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A review by notwellread
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
5.0
“He soon felt that the fulfilment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfilment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realisation of their desires.”
Anna Karenina is not a love story. It is, however, a piece of social, moral, religious, and philosophical commentary explored primarily through three marriages and an extra-marital affair. As a result, the story is largely character-driven and much of the narrative’s development of its themes stems from the individual perspectives we receive as Tolstoy flits between them.
Perhaps best to begin, therefore, with Anna herself. Much like Madame Bovary, published twenty years prior, Anna has a supposedly great life by the standards of the time — a respectable husband; a high position in society; and a stable and comfortable home life as mistress of the household — but chooses to discard all the above for the thrills of adultery. In the process, she becomes a shadow of her former self: initially beautiful, intelligent, and charming, she experiences social ostracism, the breakdown of both her marriage and her affair, and an eventual. Trading the boring security of her established position for a more rebellious existence means her refined, poised nature goes with it: as she struggles with the unsure footing of her escape, tormented by her feelings of abandonment, insecurity of her relationship with Vronsky, into an empty void of an existence without the values her old life, particularly her love for her son. The passionate nature which drew her and Vronsky together begets . She tells her sister-in-law Dolly that she has had a revelation: “Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened…and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up”, but she has escaped her old problems to plunge herself into a new nightmare. Perhaps her former life was not as ideal as it seemed, but her dreams of romantic adventure throw her into a chaos and uncertainty that eats her alive.
The role of a more conventional protagonist is occupied by Constantine Dmitrich Levin. Like Anna, he begins dissatisfied with his situation and is on a quest to find his true path, personal fulfilment, and meaning in life. However, his story is an inverted version of Anna’s, moving from an unconventional, solitary life in which he is single, agnostic, and prefers reaping wheat with the peasants in the countryside to the awkwardness he feels in high society, to. The pair of narratives end in a culmination of their contrasting points: . Tolstoy based the character largely upon himself, particularly his religious journey and his relationship with his wife, and so reveals Tolstoy’s own contemplative journey and self-actualisation, as well as providing a mouthpiece for the author’s views.
Part of the essential nature and value of classics is that they are timeless: they should communicate something about the human condition that can resonate regardless of place or time. However, one of the more interesting aspects of Anna Karenina is our moral judgement of Anna’s decision to commit adultery and the social reaction to it. Even at the time Tolstoy worried that it might be misunderstood as a defence of Anna’s behaviour, rather than as a cautionary tale, because society was shifting so rapidly away from traditional family values. Most readers today will also not experience the shock that was intended when Anna commits adultery, given that she was truly unhappy in her marriage and because this trope is common reflected in modern romance narratives. This is also reflected in the 2012 film, which presents Anna’s adultery as more of a ‘forbidden love’ or a decision to give into passion rather than a morally bankrupt decline, resembling modern romances like [b:The Notebook|33648131|The Notebook (The Notebook, #1)|Nicholas Sparks|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1483183484l/33648131._SY75_.jpg|1498135] in which adultery with one’s ‘true love’ is considered morally justified.
The contemporary setting therefore requires some context. Although the social strictures and the shunning of Anna may seem cruel or like bullying to us, they were necessary to some extent to provide the foundations for cultural stability: in a society with relatively few laws, unwritten expectations of social propriety and behaviour often had to provide stability. Social exclusion was considered a necessary deterrent to disruption: Anna’s behaviour is a violation of the social conscience and therefore an attack on Russian values. For its contemporary audience, Anna Karenina was meant to explore the tensions between the traditionalist values of Old Russia, including patriarchy, strict class strata, and social conformism, and the more liberal, westernised thinkers who trended towards more modern and individualist attitudes. One of the social changes explicitly cited is that young women suddenly had (at least nominally) the freedom to choose their own husbands by accepting or rejecting proposals, à la Jane Austen’s characters; Russian marriages had traditionally been negotiated between families. Tolstoy demonstrates how these tensions sow discord: Kitty is torn between her choices, as well as being manipulated by Vronsky through social niceties; Anna between her social role and the life she would choose for herself; Levin between his expected participation in society and his discomfort with politics and unfamiliarity with social delicacies. They all suffer at the hands of the social expectations placed on them, and can only resolve this not just by making their own decisions but by staying true to their own values.
Tolstoy is also responding to portrayals of family in earlier Russian novels, which tended to portray an idealised version of family life and domesticity, and the liberal criticisms that they hampered individualism. Clearly Tolstoy does not agree with the ‘family novel’ approach — his own portrayals of family life, despite the apparent love and bliss of, are much more realistic, and show the ups and downs of insecurity, jealousy, and uncertainty within the family unit as we all know them to be. Yet his novel clearly endorses and embraces family life, warts and all, and understands its value beyond pure social expectation: though it requires some personal sacrifices and responsibility, it provides a great source of comfort, peace, and contentment for our characters. This is what Anna stood to lose and Levin stands to gain. Anna loses her purpose and her place in society, while it is through familial milestones — — that Levin finds the meaning in his own life. Tolstoy conveys that, although many a reader will recognise the difficulties the characters experience, the fulfilment that can be brought by the values of family, friendship, and religion are worth it in the end.
