Book #6: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Okay, I've been reading Anna Karenina for three months now? And I'm just now finishing it. That wouldn't speak very well for the book, but I took a month-long break in the middle while we were visiting our families, and I think just knowing what bad things were coming up for Anna made me not want to jump back in to it. I knew it was a depressing story, and about halfway through I didn't want Anna to come to her inevitable fate, so it took a lot of energy for me to start reading again. But this week I decided I had to knock it out and couldn't leave it halfway finished, so I did.

And yes, the story is depressing. You can't help but feel how totally hypocritical everything and everyone is in their society, and how all of their wrath just falls on Anna when she does something to step out of line. It's said all over that everyone has affairs, it's openly acknowledged and talked about, but Anna does the unthinkable of actually going to live with her lover and leaving her husband, and she is punished unfairly in comparison to Vronsky. He is allowed to mingle in society and express his "manly independence" (which seems like such an important thing to all of the men in the book; no women seem to think about that at all), while Anna isn't received anywhere and is universally looked down upon. She realizes more and more how trapped she is in this decision she's made, how she's dependent on Vronsky and if he loses interest in her she is absolutely lost. It was fascinating to read her thoughts and see how she degenerates into almost insanity because her jealousy over everything and anything that Vronsky did, even as she knew it was insanity and that she was overreacting. In the end, she decides to punish herself and Vronsky by throwing herself under a train. So I mean, I think that committing adultery is a terrible thing to do, but you can't help observing and being affected by how unfair Anna's treatment is and the incredible double standard that was in force in their society. Just because she was a woman, she was thrown to the curb and destroyed.

The parallel story in the book is about Konstantine Levin, a landowner and farmer who usually lives in the country. You're introduced to him in the beginning when he goes to propose marriage to Kitty, the girl he loves but who has recently fallen in love with Vronsky (before Anna). Levin seems like he lives in his mind a lot--he is introverted and very concerned with deep, philosophical questions about what the point is of everything and how he can be happy in his life. He eventually does marry Kitty and they seem to have the most functional and happy marriage of the entire book--everyone else seems to be straining or cheating on each other, while Levin and Kitty have the normal tiffs and disagreements of newlyweds but care deeply about each other and see the best in each other. The book ends with Levin, who's become suicidal over his inability to answer his questions about life, finds relief through a discussion with a peasant and realizes that he does have faith in the Christianity of his childhood and believes in the goodness and righteousness that he can accomplish. The last line of the book is Levin saying, "But from now on my life, my whole life, no matter what happens to me, every second of it, is not only not meaningless as it was before, but it has the incontestable meaning of the goodness I have the power to put into it!" (868). So through Levin, the book ends on a hopeful note. I was always happy to come back to the Levin story (although Levin's and Anna's narrative overlap sometimes) because it was generally not so depressing and hopeless as Anna's.

There are so many things I love about Tolstoy's style. I love how you have a good sense of all of the character's thoughts and their innermost emotions; he really works the omniscient narrator thing. I love how there are entire scenes and chapters that are only there for establishing the characters' state of mind instead of allowing something dramatic to happen that will change the course of the plot (although, that's why his books are so long). I love how he portrays the anguished, inner thoughts of the two main characters, Anna and Levin, so that you can trace their development and changes and kind of understand their actions (Anna, in particular, struck me as particularly poignant and realistic as she became more and more jealous and desperate). I liked this book more than War and Peace, I think, and I liked that book a lot--mostly because the stories were much more focused and there weren't so many characters and plots to keep track of. But the great things about Tolstoy remain in both books.

I am so happy I read this. I really and truly enjoyed it. I think I would even read it again, especially having read it once now, because it really was so good (even though I procrastinated a lot about finishing it once I'd started).