Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina announces itself with undergraduate cynicism: “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This is the novel’s most quoted line; the line known to people who know nothing else about Anna Karenina. Happy families are boring. Unhappy families are dramatic and interesting.
Anna Karenina is not a book about families. The novel’s most overwhelming themes are love and its consequences, and how individuation is subsumed by society. The plot revolves around two couples: Anna and Vronksy’s affair, and Levin and Kitty’s romance. Vronsky’s family make occasional appearances. His mother is impressed by his society intrigue with Anna, but disapproves when he unites his life with Anna. We never meet Anna’s parents. Her husband (Karenin) and son (Serezsha) are reactive. Karenin and Serezha are defined by Anna’s actions and choices. Levin’s family is much the same.
The only unhappy family Tolstoy spends considerable time with is Stiva Oblonsky (Anna’s brother) and his wife, Dolly (Kitty’s sister). Stiva is a happy-go-lucky aristocrat: running out of money, overspending in restaurants, and sleeping with younger women. A spectacularly out-for-lunch city guy. The novel opens in the aftermath of one of Stiva’s affairs. Dolly has caught him fucking their governess. This is clearly an unhappy family, but not a unique one: Stiva’s infidelity is insultingly conventional. Even in the midst of their marital unhappiness, the Oblonskys are not the focus of Tolstoy’s attention. Anna enters the novel intending to smooth things over between the couple, and Tolstoy then tells her story. Stiva and Dolly weave in and out of the novel, mostly as observers of Levin, Kitty, Anna and Vronsky.
Nor is Anna Karenina uniquely interested in unhappiness. It is the interplay of happiness and unhappiness that drives the novel. Anna says this herself: her thoughts constantly revolve around “my happiness and my unhappiness.” Anna Karenina explores how we go from happy to unhappy and back again. How we delude ourselves into thinking that we are happy with our lives, until one day something breaks and we realise how miserable we have made ourselves. It is, perhaps, a cynical take on adult relationships, but it is more mature than the famous first line would suggest.
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I love Anna Karenina. I have reread it once a year (more or less) since I was sixteen. This surprises my friends. I do not tend to like big, inflated, literary classics. Dickens leaves me cold. I’ve read Wurthering Heights once—it was fine. Anna Karenina remains inescapable. What is it about this huge book that doesn’t even live up to its premise that keeps me spellbound, year upon year?
Reading about Anna Karenina, I was most surprised by F. R. Leavis. Leavis’ essay Anna Karenina: Thought and Significance in a Great Creative Work is one of the more on-the-money takes about the novel. I found myself agreeing and nodding as I read it. Leavis alights on the novel’s ‘greatness and largeness’ as part of its enduring charm. Other twentieth-century critics get side-tracked judging Anna and her choices. Leavis sees the novel’s power in its ability to present the story and say: ‘this is life’.
The novel’s bigness is certainly part of its appeal. But it’s not just a big book—it’s big, fun, and soapy. Anna Karenina is long, serialised, and character-driven. The characters are frequently melodramatic and have melodramatic things happen to them. After being rejected by Vronsky, Kitty nearly dies from a debilitating depression. Vronsky tries to kill himself with a revolver (he misses). We spend hours with Levin’s tortured inability to admit how he feels, and chase what he wants. There’s a set piece that brings together Anna, a reckless Vronsky, a steeplechase, and Karenin. Oblonsky is there too. Of course, Anna and Vronsky can’t be happy together. Of course, the death of Levin’s brother Nicholas reunites Kitty and Levin. Of course, Anna dies at the end. Anna Karenina is soapy trash as literary classic.
Some of this is economics: Anna Karenina was serialised from 1875 to 1877. Writing serialised fiction tends towards longer books, and stories that continue to happen. Audiences want to be drawn in and supplied with events, story, and plot.
Anna Karenina’s length is a result of Tolstoy’s dual preoccupations in the novel: Levin’s personal transformation and Anna’s slow decline and eventual death. In his biography of Tolstoy, Henri Troyat explains what brought Tolstoy to Anna. Tolstoy's neighbour Bibikov had been living with a woman named Anna Stepanovna Pirogova. Bibikov was cheating on Pirogova with his children’s governess, who he eventually resolved to marry. After learning about the affair, Pirogova disappeared for three days before dying by suicide. She threw herself underneath a freight train. Tolstoy “tried to imagine the existence of this poor woman who had given all for love, only to meet with such a trite, ugly death.” Tolstoy, in trying to explain his central character’s suicide, wrote a book that encompassed the birth of a new relationship, the end of an old one, and the devastation of love that occurs when two people can no longer sustain each other. I suspect that even this chain of events wasn’t enough of an explanation for Tolstoy, so Anna’s story also encapsulates the obligations of childbirth, and the cruel treatment conservative society meets out in the face of aberration. Tolstoy needed Anna to look a trite and ugly death in the face and say yes. He needed to display all the ways the world could treat this person badly, and all of the reactions open to her. Before her death we see Anna be defiant, escapist, crushed, pathetic, horny, romantic, caring. We see her reinvent her life four times with Vronsky. And the suicide does make sense, in the end. Anna is so worn down by the world, so out of emotional options, so lacking in support—what else is there?
