Love is Unlucky... Wider Reading 13: Anna Karenina

All good blogs are alike; every bad blog is bad in its own way, though I hope Tolstoy would have liked this one. Almost every aspect of Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy’s life is incorporated into Anna Karenina; the loss of his mother at a young age, his social awkwardness, antimilitaristic sentiments, his courtship of his wife, contact with peasants, and his overwhelming awareness of the power of death. This novel, his second most famous after War and Peace, is often viewed as the turning point in Tolstoy’s career, the point at which he shifted away from fiction and toward faith. The tug-of-war between these two forces helps create the rich portrait of Anna, whom Tolstoy both disapproves of and loves.

The novel explores the rich tapestry of mankind’s capacity for love, set against the opulent backdrop of the twilight of the Russian Empire. Despite the elegant settings, danger lurks and around every corner is the constant reminder that this powerful, precarious world is soon to drop. An impoverished train worker is killed; a privileged man who has seen the crisis coming leaves his duties to work with the commoners. The novel, however, centres on the lives and loves of families inhabiting the high societies of St Petersburg and Moscow. Anna is the wife of the respected but dull Minister Karenin. What love she lacks in her marriage she lavishes on her only son, Seryozha, and later her affair with handsome cavalry officer Count Vronsky. Meanwhile Anna’s brother, Oblonsky, is experiencing marriage troubles of his own. Dissatisfied with his wife’s fading attractiveness, he has been caught with the governess and must repent his infidelity. His wife’s young sister Kitty, at the same time, has her heart broken by Vronsky as he chooses Anna over her, but finds happiness in her friend and suitor, Levin.

In his depiction of Anna’s appearance at the train station during her first meeting with Vronsky, Tolstoy emphasizes Anna’s spiritual rather than physical attributes. This method of characterizing her is important, for it reinforces from the very beginning that although Tolstoy may harshly condemn adultery on an abstract level, he does not portray Anna as a passion-crazed vixen—as popular novels of the time often represented the straying wife. The parallel structure of Anna’s and Levin’s story lines was one of Tolstoy’s strokes of genius in composing Anna Karenina. Their stories begin on very different notes: Anna finds love with Vronsky just at the moment when Levin loses love with Kitty. Anna’s decision to act on her feelings brings her thrills and excitement, whereas Levin’s decision brings him dejection and depression. Both Anna and Levin seek truth in their personal relationships, unwilling to settle for anything less. Anna discovers that she would prefer to suffer with her true love rather than continue to lead a life of lies and deceit with a man she does not love. Her = unconventional actions are prompted by a desire not for rebellion for its own sake but for absolute sincerity in her emotional life. Similarly, Levin, after Kitty’s rebuff, does not go after the next girl on his list but resigns himself to eternal bachelorhood and withdraws to the country. Like Anna, Levin wants all or nothing in love.

Anna Karenina - Quotations