(1874-1876)
Of Anna Karenina, one of the greatest novels of the world, Matthew Arnold has said: We are not
to take Ana Karenina as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of
life." It is a chronicle of Russian life, passionate and moving, and written with the simplicity which defies anlaysis. It confirms Tolstoy's deserved reputation as a master portrayer of the normal.
The story is woven in two strands. One concerns Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky; the other Kitty Oblonsky and Konstantin Levin. The latter is more or less the mouthpiece of Tolstoy's own ideas about what life should be. Indeed, it is generally conceded that Levin is drawn from the author himself. These two strands are knotted at the outset when Levin comes to Moscow to propose to Kitty. Kitty rejects him, for she is in
love with Vronksy. But Anna, who is the wife of Aleksey Aleksandrovitch Karenin, a Minister of the Government, is also visiting Moscow, and Vronsky falls in love with her. Her relationship with her husband is cold and unhappy. She returns Vronksy's love and is too forthright and passionate to dissemble. She breaks with her husband, even though it means losing her beloved child. Later she bears an illegitimate daughter to Vronsky. Anna and her lover are both persons of integrity and high character, but the inexorable pressures of society, the reminders of the opportunities lost by each, insidiously prey upon each of them. It is the implusive, brooding Anna who first finds the strain unendurable and who flings herself under the wheels of a train.
The story of Levin and Kitty is the antithesis of this tragic history. Levin is over-serious, amiable, but rather tedious in his obsession with the revolution in living standards; he harps on social theories and religion. His courtship of Kitty is a somewhat clumsy affair, requiring as it does first his slow recovery from the wound of her initial rejection, and the mending of Kitty's vanity from the jilting by Vronsky. They settle down to a dull and commonplace existence.
The transcendent portions of the book are to be found in the observation of the progressive deterioration of the relationship between Anna and Vronsky. We see them fly from pillar to post, from Petersburg to Moscow, to Italy, to Vronsky's country estates; from dabbling in art to community good works - all in the effort to settle themselves in a free life. But soceity will not tolerate their honest relationship. It requires of them deceit, and pretense - the one price their natures forbid them to pay. Tolstoy makes it clear that their doom is foreordained with a positiveness in direct ratio to their honesty.
The book is rich in character studies. None of its figures is more complex than the lonely, tragic, well-meaning, exasperating, fumbling, pompous and frightened Karenin. In spite of the hateful and neurotic mannerisms of his personality he attains at times a magnanimity of the highest order. With his peculiar genius Tolstoy reveals Anna's self-responsibility for much of the consequences of her social defiance. Nothing but her own pique and perverse contrariness prevent her from obtaining a divorce and freedom to marry Vronsky. That Karenin later vacillates and hardened by the pressure of malicious friends, need not have made the debacle inevitable.