Levin’s philosophical and personal growth mirrors Tolstoy’s own journey towards Christian anarchism in his later life. When we meet Levin he is alienated from the Russian aristocratic society in which he lives. He feels cripplingly out of place, anxious and awkward around others who share his social class. Kitty’s rejection of Levin for Vronsky has such a destructive effect because he already feels unworthy—of Kitty and of life. And Vronsky is a hot young officer who seems to slide through society without thinking. He is everything Levin feels that he isn’t. Some people are just like that. Tolstoy does Levin the justice to show us that this isn’t all in Levin’s head—he is careless of the ritualised small talk and social obligations that society demands. After Kitty accepts his second proposal, Levin wants to get married straight away and can’t think of anything else. Certainly not what Kitty’s aunts and friends will think of the length of their engagement. We see Levin cycle through reactions that will be familiar to anyone who has been - or known - a Levin. He rejects society and withdraws from it, he dismisses society as frivolous and misguided, he tries to engage and sits in anguished awkwardness. It is only once he finds security in himself (and his marriage to Kitty) that he allows himself to be less anxious and less frightened of the world.
Levin is an atheist when we meet him. Like any educated awkward person on the edge of a big normative circle, Levin has thoughts about everything. His struggle to find meaning in late Tsarist Russia. He ploughs in the fields with the peasantry, taking joy in the pleasure of pure work—the kind of work that a certain kind of leftist has always idealised and, occasionally, tried on for a day or two. Levin’s sympathy for and willingness to work alongside the peasants shows us the ambition of his philosophy, and the folly of his actions. No matter how noble his moral and philosophical intentions, he is too far removed from the peasantry to do any real good by working alongside them. Nor is his joyous labour teaching him any real lesson about their lives, and their struggles. The irony is that the peasants see this perfectly; Levin cannot. We see Levin constantly strive for meaning only to find it ultimately beyond him.
It is only when Levin stops striving, when a peasant tells him that living for god is really living, that Levin is able to accept himself. He finds peace doing his best in a complicated world. By the end of the novel Levin has settled into a faith that gives him a sense of calm, and a moral purpose. He’s honest with himself that this faith can never be rational, but it is the best he’s got. Levin’s transformation from alienated atheist to someone more at peace in Christianity maps Tolstoy’s own conversation. Around the time he was fifty Tolstoy had an existential crisis that drove him to an almost fatal depression. Tolstoy emerged with a version of Christianity that stuck for the rest of his life. Tolstoy’s wife Sophia described Levin as Tolstoy, without the talent. Like Anna/Anna’s death, Levin/Tolstoy’s conversation needs to be told in its entirety to be understood. Alienated atheism does not give way to Christianity without events and emotion. Tolstoy builds the architecture of a moment—a suicide and a religious conversion—into the novel, and this provides the plot and the novel’s expansiveness. Not simply its length, but the amount of subtle, interconnected emotion that drives the novel forward. Anna Karenina is big and soapy because life is big and soapy. Things happen and we are all, always, feeling. Tolstoy knows this and in his drive to understand despair and religious conversion he gives us two lives, immaculately detailed and fully explained.
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But Anna Karenina is really a story about love. Oprah Winfrey calls it ‘sexy and engrossing’. Joshua Rothman, writing in The New Yorker asks the question: ‘Is Anna Karenina a Love Story?’ It is love that ultimately destroys Anna and saves Levin. It is love—the things we do for it, the ways it consumes us, and the ways we are unworthy of it—that provides most of the novel’s dramatic action.
Rereading Anna Karenina this year I was struck by Tolstoy’s exactitude in describing people in love. I saw myself in scenes I had never related to before, and the reflection was not always flattering.
I saw myself, partially at least, in Stiva’s boredom. Stiva is serially unfaithful, bored with family life and monogamy. He says that he is unable to be dishonest with himself. He can’t feel ashamed of no longer being in love with his wife after she had delivered seven children, mourned two them, and raised the other five. Dolly is no longer good looking and youthful, and Stiva is thirty-four. Men having been making these excuses for… Stiva’s affairs are cruel, and laced with a kind of unthinking misogyny. But relational obligation is stifling. It settles in your soul and makes you do cruel things. Being hot and desired is nice—it’s something we all want, and I recognised that in Oblonsky’s story. Love and sex make us do stupid things. Oblonsky is incapable of the kind of social imagination that Anna has and recognises, I think, that ending his marriage would be crueler to Dolly still. So, we see him continuing to live as easily as possible. He drinks champagne and chases girls. Sex has a way of driving out our ability to fully perceive the people we care about.
