Anna Karenina: Interesting, but Not the Greatest of All Time

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy is often ranked highly as one of the world's greatest novels and sometimes as the greatest-- that's right, the number one spot.  So I decided to give it a read.

And what I found was that this 800-pager was not particularly fun.  I realize of course that books have purposes beyond entertainment, but to attain maximum attention, readership, and respect I do feel that entertainment should be part of the equation.  But the reason this book is famous is more because it is fun to analyze rather than fun to read.  There is so much in there to unpack, and I respect this quality.  I did, after all, finish the book (something I only do about 75% of the time).  However, just because there is a lot to unpack and examine does not necessarily make it a great book.  It seems kind of messy to me and much longer than necessary.  All of the central messages could be told in far fewer words and might leave a stronger impression were the reader not forced to slog through 800 pages of loosely connected events and countless side characters.  One of the most obvious examples of this sloppiness is the choice to name the novel after Anna while choosing to spend perhaps twice as much time writing about the character of Levin.  Another example is the misleading back cover of the version I read which says, “Anna Karenina is one of the most loved and memorable heroines of literature.  Her overwhelming charm dominates a novel of unparalleled richness and density.”  Why is this misleading?  Well, Anna is not a heroine, I did not find her particularly loveable, and she does not dominate the novel; Levin does.  On top of that, these two main characters meet exactly one time in the entire 800 pages, and nothing significant comes of the meeting!  It is as if Tolstoy had at least two separate stories to tell but was too lazy to actually tell them separately.  But he is a highly respected writer, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that his choices were intentional.  If that is so, my interpretation of the connection is as follows.    WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.

Levin and Anna do inhabit the same social world and interact with many of the same people.  And through the vastly different life outcomes they experience despite coming from similar social and economic standing, we can infer that we are meant to examine the differences in moral character that must be there as a cause of the differences.  

Why must it be moral character that is the difference?  I base this mainly on a revelation that Levin has in the final chapters. Because it is so near the end of a lengthy novel, I have to suppose that it relates quite directly to the central message and purpose.  That moment and message can be found in this quote:

             “Theodore says that Kirilov, the innkeeper, lives for his belly.  That is intelligible and reasonable.  We all, as reasoning creatures, cannot live otherwise.  And then that same Theodore says that it is wrong to live for one’s belly, and that we must live for Truth, for God, and at the first hint I understand him!  I and millions of men who lived centuries ago and those who are living now: peasants, the poor in spirit, and sages, who have thought and written about it, saying the same thing in their obscure words—we all agree on that one thing: what we should live for, and what is good.  I, and all other men, know only one thing firmly, clearly, and certainly, and this knowledge cannot be explained by reason: it is outside reason, has no cause, and can have no consequences. 

            ‘If goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness [and] if it has a consequence—a reward, it is also not goodness.  Therefore goodness is beyond the chain of cause and effect.” 

            

           Levin here realizes that doing good for others is the most essential way to live in order to feel both close to God and purposeful as an individual.  And one should do good simply because that's the right thing to do-- not for any personal gain.

So let’s look at the main character of Levin, the novel’s namesake Anna, and the man who is their link, Oblonsky, in relation to this revelation.

 We start the novel in Oblonsky’s household where we learn that there is a dispute between he and his wife which arises from his having cheated on her—an action which he continues to do throughout the book.  Oblonsky is a social man who does do good for others: regularly treating people to dinners, connecting people professionally, and intervening on his sister’s behalf regarding the seeking of a divorce, for example.  But he also causes harm (mostly to his wife and himself) by “living for his belly.”  He seeks money and spends it excessively.  He seeks pleasurable company outside of his marriage.  He gets his wife to sell parts of her estate so that he can pay his debts and continue to live this way.  He exists in a very surface way, doing both good and harm, but never really thinking deeply about it, attaching much meaning to any individual occurrence, or even seemingly remembering key occurrences longer than the time it takes for a new interest to grab hold of him.  As a result, he never really learns from his mistakes, fully understands the perspectives of others, or changes himself. 

Anna, surprisingly, does not seem to be the heroine of the novel, but rather the foil to Levin and an example for the reader of what not to do.  Like Levin, she is concerned with deeper things.  However like Oblonsky, she “lives for her belly.”  As a result she makes a lot of selfish decisions while all the while remaining unsatisfied on a deeper spiritual level.  The key selfish decisions are cheating on her husband, leaving her husband, abandoning her son, and then behaving jealously and vindictively toward her lover while all the while making no effort to fully resolve the conflict between her still legal marriage and her current love, causing ongoing conflict for all involved parties.  She recognizes all the conflict, accepts some of the blame, but also pushes the blame on others, and wallows melodramatically in her problems instead of actively engaging in the struggle necessary to disentangle herself.  So she sees the deeper meanings.  She knows that she has done wrong, and she knows that others have also done wrong to her.  Her reaction to this is to stubbornly persist and survive rather than struggle to change and adapt.  Ultimately she allows her selfishness to take the most melodramatic step possible and kill herself in order to punish her lover Vronsky for all the dilemma she’s feeling—very little of which is actually his fault. 

