear. If she is to leave her husband, would she take her son with her? Or should she leave her entire life behind, as though that would damage it less?

When Anna and Vronsky go to Europe for a period, they explore cities and spend time in an Italian town. They enjoy life through a self-propagated medieval artistic lens, particularly in Vronsky’s case. Vronsky practices painting with a lot of his time. An unspoken tension with their society back in Russia underlies their time abroad. It feels like an artistic dream as they try to ignore their social situation. I suppose that when reality is difficult but not imminently dangerous, people may turn to the vicarious realities offered by art. Anna is quite revived compared with her long period of grieving and near-death. Her kind and likeable nature comes back. Vronsky is working on a painting involving one of their house servants in Italy. Anna encourages it while experiencing the following: “While painting her, he [Vronsky] had admired her beauty and medievalness, and Anna did not dare admit to herself that she was afraid of being jealous of her, and therefore she especially pampered and spoiled both the woman and her little son” (Tolstoy 467). The strong, empathetic version of Anna is back. She copes with recognition of her own potential jealousy by being overly generous to make herself feel better. The baby girl Anna and Vronsky had together is with them in Europe but is hardly mentioned.

Levin

Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin is a smart, introverted, often confused young man. He has elected to live out in the country and run his late parents’ estate. This lifestyle contrasts with a military/government career based in the city which many perceive as the glorious path for a modern young man. He is directly involved in oversight of how the land is farmed by the local peasantry. Besides his home’s servants, his day-to-day life is solitary and he is motivated to write books about agricultural economy and other political topics. He also spends some time in Moscow where he has family connections and solicits a failed marriage proposal to a young girl known as Kitty (Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya). While Kitty does feel a confused but pure interest in him, she is currently very excited about being courted by Count Vronsky (prior to his infatuation with Anna). Levin was deeply nervous to propose and is in turn deeply embarrassed by the refusal.

Poor Levin. He is the respectable and slightly tragic sort of man who strives to be true to himself but can’t quite get his vision across to his peers. He has a great heart, but one that is prone to being clouded by anger or frustration. Levin often has long strings of good rational thought. However, when it comes time to speak or debate with others, he normally can’t get it across the way he would like. Levin may attribute this failure to a lack of wisdom or heart on the part of his interlocutor. The following represents Levin well: “Konstantin Levin did not like talking or hearing about the beauty of nature. For him words took away the beauty of what he saw” (Tolstoy 241). As with all people, there is an inefficiency of translation between how one feels internally and what we put into words. Some are completely ignorant to this inefficiency, but Levin is not and he is sometimes tormented by it. This loss via translation can be broken down into two components – one is the physical limits of what language can do, while the other is the bounds of what is normal and established in the eye of society. Levin is frustrated by the latter while analyzing his relationship with his brother, Sergei Ivanovich:

But, in the depths of his soul, the older he became and the more closely he got to know his brother, the more often it occurred to him that this ability to act for the common good, of which he felt himself completely deprived, was perhaps not a virtue but, on the contrary, a lack of something – not a lack of good, honest and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of life force, of what is known as heart, of that yearning which makes a man choose one out of all the countless paths in life presented to him and desire that one alone. The more he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergei Ivanovich and many other workers for the common good had not been brought to this love of the common good by the heart, but had reasoned in their minds that it was good to be concerned with it and were concerned with it only because of that. And Levin was confirmed in this surmise by observing that his brother took questions about the common good and the immortality of the soul no closer to heart than those about a game of chess or the clever construction of a new machine (Tolstoy 239).

Levin feels that many people, including his brother, derive their morality in a less animate way than he does himself. He feels that people subscribe to a framework because it has the blessing of the status quo. I think that maybe the idea of the common good is daunting to Levin because he strives to think so truthfully and literally, so close to his feelings. To know what is good or bad, to be able to simplify things into right and wrong might feel disrespectful towards the complexities of Levin’s worldview.

