Anna Karenina

“ It often seemed to her that books and plays about the unhappiness of women in her position were all false. If one loved, what could one want better? Such women, if unhappy, could have no pride; or else could not really love! She had recently been reading “Anna Karenina,” and had often said to herself: “There's something not true about it—as if Tolstoy wanted to make us believe that Anna was secretly feeling remorse. If one loves, one doesn't feel remorse. Even if my baby had been taken away, I shouldn't have felt remorse. One gives oneself to love—or one does not.” ”

“ The miscalculations of a great genius are enlightening; here, in Anna Karenina, is one that calls attention to Tolstoy's characteristic fashion of telling a story, and declares its remarkable qualities.
The story of Anna, I suggested, is not essentially dramatic. Like the story of Emma Bovary or of Eugénie Grandet, it is a picture outspread, an impression of life, rather than an action. Anna at first has a life that rests on many supports, with her husband and her child and her social possessions; it is broadly based and its stability is assured, if she chooses to rely on it. ”

“ Already, in "War and Peace" and in "Anna Karenina," his descriptions of female charms resembled catalogues of weapons against which a man must arm himself or perish. The beautiful Princess Helena, with her gleaming shoulders, her faultless white bosom, and her eternal smile is evidently an object of aversion to her creator; even as the Countess Betsy, with her petty coquetries and devices for attracting attention at the Opera and elsewhere, is a target for his contempt. "Woman is a stumbling-block in a man's career," remarks a philosophical husband in "Anna Karenina." ”

“ But before the sinful relationship had begun—as long as love is nothing but an unconscious wave, a sweet, painful, sunny smile in the soul of Anna Karenina—what writer can compare with Tolstoy in his intuitive understanding, his unhesitating description of the woman? With what yearning sympathy his thoughts must cling to her in order to grasp the impalpable lines of her being! But the portrait of the young girl in Family Happiness is [Pg 144] still more worthy of admiration than that of the matured woman. ”

“ He’s always drawing up projects nowadays. He won’t let a poor devil go nowadays till he’s explained it all to him under heads.”
“Looking older, did you say? Il fait des passions. I believe Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s jealous now of his wife.”
“Oh, come now, please don’t say any harm of Countess Lidia Ivanovna.”
“Why, is there any harm in her being in love with Karenin?”
“But is it true Madame Karenina’s here?”
“Well, not here in the palace, but in Petersburg. I met her yesterday with Alexey Vronsky, bras dessous, bras dessous, in the Morsky.”
“C’est un homme qui n’a pas,...” ”

“ With an incomparable discernment and rare genius in the delineation of the characters and their social surroundings, Tolstoy describes the unceasing torment of this union, until Anna Karenina’s wish to destroy herself breaks out into a brutal form of suicide. Not one single moment of happiness has fallen to the lot of these equally warm-hearted and passionate people; the entire description presents nothing but a continual judgment on injured morality. ”

“ Next came “Anna Karenina”: a sort of Russian high-society version of “The Scarlet Letter.” Anna is a woman who has been sold in the usual way to an elderly gentleman; she is a contented wife, until she meets a young cavalry officer whom she truly loves. Instead of engaging in a polite intrigue, according to the custom of her time, Anna takes the new love affair more seriously than she takes her marriage, and so Tolstoi drives her and her lover to suicide. This harshness greatly shocked the critics of the time, who said that Tolstoi was “killing flies with an ax.” ”

“ If I looked for the most beautiful illustration in all fiction of a woman at the mercy of time, exposed to the action of the years, now facing it [52] with what she is, presently betraying and recording it with what she becomes, I should surely find it in the story of Anna Karenina. Various and exquisite as she is, her whole nature is sensitive to the imprint of time, and the way in which time invades her, steals throughout her, finally lays her low, Tolstoy tracks and renders from end to end. And in War and Peace his hand is not less delicate and firm. The progress of time is never broken ”

