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hearingtrumpet 's review for:
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
The perfect quarantine read, which I picked up after putting another whale aside because it was just too similar to the life I was leading in this new crazy world (Knausgaard I am talking to you). A definite improvement on War and Peace (which is already greatness), although I couldn't help but miss the dry wit and mocking remarks poking fun at Petersburg society. What I didn't miss were the long musings on tactics and historical determinism. In Anna Karenina the outside world almost entirely ceases to exist (save some descriptions of the countryside) and we submerge in the psyches of multiple characters, more so in some than in others. And again, although certainly an improvement to Natasha or Maria, I still feel that female characters are a lot less developed than their male counterparts, which is sort of a problem if a book is called Anna Karenina. Until the very end when she finally disintegrates, we are offered nothing but glimpses into the workings of her mind, while at the same time I felt I understood Vronsky and Karenin more (and obviously Levin, who is the actual protagonist of the novel), maybe because Tolstoy understood them more himself. However, I sympathized with Anna the most, but not for the reasons Tolstoy would have wished me to. For me her tragedy is not about choosing love and her own (perceived) happiness over rigid social norms that becomes her downfall, but the waste of an apparently brilliant mind in a world that could not fathom roles for women other than that of a wife, mother or a mistress, deeming them to find all the fulfillment in domestic life. Towards the end there is a part where Tolstoy is describing how Vronsky asked for Anna's opinion on everything from architecture to agricultural innovations, as she spent a lot of time educating herself on all those subjects, but than off-offhandedly dismissed the idea of universal education for girls as "unnatural".
So the real tragedy to have an intelligent woman who is surrounded by dull men (well-meaning yes, but not exceptionally bright), none of which is her equal trying to find ways to break free, but given the circumstances, can only do so by going against rules of propriety. Who knows, she could have been an astrophysicist. Or a psychologist and all this would not have happened.
So the real tragedy to have an intelligent woman who is surrounded by dull men (well-meaning yes, but not exceptionally bright), none of which is her equal trying to find ways to break free, but given the circumstances, can only do so by going against rules of propriety. Who knows, she could have been an astrophysicist. Or a psychologist and all this would not have happened.