write a reflection essay about the story of anna karenina

Here's Why Anna Karenina Is Considered The Best Novel Of All Time

While there are definitely examples of fiction  dating back thousands of years  that could be considered novels, what we think of as a novel in the modern sense really only goes back a few centuries. Of course, when you start looking into the history of the novel, you quickly realize that this is an argument that can never be definitively settled, simply because people can't even agree on what officially constitutes a novel.

If we can't even nail down the definition, you might think it would be hopeless to figure out what the best novel ever written might be, and in a sense, you'd be right. Art is subjective, and you'll never get 100% of humanity to agree on the greatest novel ever (or even read a novel in the first place). Plus, you'd always have that one joker that keeps voting for "Twilight."

But if you leaf through the many, many discussions, articles, essays, and theses concerned with picking the best novel in history, you will find a short list of works that appear each and every time — and of those, one stands out: a novel that is always in the Top 5, if not the Top 3, if not No. 1. Here's why "Anna Karenina" is considered the best novel of all time.

It begins with one of the greatest opening lines ever

The first line of "Anna Karenina" is deservedly famous — so famous that people are aware of it even if they've never read the book: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

This is far more than simply a well-written line. It communicates an idea that immediately seems universal and obvious while setting up the fundamental philosophical lens we'll experience the story through. The Conversation reports that Leo Tolstoy made this explicit in a conversation with his wife when he said, "In order for a book to be good, one has to love its basic, fundamental idea. Thus, in 'Anna Karenina,' I loved the idea of the family."

As noted by Book Riot , the sentence is written in the present tense, while the story itself is told in the past tense, as if it's the evidence supporting Tolstoy's statement. The genius goes deeper, though, because there's a subtle, implicit challenge: You can be happy and boring — all alike — or you can be miserable and interesting .

And yet, there are no truly happy families in the story. (Only one pair of characters achieve what could be described as a certain kind of happiness.) In other words, there's a spoiler hidden in the first line, because happy families are all alike because they don't actually exist .

Anna Karenina is the ultimate realist novel

Realism is a literary movement that evolved during the 19th century. According to Britannica , it sought to depict life accurately and objectively, portraying common people in everyday scenarios without artifice. That doesn't necessarily mean a lack of symbolism or beautiful writing — it's more about capturing the drama and beauty inherent in real life than inventing wild stories about exceptional people.

By the time Leo Tolstoy sat down to work on "Anna Karenina," realism was a well-established movement. But Tolstoy perfected the technique. As critic James Meek points out , Tolstoy eschews metaphors and similes and simply tells the reader what things are, what characters are doing, in simple but beautiful language. He goes inside the heads of his characters and lets the reader know what they are thinking. There are no mysteries here. The use of both an omniscient narrator and a stream-of-consciousness approach to the characters' inner lives effortlessly captures every detail.

A s noted by author Debashish Sen , the realist approach in "Anna Karenina" extends to the narrator and the characters. Even though the reader is allowed into the private thoughts of the characters, the technique conveys the impression of simple truth-telling, that the narrator is simply reporting facts about people he knows intimately. That gives the characters and their motivations a timeless quality and makes all of their decisions — even when self-destructive — believable.

The characters feel incredibly real

It's often said that modern audiences can't appreciate how groundbreaking the film "Citizen Kane" is because the techniques it introduced or perfected have become common. The same can be said for "Anna Karenina." Its characters feel extremely solid and real. Tolstoy achieves this remarkable effect through a variety of sophisticated techniques that are commonly used in modern fiction but were startlingly original in the late 1800s.

Author William Dalrymple notes  that Tolstoy's realistic approach results in characters whose personalities we recognize because they resemble people we've met or interacted with, even though the book is set in Imperialist Russia more than a century ago. Tolstoy also employed stream-of-consciousness writing (portraying the unvarnished thoughts of his characters) long before the technique was made famous by writers like James Joyce. Critic Gary Saul Morson points out that Tolstoy's use of the device is so seamless that he even offers us the perspective of Levin's dog, Laska, several times without disrupting his narrative — and Laska's perspective is crucial to understanding her owner, Levin.

As James Meek notes , Tolstoy's use of an omniscient narrator together with the characters' internal monologue allows that narrator to subtly comment on their behavior and thoughts. And jumping between different perspectives gives us both subjective and objective views of the characters. We have so many sources of information about them, we are able to form a three-dimensional image of them just like we do in real life when observing the people around us.

Anna Karenina is surprisingly feminist

Being feminist in outlook doesn't automatically make a novel great, but as noted by Britannica , the way Tolstoy explores the uneven playing field faced by women in 19th-century Russia was way ahead of its time.

Most obviously, Tolstoy carefully notes the tragic double standards faced by his characters. Author Jilly Cooper points out that the consequences of infidelity and sexuality are starkly different for the men and women in the novel: Anna's brother has an affair with the nanny hired to care for his children but is forgiven. The man Anna has an affair with, Vronsky, suffers some minor embarrassment over their affair but remains wealthy and accepted by society. As explained by Book Riot , Anna has the opposite experience — she loses everything . She finds herself ostracized and powerless, she's cut off from her beloved son, and she's ultimately driven to suicide.

Tolstoy is careful to make his feminist themes a thread that runs throughout the novel. The characters argue about educating women, and Anna and other female characters suffer in large part because their lives are restricted to being wives and mothers. The novel's famous scene involving Vronsky in a horse race can be seen as a metaphor for his relationship with Anna: Instead of letting the horse take charge, Vronsky imposes his will on it, with tragic results — for the horse. Vronsky walks away unscathed.

Its themes are incredibly complex

Telling people what "Anna Karenina" is about can be tricky. You can say it's about love, the consequences of infidelity, the plight of women trapped in regimented, gendered roles, or how the modern world distorts our natural lives — and you'd be correct on all counts.

As Book Riot points out , part of the complexity of the novel's themes is how Tolstoy misdirects us. For example, the only true love affair in the story has nothing to do with Anna and her love for Vronsky. True love is found in the slow-burn relationship between Kitty and Levin. Tolstoy contrasts the two relationships to make the point that Levin, who wishes a simpler, more natural life, is the better man, and thus the better lifestyle.

The New Yorker explains that Tolstoy's novel isn't just about infidelity or even love. It explores the consequences of our emotional attachments, both familial and romantic. A superficial reading of the novel sees Anna as a heroine, a woman who follows her heart and is willing to pay the ultimate price. A deeper look reveals Tolstoy's true lesson: Love destroys. Nothing good comes of Anna's quest for happiness. And as critic Gary Saul Morson notes , ignorance and a lack of education and experience are what doom Anna. She can't predict the consequence of her actions because she's working on a primitive, thoughtless level. And there are even more layers to Tolstoy's themes, if you work to reveal them.

It's a novel of many interpretations

Tolstoy had some very definite ideas he wanted to communicate in "Anna Karenina." He was going through a spiritual awakening, and his preference for a rural, simpler life versus the "artificial" life he saw in the cities is clear in the way he presents his characters and settings. As noted by critic James Meek , Tolstoy barely describes the urban settings in his novel, while the countryside is lavished with incredible detail, making the author's preferences plain to see.

But one of the marks of genius in the novel is how different people come away with different interpretations. As The New Yorker notes , some see it as a love story, while others note that love is actually a destructive force in the book. For example, Commentary Magazine argues that Tolstoy's real point is that the dramatic and exciting love we're shown in other love stories is actually Anna's downfall, while the patient, steady love that grows slowly and naturally between Levin and Kitty is nourishing and healthy. But as Inquiries Journal notes , the novel can just as easily be seen as a study of families and how they support — or fail to support — and sometimes smother their members.

"Anna Karenina" is a novel that can be interpreted in many different ways because it's actually about all these things. Tolstoy somehow weaves together several philosophical discussions into a single novel.

It's sexy as heck

When faced with reading an enormous 19th-century novel written by a stoic Russian aristocrat who spent the last few decades of his life dressing like a peasant and arguing for chastity, you might think you're about to be bored to tears. But "Anna Karenina," like its author, is pretty lusty.

As James Meek makes clear , much of the novel is actually obsessed with sex, most obviously in Anna's lust for Vronsky and its disastrous consequences. And Oprah's Book Club describes the novel as "the 'Harlequin Romance' of its day."

As critic Ronald D. LeBlanc notes , "Anna Karenina" is obsessed with sex and its consequences in large part because Tolstoy himself — a noted womanizer — was struggling with his own libido while writing it. While the book contains no overt sexual descriptions (this isn't "Fifty Shades of Grey), sex soaks just about every page — even moments of disdain or hatred are defined by sex. Author Francine Prose points out the scene where Anna returns to her husband after meeting the handsome, virile, sexually exciting Vronsky and becomes obsessed with how unattractive her husband's ears are. This is a woman who is suddenly lusting after a good-looking man, and that lust starts to affect how she sees the world around her.

Anna Karenina is a lot of fun

Somehow, despite tackling heavy themes like the destructive power of love or the corrupting influence of modernity, Tolstoy managed to make "Anna Karenina" a whole lot of fun . Tolstoy's narrator is often arch and subtly sarcastic, as when he describes the trouble with finding suitable matches for women in Russian society: "The Russian fashion of matchmaking by the officer of intermediate persons was for some reason considered disgraceful; it was ridiculed by everyone ... but how girls were to be married, and how parents were to marry them, no one knew."

The book is full of sly humor, but it's often subtle and takes some work to "get." The New York Review, for example, notes how Tolstoy describes Lydia Ivanovna and her marriage: "Whenever the husband met the wife, he invariably behaved to her with the same venomous irony, the cause of which was incomprehensible." The joke is, the cause is not incomprehensible at all : Lydia is an awful person, a moralizing hypocrite who hides her insults behind polite bible-thumping.

As noted by Prolific Living , Tolstoy is careful to offer us comic relief throughout, often via the character of Anna's brother Oblonsky. Oblonsky is presented as a typical modern Russian man, and Tolstoy, who has nothing but contempt for modern Russian men, makes him a cluelessly happy blunderer whose inability to truly understand the world around him amuses the reader.

The story is perfectly paced

When people first encounter "Anna Karenina" they're sometimes put off by its sheer length. Depending on the translation, the book can get pretty close to 1,000 pages. And yet, once you start reading, you barely notice how long the book is, because Tolstoy is a master of pacing.

As author Jilly Cooper notes , the novel was originally serialized. ( According to Encyclopedia.com , it appeared in the periodical Ruskii Vestnik between 1873 and 1877 before being published as a novel in 1878.) That allowed Tolstoy to punctuate his story with numerous cliffhangers that make the reader want to keep reading to find out what happens.

Despite the title of the novel, Anna's is just one of several stories being told within. Tolstoy uses the many subplots and minor characters he introduces to hold our interest — just as we might be getting irritated with Anna's selfishness or bored with Levin's philosophy, Tolstoy whisks us to another plotline. Oprah's Book Club also notes how Tolstoy uses anticipation: Levin and Anna seem connected, and it's natural to assume they will meet and affect each other. But they meet just twice in the story. Tolstoy uses this so the reader is always engaged.

Tolstoy uses repetition — and boredom — strategically

It might seem strange to praise a novel's use of repetition and boredom. But that's only because in most novels, repetition and boredom are accidents of bad writing. In "Anna Karenina," Tolstoy uses both as tools.

One example noted by author Mohsin Hamid concerns Levin and his work in the fields. Many readers are confused by the lengthy passages describing Levin's work on the farm side-by-side with peasants. These passages go on far longer than seems necessary to get their point across, but there are two reasons for their presence in the story. One, Tolstoy is writing a realistic novel, and he uses these passages to describe Levin and the world he inhabits through an incredibly dense exploration of detail — the world becomes real to us because Tolstoy gets down to almost a molecular level. And two, reading these repetitive passages recreates to some extent the meditative state Levin is in. Reading them, you become as hypnotized as he is by the labor he is performing.

Translator Marian Schwartz discusses another aspect of repetition in "Anna Karenina": that of vocabulary. Historically, translators have regarded Tolstoy's repeated use of certain words, often very close to each other in sentences and paragraphs, as a flaw, but, in fact, he did this to purposefully create links between characters via similar and repeated descriptions.

Tolstoy hides the deep dives

"Anna Karenina" is often misunderstood as simply a love story or a tragedy — albeit one crowded by a huge cast of characters and many philosophical digressions. But Tolstoy crowds his story on purpose, because he uses the relatively straightforward aspects to mask the bigger questions he's asking.

The New Yorker notes how the reading experience of the novel shifts as you grow older, because Tolstoy isn't really writing a love story. The deeper dive is that he's exploring the effect that emotion can have on our lives. Penguin Classics discusses how Tolstoy uses the character of Levin not just as a contrast to both Vronsky and Anna and their selfish passion. The deeper dive is how Levin acts as a stand-in for Tolstoy's examination of faith and spirituality.

Similarly, no one ever describes "Anna Karenina" as a book about suffering, but the deeper dive is that it is a book about suffering hidden behind stories about love. Its famous first line ("All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way") makes this clear with its implied focus on unhappy families. But as The Guardian notes , the universe of "Anna Karenina" isn't necessarily a fair one — many characters are unfaithful or commit crimes in the novel, but only Anna is actually punished. Tolstoy's ultimate question is why some acts of love and passion lead to suffering and some don't.

Anna Karenina is actually two novels in one

Leo Tolstoy was a masterful writer. One of his greatest achievements was the way he utilized parallel plots in "Anna Karenina" to fully explore his themes. There are two stories being told: one starring Anna Karenina, urban society woman, and one starring Konstantin Levin, old-school country aristocrat. Both seek meaning in their lives, but Anna seeks it through passion while Levin seeks it through spiritual contemplation.

The Conversation notes how Tolstoy cleverly sets up the connection between Levin and Anna through Stiva Oblonsky, Anna's brother and Levin's best friend. This connection gives the reader the impression that the two characters are very close, in the same circles — yet their parallel stories demonstrate the opposite. Oprah's Book Club observes how the story seems to promise that Anna and Levin will meet and that it will be a powerful moment, but they meet just twice in the story, because they are actually growing further apart as the novel progresses, not closer together.

The end result is two novels in one: Anna's descent into punishment and suffering as she struggles against a loveless marriage and society's unfairness, and Levin's ascent into spiritual peace and a loving relationship as he surrenders to a higher purpose. The two stories only seem like one because of the many connections the characters in each share.

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The Moral Urgency of Anna Karenina

Often quoted but rarely understood, the first sentence of Anna Karenina —“All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—offers a paradoxical insight into what is truly important in human lives. What exactly does this sentence mean?

In War and Peace and in a variant of Anna Karenina , Tolstoy quotes a French proverb: “Happy people have no history.” Where there are dramatic events, where there is material for an interesting story, there is unhappiness. The old curse—“May you live in interesting times!”—suggests that the more narratable a life is, the worse it is.

With happy lives and happy families, there is no drama to relate. What are you going to say: They woke up, breakfasted, didn’t quarrel, went to work, dined pleasantly, and didn’t quarrel again?

