Yes, folks, I am done with Anna Karenina. Hurrah! I waited ’till now to post on the last half of the book because, damn, I just wanted to be done. It’s not that the book is horrible, it’s just that it’s really, really long and there’s enough action for about half of its length. On the whole, I prefer Dickens when I want to read a social epic. Which reminds me that I need to get around to actually reading Oliver Twist some day.
So, final thoughts…
Divorce and marriage and jealousy: As the book goes on, Anna grows increasingly jealous of Vronsky. It’s not that he hangs out with other women, it’s that Anna left her husband for another man and she’s afraid that he’s going to do the same to her. Vronsky, on the other hand, wants Anna to divorce her husband and marry him, so they they can stop living on the fringes of society, and so that their child (or future children) have legal rights of inheritance. I was a little surprised at how responsible Vronsky turned out, even though he has lingering problems of feeling suffocated by Anna and needing to assert his “freedom.” I lost most of my sympathy for Anna before the end of Part VII, when I started to feel badly for her again. Anna’s jealousy makes her clingy, and I’m not surprised the Vronsky needs his occupations.
Religion: Towards the end of the book, Levin has a crisis of faith. It’s kind of a classic example of “no atheists in a foxhole.” When his wife goes into labor, Levin gets very (justifiably) fearful of her surviving the experience. So, he starts praying very sincerely for Kitty to be okay. And from there until he has an epiphany at the end, Levin starts to question his rather blasé agnosticism. He starts asking the big questions of “Why are we here?” and “What is our purpose here?” His agnosticism, of course, doesn’t have any answers. So he starts reading philosophies, and isn’t satisfied. At the end, I think he realizes that his soul craves the comfort of religion. If that sounds a little over dramatic, serious spiritual questioners will understand what I mean.
As I read this, though, I kind of felt that Tolstoy didn’t really explore this very interesting topic. It seemed–probably in comparison to a lot of depth on the subject of marriage and adultery–to be a superficial skimming over a potentially deep topic. I’ve thought that Anna Karenina feels like two novels crammed together, one about a woman named Anna Karenina and the other about a guy named Konstantin Levin. In the beginning, the juxtaposition makes sense. Anna’s plot threads show what happens when a marriage goes wrong; Levin’s shows what happens when it goes right. But by the end, the plots are no longer counter-balancing each other; they’ve gone off on their own tangents.
Tolstoy’s agenda: What really started to kill the book for me was Tolstoy’s increasingly obvious attempts to use the novel and its characters to make his points about contemporary art, academia, and music. I have an annotated edition of Anna Karenina, and a lot of the references to art, etc., had endnotes that described Tolstoy’s opinion. The man had a lot of opinions, and it seemed like there wasn’t much he liked about contemporary trends. He either thought they were unnatural failures (music), frivolous (art), or solipsistic and comical (academia). Tolstoy kept having his characters do meet artists or attend concerts or interact with scholars, and then using the characters as mouthpieces for whatever he had to say. I’ve never seen this done well, which for me means that the characters’ monologues don’t interrupt the narrative and/or are out of character.
Even though this book doesn’t really work for me as a novel, I can see that it would be a goldmine for literary critics and scholars.
I think I might donate my copy to the library, since I don’t see myself ever reading this again. It’s a good translation though. I think if the translators hadn’t done such a good job, this book would have been an even big chore to read that it was.