In time, Levin and Kitty meet again and their connection leads to a successful second proposal. Their marriage is working well, with mostly healthy disagreements. However, Tolstoy starts to emphasize how different their perspectives are when describing their coexistence in his country home:

No interest in my work, in farming, in the muzhiks, nor in music, which she’s quite good at, nor in reading. She’s not doing anything and is quite content. In his soul Levin disapproved of that and did not yet understand that she was preparing for the period of activity which was to come for her, when she would be at one and the same time the wife of her husband, the mistress of the house, and would bear, nurse and raise her children. He did not understand that she knew it intuitively and, while preparing for this awesome task, did not reproach herself for the moments of insouciance and the happiness of love that she enjoyed now, while cheerfully building her future nest (Tolstoy 486).

Despite their frequent disconnects, Levin and Kitty’s love and relationship always feels quite strong. There is an interesting scene which demonstrates both sides of their somewhat confused relationship:

This first quarrel occurred because Levin went to a new farmstead and came back half an hour late, having lost his way trying to take a shortcut. He was returning home thinking only of her, of her love, of his happiness, and the closer he came to home the more ardent his tenderness for her grew. He rushed into the room with the same feeling and even stronger than when he had gone to the Shcherbatskys’ to propose. And suddenly he was met with a sullen expression he had never seen in her. He wanted to kiss her, but she pushed him away. . . Only then did he understand clearly for the first time what he had not understood when he had led her out of the church after the wedding. He understood not only that she was close to him, but that he no longer knew where she ended and he began. He understood it by the painful feeling of being split which he experienced at that moment (Tolstoy 482).

While Levin is late, he is coming home thinking about her and very happy. One would think that if Kitty understood how he feels, she would also be very happy. However, she has jealous feelings towards his absence. What Tolstoy proceeds to explain about Levin’s new understanding is interesting, a bit unexpected. In this moment, the attachment that made Kitty upset is felt from within Levin as well. He realizes that they have such a strong connection, he imagines and feels things now as though she is a part of them. And if he perceives her to feel something, he is likely to empathize and feel it along with her. Perhaps it shows how susceptible Levin is to influence by others. Kitty is upset because of unexpected separation, but Levin is not. Rather than seeing it as only her perception or being frustrated by her feelings, he adopts them into the simple reality that they share.

The Artist Mikhailov

In their Italian dreamland, Anna and Vronsky go to visit a local Russian artist. Tolstoy writes much of their meeting from Mikhailov’s perspective, which is quite a treat. He’s shown to be a bit of an unpleasant man, proud and with a short temper. “He never worked so ardently and successfully as when his life was going badly, and especially after quarrelling with his wife. ‘Ah, it can all go to blazes!’ ” (Tolstoy 469). He has a real artistic–emotional connection channel and such a fun mind. He has a focus on faces, and we get to see how he draws subconsciously on his immense stored memory of faces and expressions to shape his painting. “As he was drawing this new pose, he suddenly remembered the energetic face, with its jutting chin, of the shopkeeper he bought cigars from, and he drew that very face, that chin, for his man. He laughed with joy” (Tolstoy 469).

Mikhailov has an endearing excitement to see what the visitors will think of his art. His emotional and tumultuous nature is displayed as he cycles between feelings while waiting for their opinions.

 “For those few seconds he believed in advance that the highest, the fairest judgement would be pronounced by them, precisely by these visitors whom he had so despised a moment ago. 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” (Tolstoy 472).

Mikhailov comes off as highly empathetic. He feels what he imagines the guests to be thinking. Though he has more than enough pride to ward off true insecurity, I sense some degree of worry in his self-consciousness. When Anna and Vronsky’s companion, Golenishchev, makes his observation, Mikhailov feels the following:

The whole of Mikhailov’s mobile face suddenly beamed; his eyes lit up. He wanted to say something but could not speak from excitement, and pretended he was coughing. Little as he valued Golenishchev’s ability to understand art, trivial as was the correct observation about the rightness of Pilate’s expression as a functionary, offensive as it might have seemed to voice such a trivial observation first, while more important things were ignored, Mikhailov was delighted with this observation (Tolstoy 473).

