Book Four - Anna Karenina - Part Six

Leo & Sonya Tolstoy
Image from The American Society of Authors & Writers
amsaw.org

I've finished Anna Karenina: Drama Queen.

Here's an imaginary conversation between Tolstoy and his wife--

Tolstoy: I want to write a book about a ‘fallen’ rich woman that people pity.

Mrs. Tolstoy: Good luck with that, Leo.

Tolstoy: Which part, the rich or the fallen?

Mrs. Tolstoy: Both. Most people in this world are not rich and couldn’t relate to her problems. Then you add the fact that she brought these problems on herself? Can’t see it working.

Tolstoy: But my dear, I am sure the book will sell. After all, the people in high society buy most of the books in this country.

Mrs. Tolstoy: Ah, so it’s a marketing strategy. You are good.

Tolstoy: But my motives are pure! I must tell a moral tale.

Mrs. Tolstoy: So, basically, there’s no way things are going to go well for this fallen rich woman.

Tolstoy: No chance, no way, no how. But it will provide an opportunity to expound upon many of my theories.

Mrs. Tolstoy: Dude, people who read novels want a story. They do not want to read a bunch of philosophical mumbo-jumbo.

Tolstoy: But I have spent months and months reading the philosophy and I must share my insights with others! I must also share my sympathetic tendencies towards the peasants! These ideas are burning within me!

Mrs. Tolstoy: You just never really got that whole moderation thing, did you?

(In this imaginary dramatization, the part of Mrs. Tolstoy was played by Hurley on LOST.)


Anna, sweetie, I believe Mr. Tolstoy used you to illustrate that at some point in life you've got to own up to the consequences of your choices. We all do. As I was nearing the book’s end, I thought of the song "Babylon" by David Gray.

Looking back through time
You know it's clear that I've been blind
I've been a fool
To open up my heart
To all that jealousy, that bitterness, that ridicule
... You know I'm seeing it so clear
I've been afraid
To show you how I really feel
Admit to some of those bad mistakes I've made

History repeats itself because there are no new mistakes. Oh, and because humans are so good at rationalization. Anna Karenina is an example of excellence in both rationalization and delusion, particularly the obsessive type of delusion, the type that starts with denial and moves along the irrational obsessive path until it is a fireball of anxiety and resentment and want, and even though you know it’s irrational you feel powerless to stop the cycle. Not that I can relate.

Tolstoy also makes a statement on the value of work, the good hard work of tilling the soil and harvesting the crops. Other work is valued as well, whereas not having enough to do leads to people filling their time with meaningless activities in an attempt to give their lives meaning. He’s real good with the saying stuff without saying it, is Tolstoy, but there are plenty of times he simply expounds upon one of his pet theories. Apparently he felt the need to teach us a thing or twelve.

This novel is an extravaganza of interconnected people. Maybe one reason there are so many characters in this book is to provide contrast. For every character making progress on his journey to self-awareness/spiritual enlightenment there is another who happily remains clueless. This book is jam-packed... politics, spirituality, religion, morality, love, hate, indifference, the intelligentsia, sincerity, hypocrisy, dishonesty, honor, bribery, delusion, sacrifice, war, pacifism... in short, all the ingredients of a society.

I really needed a flowchart to keep up with the characters, but that is frequently the case with Russian names since each name also has a nickname and sometimes the nicknames don’t look much like the full name. My boy Levin is Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin and his nickname is Kostya. That one’s not too difficult, but his brother Sergius Ivanovitch Koznyshev is sometimes called Koznyshev and sometimes Sergey, and sometimes Sergey Ivanovitch. That’s all well and good until you have to start remembering dozens of people by their various names. Sometimes the characters were so well defined that I could tell who was speaking simply by the context, but that wasn’t always so with the minor characters.

And what about Levin? I won’t say what happens to him because this is a spoiler-free zone, but I will say that he started getting on my nerves during the last half of the book, and I fairly screamed at him to get some perspective already! But Tolstoy definitely wants the reader to love Levin, and I do.

Reading is such a personal thing that books affect us differently. Rereading a book can also affect an individual differently when read at another point along life's timeline. This passage in Part 7 Chapter 4 rang true to me--

… when we were brought up there was one extreme--we were kept in the basement, while our parents lived in the best rooms; now it's just the other way--the parents are in the wash house, while the children are in the best rooms. Parents now are not expected to live at all, but to exist altogether for their children.

Ah, the cycles of humanity. We are determined not to make the mistakes of our parents so we go to the opposite extreme and wind up making the mistakes of our grandparents, doing the very things our parents tried to avoid.

I need a break from all this angst!

Book Four - Anna Karenina - Part Five

A couple of things I've read in this book remind me of one of the requirements for a book to be great: the author must so capture the characters that they remind readers of themselves and/or people they know. The characters, no matter the particular situation, must have a kind of "everyman" quality. Anna Karenina was written in the late 19th century, but people are people. From Part 5 Chapter 13--

Golenishtchev was the first to give expression to an idea that had occurred to all of them, which was that Mihailov was simply jealous of Vronsky.

