jethrien

Title: Anna Karenina
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Genre: Classic literature
Thingummies: 4

Synopsis: A lady throws herself in front of a train so a wealthy landowner can learn an important lesson about faith and farming.

Thoughts: I’m not going to try to debate the merits of what’s accepted as a towering achievement in world literature. I’m just going to discuss my own reactions to it.

Like most people, I thought I knew the basic plot of this book. Woman cheats on her upstanding husband with a dashing prince (and goodness, there were a lot of princes in Russian society at the time), throws herself in front of a train in despair. Given that plot synopsis, and the title itself, I kind of figured that the main character of this book would in fact be Anna Karenina.

She’s not. The protagonist is actually Levin, a vacillating and kind of irritating little man. Actually, I found all the characters rather irritating. I suppose that it should have been clear from the famous opening line about all happy versus unhappy families that most of the people in this novel would be disagreeable in some way. It’s essentially a book on the nature of goodness, which requires most folks to not be very good. It’s not exactly big transgressions, for the most part. There’s the adultery, of course, but that’s actually less of a problem in the long run than the hopeless pride and senseless jealousy displayed by most of the characters. Also, long digressions onto the state of Russian farming and Russian politics that are no longer particularly relevant or interesting to the modern reader make sections rather difficult to get through.

But other parts were far more readable than I was expecting. And I found myself loving certain passages. Anna’s thought process heading into her suicide makes you want to smack her upside the head for being a self-involved idiot. But Tolstoy is right—her logic is exactly how people with clinical depression think. Despair requires a certain self-centeredness that he nails.

The passage that really won me, though, was a strangely personal one. It’s not a particularly important scene—Kitty is nursing her infant son, watching his little hand wave around as he falls asleep eating. I read this particular passage, however, at 3am, nursing my infant son, watching his little hand wave around as he fell asleep eating.

So many of the scenes in this book drag terribly for the modern reader. And I can’t say that I found his final conclusions regarding the nature of faith particularly compelling. But at the same time, for many of the scenes of everyday life (as opposed to musings on why Russian agriculture was behind that of the rest of the world), the writing is such that one finds oneself thinking, “Yes. This is exactly what that is like.”