Happy families resemble each other because there is no story to tell about them. But unhappy families all have stories, and each story is different.

II. Love and Fate: Anna Karenina’s Theory f Love and Life vs Tolstoy’s Own

We tend to think that true life is lived at times of high drama. When Anna Karenina reads a novel on the train, she wants to live the exciting incidents described. Both high literature and popular culture foster the delusion that ordinary, prosaic happiness represents something insufferably bourgeois, a suspension of real living. Forms as different as romantic drama, adventure stories, and tragedies suggest that life is truly lived only in moments of great intensity.

Tolstoy thought just the opposite.

The dramatic understanding of life that Tolstoy rejected has, if anything, grown still more powerful. Today very few people question that “true love” is the grand and glorious feeling that consumes one’s very being, as in Romeo and Juliet and countless debased imitations. By contrast, Tolstoy wants us to recognize that romantic love is but one kind of love. It is an ideology of love, in fact, but we do not recognize it as one. In Anna Karenina , Kitty at first prefers the dashing and romantic Vronsky to the kind and staid Levin because she has assumed, as most of us do, that she should marry the one she “loves”; and she has been told that “love” is romantic rather than prosaic. She does not yet recognize that what she feels for Levin is also a form of love, and that she has a real choice. Which love does she really want?

Over time Kitty comes to recognize that in addition to romantic love there is also intimate love. Only intimate love is compatible with a family. Tolstoy wants his readers to be aware that this choice exists for them as well.

The myth embodied in great romances tells us that love envelops our whole being. Romantic love presses upon us with irresistible intensity. It transcends all ordinary prosaic conditions and lifts lovers to a realm of resplendent meaning. All-consuming, it allows no room for anything else. Lovers love, not so much each other, but love itself.

What is more, according to this ideology, we do not choose such love. It befalls us. We “fall in love,” we do not jump in love. Such love is a “passion,” not an action. It is something we suffer, an idea prefigured in medieval literature by love potion and in modern thought by unconscious forces overwhelming the will.

For this reason, romantic love feels like fate, and an ideology of amoral fatalism often accompanies it. Lovers live in a realm beyond good and evil. After all, good and evil depend on choice, and where fate governs, choice is out of the question. No matter how much pain the lovers cause, one cannot condemn them. Adultery becomes as noble as revolution, and only cramped moralists worry about the pain caused the betrayed spouse or abandoned children.

That is the story Anna Karenina imagines she is living. As one of her friends observes, she resembles a heroine from a romance. But Anna Karenina’s sense of herself is not Tolstoy’s sense of her. He places his romantic heroine not in a romance, where her values would be validated, but in the world of prosaic reality, where actions have consequences and the pain we inflict matters.

Oprah Winfrey, who chose Tolstoy’s novel for her book club, followed many others in viewing Anna Karenina as a celebration of its heroine and of romantic love. That gets the book exactly wrong. It mistakes Anna Karenina’s story of herself for Tolstoy’s. Just as Anna Karenina imagines herself into the novel she reads, such readers imagine themselves as Anna Karenina or her adulterous lover Vronsky. They do not seem to entertain the possibility that the values they accept unthinkingly are the ones Tolstoy wants to discredit.

Perhaps such readers simply presume that no great writer would take the side of all those shallow moralists. Would a genius endorse what we dismiss as bourgeois banality? But in an unexpected way, that is what Tolstoy does. He shows with unprecedented psychological subtlety the shallowness of the romantic view.

Anna Karenina’s story illustrates the dangers of romantic thinking. As she gives herself to her affair, she tells herself that she had no choice, but her loss of will is willed. Returning by train to her husband in St. Petersburg with Vronsky in pursuit, she experiences a sort of delirium:

She was constantly beset by moments of doubt as to whether the car was going forward or back or standing still altogether. Was it Annushka beside her or a stranger? “What is this on the arm, a fur or a beast? And is this me here? Am I myself or someone else?” She was terrified of surrendering to this oblivion. But something was drawing her into it, and she could surrender or resist at will (Part I, chapter 29).

The relativism of motion she experiences is a precise analogue to the delirious moral relativism she is falling into. Though she will later insist she could not have done otherwise, Tolstoy tells us that “she could surrender or resist at will.” Her fatalism is a choice.

Later, when her sister-in-law Dolly comes to visit her, Anna Karenina pleads inevitability to excuse her affair, the pain she has caused her husband, and the abandonment of her young son. She argues that choice is an illusion and so blame is never appropriate. “I was not to blame,” she tells Dolly. “And who was to blame? What does it mean to be to blame? Could it really have been any other way? Well, what do you think?”

III. Omens: Is Anna Karenina’s Ending Foreshadowed by Tolstoy or by Anna?

Anna Karenina feels that fate has marked her out for a special destiny, perhaps tragic, but surely exalted. When we first see her at the St. Petersburg train station in the book’s opening sections, a trainman is accidentally crushed. With a shudder Anna tells her brother Stiva: “It’s an evil omen,” and she means, “an evil omen for me.” This comment proceeds not only from fatalism but also from narcissism. After all, even if the event were an omen, how can Anna know it refers specifically to her among all the countless people present?

An omen is a sign from the future. A later event sends a sign of its approach to an earlier time. For a future event to have such causative power, it must already in some sense exist. It is somehow already there, the way a place we are traveling to, but cannot yet see, is already there. Indeed, if omens exist, then the world we live in resembles a literary work. It is rife with foreshadowing. The very term “foreshadowing” derives from a spatial metaphor for time. If we are walking down a curved path, we may see the shadow of an object before we see the object casting it, and so the sign precedes its cause. Omens and foreshadowing treat time in this way. They treat the future as not dependent on present choices but as already given.

Anna repeatedly experiences a terrifying dream of a peasant carrying a sack on his back and saying incomprehensible French words. She takes this dream for another omen. On one occasion she wakes from this dream into another, in which she is told that the inner dream means she will die in childbirth. When her lover Vronsky tries to persuade Anna to take some step to alter their socially untenable position, Anna replies that there is no need for them to do anything since she is fated to die in childbirth. For Anna, fatalism excuses not only her actions but also her lack of action.

The fact that Anna survives childbirth does not in the least shake her faith in omens and fatalism. When she is in the depths of her despair at the train station where she will take her own life, the sight of a peasant reminds her of her dream. And “suddenly, recalling the man who was crushed the day she first met Vronsky, she realized what she had to do.”

It is crucial that we understand this passage.

Anna Karenina’s decision results not from fate but from her own fatalism. The omen is fulfilled only because she chooses to fulfill it.

Tolstoy is not using foreshadowing here, a device he avoided as incompatible with realism. The agency for Anna’s death is not the omnipotent author’s but the character’s. It results from her mistaken view of the world.

IV. What We Do Not See: Tolstoy Hidden Clues

Anna interprets the dream of the hideous peasant as a sign from the future, but Tolstoy subtly shows us how it results from ordinary causality operating from the past. The images of the dream derive either from previous dreams or from events connected with meeting Vronsky. Some occur at the train station where she first sees him, others on the train ride home. They become fused with her feeling that she is doing something terribly wrong. Her guilt fuels the dream’s sense of terror. But why doesn’t she recognize the source of the dream’s images?

The answer reflects Tolstoy’s sense of how the human mind works: We see much more than we remember seeing. Events happening at the periphery of our attention and scarcely noticed may recur to us without our awareness of their source. So, when the train at the beginning of the novel stops, passengers get out:

The dashing conductor, giving a whistle while still moving, jumped down, and behind him impatient passengers began getting off one by one: a Guards officer holding himself erect and looking around sternly; a restless merchant carrying a valise and smiling cheerfully; a peasant with a sack over his shoulder.

Anna’s dream incorporates and transforms this peasant, but she will never remember that she saw him. Interestingly enough, neither does the reader. What she sees but does not notice, we read and do not remember. I have taught this novel to more than 10,000 students and not one has ever noticed this passage or remembered reading it; so far as I know, the same is true of the critics as well. But they did read it.

The crucial difference between Anna’s experience and the reader’s is that the reader can go back and check. We can reread earlier portions of a novel as we cannot re-experience earlier moments of our lives. Anna Karenina encourages us to grasp how we miss things right before our eyes.

Tolstoy is always showing us this truth: We do not see the world, we overlook it. He wants to re-educate us to perceive the world differently, so that we are capable of understanding what passes before our eyes hidden in plain view.

V. Tiny Alterations: What Makes Anna Karenina so True to Life

In an essay about War and Peace , Tolstoy evokes the image of a man seeing nothing but treetops on a distant hill and concluding fallaciously that the hill contains nothing but trees. Of course, had the man actually visited the hill and seen it up close, countless houses and people might have presented themselves. In much the same way, historians conclude that in bygone times only dramatic events were taking place since those are the only ones people bother to record. In short, we tend to think of life as consisting primarily of noticeable events precisely because those are the ones we notice.

In Tolstoy’s opinion, that view is precisely wrong. Life consists primarily of the countless ordinary events that are always occurring. In one of his later essays, he retells the story of the painter Bryullov, who corrected a student’s sketch. “Why you only changed it a tiny bit, but it is quite a different thing,” the student exclaimed. Bryullov replied: “Art begins where that ‘tiny bit’ begins.”

Tolstoy explains:

That saying is strikingly true not only of art but of all life. One may say that true life begins where the tiny bit begins—where what seem to us minute and infinitesimally small changes occur. True life is not lived where great external changes take place—where people move about, clash, fight, and slay one another—it is lived only where these tiny, tiny, infinitesimally small changes occur. 1

Better than any other writer who ever lived, Tolstoy traces the infinitesimally small changes of consciousness. That, perhaps, is the key to the impression of so many readers that his works feel not like art but like life, that if the world could write directly, it would write like Tolstoy.

There are only two places in world literature that make Christian love—love not just for one’s neighbors but for one’s enemies—psychologically plausible. One occurs in War and Peace , when Prince Andrei loves his enemy Anatol Kuragin, and the other in Anna Karenina , when Karenin, who has hated Anna and wished her dead, is moved to genuine Christian love and forgiveness. Even Dostoevsky was never able to do more than assert the existence of such love. How does Tolstoy make it truly believable?

Here is how: Tolstoy breaks the process of consciousness into finer and finer pieces. Where most good writers would see the movement from one state of mind to another as a single step, Tolstoy identifies many more steps along the way. When we read his descriptions, we recognize we have experienced such infinitesimally small steps even if we would not otherwise remember them. We grant the plausibility of each small step he describes and so find ourselves at the final one.

VI. Open Camouflage: What Most Anna Karenina Reader (and Critics) Miss

As if to demonstrate how we often overlook key facts right before our eyes, Tolstoy often places them in subordinate clauses of long sentences or in the middle of paragraphs primarily about something else. Having forgiven Anna, her husband Karenin dotes on the daughter she has borne to Vronsky, and in the middle of a long paragraph we read, but easily miss, something immensely important:

At first from a feeling of compassion alone he took an interest in the rather weak newborn girl who was not his daughter and who had been abandoned during her mother’s illness and who surely would have died had he not taken an interest in her—and he himself did not notice how he had come to love her. Several times a day he went to the nursery and sat there for long stretches of time so that the wet nurse and nurse, who at first were shy in front of him, became accustomed to him.

“Who would surely have died if he had not taken an interest in her”: The little girl owes her life to Karenin. He is the only character in this novel who saves a life. And yet, this remarkable fact appears in the fourth of five clauses—the least prominent position possible—and the next sentence deals with something else. I know of no critic who has remarked on this passage, and yet surely it should make an enormous difference in our evaluation of Karenin.

Anna will repeatedly say how horrible her marriage was, but we are given ample evidence to the contrary. In Part Two, Karenin tries to talk with Anna about her ostentatious flirtation with Vronsky, but she fends off all attempts at conversation with a feigned “amused bewilderment” about what he could possibly be talking about. Anna “was herself surprised, listening to herself, at her ability to lie…She felt as if she were wearing an impenetrable armor of falsehood.” The next paragraph begins:

Her look was so simple, so cheerful, that anyone who did not know her as her husband did would never have noticed anything unnatural in the sounds or the sense of her words. But to him, knowing her, knowing that when he went to bed five minutes later than usual she noticed and asked the reason, to him, knowing that she immediately informed him of any joy, happiness, or grief, to him to see now that she did not want to remark on his state, that she did not want to say a word about herself, meant a great deal.

When he went to bed five minutes later than usual, she noticed and asked the reason; she shared any joy, happiness, or grief with him. Surely this was a marriage as good or better than most! And yet readers and critics repeatedly miss this information and accept Anna’s later false memories as accurate.

Time and again, Tolstoy uses this technique of open camouflage. He does so, I think, so that we learn not to equate noticeability with importance and so that we acquire, bit by tiny bit, the skill of noticing what is right before us.

VII. Gold in Sand

Anna Karenina interweaves two major stories—the story of the destruction of Anna’s marriage and life and the making of Levin’s life and marriage. But it is the novel’s third story, concerning Anna’s brother, Stiva, and his wife, Dolly, that provides the book’s moral compass.

If by the hero or heroine of a novel, we mean not the one who occupies the most dramatic space but the one who best embodies the author’s values, then the real hero of Anna Karenina is Dolly. Her everyday goodness, her ceaseless efforts for her children, and her fundamental decency attract no attention, but they are, from Tolstoy’s perspective, the most meaningful possible activities. Here, as in many other works, Tolstoy teaches that we do not notice the really good people among us.

If a life well lived is one without major events, how does one write a novel about it? Tolstoy’s solution is to put the life based on mistaken values—Anna’s—in the foreground, while Dolly’s virtues and troubles remain in the background where they can easily be missed. Readers, critics, and filmmakers often treat Dolly as nothing more than a boring housewife—merely a good mother, as Stiva thinks of her—but for Tolstoy, nothing is more important than a good mother. Life’s most important lessons are acquired in childhood or not at all. Vronsky will always remain a shallow person because, as Tolstoy explains, he never had a family life. How one is raised truly matters.

Perhaps the novel’s key moment belongs to Dolly. She finds herself in the country with her children in a house that Stiva has promised but neglected to make suitable for them. At last, she manages to get things in order:

And for Darya Alexandrovna her expectations were being fulfilled of a comfortable, if not peaceful, country life. Peaceful with six children, Daria Alexandrovna could never be….But in addition, however hard it might be for a mother to bear the fear of illnesses, the illnesses themselves, and the grief at the sight of signs of bad tendencies in her children, the children themselves were even now repaying her sorrows with small joys. These joys were so small they passed unnoticed like gold in sand and in bad moments she saw only the sorrows, only the sand; but there were good moments, too, when she saw only the joys, only the gold.

Gold in sand: That is what true happiness is like. It occurs at ordinary moments and does not call attention to itself, much as Dolly does not call attention to herself. And yet it is moments like these that make a life meaningful.

If one were to offer a plot summary of the novel, this scene would probably not appear. It, too, is openly camouflaged.

