anna karenina

I am just about finished reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and I say I really enjoyed it. I had tried reading it a few years back, well, many years back but I did not like it at all, I barely got past the first page, perhaps it had to do with that particular translation; this time it really jelled.

My first reaction, after reading about three pages was that of utmost joy. I have not enjoyed anything this much since Jane Austen. So I was just unabashedly happy with the mere thought that I had War and Peace to look forward to. Yes, yes, it is stupid to think about the next book when you still have about nine hundred and sixty pages left to read in the book in your hand and that probably qualifies for another kind adultery, but, whatever. I was just so amazed that here is this wonderful book, this writer, that I have known of all my life, and yet, have never bothered to read, and there is not just what is in my hands but more of what he has written. An embarrassment of riches if there ever was one.

Now, having almost finished it, I am a fan of his writing style. He is able to draw each character in such detail, he is able to relate to them all emotionally and he is able to give the appearance of them all being very different from each other. That in my opinion is the hardest thing for a writer, at least that is what I think right now. I am impressed by how equally well he can describe what the women and the men in the book feel, think, and want. Being a woman, I always find myself wondering what the men think and feel, mostly because of this notion in popular culture that men and women are so different.

Personally I am intimidated by the though of writing about a political, socio-economic debate between characters. I feel severely lacking in such knowledge and feel I shall not be able to bring out cohesive arguments, besides I always find such arguments pointless. They are a bad waste of good time in my opinion, and I am often bored when I listen to men discuss policy and stocks and stuff at parties, mostly because either they are all saying the same thing, or they are not listening to each other and merely want to prove they know more than the next guy, or more often than not none of them have any idea what they are talking about. Most of these discussions that I have heard in my lifetime, between my dad and his friends, and now between my husband and his friends are sad attempts at paraphrasing yesterday's editorial in one's own words and passing it off for original thought! really! I read the paper too! so please, spare me the horror!

Now what has that got to do with Tolstoy and Anna Karenina? Well, this, that he is able to not only write these arguments in a convincing coherent manner, but he is also able to show that they do not really matter. It is the fluff that the real story happens around, but it also goes to give depth or depict the shallowness of certain characters. I think I can never do it myself, not without considerable to the power of infinity effort that is, and hence I admire him even more for being able to do that. And I love him, for showing one of his principle characters (Levin) as taking no interest in these discussions. Well, glad to know there are men who are equally bored of this nonsensical talk. And yes, I accede that the stuff that women talk about, food, housekeeping, and kids is equally nonsensical too. They are both means of structuring time in social contexts coz for some weird reason we cannot sit together and be comfortably quiet. We just have to talk. It's a part of the human condition.

What I did not like that much about the book was Tolstoy's failure to depict Anna's emotional state when she decides to finally give in to Vronsky's overtures. We see her resistance, we see she is aware of the downfall this will be, we see her pushing him away and then suddenly she has taken the plunge. Why? What was she thinking? It was especially disheartening for me to see Tolstoy evade that part, because I see him doing this astonishingly detailed description of her mindset just before she commits suicide. It was like I was with her, I was feeling and thinking everything that she was, I took that journey with her going to Dolly's home, feeling humiliated, lost, option less, and I was with her when she went to the railway station, I was with her when she stood beside the platform and imagined herself falling on the tracks. I can't say if I agreed with her about the hopelessness of her situation, but I know that I understood her. I got it. I got why she felt that the jump and the subsequent death could be her only means of getting out of the mire she was in.

So when he can write so well, that he can convince me that she felt helpless enough to jump, why did he not write to convince me that she felt equally compelled to commit the adultery. Which in effect was the same thing. I got the impression that Anna, from the beginning understood that adultery was suicide, in her social position. She understood that it was a one way street and at the end of it, she would be a fallen woman. But he never goes into her mental state at that time, he does not so acutely describe why she took that first step towards her ruin. She was smart enough to expect every single consequence, but Tolstoy does not describe it, why? Is it because it is impossible to keep the aura of the heroine if you go into such murky confused workings of the brain? And by the time he begins to describe her end, she has already fallen from grace and we can pity her as a once loved friend who has lost her mental balance, whereas in fact that balance never existed. It would be hard to love an imbalanced character from the start so he hides it? Because when i think about it, Vronsky was was just another young captain trying to flirt with a married woman. Anna must have met many of them. Why him? What was so special about him? Why does Tolstoy not write about that? At times I felt like the adultery had nothing to do with Vronsky. It was all Anna, and her own self-destructive streak. He just happened to be there.

Is that what is his "brilliance" because Tolstoy without writing it explicitly, creates her character as one that defies logic to make these grand acts of self-annihilation and self-loathing. Her committing adultery, her telling her husband about it to incite his wrath, her refusal of his offer of divorce, her insistence on going to public places and facing humiliation, and her final suicide. I don't know. Maybe that is his brilliance, but I felt cheated. I think these were such complex decisions that he being this great writer that he was, I wish he had tackled them. I wish he would have written about her mental state at each of these moments, when she took these logic defying steps. It if it meant she could no longer come across as a cool heroine then so be it. I would have still read that.

But, overall, he writes beautifully, and I feel a special friendship to Levin, which i believe is Tolstoy himself, and that is nice feeling, to feel like you and someone else this great think on the same lines :)