Anna Karenin (Classics) [Paperback]

Tolstoy was a "giant, striding through the world with his eyes wide open and his nostrils flaring." He didn't miss much. After reading this and his other great work, War and Peace, I was pretty much dumbfounded by his accomplishment.

To me, one halmark of true art, whether it be the Sistine Chapel, Beethoven's ninth, King Lear, Paradise Lost, Faust, etc. is how they are even conceived, much less carried off. I am in awe of very few authors, but Tolstoy has to rank as one of the true big leaguers, and this novel captures him at the height of his powers. No one could touch him, not even Dostoevsky, and certainly not Turgenev.

I think he does an even better job than Flaubert (another of my heroes) at portraying a woman as his central character. I can't speak from experience, obviously, but both Emma and Anna come across as realistically fleshed-out, multi-dimensional figures.

I probably lean towards Anna because she is a much more sympathetic character than Emma Bovary. She is an aristocrat in the true sense of the word, not just born into a noble family, but possessing a nobility of spirit as well. Unlike Emma, she loves her child. Her husband, Karenin, is dry and humorlessly ascerbic, with the soul of a civil servant. He uses the child as a pawn to get back at Anna.

Vronsky, in contrast, is dashing and clever and looks great in his uniform. In short,Anna is doomed as soon as she meets him. Fate (of the ancient Greek variety) wends its way through the novel, dragging her inexorably to her doom.

There are so many vivid scenes throughout, but the most memorable to me is the scene in which Vronsky's racehorse breaks down, foreshadowing the conclusion at the train station.

The subplot involving Levin and Kitty does not detract from the main plot, as it might in the hands of a lesser novelist. It is undeniably less dramatic, but serves as a counterpoint precisely because it is more prosaic. Levin is saved by love, Anna destroyed by it.

I really don't believe in re-reading books. I'm usually disappointed when I return to them after a prolonged interval. For instance, I just can't bring myself to read War and Peace again, though I did enjoy listening to the BBC audiotape recently. As to reasing the novel again, it would be like returning to an earlier affair. I'd be afraid my response wouldn't be as rich as it was at first encounter. But Anna is different. I've read it three times and haven't tired of it in the least. I really couldn't praise a work of art more highly.

This Penguin edition is the translation I've most enjoyed. The recent Pevear/Volokhonsky translation has been well received, and may be a good bet for those who haven't read the work before. Primarily due their use of Russian patrynomics, I have a hard time figuring out which character they are writing about. The same difficulty presented itself to me in their translation of The Brothers Karamazov and The Possessed. They probably are more accurate translations, however.

War and Peace (Vintage Classics) and Anna Karenina are Leo Tolstoy's most important works, and Tolstoy is the greatest of novelists. However, a significant number of user reviews on Amazon confirm that Anna Karenina is not for everyone. Reviewers who have understood well what Tolstoy was saying and why have nevertheless found the novel too long, and have not enjoyed passages that Tolstoy would have considered essential.

Yes, it's a long and "difficult" novel. Its central story of an attractive married woman who leaves her husband and son for a dashing cavalry officer, ultimately coming to a bad end, is well-known. But there is vastly more to it than that. Against a detailed background of events and social issues in mid 1870's Russia, Tolstoy explores a spectrum of ways in which families are unhappy. He is much concerned with the moral and spiritual state of his characters. Some, including Anna, her lover and her brother, are totally lost, and they, aided by external factors, bring great unhappiness to themselves and others. Some have found a spiritual home, providing Tolstoy with the opportunity to explore several, but we are left thinking that what they have found may be no more than self-satisfaction, if that. Levin, who marries into the same family as Anna's brother, but is a very different type of person, is modelled on Tolstoy himself, and he spends most of the novel on a spiritual quest. In the concluding chapters he finds a tentative answer, though we suspect that, as with Tolstoy, it will prove to be only a staging-post on the longer journey.

Levin is also given Tolstoy's experience of courtship, early marriage and first fatherhood, and there is much about the contemporary agricultural scene (an exciting time, as new methods and machines were introduced), some politics, a couple of game shoots, an enlightened discussion of the case for the emancipation and education of women and peasants, the provision of medical care for the peasantry, and an examination of the misery caused by the Russian church's rules on divorce.