VIII. Stiva

If Dolly represents what goodness is, then her husband Stiva represents what evil—most, if not the worst, evil—truly is. And the first thing to notice about evil is that it is not as ugly as sin but as attractive as pleasant company. That is why there is so much of it. We have met the enemy, and he is us. Evil is not alien but resembles us, because we are most responsible for it.

Stiva is immensely charming, and so everyone likes being with him. What’s more, he does not have a shred of malice. Tolstoy wants us to appreciate that most evil results not from active hostility but from mere neglect, something like criminal negligence. It is largely negative, an absence, a forgetting. It is caused primarily by what we don’t do. And so we can easily be responsible for it while thinking well of ourselves. When Stiva forgets to fix up the country house for Dolly, Tolstoy remarks: “No matter how hard Stepan Arkadyevich tried to be a concerned father and husband, he never could remember that he had a wife and children.”

Stiva is the perfect hedonist, totally immersed in the pleasures of the moment. When he is with Levin, he encourages Levin’s pursuit of Kitty with some German verses. Only a few pages later, Stiva encourages Vronsky’s pursuit of Kitty with the very same verses. In doing so, Stiva is not exactly lying, if by lying we mean telling a conscious falsehood. It is simply that when he is with Levin, he sincerely sympathizes with Levin, and when he is with Vronsky, sincerely sympathizes with Vronsky. The dishonesty lies in what he does not do: He does not check his memory to find the discrepancy. Stiva can sincerely think of himself as truthful because for him each present moment is entirely discrete. It binds him to nothing. When he sees Dolly’s misery over his affair, his heart goes out to her, but that will not preclude him from endless future affairs.

It is not exactly that Stiva has a bad memory. Rather, he has an excellent forgettory. Appreciating that guilt, regret, and other unpleasant memories distract from the pleasures of the moment, he has taught himself to banish them from his mind. As the novel proceeds, we watch his progress in forgetting. He keeps selling off Dolly’s property to indulge his pleasures while she tries harder and harder to fend for the children he forgets about.

IX. Self-Deception

Families in Tolstoy’s novels are not collections of individuals who happen to be related but distinct miniature cultures. Each family appreciates the world in its own way. The Shcherbatskys—Dolly’s family—understand the world in terms of family life. The Oblonskys are quite different, and the first thing to understand about Anna is that she was born an Oblonsky.

Like Stiva, Anna commands an amazing receptiveness to the people in front of her. When she wants to, she can make herself the perfect listener, which is how she manages to persuade Dolly to forgive Stiva for his affair. Her manipulation is both skillful and deliberate.

Stiva is anything but weighed down with remorse, much less repentant. The novel opens with him waking from pleasant dreams about feasts and women, and he calls himself honest because he is incapable of feeling any guilt over what he has done. Yet Anna tells Dolly just the opposite: “He is wretched, remorse is killing him.” Dolly is dubious. “Is he capable of remorse?” she asks. Anna replies:

“Yes, I know him. I could not look at him without pity. We both know him. He is good but he is proud, and now he is so humiliated. What touched me most”—and here Anna  divined the main thing that could touch Dolly—“he’s tormented by two things: he’s ashamed for the children’s sake, and while loving you….yes, yes, while loving you more than anything in the world.”

“Here Anna divined what would touch Dolly most”: Her guesses at such moments are unerring, and she says what she needs to. That, indeed, is why Stiva has summoned her to patch up the quarrel.

But Anna differs from Stiva in one important respect. She has a conscience. She feels terrible guilt for her affair and the pain it causes her husband. Her response to this guilt constitutes one of the book’s most remarkable psychological studies.

To escape from conscience, Anna practices an elaborate process of self-deception. So insightful is Tolstoy’s description of this process that this novel could well be the touchstone for any study of lying to oneself. How it is possible both to know something is true and yet to convince oneself that it is false? Wouldn’t the falsehood be palpable and therefore unbelievable? We are so familiar with self-deception, and we all practice it so often, that we often forget how perplexing a phenomenon it is.

Because Anna feels guilty for hurting her husband, she persuades herself that he cannot feel. She knows better and is well aware that although he cannot express his feelings, he nevertheless experiences them. He suffers horribly from jealousy. But she makes sure not to see his suffering. Tolstoy tells us that Anna “schooled herself to despise and reproach him.” She maintains of him that “this is not a human being, this is a machine.”

Karenin has set one condition for Anna to continue her affair with Vronsky: that she not meet her lover in their house. That condition hardly seems especially arduous, but Anna violates it anyway and so Karenin runs into Vronsky in the doorway. When Vronsky describes what happened, Anna responds with practiced mockery:

“And he bowed to you like this?” She made a long face, and half-closing her eyes, quickly changed the expression of her face and folded her hands, and Vronsky suddenly saw in her handsome face the very expression with which Alexei Alexandrovich had bowed to him.

Vronsky wonders, “How can he bear this situation? He’s suffering, that is obvious.” But Anna denies he is capable of suffering at all:

“He?” she said with a grin. “He’s perfectly content.”… Again she could not help but mimic him. “Anna, ma chère, Anna dear!” “He’s not a man, not a human being, he’s a puppet!”

Anna’s pretense breaks down when she thinks she is dying in childbirth with her illegitimate daughter. Apparently at the point of death, she renounces all her falsifications and admits to having deliberately altered her impressions of her husband. Before she realizes Karenin has arrived, she says of him: “He is good, he himself does not know how good he is….You’re just saying he won’t forgive me because you don’t know him. No one knew him. Only I do, and it was hard even for me.”

When at last Anna sees Karenin, she describes her negative views of him as an effort at falsity:

Yes, yes, yes. Here is what I wanted to say. Don’t be surprised at me. I’m still the same…. But there is another woman inside me, and I’m afraid of her—she loved the other man, and I wanted to hate you and couldn’t forget the woman who had been before. I’m not her. Now I’m the real one.

When Anna recovers and again wants to take up with Vronsky, she can no longer call her husband heartless, especially after his Christian conversion and his unqualified forgiveness of her. In that state of mind, he offers her a divorce and more. Under Russian law, adultery was the only grounds for divorce, and the adulterous party could not remarry. Karenin offers to plead that he is the adulterer so Anna can marry Vronsky. He also offers her custody of both children. Later, Anna will say that she had to choose between her lover and her son, but that statement is palpably untrue—another sign of a memory repatterning the past.

When readers accept her assertion, is their memory playing the same trick?

Anna herself makes it crystal clear why she refuses Karenin’s amazingly generous offer. She explains to Vronsky: “Stiva says he has agreed to everything, but I cannot accept his generosity.” She does not wish to be indebted to him, to acknowledge his moral superiority. One might well ask how much she can love her son if that is the reason she chooses to leave him behind.

Unlike the book’s other educated characters, the agrarian intellectual Levin thinks for himself. Instead of just adopting approved enlightened opinions, he actually learns both sides of an issue. When the progressive theories he adopts to modernize his farm and improve the peasants’ lot fail, he does not change the subject or seek some ad hoc justification of progressivism. Rather, he admits his mistake and seeks some other solution, however unconventional it may be. How many intellectuals can ever admit that their critics were right? In Tolstoy’s view , Levin’s honesty is vanishingly rare.

Most intellectuals resemble Stiva, who first decides which camp to join and then makes sure to learn only the arguments on that side:

Stepan Arkadyievich took and read a liberal newspaper….And even though neither science nor art nor politics held any particular interest for him, he firmly maintained the same views on all these subjects that were maintained by the majority and by his newspaper, and he changed them only when the majority changed them, or, better put, he did not change them at all; they changed in him imperceptibly, of their own accord.

His views seemed to change by themselves because Stiva never really thinks: He just arranges to believe what a liberal is supposed to believe. When liberal positions shift over the years, so do his, but without any of the agonized confrontation with disconfirming evidence that marks an authentic thinker such as Levin.

Levin far prefers to exchange views with a landowner much more conservative than he because the landowner “obviously spoke his own individual thought, a thing that very rarely happens, and a thought to which he had been brought not by a wish to occupy an idle mind, but a thought that had grown up out of the conditions of his life, which he had considered in his rural solitude and had thought over in its every aspect.”

Here and elsewhere, Tolstoy is concerned with how intellectuals think. Can they really be concerned with helping the poor peasants if they do not bother to consider whether their reforms would actually work? If they really cared about their professed aims, wouldn’t they learn to consider disconfirming evidence and invite criticism? Could it be that, instead of helping the poor, their real concern is to think well of themselves? In focusing on the inauthenticity of the educated, Tolstoy dissected the intellectuals of his day—and ours.

XI. Daily Miracles

Levin’s experience, and the book he is writing, teach him that in the social and moral worlds, abstract thought tends to mislead. One must give precedence not to theory, as intellectuals typically do, but to what might be called the wisdom of practice. Theory properly serves as a sort of mnemonic device, a set of provisional generalizations from experience.

The same is true of conventional narratives. The stories we routinely tell about life typically leave out all those messy contingencies that characterize real experience. Levin comes to appreciate that the neater an account of experience, and the more it resembles a well-made story, the further it departs from reality.

Levin believes in marriage as a perfect idyll. But his wife, Kitty, who understands the intimate love of good families, knows that story is as false as romance. In intimate love, one’s spouse is a less-than-ideal person whose thoughts and feelings are hard to appreciate. Such intimacy takes work and, until the couple come to know each other, it occasions quarrels.

Contrary to common opinion, the early days of a marriage are likely to be the hardest. Levin, with his fantasy views of marriage straight out of storybooks, is surprised at the prosaic truths that Kitty has known all along, but here, as elsewhere, he eventually comes to value her wisdom:

Levin had been married nearly three months. He was happy, but not at all in the way he had expected to be….Levin was happy, but having embarked upon family life, he saw at each step that it was not at all what he had imagined. At each step he experienced what someone would experience who, having admired the smooth, happy progress of a little boat across a lake, should then actually get into that boat. He saw that it was not enough to sit there evenly without rocking; that one also had think, too, without forgetting for a moment where one was floating, that beneath one’s feet was water, and that one must row, and that his unaccustomed hands would hurt, and that it was only easy to look at, but doing it, though quite joyful, was also quite difficult.

Difficult delight resulting from constant hard work: That is what family love demands. The reward is knowledge of each other almost from within.

In the book’s final section, Levin falls into despair because he cannot answer the existential questions about death that trouble him. He reads the great philosophers, but they offer no help in his search for meaning in the face of all-devouring death. Tolstoy’s description of Levin’s state of mind—which had also been his own—remains one of his great triumphs.

Levin finds his way out of despair when he realizes that he must trust not to theory but to practice: “He had been living rightly but thinking wrongly.” He needed to look not into the distance but at what he was already doing.

Levin lives rightly when he focuses not on Humanity or Russia or any other remote abstraction but on the people immediately around him. He tends to what is, as he says, incontestably necessary. He cares for the peasants, for the property of his sister, and for his immediate family. He could no more fail to do so than he could fling down a baby in his arms. There are some things we know more surely than we could justify theoretically, and anyone who needed a theory to tell him why he should not fling down a baby would be lacking something fundamental.

In his daily work, Levin comes to appreciate the importance of the ordinary and prosaic. If one lives rightly moment by moment, and trusts that daily practice has its own wisdom, then the questions troubling Levin are not exactly answered, but they disappear. When Levin recognizes these Tolstoyan truths, he is overcome with joy:

I was looking for miracles, regretting that I had not seen a miracle that might convince me. But here is a miracle, the sole miracle possible, existing continuously, surrounding me on all sides, and I didn’t notice it!…I have discovered nothing. I have only recognized what I already knew….I have been freed from falsity, I have found the Master.

In his time, Tolstoy was known as a nyetovshcik —one who says no ( nyet ) to what almost all educated people believed. If anything, his views are even more at odds with educated opinion today. In this novel’s rejection of romantic love, in its challenge to the inauthentic ways intellectuals think, in its trust in practice over theory, and above all, in its defense of the prosaic virtues exhibited by Dolly—in all these ways, Anna Karenina challenges us today with ever-increasing urgency.

1  Leo Tolstoy, “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?” Recollections and Essays , trans. Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford University Press, 1937; reprinted 1961), p. 81.

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“Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy Essay

Written by Leo Tolstoy in the distant 1912, Anna Karenina has not lost its topicality yet, rendering one of the most basic and yet the most tragic issues that may occur to a married couple, which is the loss of passion and the further awkward attempts at putting the remnants of once passionate romance together. Being a “breakthrough” (Morson 55) at the time, the novel addresses one of the aspects of marriage that was least talked about. More importantly, the novel shed some light on the situation as viewed from the perspective of a woman, which alone was a major foot forward in the analysis of the social issues of the beginning of the 20 th century.

While Tolstoy makes it obvious that Anna is far from being a positive character, seeing that she makes a range of mistakes and does not put any major effort in restoring her relationships with her husband, he clearly sympathizes with her situation, therefore, making her character more relatable and attracting the public’s attention to the problem of an early 20 th century wedlock.

Though technically retaining his objectivity and refraining from describing Anna as a flawless human being, Tolstoy adopts an obviously sympathetic tone when talking about Anne and her relationships with her husband, as well as the collapsing marriage: “I’ll be bad; but, anyway, not a liar, a cheat” (Tolstoy 553), says Kitty, one of the side characters, therefore, representing a different opinion on Anna’s actions.

Thus, Tolstoy is able to stress the significance of balance between proclaiming personal freedoms, and remembering about the significance of basic human virtues, loyalty being one of them. At the same time, Tolstoy shows that he does not approve of a thoughtless search for a thrill, which Anna’s attitude towards her marriage borders; for instance, the line “I hate him for his virtues” (Tolstoy 992) nearly makes Anna unlikable.

Therefore, while admittedly being critical towards the decisions, which his leading character makes, Tolstoy is also very sympathetic to the leading character; this makes the latter all the more human and, therefore, allows for getting the message concerning life choices across in a more efficient manner than blatant criticism.

While Tolstoy obviously stresses that what Anna is doing is wrong, he cannot help but admit that she is trapped in the hypocritical norms of the early 20 th -century society, where the divorce was considered shameful and where a couple forcing themselves to be together instead of being happy was viewed as a norm. In fact, Tolstoy spells the social problems of the era out at some point of his narration; in fact, when Anna comes to understanding that her relationships with Vronsky are not going to evolve any further and instead lead her to the same dead-end, she makes a very important statement by saying that “Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be” (Tolstoy 1712).

The empathy, which Tolstoy has for the women that are trapped in the circumstances similar to those of his leading character, shines through as the author comments on the choices made by Anna. Specifically, a range of elements of the narration conveys the sadness and the sympathy, which the author has for the heroine: “If you look for perfection, you will never be satisfied” (Tolstoy 1574). The above-mentioned quote, in fact, reveals the entire depth of the feelings that the author has for the women, who face the situation similar to that one of Anna. The above-mentioned quote, in fact, makes the readers deviate from the analysis of the unfair moralist principles of the early 20 th century and analyze the character herself, isolated from the environment in which she lived (Jones 24).

