Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy (1878)
You and me could write a bad romance
Finished "Anna Karenina." All great novels are alike; all mediocre novels are mediocre in their own way. Since college, there's always been an "Ann" or "Anna" in my life. For the last year, that role's belonged to Mrs. K.
The novel is about four Russian aristocrats (two couples). The good and beautiful Anna has an illicit affair with dashing Count Vronsky; the awkward, decent Levin (Tolstoy's alter ego) courts young Princess Kitty. Simple, right? Oh no.
Tolstoy spent his life in internal civil war. The Count had two sides: the tedious preacher, and the god-like artist. It's as if Jordan Peterson shared a dorm room with Bach. "Karenina" marks the last moment where the genius could hogtie the bore. That's what the book is *really* about. Tolstoy saw his own conflict--the wannabe saint vs. the sensual aristocrat--as epitomizing the only human battle that really mattered. So he handmade a world, and projected his own struggle onto it.
I suspect Tolstoy's original aim was to contrast the selfish lust of Anna-Vronsky with the selfless love of Levin-Kitty. Good Love vs. Bad Romance. But the author was so great that he defied his own design, and imbued Anna with a kind of divinity. Mrs. K is far more vital than Levin. She labors under two burdens: her tedious marriage to the decent prig Karenin, and her scandalous affair with the paradigmatic Russian fuckboy, Vronsky. To be alive, she has to be with Vronsky--but living only as his mistress means self-betrayal, and hurting Karenin. Neither man comprehends her.
And Levin? He loves Kitty but doesn't know how to live or what he believes. And Dolly loves Stiva, but not as much as Stiva loves Stiva. And so on, and so on. Yet Tolstoy ends up treating all of his children with respect, and there are no villains. In a figurative and literal sense, love is the coal that makes this train roll.
And yet "Karenina" is not a romance novel, except in the sense all novels are romance novels. Russian society hypocritically shames Anna for a public affair, but forgives Stiva (her brother-in-law) for his private infidelity. And behind it all, the old question of "What, exactly, is love?" sits in the middle and knows.
Harold Bloom wrote that great poets are failed versions of their masters: Shakespeare was a failed Marlowe, Beethoven a failed Mozart. And Tolstoy? He wanted what Victor Hugo had: the capacity to preach *and* write at the same time. Ironically, Tolstoy's greater creative power is precisely what prevented him from instructing the class. The work ran away from the tidy sermon. He failed to teach history in "War & Peace" like he failed to teach "morality" in "Karenina"--and this is why both are immortal. My dude tried to do a Very Special Episode and created living beings instead.
What Tolstoy has, where he beats the world, is his ability to capture the fleeting sensory and emotional impressions which make up the entirety of personal existence. Human brains do not see the world objectively. We live in a kaleidoscope of sense data. Out of this confusion of light and sound, we pick out the details that most stir emotion. "[Levin] walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as one does the sun, without looking." This is what people praise when they praise Tolstoy: his eerily perfect pitch for the subjective human experience of the world, what it is like to be us. Deep down, he suspected the meaning he sought lived there, and not in any single doctrine. It is not so much that his characters are real people (though they are), but that their lived reality is ours precisely.
He excels in interior texture of experience: the way cold metal touches against your skin. The way you fall into half-sleep on a train. How it feels to panic about your crush. All the subtle, quivering strings in the spider-web of life. He renders these brief moments, these vanishing whisps, into solid matter. Everything is in focus. It is an empirical, not theoretical, genius:
And suddenly, from the mysterious and awful far-away world in which he had been living for the last twenty-two hours, Levin felt himself all in an instant borne back to the old every-day world, glorified though now, by such a radiance of happiness that he could not bear it. The strained chords snapped, sobs and tears of joy which he had never foreseen rose up with such violence that his whole body shook, that for long they prevented him from speaking.
Falling on his knees before the bed, he held his wife’s hand before his lips and kissed it, and the hand, with a weak movement of the fingers, responded to his kiss. And meanwhile, there at the foot of the bed, in the deft hands of Lizaveta Petrovna, like a flickering light in a lamp, lay the life of a human creature, which had never existed before, and which would now with the same right, with the same importance to itself, live and create in its own image.
Tolstoy’s story-sense is faultless: he writes about the kinds of things that happen in the real world. For instance, both lovers of Anna are named Alexei. No other novelist would have dared; they would've been self-conscious. But Tolstoy knew, explicitly or implicitly, that common names are likely to be shared. Who else would've done that? We enter the mind of a dog, twice. We're told of Anna's husband's ears. There are moments that serve nothing in the story but to convince the reader that the author is not creating the illusion of life, but capturing something realer than life: "Sergey Ivanovitch did not answer. He was carefully with a blunt knife getting a live bee covered with sticky honey out of a cup full of white honeycomb."
It's funny: his prose is rather plain. He's not Nabokov, where every word has an implied poem hiding behind it. Count Leo is a train yard of nouns and verbs bouncing up against each other, with "and, and, and," clacking away, and before you know it, you're on the train with him too. And somehow, in the course of his rather unspectacular language, you feel suddenly that you're lifted to the sublime; you're listening to St. Peter, and he’s giving you the kingdom and the power and the glory and the keys therein.
What's behind that door is worth your while. Reading a great book is not like winning a race. You will be changed by it, always. I have. You go into it knowing this; it will affect you in some way, and how exactly you can't say. It will become part of your internal mental furniture. You don't read Anna Karenina, it reads you. Listen, dears: this is "Dune" for the human heart.
Imbued, not inbued
also, good review