Anna Karenina

This is the first classic that I've read this year that is getting added to my all-time favorites. This book does it for me, and I think it is because I have learned so much about the psychology of so many groups of people. I learned how the rich justify being rich, how the poor justify being poor, how cheaters justify their infidelity, how men justify their work passions, among so many others.

The characters in this story don't choose sides between good and evil, with the exception of two characters. The namesake character Anna Karenina is the embodiment of self-absorbed, arrogant, and uncaring evil. She ruins another life every time she does something, and she knows this. To counter this, Konstantin Levin, despite being a wealthy show more landowner, shows the good that can come from high society. He is devoted to his wife and child, to his work, and to his workers.

The landscape is breathtaking, and every single location that is explored has its importance. Within the cities of Moscow and Petersburg, the bustle of the people that seems to avoid the highest of society shows how these people lived as opposed to the rest of the Russian people. The constant balls and concerts and galleries that the rich are expected to enjoy is in stark contrast to the poverty of the "muzhik" (peasant). I can see why communism was allowed to explode in a place like this. The country in this story shows an unfiltered beauty that can come from toil and diligent work, while exploring how the high society exploit their land in any and every way. Hunting is a common affair, walking hundreds of acres is a break from the affairs that fill the household, and passions of the landowner are able to be explored. The class divide is stark, but due to Levin's character, is not something that is unbearably cruel.

This book taught me more than most college courses I have taken. From writing technique, to psychology, to religion, to love, this book sets out to teach right and wrong. And it does just that. show less

As with all forms of fiction, the novel as a literary form betrays its cultivated sense of singularity/immersion when one considers the unique basis for the novel’s existence—to communicate ideas and convictions wrestled with individually or through debate. Each author arrives at and completes the novel format with a specific agenda; this can range from illuminating and framing in accordance to their religious beliefs the sociopolitical realities of late 19th-century Russia to exciting readers with magic-imbued adventures otherwise impossible to entertain in the context of everyday life. Regardless of the proposed subject or intent of any individual author, however, all novelists are bound by the nature of novels, which supersede show more any other considerations when the literary form is actualized. Novels call for human situations to be posited and therefore examined, either through deliberate and continued elaboration on the part of the author or simply through their very mention. What makes Anna Karenina so impressive is the pattern Tolstoy molds his novel with: he communicates both an engaging story about high society, colored with passionate romantic drama and seemingly hopeless spiritual journeys, as well as using the rhythm of each characters’ many social and personal conflicts to derive profoundly relatable conclusions, voiced in response to their situations. Here is precisely where the true nature of the novel as a form shines through, regardless of the subject matter: through the creation of specific scenarios and situations; through dialogue between characters with carefully defined personalities: through the nature of conflicts and their resolutions are the author’s philosophical concerns communicated. All their rigorous intellectual musings—individual reflections upon their and others’ lived experiences, the arguments spurred by academic and social debate—it is the communication of these ponderings that are novelists’ chief priority in the construction of their books. They are granted near total freedom in proposing situations in which characters live, the everyday philosophical concerns of said characters, the outcomes of characters’ decisions in response to their concerns—but in all these respects, are limited by how receptive the audience is to their validity insofar as faithfulness to the real world’s social structure. As such, the mark of a good novelist is choosing to relay experiences and philosophical considerations and outcomes which remain true to life, while evoking a sense of collective consciousness, revealing emotions and musings felt to be potently idiosyncratic as universal experiences/considerations. The drab, largely unrelatable, and repulsively self-obssessed setting of Russian high society is managed with expert care as Tolstoy draws out surprisingly evergreen social commentary on everyday conflicts, ranging from matrimonial displeasure to struggles with religious conviction, communicated with language whose shocking clarity reveals both the skill of the translators and the largely untapped potential of language use in literature. It’s segments like these that convince me that Tolstoy’s use of the novel is truly faithful to the literary form, because he repeatedly reveals how uninteresting a plot can be while evoking the most startlingly true-to-life philosophical musings or depictions of social interaction readers have ever seen put to writing. As far as the novelists’ beliefs go, Tolstoy’s growing religious convictions are granted the utmost importance by the end of the novel, but through various characters he suggests his perspective on marriage as a legal and social institution and the intrinsic disharmony between moral obligations in social life and the material successes of landowners, to name a few. While slow and at times dreadfully uninteresting (plot-wise), Anna Karenina is full of tidbits that make you marvel at the potential of language in literature. show less