“ There’s something strange about her,” said her friend.
“The great change is that she brought back with her the shadow of Alexey Vronsky,” said the ambassador’s wife.
“Well, what of it? There’s a fable of Grimm’s about a man without a shadow, a man who’s lost his shadow. And that’s his punishment for something. I never could understand how it was a punishment. But a woman must dislike being without a shadow.”
“Yes, but women with a shadow usually come to a bad end,” said Anna’s friend.
“Bad luck to your tongue!” said Princess Myakaya suddenly. “Madame Karenina’s a splendid woman. ”

“ We are not told to believe, for example, that Anna is wonderfully exalted and ennobled by her passion for Vrónsky. The English reader is thus saved from many a groan of impatience. The other thing is yet more important. Our Russian novelist deals abundantly with criminal passion and with adultery, but he does not seem to feel himself owing any service to the goddess Lubricity, or bound to put in touches at this goddess's dictation. Much in Anna Karénina is painful, much is unpleasant, but nothing is of a nature to trouble the senses, or to please those who wish their senses troubled. ”

“ As an impressionist he well knows how to produce certain rapid and subtle sensations, while he is never obscene or unhealthy in tone. “War and Peace” is put into the hands of all young girls in Russia. “Anna Karenina,” which touches upon a perilous subject, is considered a manual of morals. ”

“ He had now reached some satisfying convictions in his religious speculations, and felt that his personal life was moving up in the right direction. His moral change is made plain in the contrast between two figures of the story, Prince Andrey and Peter Bezukhoff: the ambitious worldling and the honest seeker after the right way.
In his second great novel, “Anna Karenina,” the undercurrent of the author's own moral experience has a distinctly greater carrying power. It is through the earnest idealist, Levine, that Tolstoy has recorded his own aspirations. ”

“ In the dining-room he was met by Konstantin Levin.
“I’m not late?”
“You can never help being late!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, taking his arm.
“Have you a lot of people? Who’s here?” asked Levin, unable to help blushing, as he knocked the snow off his cap with his glove.
“All our own set. Kitty’s here. Come along, I’ll introduce you to Karenin.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch, for all his liberal views, was well aware that to meet Karenin was sure to be felt a flattering distinction, and so treated his best friends to this honor. ”

“ Meeting his eyes, Anna’s face instantly took a coldly severe expression as though she were saying to him: “It’s not forgotten. It’s all the same.”
“Were you really in love?” she said to Yashvin.
“Oh heavens! ever so many times! But you see, some men can play but only so that they can always lay down their cards when the hour of a rendezvous comes, while I can take up love, but only so as not to be late for my cards in the evening. That’s how I manage things.”
“No, I didn’t mean that, but the real thing.” She would have said Helsingfors, but would not repeat the word used by Vronsky. ”

“ Darya Alexandrovna still mused when she had passed the peasant women and was driving uphill again at a trot, seated comfortably on the soft springs of the old carriage, “while I, let out, as it were from prison, from the world of worries that fret me to death, am only looking about me now for an instant. They all live; those peasant women and my sister Natalia and Varenka and Anna, whom I am going to see—all, but not I.
“And they attack Anna. What for? am I any better? I have, anyway, a husband I love—not as I should like to love him, still I do love him, while Anna never loved hers. ”

“ In all Petersburg there was not a human being to whom he could express what he was feeling, who would feel for him, not as a high official, not as a member of society, but simply as a suffering man; indeed he had not such a one in the whole world.
Alexey Alexandrovitch grew up an orphan. There were two brothers. They did not remember their father, and their mother died when Alexey Alexandrovitch was ten years old. The property was a small one. Their uncle, Karenin, a government official of high standing, at one time a favorite of the late Tsar, had brought them up. ”