I saw myself, too, in Anna and Karenin’s relationship. Anna feels stifled by Karenin’s presence. Anna is too impulsive and too joyful to be to married to someone who is several years her senior and whose main interest is tinkering with the crumbling Tsarist state. Or as Leo Sestov writes ‘a gifted, clever, sensitive and living woman bound by the bounds of marriage to a a walking automaton’. This is a tad unkind to Karenin who, though boring, is generally described to be hard working, diligent and caring in his own way. But he doesn’t have Anna’s passion, and is consumed by himself and his work. Anna had little choice in her marriage to Karenin. The marriage was arranged by her mother, and Tolstoy tells us that Karenin was put in a position where he was essentially obligated to propose. It is easier, today, to dissolve a marriage: the grating unhappiness of living every day with someone who doesn’t understand you is universal.
Anna’s own emotional logic in following her affair is meticulously detailed by Tolstoy:
The thought of her husband’s unhappiness did not poison her happiness. On one side that memory was too awful to be thought of. On the other side her husband’s unhappiness had given her too much happiness to be regretted. […] The thought of the harm caused to her husband aroused in her a feeling like repulsion, and akin to what a drowning man might feel who has shaken off another man clinging to him. That man did drown. It was an evil action, of course, but it was the sole means of escape, and better not to brood over these fearful facts.
Anna is incapable of regretting leaving her husband. She feels the guilt, the wrongness and (in this translation) the evilness of what she has done. But she was drowning. Other people can drown you. They drown you with themselves even (especially?) when they think they love you. This was perhaps the most resonant passage I read this year, the one I took a photo of and sent to my best friend. Anna feels her guilt and her freedom with such intensity, and so simultaneously, that all she can do is look away. It overwhelms her.
Mostly I see myself in Anna and Vronsky’s relationship. I have never fallen in love at first sight, as Anna and Vronsky seem to. But I’ve experienced something like it. Anna and Vronsky spend an evening together, dancing at a ball. Sometimes you only need an afternoon with a person to leave your life feeling upended. Perhaps they see something in you that you didn’t know was there, and you feel more understood than ever before. Or maybe there’s an intensity to your conversation that’s liberating and scary all at once. I’m sure sexual attraction helps. Sociologists might describe this as infatuation, the energy that comes with meeting someone new. Infatuation can last for a couple of weeks, or a couple of months and it can be hard to distinguish from love. Delineating infatuation from the building blocks of something more lasting is a task in itself, and one that people often get wrong. Sometimes someone can just unlock something in you, whether you should spend your life with them is a more fraught question.
Anna, initially, tries to avoid Vronsky—or at least that’s what she tells herself she is doing. Anna flees to St Petersburg after the ball. Vronsky follows her, consumed by thoughts of her love. When confronted by Vronsky, Anna denies that she feels the same way. The novel makes it clear that Anna knows she is lying. Anna spends the next year trying to manage her relationship with Vronsky, whilst inventing reasons to be around him and seek out his company. Anna knows that any real relationship with Vronsky will throw a grenade into her life, but she cannot bring herself to stop pursuing it. She tells herself that she can maintain the status quo. Everything she does brings her closer to Vronsky. Anna’s friends and society people can quite clearly see what is happening, but Anna remains obstinately oblivious. It is only the final rupture of their consummation (and her subsequent pregnancy) that makes Anna see their affair for what it is, and face what it means. Anna is then forced to choose: her husband who makes her miserable, or Vronsky who she barely knows.
Anna and Vronsky flee to Italy, where they quickly become bored with each others’ company and the lack of society in which to move. They return to Russia and Anna it snubbed by her former friends and acquaintances. There is a humiliating scene when Anna attends the opera. Unable to secure a divorce from Karenin, Anna and Vronsky are cannot live in Russia as a couple. Russian society considers their relationship too deviant to accommodate. Thus, Anna and Vronsky are driven closer together which fuels their jealousy and resentment. Their relationship becomes the factor that is limiting their lives and ability to self-actualise.