Although Tolstoy obviously states that the societal principles of the time were unnecessarily cruel and lacked the understanding of how the basic human relationships work (Evans 77), he never claims that what Anna is doing is a good thing, either. Wrapped in her desire to escape the mundane life and the solitude, which she locked herself into, she dashes into the rushed romance without thinking of whether she actually needs it as emotional support or temporary salvation from her current “situation” (Orwin 263). In other words, Tolstoy’s opinions on the fact that Anna is searching for the perfect balance in marriage instead of coming to grips with reality and admitting that conflicts and boredom are integral parts of living with a partner are “implicit, if not directly stated” (Simmons 51).

The problem of Anna, therefore, as Tolstoy explains, is that she does not try to fix the issue but, instead, seeks the notorious “perfection” (Tolstoy 1574), i.e., something that she will never be able to find and, therefore, dooms herself to being miserable.

While it would be wrong to claim that Tolstoy refrains from criticizing his character at all, there is an obvious element of sympathy in his attitude to Anna, which can be traced in the way that Tolstoy describes her actions, intentions, and feelings. Tolstoy offers a very pragmatic, yet also very reasonable way to view the issue – he shows the significance of free will and equality in relationships, as well as the negative effect of social prejudice on marriage and divorce. Tolstoy’s empathy is supported by logical reasoning, which does not make it any weaker and, if anything, adds credibility to his argument.

Works Cited

Evans, Mary. Reflecting on Anna Karenina . New York, NY: Routledge, 2014. Print.

Jones, Malcolm. New Essays on Tolstoy . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Print.

Morson, Gary Saul. Anna Karenina in Our Time: Seeing More Wisely . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Print.

Orwin, Donna Tussing. Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847-1880 . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Print.

Simmons, Ernest Joseph. Tolstoy . New York, NY: Routledge, 2014. Print.

Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina . New York, NY: Plain Label Books, 1912. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2020, July 1). "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy. https://ivypanda.com/essays/anna-karenina-by-leo-tolstoy/

""Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy." IvyPanda , 1 July 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/anna-karenina-by-leo-tolstoy/.

IvyPanda . (2020) '"Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy'. 1 July.

IvyPanda . 2020. ""Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy." July 1, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/anna-karenina-by-leo-tolstoy/.

1. IvyPanda . ""Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy." July 1, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/anna-karenina-by-leo-tolstoy/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . ""Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy." July 1, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/anna-karenina-by-leo-tolstoy/.

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Leo Tolstoy

Great Russian writer

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself"

The writing of Anna Karenina

About several families, happy in the same way and unhappy in different ways. About life in Russia in the 1870s on its different levels, from St Petersburg high society to peasant backyards. About a secular woman who abandons her family for love, destroying her own and others’ lives, and about an idealistic landlord who seeks love and truth in his family. About the overt and covert motives that drive people, about the mysteries of the soul and the properties of passion.

When was it written?

Tolstoy begins writing the novel “from modern life” in the first months of 1873; in May he writes to the critic Nikolai Strakhov that the novel is already “finished in draft”. In March 1874 Tolstoy gives the first part of the novel to the printer, but then stops printing. “…I have stopped printing my novel and want to give it up, so I do not like it,” he writes to his great aunt Alexandra Andreevna Tolstoy. Material interest makes him change his plans: Tolstoy urgently needs money to buy land and the magazine “Russian Gazette” offers him 20 thousand rubles in advance for the book is not yet finished. The work resumes in January 1875, but goes hard, Tolstoy complains to his correspondents: “I take on a boring, vulgar Karenina,” “I hate what I wrote,” “my Anna bore me as a bitter radish. The turning point comes after a trip to Moscow in November 1876; Tolstoy’s wife Sophia Andreevna writes to her sister: “Tolstoy, animated and concentrated, adds a whole chapter every day.” In the spring of 1877, the novel is finished.

How is it written?

Tolstoy unfolds a picture of contemporary Russian life as if looking through the windows of parallel trains: in extreme simplification, Karenina is two stories that almost do not intersect, Anna’s affair with Vronsky and her separation from her husband, Levin and Kitty’s love and the beginning of their married life. The basis of Tolstoy’s language is complex syntax with extended periods and deliberately “unbookish” speech: this is how he gives added cogency, literally piles weight on the author’s statements and preserves the naturalness of the characters’ speech. Tolstoy describes what is happening through his characters: looking at the world through their eyes, Tolstoy also examines their mental movements, speech patterns and social environment – and constantly comments on their thoughts and actions from the position of an as if behind the screen, but all-seeing and all-knowing judge. Karenina” has no detailed authorial digressions; Tolstoy’s own thoughts are largely relegated to Loewin, but the presence of the author, who creates multi-dimensional, almost physically perceptible worlds and simultaneously views them from a position of higher truth, is felt in every line.

How was it published?

In 1875 “Karenina” begins to be published in parts by the journal “Russky Vestnik”. The April 1877 book publishes the seventh part, which ends with the death of Karenina, with a note “The ending follows”, but the journal editor Mikhail Katkov refuses to print the eighth part, disagreeing with the author in assessment of the volunteers going to the Balkan War, and Tolstoy had to publish the final part in a separate book. The following year, 1878, the novel comes out as a separate three-volume edition.

What influenced it? Pushkin’s prose: from the memoirs of Sophia Andreevna we know that Tolstoy begins work on “Karenina”, rereading the “Tales of Belkin,” in the first version of the novel there is almost verbatim overlap with the passage “The guests have come to the cottage. Contemporary French novels (e.g. Stendhal’s Red and Black) and journalism, especially Dumas the son’s pamphlet Man – Woman. The philosophical writings of Schopenhauer. His own experiences of managing a household and reflecting on the meaning of family life, relegated to Leuven in the novel.

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The Ecstasy of Reading (and Rereading) Anna Karenina

This week on the history of literature podcast with jacke wilson.

For tens of thousands of years, human beings have been using fictional devices to shape their worlds and communicate with one another. Four thousand years ago they began writing down these stories, and a great flourishing of human achievement began. We know it today as literature, a term broad enough to encompass everything from ancient epic poetry to contemporary novels. How did literature develop? What forms has it taken? And what can we learn from engaging with these works today? Hosted by Jacke Wilson, an amateur scholar with a lifelong passion for literature, The History of Literature takes a fresh look at some of the most compelling examples of creative genius the world has ever known.

In 1870, the 42-year-old Russian author Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) told his wife that he “wanted to write a novel about the fall of a society woman in the highest Petersburg circles, and… to tell the story of the woman and her fall without condemning her.” The result was his novel Anna Karenina (1877), which is widely viewed as one of the pinnacles of world literature. In this episode, Jacke is joined by longtime friend of the show Mike Palindrome, the President of the Literature Supporters Club, for a discussion of this 19th-century classic.

From the episode:

Jacke Wilson: The sorrows that Tolstoy suffered from when writing this novel and the pain that he had works its way into the book. It’s full of pain, saturated with it, but it’s full of epiphanies too, full of ecstasy and joy and promise. And there’s a joy that comes from Tolstoy just celebrating life through his observational powers. Saul Bellow is like this too—the kind of book that works like smelling salts. These books wake you up. They shake you out of your stupor. They make you want to go experience some more things.

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Defining Moments in Anna Karenina

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R. L. P. Jackson, Defining Moments in Anna Karenina , The Cambridge Quarterly , Volume 43, Issue 1, March 2014, Pages 16–38, https://doi.org/10.1093/camqtly/bft040

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This essay returns to F. R. Leavis's 1965 essay on Anna Karenina as its point of departure, arguing that the novel is ultimately more tragic in its effect than Leavis allows. Beginning with an account of some representative moments which define the unbridgeable gaps between certain major characters, it moves to consider the differences between the new Penguin and the Maudes’ World's Classics translation of a passage which is seen as embodying Tolstoy's consistent attempt to imagine life as always lived in time. The essay then proceeds to consider the three ‘defining moments’ which together provide the rationale for its title. These related moments - Koznyshev's aborted proposal to Varenka, Anna's suicide and the death of Frou-Frou in the famous horse race – are at the heart of this essay's claim for the tragic status of Anna Karenina .

I t is almost fifty years since F. R. Leavis's essay on Anna Karenina appeared in the first issue of the Cambridge Quarterly , 1 and the intervening years have seen their fair share of published writing in English both on Tolstoy in general and on Anna Karenina in particular. There have been influential new biographies, from A. N. Wilson's rather too relentlessly knowing Tolstoy of 1988 (Penguin 1989) to Rosamond Bartlett's valiant attempt to update Tolstoy's ‘Russianness’ in her Tolstoy: A Russian Life (Profile Books) of 2010. The acclaimed new Penguin translation of Anna Karenina , by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, appeared in 2000, and John Bayley, whose book on Tolstoy and the Novel was published in 1966, added a preface to it in 2003. Yet another attempt was recently made – with screenplay by Tom Stoppard and inevitably limited success – to represent Anna Karenina through the medium of film. And the novel itself has – both before and after the appearance of the new Penguin translation – received continuing critical attention, with its treatment of, among other things, ‘the woman question’ inevitably attracting extensive comment during this period. 2

Much of this writing has been of an informative, expository, interpretative, or ‘instrumental’ kind – concerned, primarily, with investigating the underlying ‘meanings’ – historical, ideological, sexual, political – of the novel, or making use of various aspects of it to mount a more general case about a particular issue or issues. Very little of it has paid much attention to the actual experience of reading the novel, what it feels like to be immersed in the particular novelistic universe which Tolstoy creates for us. In offering a rather different slant on Anna Karenina I don't, of course, claim to be completely innocent of instrumental or ideological concerns of my own. But I do claim to be attempting to define something of the peculiar power and effect of Tolstoy's writing in this novel in a way that tries first and foremost to honour the distinctive qualities of his art (as opposed to expounding his ‘ideas’) and the meanings inherent in it as opposed to the meanings which might be deduced from it.

In everything or almost everything I have written, I have been moved by the need to bring together ideas that are closely knit, in order to express myself, but each idea, expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is enormously impoverished when removed from the network around it. This network itself is not made up of ideas (or so I think), but of something else, and it is absolutely impossible to express the substance of this network directly in words: it can be done only indirectly, by using words to describe characters, acts, situations. 3

Despite Leavis's eloquent and deeply engaged championing over the years of the unparaphrasable particularities of this way of thinking, his essay on Anna Karenina does seem to me to concentrate rather too exclusively on the sense in which the complex interrelationships between the various characters in the novel subserve an implicit search for ‘the normative’. Leavis associates that search primarily with Levin and sees it as more or less unproblematically continuous with Tolstoy's life beyond the pages of the novel. I don't want to exclude this as an important part of the novel's significance. But I do want to argue that it is at least equally true that the novel gains its power from its seeming continually to come up against the reality of the unbridgeable differences between the characters it brings into relation with one another. Which, if we invoke Leavis's own sense of the tragic as associated with ‘a kind of profound impersonality, in which experience matters … because it is what it is’, 4 is another way of saying, perhaps, that Anna Karenina is more consistently tragic in its effect than any nineteenth-century English novel.

To turn now, then, to the significance of the title of my essay. There's a sense in which the greatness of Anna Karenina consists precisely in its resolute resistance to casting any particular moment or succession of moments as ‘defining’. And far from being incidental to the novel it is, rather, of its very essence that it should, at the height of Anna and Karenin's negotiations over divorce, equably give us, too, Oblonsky formulating a joke about his part in facilitating that divorce (a joke that turns on the similarity between ‘solution’ and ‘dissolution’). 5 This embrace of the provisional, this resistance both to finality and to solemnity, along with a related resistance to the idea of any single character as constituting an ‘answer’ for any other character, is arguably one of the main things that distinguishes Anna Karenina from a comparable English novel of the period such as Middlemarch . 6

After rejecting Levin and being rejected by Vronsky, for instance, Kitty is sent abroad and, in an understandable state of revulsion from male sexuality and from her own particular nature, initially finds herself attracted to Varenka's seemingly asexual charitable ministrations as a way of life which she might profitably imitate and grow into. Varenka seems to have experienced something of her own pain in having been reluctantly separated from a man with whom she has been in love. And she has, Kitty seems to feel, contrived to make a satisfyingly compensatory life for herself built on quiet independence, patient resignation, and charitable good works. Before long, however, Kitty begins to question Varenka's world. When inhabited by Kitty – and perhaps even when inhabited simply by Varenka – it is itself infected by the sexuality from which she had hoped to escape (a wife grows jealous of what she perceives as Kitty's over-solicitous attentions to her sick husband). And her father's ironies at the expense of Madame Stahl, Varenka's religiose ‘aunt’, together with Kitty's realisation that Varenka herself is not exactly as solemnly virtuous as she had imagined her to be – Varenka surprises her by laughing at the Prince's jokes – soon lead Kitty to sense that Varenka's modestly selfless virtue is neither unequivocally ‘selfless’ nor permanently safe from the incursions of her own more demanding sexuality. What promised to be a potentially transformative moment (or series of moments) in Kitty's life ends up feeling rather more like a confirmation of Conrad's incidental remark that ‘[w]e can never cease to be ourselves’. 7 We can call this a defining moment in Kitty's life if we like, but the essence of what it defines is simply the difference between Kitty and Varenka.

So, too, Dolly, immersed in her own particular version of a state of reaction (in her case, from Oblonsky's incurable philandering), travels to Anna and Vronsky's estate toying with envy of Anna, imagining herself in her shoes and flirting with the idea of embarking on an affair of her own. And Anna responds to Dolly's characteristic warmth and generosity by offering in return her most communicative and most attractive self. Nevertheless, something eventually has to give and Dolly, confronted by somebody so different from herself, finds that she cannot go on idealising Anna and suspending judgement indefinitely. She cannot help being, and indeed prefers being, Dolly.

The intractable differences between the two women come to a head in their conversation about contraception, during which Anna confesses that her motive for practising contraception is to preserve her sexual attractiveness to Vronsky, since having any more children would diminish that attractiveness. Dolly is shocked as much by the egotism of Anna's argument as by the position it adopts on contraception. She herself cannot imagine not having the children which the practice of contraception might have prevented. She experiences anew the unbridgeable gap between Anna's life, lived now apart from ‘society’ and for love alone, and her own life, the meaning of which is inseparable from a set of duties, responsibilities, commitments and connections which have, to a large extent, been made for her, however willingly or unwillingly she might embrace them at any particular moment. No more than Kitty can Dolly cease to be herself.

And then, having been forced to surrender her illusion that she herself might become an Anna, Dolly returns home and, despite having just confessed to the coachman that Anna and Vronsky's life is not for her, proceeds fiercely to justify Anna and Vronsky to her friends and family with, as Tolstoy puts it, ‘entire sincerity, forgetting the indefinite feelings of dissatisfaction and embarrassment she had experienced there’. 8 She is even found, later in the novel, once again imagining what it might be like to abandon Oblonsky and even her children. If we can never cease to be ourselves, those selves, Tolstoy seems always to be insinuating, are nevertheless never fixed or final, never fully defined by or in any particular moment.