What a great novel - rereading it just confirms what a literary masterpiece it is. Tolstoy’s ability to unmask the movements of the mind reveals him as a true master, especially in Anna and Levin, whose inner life is carefully unfolded. City life set up against country life, philosophical questions and search after God. Marriage as convention, lust and love - it’s all there in Stiva and Dolly, Anna and Vronsky, Levin and Kitty.

All books you love are alike; each unloved book is unloved in its own way. On page 542 of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the titular character remarks to her lover, Vronsky: "for us, for me and for you, only one thing matters: whether we love each other. There are no other considerations." It is this statement which perhaps best explains my somewhat muted reaction to reading Tolstoy's lauded novel, often reflexively seen as the pinnacle of literature in the same way Citizen Kane is for cinema. You see, for all its remarkable qualities, the only thing that mattered was whether I loved the book. In the final analysis, there could be no other consideration.

And when I say I didn't love the book, I should be clear that I don't mean I disliked it. show more There is a great deal to admire about Anna Karenina, and I have almost nothing bad to say about it. In the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, with a translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (the P&V translation – one I highly recommend), Tolstoy is quoted in a letter as having said he was "proud of my architecture. But my vaults have been assembled in such a way that the keystone cannot be seen" (pg. xix). And, certainly, it is a magnificent assembly. Trains and train stations are a key theme in the book: the famous scene towards the end, of course, but also the comings and goings of characters throughout, "these announcements invite one to go, and everywhere and always" (pg. 764), with the stationmaster "courteously conducting [people] through the crowd" (pg. 105).

The oft-criticised dual narrative of the book (the story of Anna's love affair with Vronsky is told alongside the story of author avatar Konstantin Levin) in fact works well for Tolstoy's architecture. Just as two train tracks are held in place by slats without ever touching directly, so too are Anna and Levin on complementary journeys, even if they only meet the once in more than 800 pages. Tolstoy is laying his foundation work on this from the very first page, where two characters "felt that there was no sense in their living together and that people who meet accidentally at any inn have more connection with each other than they" (pg. 1). The keystone cannot be seen, as Tolstoy stated in his letter – for the keystone is that everything and everyone is interconnected, moving in and out of one another's lives. It is what Levin learns at the end. The world is that subtle kind of architecture that seems to support itself.

And yet, in spite of my admiration for its construction, I was always of the mind that War and Peace, Tolstoy's other great novel, presented the same summa of life much more convincingly – and, to my tastes at least, more entertainingly. War and Peace balanced its themes and characters better (despite its epilogue), whereas Anna Karenina is much more heavily weighted towards the characterisation. The philosophical elements of Anna Karenina are not as stimulating as those of War and Peace, and as essential as it is for Tolstoy's architecture, the Levin narrative is often far too dry.

I tend to have an aversion to 'society' novels, the sort where a bunch of upper- or upper-middle-class types fret about their standing as they manoeuvre through a social calendar of dinner parties and personal engagements, but it works in Anna Karenina precisely because we are seeing the penalties of not adhering to it. The society is the architecture, and Anna is trying to follow her heart instead of the social norms. The subtle, shifting ways in which society (often coldly) grinds its gears in order to wear her down into something that can no longer threaten it, is interesting to observe. We sympathise with Anna: I suspect there is a lot of feminist critique out there about how Anna pays the social penalty, but her male lover Vronsky doesn't – though for Tolstoy, this would not have been political, simply a sign of his humanity. Anna makes her own decisions regarding love and family, but has an almost fatalistic "awareness of her humiliation", recognising Vronsky "has the [legal] right to go off wherever and whenever he wants. Not only to go off but to abandon me. He has all the rights and I have none" (pg. 666). We the reader have immense sympathy for her situation (a divorced woman has few rights in the Russia Tolstoy is writing about), and yet we also experience exasperation at many of her thoughts and decisions. Similarly, we often disapprove of Vronsky (and Anna's implacable estranged husband Alexei Karenin), and at other times recognise some of their logic, or sensible emotion. Part of Tolstoy's literary achievement here is that none of the characters are fully right or moral all the time, or even most of the time. They are very real, very human.