Tolstoy wishes to criticise the degradation of the family and defend its value, and can convey this most realistically through the downfall of a ‘fallen’ woman, but is also keenly aware of the double standards that society applies to men and women, turning a blind eye to men’s affairs while condemning those of women. The novel opens with the adultery of Anna’s brother Oblonsky, which blows over very quickly, throwing Anna’s turmoil over the next 900 pages into sharp relief. Despite his long-suffering wife’s call for a divorce, she is expected to put up with him and even to support his continued profligacy, while he suffers neither psychological nor social consequences for his behaviour. It is remarkable to see both the believability and ludicrousness of such a character, who has no scruples and lives life without any sense of duty or responsibility, yet even the reader is not immune to his easygoing charm. Furthermore, despite some popular readings, the feminine side of society is not exempt from criticism: their two-facedness on this issue is shown in Madame Vronsky’s insincerity, liking Anna very much initially but turning against her when she becomes Vronsky’s mistress, and Princess Betsy encourages Anna’s affair only to decide later that she cannot be associated with her. Not only is all this blatant hypocrisy, but I think that Tolstoy draws attention to this partly to show that, though he believes that adultery is deeply wrong, this does not mean that society’s contemporary attitude is right, nor does he condone their treatment of Anna, and partly to show that Anna Karenina is not a purely moralising novel lecturing women on the importance of keeping their virtue: he wishes to convey the moral standards that should be expected of all people, and the damage that is wrought by those who harm others and disrupt something sacred in pursuit of their own pleasure.
Anna and Vronsky have a problem: they want to live as normal a life as possible in a society which still views adultery as unacceptable. Their perspective is more or less in line with criticisms of Russian family novels in this period that they suppressed personal freedom, which is also reflected in the famous opening line: “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. Tolstoy’s task is to show us that we should sympathise with Anna while understanding that her actions are clearly wrong. Her major source of conflict is that she longs for her son whom, after her separation from her husband, she is no longer allowed to see, which humanises her and creates pathos, but she has already betrayed her son by destroying his stable home life and choosing her lover over him. There are bonds at play here, between mother and son, beyond the socially constructed which cannot be broken, which is why she feels such a need for him even as she has a new baby in her arms. There can be no easy fix through the changing of social norms when one’s actions are against God, against nature, and against ‘goodness’ itself: despite Anna’s conviction, her situation cannot be neatly resolved by the receipt of social approval. Of course, the social hypocrisy on display is its own problem — not just the double standards, but also that the aristocrats are so immoral that they balk not so much at Anna and Vronsky’s adultery but at their brazenness at living together openly as lovers, even though this is the more honest approach than the alternative. In high society, everything is about appearances.
There is, on the other hand, something of a challenge here for Tolstoy in promoting these traditional values while also championing a norm-defying, unconventional protagonist. The problem is not so much that Anna and Vronsky do not conform, but that they fail to find stability and meaning with which to replace their former roles, and create disruption for others. They have criticisms of society, but lack solutions: Vronsky apparently disagrees with the social convention that girls be carted off for marriage and be expected to remain with their husbands forever, but gradually becomes resistant to Anna’s attachment to him, prioritises his own freedom and independence, and attempts to undermine her. He claims to want to empower Anna, but in practice dislikes her attempts at educating herself and finding projects, wanting her dependent on him in a pseudo-wifely manner while remaining free and independent himself. Anna valiantly defies social norms wholesale and attempts to carve out a role that reflects her own individual vitality, but is stifled by the social conservative even within her own adulterous union. In his modern attitudes of challenging women’s roles superficially while insisting on his own independence, he is selfish: he complains of loss of status and opportunities for his affair, but this is short-lived. There is no significant change to his life or situation, even after. Like Oblonsky, he gets off lightly. Anna, on the other hand, attempts to live life on her own terms, but the restrictions of society do not allow for this, and she rebels against her punishment to no avail.
Non-conformity done right, as Tolstoy sees it, is rather different: Levin is also a critic of society, but neither strictly a rebel nor a liberal intellectual — he wishes to preserve and defend Russian values while employing practicality and critical thinking, including western technology and industrialisation. In contrast to Anna, he isolates himself from society voluntarily, rejecting its affectedness and artificiality, though he finds value in the agrarian community. Tolstoy is also anxious to show the quiet dignity of the social outsider: although Levin is on a journey of self-discovery, his initial attempts to isolate himself are not fruitful: his most important experiences — are common rather than unique experiences and ones that both reflect the importance of family and the importance of forging one’s own community. Kitty’s innocence suits the simplicity of the rural setting, but she doesn’t require such a journey to find peace, and doesn’t struggle with her piety because of her simplicity. Levin’s unique path allows him to discover a secret inexpressible in words: he doesn’t share his revelation with her, but he doesn’t need to. Tolstoy ultimately champions both individualism and simple virtues, which are united in his pastoralist and anarchist Christian worldview: Levin, his avatar, finds this same clarity. These simple virtues yield a great deal of value.
