"All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
It took me a good few months to get through Anna Karenina. It's one of those books that becomes part of your daily routine simply because it takes so long to read. Or at least it did for me.
I initially picked up Anna Karenina because it had been on my reading list for a long time, along with other classic books I haven't gotten around to reading yet, like Madame Bovary and The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Decameron (soon! I will read them soon!). I had also managed not to hear about the novel's famously tragic ending, and I thought I should read it before someone spoiled the surprise (it seems like whenever anyone saw me reading the book, they would say "You how it ends, don't you?").
The novel follows two main plot lines, with various interweaving subplots. One main story is the romance between Anna Karenina, a beautiful, charming, and married Society woman, and Count Vronsky, a charismatic soldier who is not her husband. The other is the romance between Kitty (Anna's brother Steve's wife's sister) and Constantine Levin, a shy, earnest man who lives in the country.
To be honest, as much as I empathize with Anna Karenina, she annoys me. She is intelligent enough to foresee the trouble that getting involved with Count Vronsky will bring her, but she does it anyway. She also seems not to care much for her children. At one point Tolstoy writes that Anna cannot love her daughter the way that she loves her son, whom she has abandoned. Both of Anna's children are left in the care of others while she battles her own demons -- jealousy, morphine dependency, and most of all the fear that Vronsky will stop loving her. Vronsky reacts to her alternating stormy moods and extreme neediness by spending more time in Society, the elite circle in which Anna is no longer welcome, which fuels her delusions even more.
I found that the novel does a good job of highlighting the gender inequalities of 19th century Russian society. Anna's brother Steven Oblonsky, for example, merrily sleeps with as many beautiful women as he can, much to the continuing despair of his wife. And while Oblonsky's behavior has no effect on his place in Society, when Anna falls in love with Vronsky and leaves her husband, Society shuns her. It leaves Anna in an impossible place. Karenin, her husband, will not grant her a divorce; among other things he thinks it will ruin her. Yet the way she is living, ostracized from her social circle and without legitimacy in society, is unbearable. It is a testimony to the rigid social structure of the society in which Anna lives, which only allows survival within the framework of propriety. It made me think of our own modern society, in which this attachment to propriety still exists, although to a much lesser degree (unwed teenage mothers, for example, are looked down upon).
I preferred the less-depressing story of Levin, his farm, his relationship with the peasants, and his pursuit of Kitty Scherbatskya (I have read that Tolstoy modeled Levin after himself, and Kitty after his wife). Kitty is the daughter of Prince and Princess Scherbatsky, and the youngest sister of Steven Oblonsky's wife, Dolly. She is being courted by Vronsky when she refuses Levin's first offer of marriage early on in the novel. This drives Levin to focus on his other great passion, writing a book about how to improve Russian agriculture, focusing on the needs of the laborers. I found this interesting because Levin's concern with class issues and his preoccupation with the laboring class seems to anticipate the rise of the Bolsheviks in the following century. Throughout the narrative Levin struggles with his own place in society, especially in relation to the peasants who work his land.
The descriptions of Levin's land are some of the most beautiful in the whole book. The way Tolstoy illustrates the sights, sounds, and smells of the changing seasons; the harmony the peasants have with nature, and the virtue of their demanding physical labor is something that really stayed with me after I finished reading.
Another thing that struck me was the very realistic way in which Tolstoy describes uncertainty, in all characters but especially in Levin. Thought processes that lead to changes in opinion and changes of heart are delineated in detail. In this way Anna Karenina reminds me of novels by Dostoevsky, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.
I think one of the great things about this story is that it has such a wide appeal. Topics explored include romance, marriage, family, politics, religion, philosophy, education, women's rights, and class issues. There is also just a great mixture of love, betrayal, vengeance, tragedy, and hope.
I read the Wordsworth Classics edition, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. I found it very easy to read, although in places there were some awkwardly phrased sentences. Not enough to detract from my enjoyment of the novel though. I appreciated the realism, although there were a few sections that I thought could be shorter, especially those that related politics and elections in minute detail. All in all I found it a good, solid, and complex novel, and definitely worth a read.
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