Being in his head is such good fun. It seems that the observation was correct, even in Mikhailov’s opinion, but he cannot bring himself to respect the opinion. He must hide his excitement, of course, while running through reasons why Golenishchev’s opinion is not on the level of his own understanding. Some of this is understandable and perhaps expected in an artist. On being a true artist:

In spite of the agitated state he was in, the remark about technique grated painfully on Mikhailov’s heart and, glancing angrily at Vronsky, he suddenly scowled. He had often heard this word ‘technique’ and decidedly did not understand what it implied. He knew that it implied a mechanical ability to paint and draw, completely independent of content. He had often noticed, as in this present praise, that technique was opposed to inner virtue, as if it were possible to make a good painting out of something bad (Tolstoy 474).

Vronsky & Alexei Alexandrovich Notable Scene

              One of the most interesting scenes occurs as we watch Anna in her severe illness during and after childbirth. In a dramatic act, Tolstoy places both her husband and her paramour Vronsky in the room around her. The two men are probably in a more emotional and vulnerable state than they have been in their adult lives. In addition, Anna is somewhat delirious. Vronsky feels grief and embarrassment, while Alexei Alexandrovich is eerily calm and makes some self-discoveries. Both men are largely confused. “Alexei Alexandrovich, seeing Vronsky’s tears, felt a surge of that inner disturbance that the sight of other people’s suffering produced in him” (Tolstoy 411). “Alexei Alexandrovich’s inner disturbance kept growing and now reached such a degree that he ceased to struggle with it; he suddenly felt that what he had considered an inner disturbance was, on the contrary, a blissful state of soul, which suddenly gave him a new, previously unknown, happiness” (Tolstoy 413).

As we know, Alexei is more rational than emotional. It’s a little comical to see that he feels uncomfortable in the face of other people’s suffering, especially in a situation when he has much to be suffering over. His wife is having an affair, a child outside of his marriage, and is currently on the brink of death. However, the following pages show that his dryness is not fundamental, and he experiences some unfamiliar emotions. As Anna’s condition begins to improve, Alexei realizes that in his projections of possible outcomes he had failed consider the contingency where Anna survives, she feels sorry for her actions, and he has the heart to forgive her. Again, it’s comical and robotic. But it is a part of his softening:

At his wife’s bedside he had given himself for the first time in his life to that feeling of tender compassion which other people’s suffering evoked in him, and which he had previously been ashamed of as a bad weakness. … that what had seemed insoluble when he condemned, reproached and hated, became simple and clear when he forgave and loved (Tolstoy 418 & 419).

But for the newborn little girl he had some special feeling, not only of pity but also of tenderness. At first it was only out of compassion that he concerned himself with the newborn, weak little girl, who was not his daughter and who was neglected during her mother’s illness and would probably have died if he had not looked after her – and he did not notice how he came to love her (Tolstoy 419).

Alexei Alexandrovich realizes a lot all at once. The idea of him taking care of a baby, much less one who represents his family’s scandalous situation, would have been unlikely a few weeks earlier. Vronsky, on the other hand, is in a less functional state. I think it is one of the first times in his life that he has lost his coolness, and emotions are taking him over. The emotions are mostly a tangled cloud, but we know that he feels shame. “Vronsky came to the side of the bed and, seeing her, again covered his face with his hands … Alexei Alexandrovich took Vronsky’s hands and drew them away from his face, terrible in the expression of suffering and shame that was on it” (Tolstoy 413). This moment gets seared into Vronsky’s mind. When he leaves the hospital, again and again he thinks about it, and it feels like a wound to his person. “Most terrible of all had been his ridiculous, shameful position when Alexei Alexandrovich tore his hands from his ashamed face. He stood on the porch of the Karenin’s house like a lost man and did now know what to do” (Tolstoy 415).

What would have been Anna’s future if Vronsky had not come along? How much of her dissatisfaction with her husband existed before an alternate reality presented itself? Being that Vronsky made his advances, is it better for her to keep her family intact or pursue a connection that may value her more? If only we had Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy around to tell us … as though he wouldn’t frustrated at the insinuation that there are answers to these questions…

Work Cited:

Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition). Penguin, 2004.