And what he then saw he never saw again. Two children going to school, some pigeons that flew down from the roof, and a few loaves put outside a baker's window by an invisible hand touched him particularly. These loaves, the pigeons, and the two boys seemed creatures not of this earth. It all happened at the same time; one of the boys ran after a pigeon and looked smilingly up at Levin; the pigeon flapped its wings and fluttered up, glittering in the sunshine amid the snow-dust that trembled in the air; from the window came the scent of fresh-baked bread and the loaves were put out. All these things were so unusually beautiful that Levin laughed and cried with joy. (I. 456–7)

You could argue that this moment of heightened perception in which objects and feelings seem somehow to coalesce, in which the world around one is experienced as a kind of unified whole, corresponds pretty closely to the visionary moment beloved of the English Romantic poets, that moment of transcendence which seems somehow to ‘justify’ life and requires constant revisiting in order to establish its permanent importance: Wordsworth's famous ‘spots of time’ come to mind. But in Tolstoy such a moment typically remains simply one moment among many. And it's specifically and even banally connected with the jubilant and excessive euphoria consequent upon Kitty's having agreed to marry Levin. Nor is there any desperate, wilful – or wistful (I'm thinking of Virginia Woolf – a great admirer of Tolstoy – and her desire ‘to make of the moment something permanent’ 9 ) – attempt to hold on to it for ever or transmute it into art. Simply, a fidelity to the truth of the moment and its special and unique character even as the moment is allowed to pass: ‘What he then saw he never saw again.’

And what he saw then, he afterwards never saw again. He was especially moved by children going to school, the grey-blue pigeons that flew down from the roof to the pavement, and the white rolls sprinkled with flour that some invisible hand had set out. These rolls, the pigeons and the two boys were unearthly beings. All this happened at the same time: a boy ran up to a pigeon and, smiling, looked at Levin; the pigeon flapped its wings and fluttered off, sparkling in the sun amidst the air trembling with snowdust, while the smell of baked bread wafted from the window as the rolls appeared in it. All this together was so extraordinarily good that Levin laughed and wept from joy. (p. 403)

In their ‘translators’ note', Pevear and Volokhonsky endorse Nabokov's description of Tolstoy's style as a style which rejects ‘false elegancies’ and is ready ‘to admit any robust awkwardness if that is the shortest way to sense’. ‘In previous English translations’, claim the Penguin translators, ‘such passages [as, among others, the passage on which Nabokov bases his account of Tolstoy's style] have generally been toned down if not eliminated. We have preferred to keep them as evidence of the freedom Tolstoy allowed himself in Russian’ (p. xxi). Not knowing Russian myself I am not in a position to comment on this characterisation of Tolstoy's Russian. But there does seem to be a sense in which Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation of the passage I have quoted plays down the hint of the other-worldly which Tolstoy at once proffers and withdraws even more uniformly and determinedly than does the Maudes' translation.

The first sentence is rhythmically and syntactically rougher in the Penguin than in the World's Classics version. In the second sentence, the Maudes' withholding of the main verb, their rendering of that verb as ‘touched’ rather than the more prosaic ‘moved’ (along with their placing of the adverb – ‘particularly’ or ‘especially’ – after rather than before the verb), their use of the vaguely biblical ‘loaves’ rather than the mundane ‘rolls’, and their construing of the operation of the ‘invisible hand’ in the passive rather than the active voice all contrive to convey a greater sense of mystery than the Penguin translators allow. Even the indefinite article (‘a few loaves’ as opposed to ‘the white rolls’) helps the Maudes' cause, though the precision of their ‘two children’ (as opposed to ‘children’) – which somehow seems to attest the authenticity of the experience – seems cancelled out by their competitors' ‘grey-blue pigeons’ instead of their own, looser, ‘some pigeons’. The more elevated register chosen by the Maudes seems, though, to persist in the next sentence: ‘loaves’ instead of ‘rolls’ once again, and ‘seemed creatures not of this earth’ rather than ‘were unearthly beings’, their ‘unearthliness’, paradoxically, intensified rather than diminished by ‘seemed’ in place of the Penguin ‘were’ and made more emphatically other-worldly by the more insistently negative ‘creatures not of this earth’.

The different emphasis of the two translations, however, is made somewhat more problematic by the fourth sentence. ‘It all’ is more casual than ‘all this’; ‘one of the boys’ is more prescriptive than ‘a boy’; ‘looked smilingly up at Levin’ is less rhythmically charged than ‘and, smiling, looked at Levin’; ‘amid the snow-dust that trembled in the air’ is more literal and less indeterminate than ‘amidst the air trembling with snowdust’; and ‘the loaves were put out’ calls attention to the human agency involved in their appearance marginally more than the reflexive ‘as the rolls appeared in it’. But ‘fluttered up’ is, on the other hand, more ethereal than ‘fluttered off’, ‘glittering’ carries more poetic charge than ‘sparkling’; and ‘scent’ is less quotidian than ‘smell’. And, though the Penguin translators seemingly atypically opt for ‘wept’ rather than ‘cried’, the first part of their culminating sentence certainly seems to want to insist more emphatically than the Maudes' does on Levin's experience as having been, in the end, of this world rather than the other (‘extraordinarily good’ rather than ‘unusually beautiful’).

The Penguin translation does, then, seem, in this instance, to represent Tolstoy's Russian as rather more relaxed, more informal, less ‘elegant’ than it appears in the Maudes' version. That said, however, both the faint suggestion of the transcendent and a complementary persistent scepticism of such a possibility remain in both versions. The moment is re-enacted three times, unapologetically broken down repeatedly into its component parts even as its indivisibility is apparently being affirmed. To stick with the Maudes' translation for the moment: the ‘invisible hand’ of the first presentation foreshadows the ‘creatures not of this earth’ of the second, more summary presentation; but the ‘invisible hand’, which is part of what gives to the moment its other-worldly air, is almost retracted in the ‘were put out’ of the third presentation (though the passive form of the verb retains just enough of the ‘invisible hand’ to be consistent), even as the third presentation (in both translations) seems the most intent of the three on rendering the experience in all its resonant and mysteriously evocative detail. Even here, though, in the third presentation of the moment, the preliminary – or explanatory, if we take it as referring backwards rather than forwards – insistence that ‘It all happened at the same time’ seems somehow to be undermined by what follows. The orderly and syntactically balanced listing of the three components of the apparently unified experience as discrete parts of a seemingly chronological sequence works against the presentation of these parts as simultaneously apprehended. (And the use of ‘while’ in the final compound clause of the Penguin version doesn't exactly insist on simultaneity.) It's as if the truth of the opening, summary sentence – ‘And what he then saw he never saw again’ – were being enacted in the very way the novel then proceeds to revisit the moment. Tolstoy's novelistic realism, committed as it is to faithfully embodying the experience of life lived in time, resists any impulse towards transcendence even as it re-enacts a moment the very point of which consists in its providing a temporary illusion of such a transcendence. ‘What he then saw he never saw again’ indeed.

where the heroine is at death's door and the culprits and enemies are transformed into higher beings, into brothers forgiving one another everything – into beings who by mutual and complete forgiveness have freed themselves from falsehood, guilt, and crime, and thereby justified themselves with full consciousness that they have acquired a right to do so. 10

But that kind of transfiguration is Dostoevsky's, not Tolstoy's.

Suddenly he felt that what he had taken for perturbation was on the contrary a blissful state of his soul, bringing him joy such as he had never before known. He was not thinking that the law of Christ, which all his life he had wished to fulfil, told him to forgive and love his enemies, but a joyous feeling of forgiveness and love for his enemies filled his soul. (I. 468; emphasis added)

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier for her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling – an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects – that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference. 11

The idea that she might and should have her own independent life appeared to him so dreadful that he hastened to drive it away. That was the abyss into which he feared to look. To put himself in thought and feeling into another being was a mental action foreign to Karenin. (I. 162)

It's hard not to feel that the forgiveness scene represents, at least in part, Tolstoy's attempt to imagine Karenin experiencing for the first (and only?) time in the novel the ‘equivalent centre of self’ in another. And it's hard not to feel, too, that Karenin's experience is continuous with that of Tolstoy himself who is, as it were, here discovering the equivalent centre of self in the formidably consistent character which his at one and the same time merciless and merciful art has created. After all, there's a sense in which Karenin's desire to control Anna is analogous to just such a controlling impulse within Tolstoy himself in his creation of Anna, an impulse which his own desire for ‘vengeance’ struggles – for the most part successfully – to escape from throughout the novel.

But that said, Dostoevsky's ‘mutual and complete forgiveness’ seems so ludicrously remote from the complex reality of the scene which Tolstoy gives us that he might just as well have been reading – or writing – a different novel. There is Anna's painfully deluded idealisation of Karenin as a ‘saint’; there is Vronsky's disturbingly abject sense of humiliation (which leads to his attempted suicide); and, before long, and arguably even tainting the feeling of forgiveness itself, there is Karenin's ‘sense of joy and emotion at the greatness of his own humility’ (I. 489). So that however temporarily ‘transformative’ this moment of apparently true feeling might be represented as being in the life of Karenin, it hardly qualifies as in any sense ‘defining’. It belongs simply, to make use of the Lawrence whom Leavis draws on in his essay on Anna Karenina , to its own ‘particular time, place and circumstance’ and cannot be generalised beyond that. 12 And this applies, too, to the moment towards the end of the novel when, to put it crudely, Levin gets religion.

Of course the shadow of death – which is final and absolute – does hang menacingly over these final chapters. And given what one knows of Tolstoy's life and opinions beyond the novel it can be hard not to think that Levin's new-found faith – formulated as ‘to live for God and the soul’ – is being offered as a generalizable ‘answer’, an irritable reaching after certainty. Even in the midst of death, however, we are, in Anna Karenina , constantly in life; and, in the context of the novel as a whole, Levin's seemingly definitive moment of illumination no more transcends the particular place and time to which it belongs than does Karenin's feeling of forgiveness. It's a moment of feeling peculiar to Levin rather than a general truth. And when Levin does start to try and make sense of it in general terms, asking himself the question of where his unexpected assent to the Christian faith leaves other religions, he quickly recognizes that he's falling into precisely the trap from which his individual experience of faith has temporarily rescued him. He's attempting to generalize something which can only ever be personally felt. Despite his new-found faith, he can't, as he himself says, stop quarrelling with Kitty and trying to resolve the insoluble problems connected with the workings of his estate. Levin, too, cannot for long escape from being himself. 13

Which brings me to those moments in the novel which do seem more insistently to be concerned with the more permanent creation, definition, and affirmation of something like the conflicted self – or selves – of a particular character or characters, moments in which those characters seem, as it were, to be most fully and completely themselves. We can, I believe, identify in these moments a recurrent pattern of thinking about the nature of human life. And that thinking implicitly addresses the old philosophical problem of determinism versus free will which was felt particularly acutely by nineteenth-century writers affected by the intellectual climate of scientific materialism and evolutionary biology so frequently touched on in Anna Karenina . 14

It's a pattern which operates both in the seeming domestic ordinariness of those marvellous chapters leading up to and dramatising Koznyshev's eventually aborted proposal of marriage to Kitty's friend Varenka and in the prolonged and troubled intensity of the chapters eventually issuing in Anna's last moments. And it arguably operates at its most fully tragic in the sustained and deeply considered thinking about Vronsky which takes place in the chapters leading up to and dramatising the fatal accident which occurs at the end of the famous horse race. I want to look first at Koznyshev and Varenka.

Though Levin has his doubts, most of Koznyshev and Varenka's friends seem to agree that they'd be well matched – both are serious-minded, principled individuals and they both have a past which includes a love-affair which was never realised (Koznyshev's lover died). Varenka is clearly attracted to Koznyshev and he to her, despite his previously settled determination to remain true to the memory of his dead lover. All seems to be leading irresistibly to a proposal of marriage on the part of Koznyshev, particularly when the two are left to themselves – apart from the presence of the Oblonsky children – on a mushroom-gathering expedition. Both his feelings and his reason (which he here exercises at some length) seem to be leading Koznyshev towards a proposal, and ‘throwing away his cigar’ he goes ‘towards’ Varenka (who is at this moment light-heartedly ‘defending some mushrooms from Grisha’, Oblonsky's son) ‘with resolute steps’. He rehearses in his mind exactly what he is going to say to her. Both characters seem tense with partly suppressed excitement, glad in one another's company, and our anticipation of the seemingly inevitable outcome, though more pleasurable than theirs perhaps, mimics theirs.

small mushroom cut across its firm pinkish crown by a dry blade of grass from beneath which it had sprung up. Varenka rose when Masha had picked the mushroom, breaking it into two white pieces. ‘It reminds me of my childhood,’ she added. 15

The presence of the Oblonsky children on this occasion is at once natural and, somehow, meaningful, a meaningfulness which seems to find a way into the ambiguous syntax, which leaves it open as to whether Varenka or Masha has broken the mushroom into two. (The Penguin translation, though marginally different, reproduces this syntactical ambiguity.) Continuity – or the possibility of continuity – between past and present, child and adult, suffuses the golden haze and tranquil beauty enveloping the potential lovers. Koznyshev is seemingly touched by Varenka's entry into a world of memory and of feeling: one guesses that it evokes in him, too, past memories – the memory of his own boyhood, perhaps, or of the buried love which he has now determined to forsake. Such a moment of shared feeling ought, one feels, to precipitate his proposal. But he remains silent and Varenka, ‘against her will, and as if by accident’, possibly embarrassed that she might have given too much away, been too ‘confessional’, too ‘emotional’, switches from the mushroom as a facilitator of a shared world of childhood memory to the mushroom as more of a botanical fact: ‘deep in the wood’, where Koznyshev has been searching unsuccessfully, there are, she says, ‘always fewer’. And Koznyshev, at once vexed and at the same time relieved by the retreat into prose, and both wanting and not wanting to bring Varenka back to the suppressed life of memory and feeling which they have in common, ‘without wishing to’, takes up the ball and begins to run with it – out of childhood and the possibility of reciprocated love and into mushrooms. 16

He repeated to himself the words with which he had intended to propose; but instead of those words some unexpected thought caused him to say:

‘What difference is there between the white boleti and the birch-tree variety?’

Varenka's lips trembled with emotion when she replied: ‘There is hardly any difference in the tops, but only in the stems.’

And as soon as those words were spoken, both he and she understood that all was over, and that what ought to have been said would not be said, and their excitement, having reached its climax, began to subside.

‘The stem of the birch-tree boletus reminds one of a dark man's beard two days old,’ remarked Koznyshev calmly.

‘Yes, that's true,’ answered Varenka with a smile, and involuntarily the direction of their stroll changed. They began to return to the children. Varenka felt pained and ashamed, but at the same time she experienced a sense of relief.