“ Anna got into the carriage again in an even worse frame of mind than when she set out from home. To her previous tortures was added now that sense of mortification and of being an outcast which she had felt so distinctly on meeting Kitty.
“Where to? Home?” asked Pyotr.
“Yes, home,” she said, not even thinking now where she was going.
“How they looked at me as something dreadful, incomprehensible, and curious! What can he be telling the other with such warmth?” she thought, staring at two men who walked by. “Can one ever tell anyone what one is feeling? ”

“ Princess Myakaya turned to him. “But the point is that I won’t abandon Anna to your mercies. She’s so nice, so charming. How can she help it if they’re all in love with her, and follow her about like shadows?” ”

“ The commencement of Anna Karénina, appeared in the first four monthly numbers of the Russian Messenger for 1875.
By far the best English version of that novel (as also of War and Peace) is Mrs. Constance Garnett's, though I do not like her alteration of the title of the book to Anna Karénin, nor am I quite satisfied with her treatment of some of the conversations in it; but unquestionably we have much to thank her for.
In February the baby, Nicholas, died of inflammation of the brain, and on 4th March 1875 [53] Tolstoy wrote to Fet:
We have one grief after another ”

“ You can’t get away from yourselves.” Turning her eyes in the direction Pyotr had turned to look, she saw a factory-hand almost dead-drunk, with hanging head, being led away by a policeman. “Come, he’s found a quicker way,” she thought. “Count Vronsky and I did not find that happiness either, though we expected so much from it.” And now for the first time Anna turned that glaring light in which she was seeing everything on to her relations with him, which she had hitherto avoided thinking about. “What was it he sought in me? Not love so much as the satisfaction of vanity.” ”

“ He knows all about it, he sees it all; what does he care if he can talk so calmly? If he were to kill me, if he were to kill Vronsky, I might respect him. No, all he wants is falsehood and propriety,” Anna said to herself, not considering exactly what it was she wanted of her husband, and how she would have liked to see him behave. She did not understand either that Alexey Alexandrovitch’s peculiar loquacity that day, so exasperating to her, was merely the expression of his inward distress and uneasiness. ”

“ Betsy agreed; “one must make mistakes and correct them. What do you think about it?” she turned to Anna, who, with a faintly perceptible resolute smile on her lips, was listening in silence to the conversation.
“I think,” said Anna, playing with the glove she had taken off, “I think ... of so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.”
Vronsky was gazing at Anna, and with a fainting heart waiting for what she would say. ”

“ If you are convinced now that you cannot make each other happy....”
“Happiness may be variously understood. But suppose that I agree to everything, that I want nothing: what way is there of getting out of our position?”
“If you care to know my opinion,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with the same smile of softening, almond-oil tenderness with which he had been talking to Anna. His kindly smile was so winning that Alexey Alexandrovitch, feeling his own weakness and unconsciously swayed by it, was ready to believe what Stepan Arkadyevitch was saying. ”

“ I’ll set you free. You don’t love me; you love someone else!”
Vronsky besought her to be calm, and declared that there was no trace of foundation for her jealousy; that he had never ceased, and never would cease, to love her; that he loved her more than ever.
“Anna, why distress yourself and me so?” he said to her, kissing her hands. There was tenderness now in his face, and she fancied she caught the sound of tears in his voice, and she felt them wet on her hand. And instantly Anna’s despairing jealousy changed to a despairing passion of tenderness. ”

“ She is happy, she makes another person happy, and she’s not broken down as I am, but most likely just as she always was, bright, clever, open to every impression,” thought Darya Alexandrovna,—and a sly smile curved her lips, for, as she pondered on Anna’s love affair, Darya Alexandrovna constructed on parallel lines an almost identical love affair for herself, with an imaginary composite figure, the ideal man who was in love with her. ”

“ Only Anna was sad. She knew that now, from Dolly’s departure, no one again would stir up within her soul the feelings that had been roused by their conversation. It hurt her to stir up these feelings, but yet she knew that that was the best part of her soul, and that that part of her soul would quickly be smothered in the life she was leading. ”