Despite the length of this review, it really only skims the surface of the discussions and depth of exploration therein. The only thing I can add is that it deserves its status as one of the greatest books ever written.
Anna Karenina is not a love story. It is, however, a piece of social, moral, religious, and philosophical commentary explored primarily through three marriages and an extra-marital affair. As a result, the story is largely character-driven and much of the narrative’s development of its themes stems from the individual perspectives we receive as Tolstoy flits between them.
Perhaps best to begin, therefore, with Anna herself. Much like Madame Bovary, published twenty years prior, Anna has a supposedly great life by the standards of the time — a respectable husband; a high position in society; and a stable and comfortable home life as mistress of the household — but chooses to discard all the above for the thrills of adultery. In the process, she becomes a shadow of her former self: initially beautiful, intelligent, and charming, she experiences social ostracism, the breakdown of both her marriage and her affair, and an eventual
Spoiler
descent into madness and true despairSpoiler
a fully-fledged breakdown and unraveling of her very nature. We see her in that liminal space at the railway station once at the beginning of the novel, and again at the end: Vronsky remembers how he saw her there for the first time, as a “mysterious, exquisite, loving” vision of a woman, but his presence in her life has turned her into a raging Fury, who finally crumbles into suicidal impulse at the endThe role of a more conventional protagonist is occupied by Constantine Dmitrich Levin. Like Anna, he begins dissatisfied with his situation and is on a quest to find his true path, personal fulfilment, and meaning in life. However, his story is an inverted version of Anna’s, moving from an unconventional, solitary life in which he is single, agnostic, and prefers reaping wheat with the peasants in the countryside to the awkwardness he feels in high society, to
Spoiler
marriage, settled family life, commitment to Christianity, and a small community of his own making around himSpoiler
Anna, once beautiful and captivating, commits suicide by jumping in front of a train, suffering horribly as her body is mangled in the process, while the shy, insecure, and socially alienated Levin not only finds happiness with a wife, child, and extended family, but also resolves his theological and philosophical struggles to find God’s nature revealed to himPart of the essential nature and value of classics is that they are timeless: they should communicate something about the human condition that can resonate regardless of place or time. However, one of the more interesting aspects of Anna Karenina is our moral judgement of Anna’s decision to commit adultery and the social reaction to it. Even at the time Tolstoy worried that it might be misunderstood as a defence of Anna’s behaviour, rather than as a cautionary tale, because society was shifting so rapidly away from traditional family values. Most readers today will also not experience the shock that was intended when Anna commits adultery, given that she was truly unhappy in her marriage and because this trope is common reflected in modern romance narratives. This is also reflected in the 2012 film, which presents Anna’s adultery as more of a ‘forbidden love’ or a decision to give into passion rather than a morally bankrupt decline, resembling modern romances like [b:The Notebook|33648131|The Notebook (The Notebook, #1)|Nicholas Sparks|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1483183484l/33648131._SY75_.jpg|1498135] in which adultery with one’s ‘true love’ is considered morally justified.
The contemporary setting therefore requires some context. Although the social strictures and the shunning of Anna may seem cruel or like bullying to us, they were necessary to some extent to provide the foundations for cultural stability: in a society with relatively few laws, unwritten expectations of social propriety and behaviour often had to provide stability. Social exclusion was considered a necessary deterrent to disruption: Anna’s behaviour is a violation of the social conscience and therefore an attack on Russian values. For its contemporary audience, Anna Karenina was meant to explore the tensions between the traditionalist values of Old Russia, including patriarchy, strict class strata, and social conformism, and the more liberal, westernised thinkers who trended towards more modern and individualist attitudes. One of the social changes explicitly cited is that young women suddenly had (at least nominally) the freedom to choose their own husbands by accepting or rejecting proposals, à la Jane Austen’s characters; Russian marriages had traditionally been negotiated between families. Tolstoy demonstrates how these tensions sow discord: Kitty is torn between her choices, as well as being manipulated by Vronsky through social niceties; Anna between her social role and the life she would choose for herself; Levin between his expected participation in society and his discomfort with politics and unfamiliarity with social delicacies. They all suffer at the hands of the social expectations placed on them, and can only resolve this not just by making their own decisions but by staying true to their own values.