Koznyshev when he got home and went again over all his reasons, came to the conclusion that at first he had judged wrongly. He could not be unfaithful to Marie's memory. (II. 148–9)

That they have gone ‘further from the children’ at the moment of the final crisis and return to them as the crisis subsides seems marvellously pregnant with meaning: from the presence of the children as a springboard into a distant past which, when left alone, the two adults might make part of the present, to the presence of the children as a safe insulation from a dangerous world of untapped private feeling, having no bearing on an impersonal and adult discussion of the characteristics and properties of different varieties of mushrooms. From the glimpse of a personal world of feeling which both want to succumb to and both want to resist, they and we move to a more intellectual discussion which restores Koznyshev to his familiar world of abstract thought, enabling him retrospectively to justify his involuntary ‘decision’, and Varenka to a familiar and more comfortable role as forsaken lover which, though ‘pained and ashamed’, she embraces with ‘a sense of relief’. The moment has passed and the proposal will never be made. If what's done cannot be undone, neither can what's undone be done. (The Penguin version of ‘what ought to have been said would not be said’ is even closer to Macbeth : ‘what was to have been said would not be said’.)

The more general question which is implicitly raised by this incident seems to be: ‘Is it simply an accident that the proposal never eventuates or is it that one kind of apparent inevitability is replaced in this defining moment by another, unexpected but no less inevitable, inevitability?’ Are we being led here – even as we're also being led in the direction of a different possibility – to the recognition that what transpires is an unavoidable function of two characters being, in this defining moment, most fully, most ‘essentially’ themselves, two characters who are at the opposite extreme from Kitty and Levin in this respect? (Though Levin's eccentric – if endearing – proposal, which involves Kitty's having to guess the meaning of various letters of the alphabet he writes down on a sheet of paper, arguably suggests that he nevertheless contains something of Koznyshev's ‘intellectuality’ within himself.) Is what happens ‘inevitable’ or ‘accidental’, ‘determined’ or ‘free’?

Suddenly remembering the man who had been run over the day she first met Vronsky, she realized what she had to do. Quickly and lightly descending the steps that led from the water-tank to the rails, she stopped close to the passing train. She looked at the bottom of the trucks, at the bolts and chains and large iron wheels of the slowly-moving front truck, and tried to estimate the middle point between the front and back wheels, and the moment when that point would be opposite her.

‘There!’ she said to herself, looking at the shadow of the truck on the mingled sand and coal dust which covered the sleepers. ‘There, into the very middle, and I shall punish him and escape from everybody and from myself!’

She wanted to fall half-way between the wheels of the front truck, which was drawing level with her, but the little red handbag which she began to take off her arm delayed her, and then it was too late. The middle had passed her. She was obliged to wait for the next truck. A feeling seized her like that she had experienced when preparing to enter the water in bathing, and she crossed herself. The familiar gesture of making the sign of the cross called up a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness, that obscured everything for her, broke, and life showed itself to her for an instant with all its bright past joys. But she did not take her eyes off the wheels of the approaching second truck, and at the very moment when the mid-way point between the wheels drew level, she threw away her red bag, and drawing her head down between her shoulders threw herself forward on her hands under the truck, and with a light movement as if preparing to rise again, immediately dropped on her knees. And at the same moment she was horror-struck at what she was doing. ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Why?’ She wished to rise, to throw herself back, but something huge and relentless struck her on the head and dragged her down. ‘God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling. … A little peasant muttering something was working at the rails. The candle, by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief, and evil, flared up with a brighter light than before, lit up for her all that had before been dark, flickered, began to grow dim, and went out for ever. (II. 380–1)

The last sentence (in both the Penguin and World's Classics versions) is about as rhetorical as Tolstoy gets in Anna Karenina . And the move to the general – which has its own kind of power – is understandable, given that this is the very last ‘defining moment’ of the character around whom the novel is organised. In many ways Anna's character is more fluid, variable, and unpredictable than that of any other of the novel's chief protagonists. But even from her very first introduction, Anna does, as the novel's tragic centre, seem to carry something of an additional burden. The space she is allowed to inhabit, though more extensive than that of any other character, does not always, all the same, seem quite as ‘infinite’ as theirs. And she alone – along with Vronsky – has really ‘bad dreams’. 18

Whatever significance one chooses to ascribe to the notorious French-speaking peasant with the ragged beard who occurs in Anna and Vronsky's dreams and who seems to have some connection with the watchman, run over by a train, whom Anna sees on her first introduction into the novel, he does seem to function as a harbinger of her eventual doom. A dream which, in its most significant details, is dreamed both by Anna and by Vronsky does seem to be a bit too bad to be true. And Tolstoy starts gathering up the threads of this foreshadowing of seemingly inevitable doom – the train, the man who was run over, the meeting with Vronsky consequent upon the conversation with his mother on the train (and, by extension, the place of Serezha in Anna's tragic story), the whole operation of the past in the present – at the beginning of the passage I have just quoted, seeming to confirm the reliability of the portent in the final glimpse of ‘a little peasant muttering something … working at the rails’.

At the same time, however, the interpretation of the watchman and/or the peasant as an ‘omen’ does seem to be made deliberately problematic. It is, quite specifically, Anna – who, as her friend Betsy remarks, is ‘inclined to take things too tragically’(I. 338) – who interprets the dead man she has seen at the station as an ‘omen’ (I. 73). And Anna's own interpretation – within her dream – of the first recorded occurrence of the peasant in her dreams is demonstrably mistaken: she takes it as foreshadowing her death in childbirth (I. 410). Besides, in giving us on more than one occasion an actual – as opposed to a dream – peasant with features corresponding pretty closely to those of the peasant in Anna's nightmare, the novel does seem to be insisting on something like a comprehensible relation between Anna's daytime world and the world of her nightmares. And in telling us, on the last occasion on which she dreams of the peasant, that Anna has had this dream ‘even before her union with Vronsky’ (II. 361) Tolstoy seems to be suggesting that the dream should be taken as an indication of something deeply embedded in Anna's particular nature rather than as a generalisable predictor of her inevitably tragic end or a punishment for her ‘crime’. In a novel which can hardly be said to be sympathetic to late nineteenth-century dabblings in the occult we might justifiably feel that ‘omens’ ought to be treated with some degree of scepticism. After all, Anna's interpretation of the dead watchman as an omen follows pretty hard upon a discussion of spiritualism; and the Countess Lydia Ivanovna's conveniently pliable ‘medium’ does what she wants him to not all that long before Anna's death. This, surely, is part of the ‘network’ (as Tolstoy calls it in his defence of his art) surrounding the appearance of the peasant.

And when one looks at the details of Anna's final moments it would seem that even here Tolstoy is drawing our attention to another possible outcome to Anna's story – just as he does in the mushroom-picking episode which features Koznyshev and Varenka. Anna's ‘little red handbag’ – an object which has accumulated, by now, a good deal of weight in relation to Anna's ‘character’ 19 – initially very nearly succeeds in ‘accidentally’ thwarting her suicide. And her girlish gesture of making the sign of the cross (one ‘omen’ fighting with another) similarly very nearly has the effect of dragging her back from the brink. Even as Anna finally commits herself to her end she draws back from it, ‘horror-struck at what she was doing’. Her moment of extinction is almost contemporaneous with her desire to continue the struggle. Her death might be inevitable but Tolstoy seems to be insisting that it is not, all the same, necessarily so.

But the finest balance between possibility and inevitability – or between two possible inevitabilities – can be found, I believe, in the horse race and the chapters leading up to it. If we were reading Anna Karenina for the first time, it would be possible to read the sequence of chapters which precedes the race itself as not all that much more than a chronological sequence of events, a credibly particular narrative with no meaning beyond itself, as it were. And even when we read it in the full or partial knowledge of what is coming we experience the sequence as almost equally balanced between potential triumph and potential disaster.

The unsettling effect of the letter from Vronsky's mother and note from his brother insisting that they need to discuss his relationship with Anna is offset by the way in which, along with Anna's unexpected announcement of her pregnancy, it goads Vronsky into committing himself to his and Anna's future together (though, admittedly, Anna's refusal to discuss that future is disturbing); the shadow which Anna's son Serezha casts over her and Vronsky's ‘affair’, and the indefinable feeling of revulsion which Vronsky experiences in this connection, are compensated by the fact that on this occasion Serezha is not present and Vronsky has Anna to himself; the unwelcome downpour (Frou-Frou, one gathers, is not a wet-track specialist) gives way to welcome sunshine; the Englishman Cord, who knows his horses, thinks Makhotin's Gladiator is stronger than Frou-Frou but Vronsky is the better rider; the hurried visit to Anna and then to the horse-dealer Bryansky (whom Vronsky has honourably promised to pay before the race) makes Vronsky dishonourably late for the race meeting but not for his own race, with Cord assuring him there is nothing to worry about; Vronsky's uncharacteristic neglect of Frou-Frou's training and the finer details of her saddling – because of his being preoccupied with Anna – seem relatively insignificant, given that, in Vronsky's absence, the horse has been well prepared by Cord, an expert trainer, and is judged by Vronsky to be in the very best condition; though Vronsky might seem to have been unsettled by his hurried visit to Anna and what transpires during it, Tolstoy assures us before the race begins that he has not lost his self-control and is looking forward to seeing Anna after the race; and, despite Frou-Frou's being fidgety before the race other horses are misbehaving too and, during the race, Vronsky seems to be following the advice which Cord has given him beforehand about how to handle the horse: ‘Don't hold back or urge on your horse at an obstacle. Let her have her own way – lead if you can but do not despair till the last moment if you are behind.’ Yashvin's bet on Vronsky winning the race seems somehow to encapsulate our conflicting expectations of his chances. As a notoriously lucky gambler Yashvin seems once again to be onto a sure thing. But are we to think that Yashvin's having made a killing the night before militates against the possibility of his winning once again? Or is the whole point about lucky gamblers that they seem consistently to defy the odds? 20

The sustained excitement of the race itself becomes the ultimate expression of these finely poised, conflicting possibilities. It's a case where the straightforward excitement of a well-told story – and this must surely be the most exciting horse race in literature – seems completely at one with the larger emotional, intellectual, and moral meanings and effects of that story. And Tolstoy's telling of the story at this point embodies his art at both its most artless and its most artful. The introductory paragraph is both a straightforward description of the course and a foreshadowing of the race itself: we learn that the ‘Irish bank’, the sixth of nine obstacles, is ‘one of the most difficult’; and, almost unconsciously, we register that, with that successfully cleared and a lead secured, the race is as good as won. The three false starts make us a little uneasy but, with the race at last under way, we settle down to enjoy it, with most of us, I imagine, like most of the imagined spectators, anxious to witness a Vronsky victory but nevertheless vaguely disturbed by the succession of events leading up to the race. Frou-Frou begins in a way which pulls our feelings first one way and then the other: being ‘excited and over-nervous’ she loses ground at the start; but we're already familiar with her highly strung nature, and almost immediately Gladiator seems to have become her only serious competitor. But is Vronsky disobeying Cord's advice in holding Frou-Frou back as she tugs at the reins? Or did that advice apply only to how to handle her when she reaches an obstacle? 21

To continue in this way would be to risk substituting a summary of the effect of Tolstoy's writing for the experience which that writing embodies: the ‘substance’ of Tolstoy's rendering of the race itself, to adapt his own account of his art, quoted earlier, ‘is not made up of ideas … but of something else’, a something rendered ‘indirectly’ in the way the race unfolds. But in a general kind of way we can see this ‘substance’ here in terms of something poised precariously but completely convincingly between one inevitability and another, between the inevitability of Vronsky's triumph and the inevitability of his defeat. And it is integral to the way in which the race acts out these opposing inevitabilities that Vronsky should be felt as having secured victory at the very moment in which he has, as it turns out, fallen.

Vronsky was touching the ground with one foot. He scarcely had time to free his leg before Frou-Frou fell on her side, and snorting heavily and with her delicate damp neck making vain efforts to rise, began struggling on the ground at his feet, like a wounded, fluttering bird. Owing to Vronsky's awkward movement she had dropped her hind legs and broken her back. But he only understood this much later. Now he only saw that Makhotin was quickly galloping away, while he, reeling, stood alone on the muddy, stationary ground; before him, breathing heavily, lay Frou-Frou, who, bending her head toward him, gazed at him with her beautiful eyes. Still not understanding what had happened, Vronsky pulled at the reins. The mare again began to struggle like a fish, causing the flaps of the saddle to creak; she got her front legs free, but unable to lift her hind-quarters, struggled and immediately again fell on her side.

His face distorted with passion, pale and with quivering jaw, Vronsky kicked her with his heel in the belly and again pulled at the reins. But she did not move and, nuzzling the ground, only looked at her master with eloquent eyes.

‘Ah, ah ah!’ groaned Vronsky, seizing his head. ‘Ah! What have I done?’ he exclaimed. ‘The race lost! And the fault mine – shameful and unpardonable. And this dear, unfortunate mare ruined! Ah! What have I done!’

Onlookers, a doctor, an attendant, and officers of his regiment ran toward him.

To his regret he felt that he was himself sound and unhurt. The mare had broken her back, and it was decided to shoot her. Vronsky was unable to reply to questions or to speak to anyone. He turned away and, without picking up the cap that had fallen from his head, left the racecourse without knowing where he was going. He felt miserable. For the first time in his life he experienced the worst kind of misfortune – one that was irretrievable, and caused by his own fault.

Yashvin overtook him with his cap and led him home, and in half an hour Vronsky came to himself. But the memory of that steeplechase long remained the most painful and distressing memory of his life. 22

There's a sense in which the whole of Vronsky's character and story is concentrated in this race, including his very last appearance towards the end of the novel, on his way to war, a broken man, not caring whether he lives or dies. The horse race distils his love of Anna, his pride in his own body, his sense of honour, his ambition, his confidence of success, his genuine love of a fine horse and his vulnerability, the susceptibility to shame which is the other side of his sense of honour, his over -confidence, the precarious instability of his relationship with Anna. And Vronsky's guilt, his ambition, his feeling of shame, his love of Anna, and his affection for his horse combine in his attributing the disaster entirely to himself.

From this point of view Vronsky's ‘character’ determines both the fall itself and Vronsky's response to it. And that character is itself felt both as determined by the events and actions that lead up to the race and as itself determining those events. But – to take one tiny detail from Book I, part II, chapter xix: is it ‘inevitable’ or ‘accidental’ that the ‘plump officer’ should enter the regimental mess at the point at which Vronsky is having breakfast? Or that Vronsky should irritably respond to that officer's jocular taunts about his weight by ordering a glass of sherry (I. 199)? And do either of these things, however infinitesimally, affect the outcome of the horse race?

Questions of this kind are essentially unanswerable because the details mentioned, however trivial, become part of a sequence which we experience as simultaneously accidental and inevitable, free and determined. And to go along with Vronsky himself in attributing the ‘blame’ for what happens entirely to him would be to ignore the way in which the response which the race itself elicits from a reader goes beyond any question of individual culpability. Frou-Frou herself, excited by the fact that Gladiator is in front, earlier jumps too soon and clips the barrier with her hoof: the ‘character’ of Frou-Frou equally plays its part in determining the outcome of the race (I. 224). As Makhotin gallops away to victory, the ‘stationary’ ground on which Vronsky is inconsolably fixed is described as ‘muddy’. Are we being reminded, almost imperceptibly, of the part played by the rain in determining the result? Isn't there a sense in which we read the chapter simply as a particular , unpredictable, and ‘accidental’ series of events?