Levin is the only major character who undergoes positive change.  He engages with all the struggles of life: seeking purpose and meaning, facing rejection, trying to improve the economy on macro and micro levels, wooing the woman he loves, navigating marital conflict, watching his brother die, and beginning to raise a son.  He frequently recognizes imperfection in both the world and himself, but always pursues better understanding, improvement, and that which is morally good, regardless of how much inner conflict he may feel or how much outer conflict he ends up engaged in with others.  As a result, he ends the novel rewarded with a happy family, a spiritual revelation, and a sense of purpose. 

So we have three major characters who are set up as a lifestyle comparison.  We have one man who has the capacity for both selfishness and selflessness but only so far as any given situation allows him—he has no sense of the long-term nor of deeper spiritual significance.  We have a character who perceives deep spiritual significance but mostly only in negative ways resulting from selfish actions including the ultimate selfish action of committing suicide.  And we have a character who is deeply concerned with spiritual matters within himself while all the while acting for goodness and selflessness and struggling through life’s conflicts.  These three characters end up unchanged, dead, and happy, respectively, as a result of their outlooks and choices.

This comparison is the main reason I can see for having a novel named after Anna but featuring Levin.  However, it does not explain the countless other characters who get an awful lot of "screen time" as well.  Let's compare a few of them, just for fun.  

Through the 3 major women characters, we get to see 3 different ways of handling flaws in relationships.  Through Anna, we see changing relationships.  We see the boredom and resentment of someone who has lost respect for the man she’s married to (having originally gotten married for status more-so than love).  We see the excitement of an affair and the turmoil and conflict that inevitably must come about when she is unwilling to end either the marriage or the affair.  Then we see crazed jealousy and vindictiveness when she suspects that her lover is in turn having another affair. 

Through Dolly, Anna’s sister-in-law, we see stoicism in a family woman dealing with a long-existing relationship who has chosen to stay with her cheating, money-wasting husband mostly for the sake of the kids.  She learns to ignore her husband most of the time and lives mostly for said kids. 

Then we see Kitty, the youngest woman and eventually Levin's wife, who must deal with the conflicts involved in new relationships.  First she must deal with balancing two men who are both wooing her, then with rejecting the one she wants less, than with being rejected by the one she wants more.  Later, upon entering into a new marriage, she must handle all the unexpected and often petty conflicts that arise when learning to live with someone new in addition to dealing with the bigger issues of giving birth and supporting her family during tragic times.

Anna’s two men, Karenin and Vronsky, also get a lot of time, and I found both quite similar in some ways as well as quite a bit more interesting than Anna herself.  The key quality they share is ambition.  The main difference between them is that Karenin’s work and position come before everything else, and Vronsky puts Anna before everything else.  However, Karenin does still care for Anna, and Vronsky does still have many other concerns.  It is Karenin’s inability to fully express personal, emotional things that mostly drives Anna away.  And despite Vronsky and Anna’s love for each other, Vronsky insists on still having ambitions and a life beyond their relationship as any normal man would.  It is this insistence combined with Anna’s poor societal position (resulting from her awkward status of a wife living with a man who is not her husband) that make her vindictively jealous toward him. 

Then there are countless side characters set up as foils or models that the main characters either come into conflict with or try to imitate.  There’s Koznyshev, Levin’s half-brother, who is too caught up in political issues to have the time or desire for personal relationships.  There’s Nicholas, also Levin’s brother, who is sickly and volatile.  There’s Lydia Ivanovna, a religious extremist, who comforts Karenin and plays a role in his preventing Anna from seeing her son.  There’s Vasenka Veslovsky, a youthful flirt that worries Levin in his first months of marriage.  There’s Sviyazhsky, a political man who has read up on and can accurately discuss any topic but gets a shifty defensive look anytime someone pushes him to say which view it is that he truly believes.  And there are many many others: peasants from whom Levin learns, society women that judge and gossip about Anna, soldier friends of Vronsky’s, house servants, children, etc. 

Ultimately it ends up being just a bit too much text with not quite enough payoff.  Are there worthwhile elements?  Tons!  But for me the whole was not any better than the sum of its parts.