Tolstoy is also responding to portrayals of family in earlier Russian novels, which tended to portray an idealised version of family life and domesticity, and the liberal criticisms that they hampered individualism. Clearly Tolstoy does not agree with the ‘family novel’ approach — his own portrayals of family life, despite the apparent love and bliss of
Spoiler
Levin and KittySpoiler
marriage, the death of his brother, the birth of his sonTolstoy wishes to criticise the degradation of the family and defend its value, and can convey this most realistically through the downfall of a ‘fallen’ woman, but is also keenly aware of the double standards that society applies to men and women, turning a blind eye to men’s affairs while condemning those of women. The novel opens with the adultery of Anna’s brother Oblonsky, which blows over very quickly, throwing Anna’s turmoil over the next 900 pages into sharp relief. Despite his long-suffering wife’s call for a divorce, she is expected to put up with him and even to support his continued profligacy, while he suffers neither psychological nor social consequences for his behaviour. It is remarkable to see both the believability and ludicrousness of such a character, who has no scruples and lives life without any sense of duty or responsibility, yet even the reader is not immune to his easygoing charm. Furthermore, despite some popular readings, the feminine side of society is not exempt from criticism: their two-facedness on this issue is shown in Madame Vronsky’s insincerity, liking Anna very much initially but turning against her when she becomes Vronsky’s mistress, and Princess Betsy encourages Anna’s affair only to decide later that she cannot be associated with her. Not only is all this blatant hypocrisy, but I think that Tolstoy draws attention to this partly to show that, though he believes that adultery is deeply wrong, this does not mean that society’s contemporary attitude is right, nor does he condone their treatment of Anna, and partly to show that Anna Karenina is not a purely moralising novel lecturing women on the importance of keeping their virtue: he wishes to convey the moral standards that should be expected of all people, and the damage that is wrought by those who harm others and disrupt something sacred in pursuit of their own pleasure.
Anna and Vronsky have a problem: they want to live as normal a life as possible in a society which still views adultery as unacceptable. Their perspective is more or less in line with criticisms of Russian family novels in this period that they suppressed personal freedom, which is also reflected in the famous opening line: “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. Tolstoy’s task is to show us that we should sympathise with Anna while understanding that her actions are clearly wrong. Her major source of conflict is that she longs for her son whom, after her separation from her husband, she is no longer allowed to see, which humanises her and creates pathos, but she has already betrayed her son by destroying his stable home life and choosing her lover over him. There are bonds at play here, between mother and son, beyond the socially constructed which cannot be broken, which is why she feels such a need for him even as she has a new baby in her arms. There can be no easy fix through the changing of social norms when one’s actions are against God, against nature, and against ‘goodness’ itself: despite Anna’s conviction, her situation cannot be neatly resolved by the receipt of social approval. Of course, the social hypocrisy on display is its own problem — not just the double standards, but also that the aristocrats are so immoral that they balk not so much at Anna and Vronsky’s adultery but at their brazenness at living together openly as lovers, even though this is the more honest approach than the alternative. In high society, everything is about appearances.
There is, on the other hand, something of a challenge here for Tolstoy in promoting these traditional values while also championing a norm-defying, unconventional protagonist. The problem is not so much that Anna and Vronsky do not conform, but that they fail to find stability and meaning with which to replace their former roles, and create disruption for others. They have criticisms of society, but lack solutions: Vronsky apparently disagrees with the social convention that girls be carted off for marriage and be expected to remain with their husbands forever, but gradually becomes resistant to Anna’s attachment to him, prioritises his own freedom and independence, and attempts to undermine her. He claims to want to empower Anna, but in practice dislikes her attempts at educating herself and finding projects, wanting her dependent on him in a pseudo-wifely manner while remaining free and independent himself. Anna valiantly defies social norms wholesale and attempts to carve out a role that reflects her own individual vitality, but is stifled by the social conservative even within her own adulterous union. In his modern attitudes of challenging women’s roles superficially while insisting on his own independence, he is selfish: he complains of loss of status and opportunities for his affair, but this is short-lived. There is no significant change to his life or situation, even after
Spoiler
Anna has killed herselfNon-conformity done right, as Tolstoy sees it, is rather different: Levin is also a critic of society, but neither strictly a rebel nor a liberal intellectual — he wishes to preserve and defend Russian values while employing practicality and critical thinking, including western technology and industrialisation. In contrast to Anna, he isolates himself from society voluntarily, rejecting its affectedness and artificiality, though he finds value in the agrarian community. Tolstoy is also anxious to show the quiet dignity of the social outsider: although Levin is on a journey of self-discovery, his initial attempts to isolate himself are not fruitful: his most important experiences —
Spoiler
working alongside the peasants, his marriage, the death of his brother, and the birth of his childDespite the length of this review, it really only skims the surface of the discussions and depth of exploration therein. The only thing I can add is that it deserves its status as one of the greatest books ever written.