The continuity between the Tolstoy who is writing the novel and the embodied illusion of life as it is actually lived which is produced by the writing is so great in these chapters that it becomes almost impossible to decide what to attribute to ‘chance’ and what to ‘design’, what belongs to conscious and what to unconscious meaning. It would be absurdly crude to say that Frou-Frou symbolises Anna, or Gladiator Karenin. (Which hasn't prevented something like this from having become a standard way of discussing the way Frou-Frou ‘functions’ in the novel: as ‘symbolising’ Anna, as symbolically foreshadowing her death and as insisting on Vronsky's culpability in Anna's eventual suicide. My point is that the ‘meaning’ of Frou-Frou's death in relation to Anna and to Vronsky can only be grasped through our fully and simultaneously grasping what it means ‘in itself’: the premature death of a beautiful horse.) But is it merely an ‘accident’ that Frou-Frou should be a nervous, beautiful, highly strung mare whose ‘ruin’ wrings out of Vronsky his deepest, most heartfelt expression of regret and out of us an answering cry of horror at living beauty irretrievably destroyed? Or that just before the race Vronsky should be involuntarily admiring the gelding Gladiator at the very moment when an acquaintance with whom he is talking casually remarks: ‘Ah, there is Karenin! … He is looking for his wife’ (I. 220)?

‘Character’ or ‘Fate’, ‘inevitable’ or ‘accidental’, ‘particular’ or ‘general’, ‘determinism’ or ‘free will’? Tolstoy's late nineteenth-century realism is about as far from a symbolic art as it's possible to be. And it's significant that, notoriously, he didn't fully understand Shakespearian poetic drama. But in meaning simply itself with such luminous – and, at times, numinous – clarity and simplicity Tolstoy's art, in episodes such as this, seems constantly to be meaning more than itself. Perhaps Shakespeare's poetic drama and Tolstoy's novelistic realism amount, in the end, to the same thing, distilling as they do the particular and the general, ‘experience’ and the meaning of experience, into what we apprehend as a single whole: ‘music heard so deeply | That it is not heard at all, but you are the music | While the music lasts’. 23

She seemed to herself to be, after all, only drifted towards the tremendous decision: – but drifting depends on something besides the currents, when the sails have been set beforehand. 25

In the very act of seeming to distinguish between the ‘determined’ and the ‘free’, the conscious and the unconscious, ‘drifted’ and ‘drifting’, Eliot's prose draws back from the distinction and conflates them: has Gwendolen set the sails ‘beforehand’ or have they been set for her by a process beyond her conscious knowledge? Vronsky's comparable act of ‘free choice’ is at once determined by everything that precedes it and in turn determines what comes after it. And it is part of Vronsky's ‘character’ precisely because it is at the same time part of a whole sequence of ‘events’ which at once forms that character and is formed by it. Even the very word ‘determined’ contains this kind of irreducible complexity within itself, its active sense clashing with its passive. 26 The ‘inevitable’ is simply the ‘accidental’ looked at from a different point of view. ‘In my beginning is my end’ writes the poet T. S. Eliot. And in these defining moments either of concentrated intensity (such as Anna's suicide or the horse race) or seemingly more relaxed but no less charged familiarity (such as the mushroom-picking episode) Tolstoy the novelist adds – ‘and at every discrete but related, intermediate stage in between’. ‘In my end is my beginning.’

‘ Anna Karenina : Thought and Significance in a Great Creative Work’, Cambridge Quarterly , 1/1 (1965) pp. 5–27; repr. in Anna Karenina and Other Essays (London 1967) pp. 9–32.

See e.g. Amy Mandelker, Framing ‘Anna Karenina’: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel (Columbus, Ohio 1993).

Introduction Anna Karenina , trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Harmondsworth 2006) pp. xix–xx.

‘Tragedy and the “Medium”’, in The Common Pursuit (London 1958) p. 130.

See Anna Karenina , trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, World's Classics (London 1973) I. 489. References throughout this article are to book and page number of this edition.

David Parker discusses George Eliot and Tolstoy in ways that overlap with my own in his Ethics, Theory, and the Novel (Cambridge 1994).

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent , World's Classics (Oxford 1983) p. 118. The discussion of Kitty and Varenka in this paragraph is based on Anna Karenina , I. 241–68.

The discussion of Dolly here is based on II. 194–237. The quotation can be found on p. 237.

I'm quoting here, of course, from To the Lighthouse , World's Classics (Oxford 1992) p. 218.

Quoted in Aylmer Maude's introduction to the World's Classics edition, p. vii.

Middlemarch , World's Classics (Oxford 1988) p. 173; emphasis added.

The Lawrence formulation here comes from his essay on ‘The Novel’, repr. in Phoenix II, ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (London 1968) p. 422. Leavis takes Arnold rather than Dostoevsky as his foil in discussing the ‘forgiveness’ scene, but my own reading of the scene closely follows his.

The discussion here is based on Book II, pp. 382–438.

Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots : Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London 1983), is, of course, relevant here.

This, and the preceding quotations relating to Koznyshev and Varenka, come from II. 144–7.

The quotations relating to Koznyshev and Varenka come from II. 144–8.

Preface to the Penguin edn., p. ix.

My somewhat cryptic allusions here are to Hamlet , ed. Harold Jenkins, Arden (London 1982), II. ii. 253–5: ‘Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams.’

Gareth Jones discusses this and other ‘omens’ in his introduction to the 1995 World's Classics edition of Anna Karenina . And the meaning of the ‘little red handbag’, like the meaning of the peasant, has attracted many eager interpreters, too numerous to list here.

This discussion of the events leading up to the horse race draws on I. 198–222. Yashvin's bet on Vronsky seems to be deliberately echoed in Kitty and Levin's playing the ‘will-he-won't-he’ game with flower petals in the lead-up to Koznyshev's aborted proposal. Levin cheats by pulling off two petals at once. Kitty complains, and Levin agrees not to count ‘the tiny one’ but, perhaps for the sake of preserving marital harmony, the novel on this occasion doesn't tell us if a result is eventually reached. Serendipitously, even the translators seem at odds on this one: the Penguin translation has Levin protesting that ‘the little one doesn't count’ (p. 561) rather than agreeing not to count the little one. Not knowing Russian, I'll settle for an each-way bet.

Quotations here are from I. 223.

The long quotation is from I. 226–7; the previous quotations are from pp. 225–6.

T. S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’, V.

See e.g. I. 114: ‘She was afraid of giving way to these delirious thoughts. Something seemed to draw her to them, but she had the power to give way to them or to resist.’ Or: ‘It evoked both in Vronsky and in Anna a feeling such as a sailor might have who saw by the compass that the direction in which he was swiftly sailing diverged widely from the right course but was quite unable to stop, and felt that every moment was taking him farther and farther astray, and that to acknowledge to himself that he was diverging from the right direction was tantamount to acknowledging that he was lost’ (I. 210), There's clearly an overlap here with the passage from Daniel Deronda , which I go on to quote.

Daniel Deronda , ed. Terence Cave (Harmondsworth 1995) p. 303.

C. K. Stead makes this same point about the fruitful ambiguity of the word ‘determined’, and, more generally, about the unsatisfactoriness of an implied opposition between the ‘determined’ and the ‘free’, in his fine autobiographical memoir South-West of Eden (Auckland 2010) pp. 274–6. And I don't mean to imply that he is alone in this respect.

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• Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

• Literature Notes
• Themes in Anna Karenina
• Book Summary
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Part 1: Chapters 1-5
• Part 1: Chapters 6-11
• Part 1: Chapters 12-15
• Part 1: Chapters 16-23
• Part 1: Chapters 24-27
• Part 1: Chapters 28-33
• Part 1: Chapter 34
• Part 2: Chapters 1-3
• Part 2: Chapters 4-11
• Part 2: Chapters 12-17
• Part 2: Chapters 18-25
• Part 2: Chapters 26-29
• Part 2: Chapters 30-35
• Part 3: Chapters 1-6
• Part 3: Chapters 7 -11
• Part 3: Chapters 12-23
• Part 3: Chapters 24-32
• Part 4: Chapters 1-23
• Part 5: Chapters 1-6
• Part 5: Chapters 7-13
• Part 5: Chapters 14-20
• Part 5: Chapters 21-33
• Part 6: Chapters 1-5
• Part 6: Chapters 6-15
• Part 6: Chapters 16-25
• Part 6: Chapters 26-32
• Part 7: Chapters 1-12
• Part 7: Chapters 13-22
• Part 7: Chapters 23-31
• Part 8: Chapters 1-5
• Part 8: Chapters 6-19
• Character Analysis
• Konstantin Levin
• Count Vronsky
• Alexey Karenin
• Kitty Shtcherbatsky
• Dolly Oblonsky
• Stiva Oblonsky
• Character Map
• Leo Tolstoy Biography
• Critical Essays
• Plot Structure and Technique in Anna Karenina
• Essay Questions
• Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essays Themes in Anna Karenina

Containing a discussion of at least three marriages, rather than just one as in Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina provides an authoritative and thorough, if not definitive, treatment of the subject.

Stiva's relationship with Dolly suggests the incomplete relationship between Karenin and Anna. The Oblonskys' problems only seem lighter because of the double standard: It is less serious for a husband to stray than for a wife, since family unity depends on the woman. Tolstoy shows us that men's primary interests are outside the home, whereas women, like Dolly, center their existence on the family. Stiva, Vronsky, and Karenin, unlike Levin, divide their lives sharply between their homes and amusements, and they are each startled, through the incidents of the novel, to confront the previously ignored feelings of their wives. The divided pattern of these marriages, moreover, allows the dissatisfied partner to seek outside fulfillment of social, emotional, or sexual needs. Anna exemplifies the divided nature of an unfulfilled spouse: During her bout of fever, she admits her affection for Karenin though another part of her soul desires Vronsky. Without solving these marital problems, Tolstoy develops his characters so they adjust to their incomplete relationships. Dolly dotes on her children, Anna gives Seriozha the love she cannot express toward Karenin (conversely lacking deep affection for her love-child Ani), while the husbands commit themselves either to work (like Karenin) or pleasure (like Stiva and Vronsky).

Tolstoy thus depicts the hopeless marriage patterns in urban society. Despite showing the blissful union of Kitty and Levin, Tolstoy ultimately states that marriage, and other sexually-based relationships, weaken the individual's quest for "immanent goodness." He prefigures this later doctrine as the love between Anna and Vronsky deteriorates and by the lighthearted intrusion of Vassenka Veslovsky.

While Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina, however, he still exulted in the success of his own marriage. The result is that Levin and Kitty have the only mutually complete union of the novel. Their marriage is a fulfillment, not a compromise, because Levin's family represents an integral part of his search for essential reality. His outside interests and his love are vehicles which aid him to discover the truth of inner goodness. Because Levin's life is more meaningful than the succession of superficial interests which comprise the lives of Stiva, Vronsky, Karenin, his marriage is more meaningful.

From Tolstoy's scheme of Levin's salvation, we must conclude that women are secondary and not individuated. Since a woman's happiness derives from her family, then the wife of a soul satisfied husband will find emotional satisfaction. Tolstoy seems to say that if either Dolly or Anna loved Levin, they, too, would find personal significance in their marriage.

Historical Necessity

Although Tolstoy has provided an exhaustive discussion of historic causality in War and Peace, his concept of "historical necessity" informs the destiny of characters in Anna Karenina. The term expresses the conditions in which human consciousness operates: "necessity" provides the form, "consciousness" provides the content. This is merely to paraphrase the thesis that history describes the dynamics of personality (or culture) responding to environmental challenge.

"Historical necessity" is illustrated in Anna Karenina according to the personal destinies of the main characters as they react to changing circumstances. Anna's adultery, for example, provides the necessity — that is, the structure — in which Anna, Vronsky, Karenin must retrench their values to overcome the crisis they face. How they meet the challenge of their situation generates the dynamics of the story. Levin's "necessity," how to come to terms with death, forces him to evolve a personal philosophy — a "moral consciousness" — in order to fulfill his life demands.

The nature of each one's response to his particular challenge, however, is defined by the heredity, education, environment which limits his nature. These factors explain why Vronsky remains selfish and fails in love, why Anna commits suicide, why Karenin succumbs to Lydia Ivanovna's influence, why Kitty cannot be like Varenka.

Historical necessity, therefore, is merely a verbal construct which helps us to explain the context in which human awareness operates. In War and Peace Tolstoy gives special attention to the forces of mass consciousness and cultural change. Anna Karenina, on a much more intimate level, illustrates the forces which allow individuals to confront challenges. They must, like Levin, overcome the crisis, compromise through stagnation, like Karenin and Vronsky, or succumb through death, like Anna.

Minor Themes

The minor themes, as well as the major ones, all stem from Tolstoy's single-minded morality. His controversial anti-war views, expressed in Part 8, became formalized among the doctrines of Tolstoyan Christianity. A Christian's first duty, Tolstoy later stated, is to abstain from living by the work of others and from participating in the organized violence of the state. While all forms of violence are evil, any government compulsion shares this taint, since the individual must be free to follow his own inner goodness, seeking for himself what is right and wrong. These as yet unformalized doctrines motivate Levin's disinterest in the "Slavonic question" and make him challenge why Russian soldiers should murder Turks.

Despite Tolstoy's anarchic morality, he believes that God's judgment operates the sanctions of moral law. The Pauline epigraph which appears at the novel's title page expresses this fatalism: "Vengeance is mine and I shall repay, saith the Lord" (Romans, 12:19). In other words, the good character gains reward, the bad one is punished; Levin achieves salvation, Anna finds death. Only God judges, not men, says Tolstoy. Depicting the gossiping members of Anna's social set with pitiless irony as they glory in the scandal, Tolstoy chastises these human judges.

Previous Plot Structure and Technique in Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina

By leo tolstoy, anna karenina study guide.

Anna Karenina was published in serial form from 1873-1877. It created a great stir in society?reports from the time claim that everyone in Russian Society was discussing the book and waiting eagerly for the next installment to appear. The critical reaction was mostly positive and, like the novel itself, passionate. It was published on the heels of Tolstoy's great opus, War and Peace (1863-1869) and solidified his reputation as one of Russia's most important 19th-century writers. This was quite a feat, given that his contemporaries included Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gogol and Lermontov.

Great changes were taking place during the mid-1870s in Russia. The serfs had been liberated in 1861. This was a long-overdue economic change in Russian society, but unfortunately it was not matched with land reform. As a result, most former serfs continued to work on the large farms as "free" peasants. The "land question," also known as the "peasant question," was a major political issue in Russia at the time of Anna Karenina . Tolstoy weighs in on this issue in many parts of the book, especially Part Three.

