Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

For the last couple of months I have been savoring the Tolstoy novel Anna Karenina. Well over a year ago I read War and Peace and was captivated, this masterful novel is often referred to as the greatest novel of all time, as one can easily see Tolstoy was perhaps the greatest writer we have ever seen.

I certainly would make that point. Anna Karenina is another long tome incorporating historical events in Russian history to tell the tales of the characters lives.

Anna Karenina is the title character and she, as the book starts, has a problem. She is married to a man twenty years her Senior and is finding the relationship increasingly to be one in which she is unfulfilled. She feels her husband cold and unfeeling and she admits to herself of a growing loathing of being even in the same room with him much less fulfilling her wifely duties. Her pain is mitigated however by the young son she and her husband have had that is the joy of her life.

At a society dance Anna is asked to dance by Count Alexi Vronsky a gentleman she had recently met at a train station after traveling in the same car with the Count's mother. Vronsky is a rich man of marriageable age who has been courting Anna's young niece Kitty Oblonsky. Immediately Vronsky is captivated by this lady, a woman as opposed to the young girl he had been spending time with. Anna resists her unacknowledged feelings awakening inside her but at the same time looks forward to and places herself in in locations where she is likely to interact with him.

Eventually their relationship develops and as we learn quickly the path of love does not run smooth, certainly not for a society woman who chooses to commit open adultery in nineteenth century Russia. What develops over the course of the book is a character that with every page becomes less and less likable. By the end of the book Anna Karenina is nothing less than a shrew, a shadow of her former confident self and a person that it is not one you can cheer for. This might well be what sets this book apart, a heroine one cannot like and what becomes her destiny some might bemoan and others might call well deserved.

Countering this storyline however is the story of Konstantin Levin a young landowner who seeks the hand of the same Kitty who Vronsky is courting. Feeling the humiliation of rejection in this relationship Levin fills his life with his estate, his agrarian interests, and his questioning of all things. In time Levin finds peace in his past and moves himself forward in ways that are admirable.

This book has multitudes of characters, people move in and out of the storyline frequently, but in the end Levin and of course Anna are the ends of the pendulum. Seemingly neither can be happy at the same time. They only interact once in the book but their circles are in constant interaction. For all the good that develops in Levin nothing positive develops in the life for the title character.

Written in serial form from 1873 to 1877 and published in book form in 1878 Tolstoy intertwined the political questions of the day with these characters in his book. It is interesting to see Levin question everything. In this the age when the lessons of Darwin were only recently espoused and embraced Levin questions religion, God and his place in the universe. Even more so Levin treasures his land, his peasants who work his land and questions the correctness of his position in the world. Questions his gaining wealth while those who work his land live lives of modesty. In many ways the questions in the heart of Levin, and thus Tolstoy were questions that would come to a violent and turbulent answer in the next century.

This is a book beyond description with positive adjectives. It is a book universal in it's appeal and a must for any serious lover of literature. At the beginning of a new year there is no better literary resolution than a commitment to read Tolstoy. This is a great place to start.