Anna Karenina in Penguin Classics

Jan 06, 2010 Moppet rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1870s

Anna Karenina has the reputation of being the greatest novel of all time. I can't agree with that. But it is a great novel, and a better one than I remember from my first attempt to read it in the 1990s. I ploughed through half of it, not especially enthralled, then left it abandoned for over a decade with - what else - a train ticket inside it to mark my place.

I'm glad I waited so long to come back to it. Tolstoy brings an almost encyclopedic knowledge of human nature (and animal nature - there Anna Karenina has the reputation of being the greatest novel of all time. I can't agree with that. But it is a great novel, and a better one than I remember from my first attempt to read it in the 1990s. I ploughed through half of it, not especially enthralled, then left it abandoned for over a decade with - what else - a train ticket inside it to mark my place.

I'm glad I waited so long to come back to it. Tolstoy brings an almost encyclopedic knowledge of human nature (and animal nature - there are some passages written from the point of view of a canine character, Laska) to this story of passion and betrayal, and the more life experience you have, the more likely you are to appreciate it. I must say that the title mis-sells the book. It gives the impression that the story will be all Anna, all the time, and it's really not. It's a story about marriage, every aspect of it. Tolstoy compares a successful courtship to two that fizzle out, a love match to a marriage of convenience, a union which survives adultery to one that doesn't. Anna makes a brave attempt to create a life for herself and her lover Vronsky outside the boundaries of her very rigid and convention-bound society. Her tragedy is less that she fails than that it's impossible for her to succeed. Her story is contrasted with that of two other women, her sister-in-law Dolly and Dolly's sister Kitty. Many readers have preferred the Kitty story to the Anna story, and there isn't a lot of overlap between the two, so you could just follow one strand and still get a lot out of the book. I also don't think it matters much which translation you read: I started off with the Rosemary Edmonds 1954 translation which I already owned, and having mislaid that, read the second volume of the book in a library copy of the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation of 1918. If I re-read it I would probably seek out the 2000 Penguin edition pictured above, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky,the version favoured by Oprah's Book Club in 2004.

Like most if not all people who pick up this book, I thought I knew how it ended. While the conclusion of Anna's story didn't come as a surprise, making some of the foreshadowing symbolism earlier in the book seem a little obvious and clunky, Tolstoy's moment-by-moment imagining of her final downward spiral was a revelation. His genius lends itself particularly to portraying states of mind, whether it's Anna's despair as she finds herself a social outcast or his avatar Levin's joy when he wins the hand of the woman he adores. Both of them, at different times in the novel, find themselves wandering around Moscow, dazed and bewildered by euphoria in Levin's case, panic and depression in Anna's. They are both hyper-aware of everything around them but while Levin sees goodness and beauty in everything, Anna can only see evil. Although I have said that the story strands can be read separately, reading the whole book provides bonuses in this sort of counterpoint.

Unfortunately Tolstoy wasn't equally expert at structure. Anna Karenina has all the faults of the nineteenth-century novel. It's lengthy, with many digressions. It's overwritten in some parts and underwritten in others. Specifically, Anna's first sexual encounter with Vronsky is skipped over, perhaps as a concession to contemporary notions of decency. Some plot bunnies (Vronsky's financial problems) rapidly dive back into their burrows. The marriage theme is what unites this sprawling novel of prerevolutionary Russia, yet Tolstoy allows it to battle for prominence with Levin's search for some meaning to life. He does ultimately find it in a very anticlimatic final section which was omitted from the initial serialisation of the book in the Russky Vestnik between 1874 and 1877. Levin is also the only character to find true happiness in marriage, but as the story of his courtship is at least partly based on Tolstoy's own tempestuous union, I wasn't convinced that it would last.

I don't think that Anna Karenina is the greatest ever novel, but given the huge changes in what defines a good novel since the birth of the genre in the seventeenth century, I don't think it is possible or meaningful to identify a "greatest novel." I would certainly support Anna Karenina's claim to be one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century. It takes a small group of characters living in an elitist, enclosed society and brings their emotions and problems into such sharp focus that the personal becomes epic, universal and immortal. ...more

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Sep 19, 2007 Davide rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Anna Karenina is your typical Russian novel: long, descriptive, beautiful, and full of love between social classes. The story starts off with Stepan Arkadyich telling his wife he has been cheating on her. This brings great distress to his wife, and so Stepan Arkadyich's sister Anna Karenina comes to help them out. While there, she attends a ball where she meets Count Vronksy who is trying to marry Kitty. At first she finds him boring and uninteresting and finds that her other suitor, Konstatin L Anna Karenina is your typical Russian novel: long, descriptive, beautiful, and full of love between social classes. The story starts off with Stepan Arkadyich telling his wife he has been cheating on her. This brings great distress to his wife, and so Stepan Arkadyich's sister Anna Karenina comes to help them out. While there, she attends a ball where she meets Count Vronksy who is trying to marry Kitty. At first she finds him boring and uninteresting and finds that her other suitor, Konstatin Levin is a much more suitable match. As the story goes on, Anna begins an affair with Vronsky and Levin is turned down by Kitty. Throughout most of the book, it shows Levin's life in the country while still contemplating about Kitty, and then showing Anna's affair with Vronsky which almost all the higher people in society know about, except her husband. One afternoon, Anna tells Vronsky she is pregnant. This puts the book in a whole new direction, from blossoming love to anger and an air of unsure. After this, Anna tells her husband, and he vows to keep everything the same, even though they basically hate each other at this point. Finally, Levin proposes again to Kitty and she accepts. This puts Levin at ease, but most of the other characters are in distress. Anna, who has basically become a scapegoat for the husband and Vronsky, see's no other way out. She being pregnant, goes to the Moscow train station and jumps in front of a commuter train. This leads to her funeral which brings together Levin, Kitty, Vronsky, and Stepan Arkadyich.
That is the basic plot of the novel. Tolstoy has an interesting way of writing, which I absolutely adore. He describes things in beautiful detail, and describes almost anything, but not in a drone-Herman-Melville way. When you read Tolstoy, you fall in love with the writing (or I did at least) and you really feel like you are in Russia in the 1880's. You can almost taste the white fish and vodka dinner at the club in St. Petersburg. You can see the snow exactly as he describes it. One of my favorite quotes of description is the following:
"But though she had the look of a butterfly that clings momentarily to a blade of grass and is about to flutter up, unfolding its iridescent wings, a terrible despair pained her heart"
It's that kind of writing that really provides great imagery for the reader and really makes you feel like you're ready to read an 800+ page book.

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Jul 25, 2013 Russell Bittner rated it really liked it · review of another edition

With the updated film version of this story already in production by Director, Joe Wright, Anna Karenina, the book, is bound to enjoy a revival — not that it has ever gone out of print or out of fashion. It’s simply too big a meal even for people who still have an appetite for books.

Anna Karenina, is a good story — no doubt about it. And while I’ll insert here the disclaimer that: (1) I’ve not yet read War and Peace; and (2) the version of Anna Karenina I read was a translation, I do ...more

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