This strong emphasis on characterisation in Anna Karenina allows for some very moving scenes. The train scene towards the end of the book is well-written and rightly famous (it is a great credit to Tolstoy's overarching architecture that [spoiler] when a man is run over by a train early on, Anna is told (in Vronsky's presence) that it would have been terrible if she'd seen the mangled corpse (pg. 64). For at the end, Vronsky is tormented by the memory of seeing her mangled corpse, "terrible in the fixed, unclosed eyes", after she commits suicide by throwing herself under a train (pg. 780). [end spoiler] But it is not the only scene that moves the reader: Anna's clandestine meeting with her son on page 537 carries power, as does Levin's single (and singular) meeting with Anna ("a special glow lit up [her] face" (pg. 697)). Elsewhere, Count Vronsky's wounded pride as he returns from Italy and tries to reintroduce Anna into 'respectable' society is palpable. Even Levin's much-criticised narrative gets its own moment, in the tenderly-drawn scene in which his child is born – and sneezes (pp718-19).

Even so, I return to Anna's remarks I quoted at the start of this review. The only thing that matters is whether we love the book, and for all its qualities I do not want to use as strong a word as 'love'. Love is something emotional and idiosyncratic, and so while my reviews for books I love all sound the same, I must write a long review about a book I do not love, like this one, to try to get into the unique particulars of why I don't love it. Like Levin after his sole meeting with Anna, I find Anna Karenina a representation of an "extraordinary woman… Not just her intelligence, but her heart", and yet I am content with confining myself to the reviewer's equivalent of being "terribly sorry for her" (pg. 701). Like Levin, I am happy to acknowledge her and admire her, but not to proactively raise her up. Even when I laud certain moving scenes, as I mentioned above, I find myself thinking that it's entirely proper they should be moving, when you consider how many hundreds of pages of characterisation Tolstoy has prepared before them. Ultimately, this novel is thoroughly enjoyable – you cannot help being charmed by Anna at times – but, for the most part, I found myself thinking that Anna Karenina evokes what I enjoy about architecture (and portraiture), not what I enjoy about literature. show less

Thirty years ago I met a young woman in an unhappy marriage who told me this was the best book she ever read. So about 15 years ago, I tried to read it. I really, really did. I got through about one-fourth of this voluminous novel about the adulterous affair of a pampered member of the aristocracy who falls for a younger aristocrat.

I desperately wanted to like it. A classic! It's Leo Tolstoy! It's counted as one of the greatest works of literature ever! Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who penned the fabulous Crime and Punishment, declared Anna Karenina to be "flawless as a work of art"! What better recommendation could a novel have?

But I couldn't get through any more than 25 percent of it -- and that was a slog. I hated Anna. I hated her show more ineffectual husband, Alexei Alexandrovich. I hated Count Vronsky. I hated Princess Kitty. I hated Kitty's entire superficial family. I hated the ascetic Levin. Really, if you read Anna Karenina, the Russian Revolution makes total sense! Early in the novel a railway worker falls into the path of a moving train and is killed. A horrible human tragedy in which we're moved to compassion? Nah! To Anna, it's merely the sign of upcoming bad luck for the members of her privileged set. You see, it's all about us!

I wanted to shout at these people, "What's wrong with you? Don't you realize you live in Czarist Russia? Are parties and dances and clothes all that you have to think about? Really? That's the worst problem that you have? You're obsessing about dance partners and the supply of good-looking army officers? Haven't you noticed these serfs all around you? Starvation, misery, homelessness, freezing to death. Might not that be a little more important?" I was ready to join the Bolshevik revolutionaries, sing "The Internationale," and overthrow these insufferable parasites myself!