Rothman describes love in Anna Karenina as a ‘vector by which the universe distributes happiness and unhappiness’ and goes on to say that this isn’t a very romantic way to think. This somewhat misses the point. Yes, Anna would have been better off without falling in love with Vronsky. But her liveliness and her passion for life are what drew her to Vronsky. Nothing is ever without risk, our love for other people is risky. Other people can make us vulnerable in the face of every received notion of how we should live. Tolstoy doesn’t provide the reader with an easy answer as to whether we should risk our sense of self for love—Anna ends up dead, Levin is settled and happy, and Oblonsky is a middle-aged sex pest. We don’t know where we will end up. Anna Karenina does not provide a coherent philosophy of love. Instead, the novel works to detail all the ways in which we react to love’s presence and hugeness in our lives. Love happens. This is life.
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When talking about Russian Literature most people are referring to some combination of Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Chekov and Tolstoy. Writers documenting the tail end of imperial Russia. The sense of imperial decline permeates Anna Karenina. Karenin is obsessed with his work in the civil service, but it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Oblonsky has a series of roles within the Tsarist state, and doesn’t take any of them very seriously. The Tsarist state and those working for it are empty, moving towards an opaque goal with no endpoint.
Levin is grappling with questions of labour and manufacture throughout - the relationship that led Marx to dismiss the idea of a Russian communist state, and ultimately led to the revolution in 1917. The political philosophy of the period drips from the novel - Levin’s brother is a minor intellectual who has spent six years writing about the state of contemporary Russia, and engages in newspaper published debates with other intellectuals of a similar calibre. Everyone in the novel discusses the Zemstvo (a local government assembly that supposedly removed the responsibility of running local affairs from the nobles) at length. These are the politics of decline, even if our characters cannot fully see it. The Zemstvo, for example, is a solution to a problem with no answer in imperial Russia. The nobles were too entrenched to ever lose power in the Russian countryside, and the relationship between the countryside and modernity remained loose until Stalin’s forced collectivisation. We are all blind to the revolution until it happens, and often the revolutionaries themselves cannot predict the shape of their future actions.
In Anna Karenina the Russian aristocratic class continue on smug autopilot a mere thirty years before the whole world started to fall apart. Oblonsky and Anna are engrossed in their own social worlds - loving, fucking, gambling, and drinking their way through the novel. Those who are concerned about the state of Russia - Levin and the others - are mostly concerned with Russia’s place in the world and the functioning of its state. Absent from the novel are the waves of political violence that started in the 1860s and would become hallmarks of the later imperial period. Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 - five years after Anna Karenina was set, and two years after Tolstoy finished publishing it.
Anna Karenina is beset by none of the anxiety that is pivotal to the tone and feeling of War and Peace. Arguably it should be a more anxious novel. Napoleon nearly conquered Russia, but the cast of Anna Karenina would be more equipped to deal with a post-Napoleon world than any of them would be to face the Leninist government. James Cameron’s Titanic gives us a deliberate portrait of (and a rather unsubtle metaphor for) the end of something in Europe and America. Anna Karenina does something similar, albeit accidentally.
Reading Anna Karenina this year I felt an unsettling sense of similarity. The chasm between the rich and the poor, an economy failing to adapt to a new world, and an endless set of conversations that seem to be hinting at some fatal criticism in our way of life without any meaningful or actionable sense of change. The blindness of its characters to their own small contributions to what was to come, and the way that they each live in or make peace with their lives seemed ominous, too. Most people are bad at understanding the future, and are often too optimistic about their own place in it. It might be my own sense of pessimism, but I worry that this is us.
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Tolstoy famously became dismissive of the work he described as his only real novel, commenting:
"What difficulty is there in writing about how an officer fell in love with a married woman? There's no difficulty in it, and above all no good in it.”
This quote gets repeated because Tolstoy is so evidently selling himself short. If there was no difficulty in the love story, why did it take him 800 pages to detail it? And, of course, this is not simply what Anna Karenina is about. An officer falling in love with a married woman is the story, but only partially. The novel tells us how its characters are transformed by love. That Tolstoy makes this both believable and resonant to modern readers is a testament to what he has managed to pull off in this story. Anna Karenina doesn’t suffer from the Romeo and Juliet problem, where the central relationship is so confusing and so reliant on the idea of love that it only seems to work when Romeo is played by young Leonardo Di Caprio.
I still don’t know what has drawn me to Anna Karenina again and again, why it’s my favourite novel. There are things I love about it, but my history with the book has dissolved in my latest reread. I was most struck this year by the novel’s intense focus on two people falling in love against the background of a world falling apart. I suspect I felt differently last year, but I don’t know. What I can definitively say is that I never read a novel and leave thinking: this, this is me. I had this feeling often reading Anna Karenina this year. Sometimes I had to stop and breathe because it felt like a recollection of my own complicated relationship to love. I root for Anna, and I feel the tragedy as her relationship fails and she loses herself. Sometimes I found myself thinking that I could save her.