At the same time, Russia was slowly and painfully undergoing a process of modernization. Western Europe had already completed many stages of industrialization, and Russia was far behind. Many of the new changes that were happening within Russia were in response to the changes in Europe. Western thought about democracy, liberalism, and social change accompanied the technological innovations that were imported throughout the mid-1870s and later 19th century. While many intellectuals and members of society saw this phenomenon in a positive light, others, like Tolstoy, were horrified by the negative aspects of Western "progress"?the rise of the urban center, the emergence of capitalism, decadent living, and the disconnection of people from the land.

Some of Tolstoy's horror was well-placed: not all Western innovations would work in Russia. For all of its backwardness, Russia was not Europe, and few ideas or technological innovations would change that fact. The scene in which Levin attempts to implement a new agricultural theory on his farm and meets with resistance from his peasants, for example, has a basis in reality.

A great deal of the spiritual underpinnings of Anna Karenina, especially Levin's struggle to find the Lord, are based on Tolstoy's own life. One critic has called Anna Karenina a "spiritual autobiography." Tolstoy went through many religious crises in his life and struggled to find a way of living religiously that fought against the hypocrises and greed of the Greek Orthodox Church. Though the Church is not addressed specifically in this novel?indeed, Tolstoy was excommunicated a few years after its publication and was probably being careful not to upset them with any commentary in Anna Karenina?it is vital to think about Tolstoy's own spiritual questions when reading this book.

Although the critical reaction to Anna Karenina was favorable and the public was shaken by the strength of both the story and Tolstoy's prose, Tolstoy himself was dissatisfied with the novel. He called it "scribblings," and had a great deal of trouble writing it. He was in the midst of several religious crises and soon became more interested in publishing didactic pamphlets and instructions than he was in writing novels. Indeed, with the exceptions of the great short story The Death of Ivan Ilyich and another novel, Resurrection, he spent the rest of his life writing didactic material about Christianity, education, and politics.

Anna Karenina Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Anna Karenina is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Russian literature

Check out some of the themes below and see if you can find some lessons within them:

https://www.gradesaver.com/anna-karenina/study-guide/themes

Adultery in Leo Tolstoy's, Anna Karenina

Like jealousy, fidelity is a concern of the three relationships highlighted in the novel. When a young man flirts with Kitty, Levin "already saw himself as a deceived husband, who was needed by his wife and her lover only in order to provide them...

Why Is Anna Karenina a Dystopian Novel?

Sorry, I just don't see the criteria for a dystopian narrative set here.

Study Guide for Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina study guide contains a biography of Leo Tolstoy, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Anna Karenina
• Anna Karenina Summary
• Character List
• Part One Summary and Analysis

Essays for Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Anna Karenina.

• Clash of Movements
• Mixed Messages; Judgment in Anna Karenina
• Levin and Mowing
• Parallels to Destruction and Conflict in Anna and Vronsky's Love Story as Evinced From Their First Meeting
• Russia in Transition: Anna Karenina and the Ever-Changing Russian Landscape

Lesson Plan for Anna Karenina

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Anna Karenina
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Anna Karenina Bibliography

E-Text of Anna Karenina

The Anna Karenina e-text contains the full text of Anna Karenina.

• Part One: Chapters 1-12
• Part One: Chapters 13-24
• Part One: Chapters 25-34
• Part Two: Chapters 1-12
• Part Two: Chapters 13-24

Wikipedia Entries for Anna Karenina

• Introduction
• Main characters
• Plot introduction
• Style and major themes

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Reflections on Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

 Though Kitty’s toilette, coiffure and all the preparations for the ball had cost her a good deal of trouble and planning, she was now entering the ballroom, in her intricate tulle gown over a pink underskirt, as freely and simply as if all these rosettes and laces, and all the details of her toilette, had not cost her and her household a moment’s attention, as if she had been born in this tulle and lace, with this tall coiffure, topped by a rose with two leaves. … Kitty was having one of her happy days. Her dress was not tight anywhere, the lace bertha stayed in place, the rosettes did not get crumpled or come off; the pink shoes with high, curved heels did not pinch, but delighted her little feet. The thick braids of blond hair held to her little head like her own. All three buttons on her long gloves, which fitted but did not change the shape of her arms, fastened without coming off. The black velvet ribbon of her locket encircled her neck with particular tenderness. This velvet ribbon was enchanting, and at home, as she looked at her neck in the mirror, she felt it could almost speak. All the rest might be doubted, but the ribbon was enchanting. Kitty also smiled here at the ball as she glanced at it in the mirror. In her bare shoulders and arms she felt a cold, marble-like quality that she especially liked. Her eyes shone, and her red lips could not help smiling from the sense of her own attractiveness.

Anna was not in lilac, as Kitty had absolutely wanted, but in a low-cut black velvet dress, which revealed her full shoulders and bosom, as if shaped from old ivory, and her rounded arms with their very small, slender hands. The dress was all trimmed with Venetian guipure lace. On her head, in her black hair, her own without admixture, was a small garland of pansies, and there was another on her black ribbon sash among the white lace. Her coiffure was inconspicuous. Conspicuous were only those wilful little ringlets of curly hair that adorned her, always coming out on her nape and temples. Around her firm, shapely neck was a string of pearls. Kitty had seen Anna every day, was in love with her, and had imagined her inevitably in lilac. But now, seeing her in black, she felt that she had never understood all her loveliness. She saw her now in a completely new and, for her, unexpected way. Now she understood that Anna could not have been in lilac, that her loveliness consisted precisely in always standing out from what she wore, that what she wore was never seen on her. And the black dress with luxurious lace was not seen on her; it was just a frame, and only she was seen — simple, natural, graceful, and at the same time gay and animated. ... She was enchanting in her simple black dress, enchanting were her full arms with the bracelets on them, enchanting her firm neck with its string of pearls, enchanting her curly hair in disarray, enchanting the graceful, light movements of her small feet and hands, enchanting that beautiful face in its animation; but there was something terrible and cruel in her enchantment.

Oh, this is just the kind of detailed, thoughtful post I missed so much when you weren't blogging, Carolyn! Yet again, I have to say how happy I am to have you back! I tried and abandoned Anna Karenina so many times as a teenager simply because I could not stomach Anna herself (I felt the same about Emma Bovary). At the time, I could not read books with characters I did not sympathise with and I could not sympathise with characters I did not like. The liking was the real issue and one I've now sufficiently overcome, enough to think it is time I gave this book another try. I loved War and Peace (where Tolstoy also goes off into some truly bizarre, non-plot-related tangents, philosophizing to his heart's content) so I'm really interested to read more of Tolstoy's work and see how it compares. I'm afraid I'm going to horrify you by discovering I'm one of Levin's fans but I think our friendship is strong enough to endure that ;)

Thanks, Claire. I worry that my writing is too random, but I'm glad you like it. Thinking about this book further by writing about it here certainly helped me get more out of it. Maybe I can just relate more to both Anna and Emma Bovary, sadly! I sometimes wish I could live a life of romantic fantasy, so I read these books to remind me of reality. But if you do become one of Levin's fans (haha, yes I'll definitely still be friends with you if that happens! Thinking about it further, I'm more annoyed with the way Tolstoy treated his wife, say, than anything Levin does. He's kind of sweet, actually.), then you'll have lots to enjoy in this book, since as I say, I think it's more focused on him than Anna Karenina anyways. It definitely goes into what he's thinking more often than what she thinks. I'd heard Tolstoy goes off on side-tangents in War & Peace, although I'm still planning to read it someday! Just not this year.

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Anna Karenina

Leo tolstoy, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Beginning with this famous opening line, Anna Karenina is an exploration of the complications of family life. Early nineteenth-century Russian novels often featured idealized portrayals domestic bliss. Family life and individual freedom might seem initially to be contrasting forces throughout the novel, but even though characters may think they will have more freedom if they reject all of the conventions of family life, these choices can ironically give them the least amount of personal control and autonomy.

Anna Karenina challenges the conceptions both of individual freedom and of marital bliss, showing how complex family life can be by offering parallel portraits of several intertwined families. The three main family units in the novel are the Oblonskys, the Karenins, and the Levins. Each of the three main family units offers a very different option for the evolution of family life: the fulfilled, happy marriage; the marriage that sticks together in spite of troubles; and the dissolved family.

The Levins begin unattached but end in marriage and a stable family life. Kitty is initially in love with Vronsky and refuses Levin’s first proposal, which crushes him, but then Kitty is crushed when Vronsky rejects her to pursue Anna. However, they eventually reconcile and wed. Levin’s second proposal to Kitty is at the structural and emotional center of the novel. Levin and Kitty communicate through code, showing that they are already united before they even need the words to prove it. Although in the initial period after they marry, Levin is afraid that his individual freedom has been compromised when Kitty comes to live with him on in the country, they develop a deep, tender family life together, first by caring for Levin’s dying brother and then through the birth of their child.

The Oblonsky family is a story of sticking together: even though their relationship is shaken by infidelity, the Oblonsky family remains constant throughout the novel. Like the Levins, the Oblonsky family also ends happily in that it remains intact, but this intactness comes at a steep price, and many tensions remain. At the beginning of the novel, the Oblonsky family appears to be at the breaking point. Oblonsky Oblonsky, Anna’s brother, is married to Dolly but has an affair with the governess. But even though Dolly knows that Oblonsky has been unfaithful, she decides not to leave him––she salvages the marriage for the sake of the family. The Oblonskys reconcile themselves through compromise.

The Karenin family comes to a tragic end over the course of the novel as their initial family unit falls to pieces. Anna runs away with Vronsky, but Karenin refuses to grant her a divorce. Even though she has been unfaithful and her reputation is eventually ruined, Karenin does not want to compromise his own position in society. Eventually, both her relationships as well as her position in society crumble. After Anna’s suicide, Karenin accepts custody of Annie, Anna’s daughter by Vronsky, thus providing a glimmer of hope for the shattered family to rebuild in the future.

Marriage and Family Life ThemeTracker

Marriage and Family Life Quotes in Anna Karenina

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

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. It was as if a surplus of something so overflowed in her being that it expressed itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her smile.

And the son, just like the husband, produced in Anna a feeling akin to disappointment. She had imagined him better than he was in reality. She had to descend to reality to enjoy him as he was.

“Don’t you know that you are my whole life? But I know no peace and cannot give you any. All of myself, my love...yes. I cannot think of you and myself separately. You and I are one for me. And I do not see the possibility of peace ahead either for me or for you. I see the possibility of despair, of unhappiness... or I see the possibility of happiness, such happiness!...Isn’t it possible?” he added with his lips only; but she heard him.

She strained all the forces of her mind to say what she ought to say; but instead she rested her eyes on him, filled with love, and made no answer.

And he felt as a murderer must feel when he looks at the body he has deprived of life. This body deprived of life was their love, the first period of their love... Shame at her spiritual nakedness weighed on her and communicated itself to him. But, despite all the murderer’s horror before the murdered body, he had to cut this body into pieces and hide it, he had to make use of what the murderer had gained by his murder.

“Not a word more,” she repeated, and with an expression of cold despair on her face, which he found strange, she left him. She felt that at that moment she could not put into words her feeling of shame, joy, and horror before this entry into a new life, and she did not want to speak of it, to trivialize this feeling with imprecise words. But later, too, the next day and the day after that, she not only found no words in which she could express all the complexity of these feelings, but was unable even to find thoughts in which she could reflect with herself on all that was in her soul.

“What was that? What? What was that terrible thing I saw in my dream? Yes, yes. The muzhik tracker, I think, small, dirty, with a disheveled beard, was bending down and doing something, and he suddenly said some strange words in French. Yes that’s all there was to the dream,” he said to himself. “But why was it so horrible?”

“And this something turned, and I saw it was a muzhik with a disheveled beard, small and frightening. I wanted to run away, but he bent over a sack and rummaged in it with his hands...” And she showed how he rummaged in the sack. There was horror on her face. And Vronsky, recalling his dream, felt the same horror filling his soul.

“I cannot forgive, I do not want to, and I consider it unjust. I did everything for that woman, and she trampled everything in the mud that is so suitable to her. I am not a wicked man, I have never hated anyone, but I hate her with all the strength of my soul, and I cannot even forgive her, because I hate her so much for all the evil she has done me!”

“Here,” he said, and wrote the initial letters: w, y, a, m: t, c, b, d, i, m, n, o, t? These letters meant: “When you answered me: ‘that cannot be,’ did it mean never or then?” ... She wrote, t, I, c, g, n, o, a ... And he wrote three letters. But she was reading after his hand, and before he finished writing, she finished it herself and wrote the answer: “Yes.”

All that night and morning Levin had lived completely unconsciously and had felt himself completely removed from the conditions of material life. He had not eaten for a whole day, had not slept for two nights, had spent several hours undressed in the freezing cold, yet felt not only fresh and healthy as never before but completely independent of his body.

Often and much as they had both heard about the belief that whoever is first to step on the rug will be the head in the family, neither Levin nor Kitty could recall it as they made those few steps. Nor did they hear the loud remarks and disputes that, in the observation of some, he had been the first, or, in the opinions of others, they had steps on it together.

The sight of his brother and the proximity of death renewed in Levin’s soul that feeling of horror at the inscrutability and, with that, the nearness and inevitability of death, which had seized him on that autumn evening when his brother had come for a visit. The feeling was now stronger than before; he felt even less capable than before of understanding the meaning of death, and its inevitability appeared still more horrible to him; but now, thanks to his wife’s nearness, the feeling did not drive him to despair: in spite of death, he felt the necessity to live and to love. He felt that love saved him from despair and that under the threat of despair this love was becoming still stronger and purer.

But even without looking in the mirror she thought it was still not too late. She remembered Sergei Ivanovich, who was especially amiable to her, and Stiva’s friend, the kindly Turovtsyn, who had helped her take care of her children when they had scarlet fever and was in love with her. And there was also one quite young man who, as her husband had told her jokingly, found her the most beautiful of all the sisters. And Darya Alexandrovna pictured the most passionate and impossible love affairs.

He knew and felt only that what was being accomplished was similar to what had been accomplished a year ago in a hotel in a provincial capital, on the deathbed of his brother Nikolai. But that had been grief and this was joy. But that grief and this joy were equally outside all ordinary circumstances of life, were like holes in this ordinary life, through which something higher showed. And just as painful, as tormenting in its coming, was what was now accomplished; and just as inconceivably, in contemplating this higher thing, the soul rose to such heights as it had never known before, where reason was no longer able to overtake it.

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be. But if you don’t love me, it would be better to say so.”

“No, you’re going in vain,” she mentally addressed a company in a coach-and-four who were evidently going out of town for some merriment. “And the dog you’re taking with you won’t help you. You won’t get away from yourselves.”

And just at that moment when the midpoint between the two wheels came even with her, she threw the red bag aside and, drawing her head down between her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage, and with a light movement, as if preparing to get up again at once, sank to her knees.

“I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray – but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which is in my power to put into it!”

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Anna Karenina: the Need to Talk About Your Problems

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