Anna Karenina: the Fate of Russia

Reading books during my August vacations. Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, and a cookbook by Alice Toklas.

In a previous post, I said that for a modern reader reading Tolstoy’s “War and Peace:” it is like climbing Mount Everest wearing tennis shoes. We don’t have the right intellectual tools anymore. But I managed to do that, more or less. So, I thought I could try Anna Karenina, too, which I had never read before.

It turned out to be another monumental task; this one really too monumental. I did my best, but after arriving at about one-third of the novel, I lost interest. I had to arrive at the end by skipping large sections that I found impossible for me to plow through. Yes, I appreciated the power of Tolstoy’s writing, his fine understanding of people’s behavior, and his gripping descriptions of events and people. But, in the end, the whole thing was too heavy and, sometimes, boring. Too many details, too slow pace.

Overall, “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” are similar novels: they tell us the behavior of ordinary people in ordinary circumstances, reflecting the struggles and difficulties we all face. But there is a crucial difference: “War and Peace” is cast against the gigantic event of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and that gives a dramatic background to events that, otherwise, could be banal. The plot of Anna Karenina has no such background so much of what the characters do seems to derive mainly from boredom and impulse. Then, Tolstoy faces a problem that not even a great writer as he was could solve: how to tell the story of female characters from the “omniscient point of view” that’s typical of these novels?

Male writers just don’t seem to have the right mental tools to do that. Tolstoy tells us a lot about what Anna Karenina does and thinks, but, in the end, she doesn’t really emerge from the story as a fully rounded character — she hovers over the events without ever letting us know why she does what she does. Tolstoy himself has an ambivalent attitude toward her: he seems to admire her, but he also condemns her on moral grounds for being an adulteress. Not knowing what to do with her, he pushes her out of the novel by pushing her under the train.

Of course, Anna is a fictional character. She never was alive, and so she never died. But I still think that a novelist is responsible for the characters he creates. Anna kills herself, but it is Tolstoy who decides that; it is a literary homicide. In defense of Tolstoy, I have to say that he did much better than other male authors who had centered their novels on female characters. Flaubert didn’t just kill his character, Emma Bovary, another adulteress. He also indulged in details about her death that made it not just a literary homicide but a case of literary necrophilia.

“Anna Karenina” and “Emma Bovary” are two of the best-known novels of the 19th century, and they both deal with the same theme: how society was adapting to the new, assertive role that women wanted to play. As always, fiction reflected reality: the character of the independent woman pervaded literature for many centuries. The ancestress of Anna Karenina is Lady Macbeth. She did not betray her husband, but she did betray her Liege Lord, King Duncan. And Shakespeare has her committing suicide. There are many descendants of these early adulteresses. Giacomo Puccini, the opera author, was a true serial killer of the heroines in his plays. In later times, evil women maintained a stable place in modern fiction, with perhaps the archetypical example being Walt Disney’s “Crudelia de Mon” — later to appear in flesh and bones in the real world under the name of Hillary Clinton.

Today, I don’t know how many people can read Anna Karenina. Who could be interested in the problems of bored noblemen and noblewomen of Imperial Russia from one century ago? Yet, we seem captivated by some universal themes that transpire from a novel that would otherwise be obsolete. One is the beauty of women, fully captured by Keira Knightley in her interpretation of Karenina in 2013.

There is something in the story Anna Karenina that goes beyond the pains of a bored Russian noblewoman. The fate of Anna is the fate of Russia and of all of us. But I’ll discuss that in another post.