Anna Karenina

Warning: this gives away the plot and the ending of the book.

I read eight hundred pages, and in the end the person I was angry with was not Anna but Tolstoy.

Who is who

The book runs two stories in parallel, and they intersect in only a few places.

Anna is the wife of a high-ranking bureaucrat in Petersburg. She was married off at twenty to the much older Karenin, and she has a son. She goes to Moscow to save her brother's marriage, and there she meets Vronsky.

Vronsky is a young officer. Rich, handsome, with a career ahead of him. He falls in love with Anna, and this love is a phase for him, a whole life for Anna.

Karenin is her husband. He is set up as the easiest character in the book to hate: a cold, formal man who puts his reputation above everything. Then Tolstoy shows him from the inside too, and things get complicated.

On the other side is Levin. A man who runs his farm in the provinces, thinks hard about agriculture, and is awkward in social settings. He is in love with Kitty; Kitty turns down his first proposal because she is waiting for Vronsky. When Vronsky goes to Anna, Kitty is devastated, and years later they marry, she and Levin.

What finishes Anna

I already knew her story. Everyone does; its ending has become an idiom.

What I did not expect was how quiet the mechanism preparing that ending is.

What finishes Anna is not Vronsky cooling off. Vronsky does not even cool off; he gets bored, he wants his own life too, that is all. What finishes Anna is the way society withdraws from her.

Tolstoy does not write this in a single big scene. He scatters it in between:

• Anna goes to the opera and a woman in a box insults her in a way she can hear. No one intervenes.
• Her old friends stop coming to visit. No one says "I'm not coming anymore"; they just do not come.
• She is not allowed to see her son. She sneaks into the house on his birthday and the child wakes up. The hardest scene in the book.
• Vronsky goes to invitations alone, because he cannot take her. No one forbids this; it just happens that way.

The sum kills a person, and at no step is there a single guilty party.

Vronsky, who lives the same relationship, keeps his career. He enters the clubs, gets invitations, can go back to the army. Tolstoy does not comment on this asymmetry at all; he just shows it, and showing it is enough.

What really disturbed me

After a certain point Anna starts repeating what is said about her.

The fits of jealousy, the morphine, checking where Vronsky goes. From the outside these read as "the woman has lost her mind," and at some point Anna accepts this reading too. She begins to see herself that way as well.

I was disturbed because I recognized this. A person who has been described for a long time as the "problem" of something takes that description in at some point. After that it cannot be corrected, because it is no longer a voice coming from outside.

In the last chapters we are inside Anna's head. She rides in a carriage, looks at the people on the street, and sees a falseness in each of them. She comes to the conviction that everyone hates everyone else and that all relationships are a lie.

Tolstoy wrote that section in such a way that, as you read, she seems right. Only when you turn the page do you see how narrow she had become.

The Levin question

This is the other half of the book, and I found it boring in the first hundred pages.

Debates about agricultural reform. Who is farming which land and how. The Russian peasant's relationship to the soil. The book Levin writes on economics.

I wanted to skip it, I did not, and I am glad I did not. Because what Tolstoy is really saying is there.

Levin is going through a crisis. Throughout the book he asks "what is the meaning of this": of marriage, of work, of death. He is at his brother's side as he dies, and no philosophy helps.

He does not resolve this crisis by thinking.

There is the famous mowing scene: Levin goes into the field with the peasants and mows for hours. At first he cannot manage, then he finds a rhythm, and at some point he stops thinking. Only movement is left.

The answer does not come. The need for an answer passes.

I know this from the times I cannot get out of my own head: you do not get out by thinking, you get out by putting your hand to some task. It was the only practical thing the book gave me, and it came from a fictional agricultural chapter.

The problem I cannot resolve

The balance Tolstoy builds is too neat and I do not trust it.

On one side is a woman who follows her desire, and she collapses. On the other is a man who returns to the land, and he finds peace. The novel does not build this like a thesis, but when eight hundred pages stand side by side, the thesis reads itself.

The epigraph of the book feeds this too: "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." From the Bible. That is, the one who will pass judgment is God, not us, but it is clear that judgment will be passed.

Tolstoy really loves Anna, that is evident. When he writes about her, he writes from the inside as no one else does. She is the most alive, the most intelligent, the most attractive person in the book.

And yet he wrote her ending, and did not give her the way out he gave Levin.

The best side of the book and its most flawed side stand in the same place, and I could not resolve this. Maybe it does not need to be resolved.

Kitty and Dolly

Two characters little talked about, and both are in the backbone of the book.

Dolly is the wife of Anna's brother. Her husband cheats, and she stays, because with six children she has nowhere to go. In one chapter she goes to visit Anna and thinks about her own life on the way: what if she had left too. Then she gives up the idea.

She is the woman who does not do what Anna did, and Tolstoy does not reward her either. A tired, worn-out life buried in her children.

Kitty, on the other hand, nearly dies in childbirth, and Levin prays at that moment. He forgets his own unbelief and prays, and later he cannot explain it to himself.

The one practical note

The first hundred pages are crowded and confusing.

Russian names appear in three different forms: the full name, the formal version used with the patronymic, and the nickname used within the family. I lost track of who was who until I understood that the same person has three names.

A good edition has a list of characters at the front. I copied that list onto a sheet of paper and kept it beside me; that is what saved the first hundred pages.

After that it carries itself. Eight hundred pages, but it is never heavy going anywhere.