This is something which has always puzzled me. Some people consistently ascribe negative reactions to jealousy. Maybe Mihailov simply thought Vronsky was a jerk. I think he was a jerk. Does that have to mean I'm jealous of him, or could it maybe, possibly mean that I see a flaw? Or maybe that we're simply not like-minded enough for me to want to spend time around him? If I could talk to Golenishtchev and Anna and Vronsky, I would gently remind them that having flaws makes them human. We all have our weaknesses as well as our strengths. And I think this is one of Tolstoy's messages.

Secondly, from a deathbed scene, speaking of women, he says in Part 5 Chapter 19--

... they knew without a second of hesitation how to deal with the dying, and were not frightened of them. Levin and other men like him, though they could have said a great deal about death, obviously did not know this since they were afraid of death, and were absolutely at a loss what to do when people were dying.

And about the man, from the same chapter--

More than that, he did not know what to say, how to look, how to move. To talk of outside things seemed to him shocking, impossible, to talk of death and depressing subjects--also impossible. To be silent, also impossible.

The man (my dear, sweet, impetuous Levin) had read books about death yet when he was about to witness it discovered that he was afraid and uncomfortable. The woman simply wanted to comfort the dying.

Disclaimer: I am not making a generalization about gender stereotypes but merely noting that the experience in the story Tolstoy published in the last quarter of the 19th century has also been my experience in life with death. Whew, that oughta do it.

When I finish this book I will take a break from the bleakness of it all. I believe I shall read a nice fluffy book, the literary equivalent of a sitcom. I like sitcoms and sometimes I need one.

Book Four - Anna Karenina - Part Four

More from the lovely Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin, from Part 3 Chapter 32--

He felt that if they hadn't both been pretending, but had had what is called a heart-to-heart talk, that is, simply told each other just what they were thinking and feeling, then they would just have looked into each other's eyes, and Konstantine would only have said: "You're dying, dying, dying!"---while Nicholas would simply have replied: "I know I'm dying, but I'm afraid, afraid, afraid!" That's all they would have said if they'd been talking straight from the heart. But it was impossible to live that way, so Levin tried to do what he'd been trying to do all his life without being able to, what a great many people could do so well, as he observed, and without which life was impossible: he tried to say something different from what he thought, and he always felt it came out false, that his brother caught him out and was irritated by it.

Yeah, that Tolstoy was pretty good all right.

Book Four - Anna Karenina - Part Three

Generally there are two ways I become intrigued by a book. Either I'm hooked immediately or I determine to devote several hours in a row to reading it, and in doing so become absorbed in the story. The latter is true in this case, and Levin had a great deal to do with it. He's a nerd and I do love nerds (well, it takes one to know one). I long for the Levin storyline and tolerate everyone else. Levin is such a sweet character. He's a bit naive and quite capricious in moments of fervent passion, and it’s clear Tolstoy wants the reader to love him. Here's a taste of Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin, "... a just idea cannot but be fruitful." 

Aww. That quote is from Part 3 Chapter 30, and I'll wager a few rubles that he changes his mind in the next few hundred pages. Levin is good and kind and decent, and since it’s a Russian novel I fear the decent people shall meet tragic ends. Every time the story gets back to him I love him more, yet I suspect he shall die a violent death--perhaps by scythe at the hand of a peasant. (It would certainly be a lovely bit of literary symmetry if he did.)

I'm not terribly concerned about Anna Karenina. I dislike her, her husband and her lover. Whine whine moan moan poor little old me whatever shall I do? Dude, shut up! That's what you should do.

Book Four - Anna Karenina - Part Two

I flew through the first hundred pages but have slowed considerably since. I learned years ago not to read the introduction to a classic (got terribly spoiled once and didn't get over it for weeks) so I was determined not to read the introduction to this one. But I briefly succumbed and allowed myself to read a few sentences from the first page. I discovered two things: 1) Tolstoy set out to write about a married woman who has an affair and portray her "as not guilty but merely pitiful"; 2) He was determined that this novel would not be as wordy as War and Peace.

Seriously, War and Peace is more wordy than this? The descriptions are wonderful, don't get me wrong, but there are so many of them. There are so many characters that I'm not sure who (besides Anna) is the focus of the novel. When I read about a farmer, I got a wonderful description of his farm, the changing seasons, the political issues of the day, the dependable-worker shortage, planting techniques, local birds, and even his faithful bird dog. But then I got a description of a horse race that was almost as detailed, and I'm not interested in horse racing. Plus I can't decide which characters to root for--this one seems like a decent person but then he goes and does something like that!

I'm not enthralled but I'm determined to slog through it and hope there are hidden treasures in store. (Clearly, I'm not a Russian writer. Optimism does not abound in the Russian lit I have previously read.)

Book Four - Anna Karenina - Part One

This one is a classic, I know. But here's the first line of the description on the back of the book. "A magnificient drama of vengeance, infidelity and retribution..."

So it'll be totally upbeat, I'm sure!!!