The superficiality of these people will make you want to grab a torch and pitchfork of your own and join the Bolsheviks. show less

So I finally got to the end of Anna Karenina. My reading speed is no reflection on the book - work's super busy and of course Christmas silly season is upon us when many an evening is spent glued to my laptop looking for gifts. And I'm back to the gym after Covid, so that burns up a few evenings a week as well. All in all, I've not had much available reading time each day.

As so many people have already read this classic I'll stick to my thoughts rather than a review of the plot.

Whilst it's a fairly lengthy tome, for the most part I was fully engrossed in it (and the pages where a glazed a little were less than double figures). So what was the draw? Characterisation is the big one that stood out, particularly the character contrasts show more between the two main couples in the novel. Tolstoy does a good job of humanising his characters, revealing their many layers as the novel develops. On many pages I was finding Anna entirely self-satisfying and not overly likeable, yet as the book progresses we see her frailties and no doubt genuine love - to the point of obsession - of Vronsky. As a reader we're torn between thoughts of 'well, you made your bed so you'd better lie in it' and sympathy for someone who in a loveless marriage who simply is dazzled by love. Vronsky similarly feels like a selfish playboy at the beginning of the novel, but his genuine love for Anna by the end is clear.

Levin's relationship with Kitty is an interesting parallel, a chalk and cheese pair compared to the fiery romance between Anna and Vronsky. Still waters run deep with Levin, whose thoughts are consumed with self-questioning and desire to work towards the greater good. A totally different man to Vronsky, but who of the two is the most noble in the end?

The second big draw for me in this novel was the setting of Imperial Russia. I knew little of the lifestyle of the nobility in this period in Russian history, and this backdrop was fascinating, from 'society' in Moscow and St. Petersburg to Levin's country dwelling and interaction with the muzhiks post the abolition of serfdom. Tolstoy's descriptions were incredibly vivid, from the dust on the face of travellers who had come the last leg of their journey by carriage to the epic train journeys regularly taken as the society characters moved between their own houses and those of family and acquaintances they went to stay with.

If I have one criticism it's that the last 50 pages felt a little flat in comparison with the rest of the novel. Tolstoy tries to bring the novel to a moral finale, but somehow it felt a bit contrived and rushed along to the conclusion he wanted to get to. But it's a small criticism in a work that was a rich tapestry and hugely enjoyable.

4.5 stars - a wonderful epic that deserves rereading. show less

Despite the 5 stars, I confess that I did not always enjoy the story at times, but the finish is so satisfying and (for me) shows that not a page was wasted in the construction of this book.

Until I got closer to the conclusion, I wasn't so sure what I thought of the book. But by the end, I came to believe that the title was somewhat misleading. The book is about Anna and her story and plight is a central part of the narrative, but Levin's reflections that constitute nearly the entirety of the eighth section show me that Anna is as much a character as a broader metaphor for the harmonious or destructive ways that human life settles into a state of order, given the guidance of social, political, legal, and religious institutions. Anna is show more caught on the outside of all of them. Infidelity led to her being caught on the margins of social and legal order and it (spoiler) destroys her, both figuratively and literally.

Now compare what Anna did to others. Oblonksy had an adulterous affair at the very start of the novel. Yet he and his life wasn't destroyed. Instead he and his family re-established order because aristocratic society at the time appeared more forgiving of male infidelity. Vronsky as an instigator of Anna's infidelity also re-establishes order socially and through his military service. Karenin, experiencing political, social, and legal instability is rocked by all but destroyed by none, eventually re-establishing order for himself on all grounds. Levin and his laborers experiencing the social and political instability of the peasant reformation of the time are not destroyed by it but instead re-establish order through co-op. On the other hand, Anna is caught on the outside of all and as the lives of people around her stabilize and re-order themselves (happy or not) she is perpetually unsettled, un-harmonized, a variance that either destroys the system where it resides, creating dis-order, or is destroyed by the system that re-establishes order. Anna's plight is her own and the imagery of continual isolation underscores the tragedy of his position -- there is no way that her dis-order matters enough to create change or a new order.

This book was outstanding. show less