Many of the issues discussed are still current today, making the novel seem in some respects rather modern. Perhaps the debate about the benefits to society as a whole of enabling and encouraging the less-favoured to better themselves and their families is eternal. The considerations offered by Anna's husband against infidelity within marriage - what society thinks; religion; hurt to near relatives; and hurt to self - also have a timeless quality.

Buy and read Anna Karenina if the web into which Anna's story is woven appeals to you. Give it the time it needs and you will find you have made an investment for life. If the 850 closely-printed pages and all the detail about Tolstoy's preoccupations and the social and other issues of the Russia of his time are just too daunting, you may prefer the similarly tragic but more accessible heroine of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Oxford World's Classics). If, of course, you have already read and enjoyed both Tess and War and Peace (possibly also Flaubert's Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics)), you won't be troubling to read this review, you will be raring to get on with Anna Karenina.

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"

- Leo Tolstoy "Anna Karenina"

Anna Karenina is a beautifully written novel about three families: the Oblonskys, the Levins, and the Karenins. The first line (one of the most famous in literature) hints at Tolstoy's own views about happy and unhappy marriages having these same three families also represent three very different societal and physical locations in Russia in addition to distinctly different views on love, loyalty, fidelity, happiness and marital bliss.

Tolstoy seems to stress that `trusting companionships" are more durable and filled with happiness versus "romantic passion" that bursts with flames and then slowly; leaves ashes rather than a firm, solid foundation to build upon.

It is like reading a soap opera with all of its twists and turns where the observer is allowed to enter into the homes, the minds and the spirits of its main characters. The moral compass in the book belongs to Levin whose life and courtship of Kitty mirrors much of Leo Tolstoy's own courtship of his wife Sophia. Levin's personality and spiritual quest is Tolstoy's veiled attempt at bringing to life his own spiritual peaks and valleys and the self doubts that plagued him his entire life despite his happy family life and the fact that he too found love in his life and a committed durable marriage. At the other end of the spectrum is Anna, who also because of her individual choices and circumstances, falls into despair.

It is clear that Tolstoy wants the reader to come away with many messages about the sanctity of marriage, love and family life. He also wants us to be mindful of the choices that we make in life and the affect that these choices have upon ourselves, our station and path in life as well as the affect upon those that we profess to love. Tolstoy also wants us to examine what makes our lives happy or not; and what is at the root of either end result. Levin and Kitty are the happiest married couple; yet Levin faces his own double bind when struggling against domestic bliss and his need for independence on the other hand and how to achieve both (if that is possible) without relinquishing that which made him who he was born to be.

Anna Karenina and Konstantin Levin are the primary protagonists in the novel and both are rich and fine characters in their own right. Both of them focus on self; one however finds the self to be a nurturer which puts value into life very much as a farmer; while the other views self with despair and as a punisher or destroyer. Both views, diametrically opposed, force the characters on very different paths and lives for themselves. Then there is the dilemma of forgiveness versus vengeance. The very epigram for the novel from Romans states: "Vengeance is mine; I will repay." Yet vengeance upon oneself or others is not up to individuals but God; and yet the characters are haunted about what forgiveness is or isn't and by the hollowness of words versus heartfelt and soulfully reflective actions. The themes of social change in Russia, family life's blessings and virtues and farming (even if it is simply the goodness one puts into life and how one cultivates it and others) dominate the novel's landscape. Trains also play a symbolic importance in the novel and it is odd that Tolstoy himself years after writing Anna Karenina dies himself in a train station after setting off from his home in an emotional cloud.

Sometimes the names of the characters themselves can be confusing: so a hint to the reader might be to think of each Russian character's name as having three parts: the first name (examples here are for Levin and Kitty) like Konstantin or Ekaterina, a patronymic which is the father's first name accompanied by a suffix which means son of or daughter of like Dmitrich (son of Dmitri) or Alexandrovna (daughter of Alexander) and then the surname like Levin or Shcherbatskaya. Thus the explanations for the Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya (nicknamed Kitty) and Konstantin Dmitrich Levin (Levin).

I loved the book and its details and the richness of the characterizations as well as the storytelling technique of the great Tolstoy and I have to agree with Tolstoy when he stated, "I am very proud of its architecture-its vaults are joined so that one cannot even notice where the keystone is. " The vaults: "Anna and Levin" are joined with the very first line of the novel and with their focus on themselves.

Rating: A

Bentley/2007