Anna Karenina

In anticipation of a major film adaptation coming out later this year (coincidentally, I saw the trailer for the first time today), I tackled Leo Tolstoy's 1877 novel, Anna Karenina. I've never read any of those long Russian novels (this one weights in at over 1,000 pages), and while it had its moments, particularly and surprisingly comic moments, I have to wonder what all the fuss is about. Opinions as wildly divergent as William Faulkner and Time magazine called this the greatest novel ever written. After taking over six weeks to read it, I don't get it.

The story mainly concerns an extended family in Russia. Anna Karenina, despite the title, is not the major player in the drama, in fact she's something of a supporting character. She is married to the much older Alexey Alexandrovich (one thing you have to get used to when reading Russian literature are these long, formal names). Her brother, Stiva, is married to Dolly, and it is their family that Tolstoy's famous opening, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" refers to. Stiva got caught schtupping the governess, and Dolly wants to throw him out. "'It's true it's bad her having been a governess in our house. That's bad! There's something common, vulgar, in flirting with one's governess. But what a governess!'"

Anna visits from St. Petersburg, and talks Dolly into staying with Stiva. Kitty, Dolly's younger sister, has her society debut, and expects a proposal from the dashing Count Vronsky. Instead she gets one from Levin, Stiva's friend, a landowner and something of a geek. She turns him down, bluntly. But Vronksy has fallen in love with Anna, when they meet at the train station. She had accompanied his mother on the visit, and the two became close. Anna becomes even more impressed with him when, after a railroad worker is killed, he gives money for the man's family.

Soon Anna has left Alexey for Vronsky, creating a scandal. They go off to Europe together, and Alexei debates whether to seek a divorce. "Alexey Alexandrovitch was not jealous. Jealousy according to his notions was an insult to one's wife, and one ought to have confidence in one's wife. Why one ought to have confidence--that is to say, complete conviction that his young wife would always love him--he did not ask himself."

A parallel plot concerns Levin, who does end up marrying Kitty. He's obsessed with agricultural reforms, and despite his at times comic appearances in the book, he's something of a drag on the plot. Tolstoy uses him to formulate his own opinions on agriculture (it is said that he is modeled after the writer himself). "The business of reorganizing the farming of his land absorbed him as completely as though there would never be anything else in his life." He even works alongside his workers, glorying in physical labor.

The story is most interesting when it concerns Anna's affair. She has a son with Alexey, whom she is not allowed to see, and she ends refusing to divorce because she would have to sever ties with her son. But then she and Vronsky have a daughter, and since she is not divorced, legally the girl is Alexey's.

Anna is a very short-sighted and selfish character. She doesn't quite understand what she does to other people, including her husband, but also to everyone else. Despite warnings from Vronsky, she goes out to the theater, where she is shunned by her former friends. Later she will become jealous of Vronsky, and (spoiler, but I already knew this before I read the book) she becomes so upset that kills herself, echoing her meeting with Vronsky by throwing herself in front of a train. "As death rose clearly and vividly before her mind as the sole means of bringing back love for her in his heart, of punishing him and of gaining the victory in that strife which the evil spirit in possession of the heart was waging with him."

Notably, that is not the end of the book. Levin becomes the focus of the novel after that, as he also contemplates suicide, as he doesn't feel instant love for his newborn son (the scene of the child's precarious birth is gripping). But he realizes that life must go on, and the book ends with him facing the future with hope and promise.

When a book is this long, it's difficult to complete focus all the time. I admit passages went by where my comprehension was low. There is a lot of stuff here, including two brothers of Levin, a visit to an artist in France, a horse race, and political talk of an election and a war against the Serbs. But above all, this book is worthwhile because of the occasional burst of brilliant and wickedly funny prose. "'Some mathematician has said that enjoyment lies in the search for truth, not in the finding it,'" or "'They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox,'" or "'I wonder the parents! They say it's a marriage for love.' 'For love? What antediluvian notions you have! Can one talk of love in these days?'"

And then there are passages that just stop a reader short, delighting in the structure and imagery: "The slanting rays of the sun were still hot; his clothes, soaked through with perspiration, stuck to his body; his left boot full of water weighed heavily on his leg and squeaked at every step; the sweat ran in drops down his powder-grimed face, his mouth was full of the bitter taste, his nose of the smell of powder and stagnant water, his ears were ringing with incessant whir of the snipe; he could not touch the stock of his gun, it was so hot; his heart beat with short, rapid throbs; his hands shook with excitement, and his weary legs stumbled and staggered over the hillocks and in the swamp, but still he walked on and still he shot."