It's horrible, horrible. When I finished with college in America, I took a year off to work on my first novel and went back to Pakistan with a suitcase full of books I thought I should read. Among those books was Anna Karenina. Very often, I used to turn to classic works of literature with a certain degree of apprehension that it would bore the pants off me but would be good for me. But that wasn't the case at all with Anna Karenina.
I thought the story was romantic, passionate, wonderful. And as somebody who was trying to write, it was an enormously educational book. At first glance it seemed like a very conservative interpretation of what a novel could be, but in fact Tolstoy was making some remarkably avant-garde and exciting moves as a writer — there is a wonderful chapter or two when you see the goings-on from the point of view of Levin's dog.
I remember reading the crazy farming scenes, where Levin is doing repetitive work with the peasants in the field, and thinking, "What's going on here? It was like finding an east Asian Zen koan buried in the heart of a 19th-century Russian aristocrat's opus.
Today, an editor would say take that out, but Tolstoy was fortunate in not existing in the current environment. To me, these scenes are signs of an unbridled belief in what a novel can do.
There are so many facets of this huge intricate thing that can blow you away if you stop to look at them. In when I was 18, I left Nottingham having only ever been abroad once to spend a year as an au pair in Florence. The fat black Penguin edition of Anna Karenina was the only novel I could squeeze into my very small suitcase. The world is still an awfully harsh place to those who step out of line or who cannot enter into prescribed ways of thinking and feeling.
Anna Karenina and War and Peace are often described as very different novels, and that is true. However, they share fundamental themes. Both of them are about how it is we decide and make mistakes about whom and what we should love in life, to whom and to what we should give our loyalty, our belief, our faith.
In War and Peace these themes are exposed amid momentous historical events; in Anna Karenina the scale is smaller, but history still intrudes.
It may surprise those who read Anna Karenina for the first time just how little the eponymous heroine appears in the novel. All three of these stories are concerned with marriage and love: their formation, their dissolution, their glories and perils. All are deeply touching. I have read Anna Karenina many times, yet I always fall in love with Anna on first sight, just as Vronsky and Kitty fall in love with her when they first see her. Anna is intelligent and charming and beautiful and wonderfully dressed and clearly fundamentally good.
Anna eventually helps reconcile the two of them; she is all-conquering, often without meaning to be. One of the reasons that Anna Karenina is such a great novel, one that we can read over and over again, and see different things each time, is that its characters are intensely human — so much so that they can feel more alive than we will ever be.
HuffPost Personal Video Horoscopes. Follow Us. Terms Privacy Policy. Here are seven life lessons from one of Tolstoy's classics, "Anna Karenina":. Divorce should be a socially acceptable option. Rushing into marriage is probably unwise. Romance and true love do exist!
Suggest a correction. What's Hot. Country's T. Set against this drama, Anna Karenina is also the story of Constantine Levin, a gentleman farmer of sorts, whose search for happiness and meaning in life culminates, not with his long-desired marriage to Kitty Shcherbatskaya the event he hoped would secure his happiness , but with the simple advice of a peasant about "living rightly, in God's way.
Anna Karenina is a morality play that deals with the damaging effects of morality on Anna and Vronsky. It is also a novel about the meaning of life and the place happiness does or does not play in it, and a meditation on death and the lessons it teaches. In many ways, Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's most personal work in that many of its scenes mirror Tolstoy's relationship with his wife, Sonya; in particular, Levin's courtship of Kitty expressing his love for her by writing with chalk on a table, as well as the wrenching scene where he gives her his diaries to read.
The writing of the final scenes of the novel, specifically Levin's fevered search for an answer to his questions about the meaning of existence, reflect Tolstoy's own process of religious conversion, enacted dramatically in his memoir, A Confession , which was written on the heels of Anna Karenina and is considered by many to be one of the most soul-searching statements of spirituality.
The publication of Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina , which his contemporary, Dostoyevsky, considered to be "a perfect work of art," was an end to the life he had known, one of material and emotional luxury, and would signal the beginning of a deeper quest for the meaning of existence.
Furthermore, this break with the past would manifest itself in Tolstoy's moral and religious writings and his rapid movement toward social reform. Although he would go on to publish other novels, such as Resurrection , and numerous stories like his masterpiece , The Death of Ivan Ilyich , Tolstoy's career as a novelist in many ways reached its pinnacle--its perfect balance of drama, morality, and philosophical inquiry--with the character of Anna Karenina and her seemingly irrational embrace of death.
Equally compelling is the character of Anna's husband, Karenina, as portrayed by Tolstoy with all his complexity and emotional denial over the loss of Anna and his subsequent brief embrace of Christian forgiveness. Finally, there is Vronsky's startling realization when Tolstoy writes: "It showed him [Vronsky] the eternal error men make in imagining that happiness consists in the realization of their desires. As well, there is the question to what extent we are happiest perhaps a suspect word here living the "examined life" as opposed to the "unexamined life.
How do Levin and Anna's husband Karenina manifest different and similar attitudes with respect to religion? When Karenina forgives Anna following her near-death experience, do you think he is sincere? When she doubts his love in the latter part of the book, do you think she is right to do so? Is it in her imagination or is he culpable? After her suicide and his breakdown, is Vronsky's love for her deeper, truer? How does Karenina's hatred of Anna and their son affect him?
Compare and contrast Anna and Levin's search for meaning: Levin's that ends in a kind of spiritual grace and Anna's that culminates in death.
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