Anna Karenina in Read a book from each country

Jun 06, 2023 Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-translation, russia, historical-fiction, best-10-books-read-in-2023, classics, literary-fiction, 4-stars-and-a-half

4.5 stars

Classics are hard to review, in some ways especially when you like them. Anna Karenina is an impressive book, and I enjoyed it: Tolstoy is brilliant at illuminating the nuances of people’s inner lives, and his characters all feel authentic and real. And yes, it runs a bit long, with plenty of scenes that aren’t strictly plot-related, but those scenes were always interesting once I got into them, and seeing a panorama of upper class Russian life in the 1870s is just fundamentally fascina 4.5 stars

Classics are hard to review, in some ways especially when you like them. Anna Karenina is an impressive book, and I enjoyed it: Tolstoy is brilliant at illuminating the nuances of people’s inner lives, and his characters all feel authentic and real. And yes, it runs a bit long, with plenty of scenes that aren’t strictly plot-related, but those scenes were always interesting once I got into them, and seeing a panorama of upper class Russian life in the 1870s is just fundamentally fascinating to me because it’s so far from my experience. And he writes on such an impressively wide canvas, as if he knew everything there is to know about every aspect of life. Some of the scenes that others disliked were actually stand-outs for me, like the (aristocracy-only) elections: it felt a lot like a legislative session today, all chaos and wheeling and dealing, and showing the reader the complexity of the system through the eyes of someone who doesn’t care to understand it is just entertaining.

It’s funny though: while reading Tolstoy I love his work, I want every author to write like Tolstoy. That insight, that clearsighted understanding. Perfection. But the depth of my emotional response never reaches quite the same height, and once I finish the details start to slip away. Years ago I gave War and Peace 5 stars, which it no doubt deserves, but today I could barely tell you who was in the book, let alone what their roles were and how their lives ended up. Actually, I’ve read Anna Karenina before and remembered nothing that isn’t in the cultural zeitgeist (though admittedly I was a teenager at the time and just wanted bragging rights, I wasn’t mature enough to appreciate it). At any rate, maybe I should call this 5 stars—if it were by an unknown author I’m sure I’d give 5 stars, but compared to Tolstoy’s reputation I’m not sure it’s quite there for me. Maybe I wanted it to change my life, I don’t know.

At any rate, this book doesn’t need more reviews, so just some scattered notes:

- The translation: I chose the Schwartz (2014) this time. Interestingly, her primary goal seems to be recreating the deliberate artlessness of Tolstoy’s language—apparently he rejected literary Russian, wanting to write the truth and not just pretty words. And it’s true, reading this translation you won’t stop and sigh at the beauty of the sentences. On the other hand, they are precise and effective; you can tell Tolstoy spent years working on the book. There’s nothing clumsy in the artlessness. My big complaint with the translation is that Schwartz kept all the French and German bits as is and stuck their translations in endnotes, so you have to regularly stop and flip to the back of the book. Ugh.

- The women: Of all that can be said about Tolstoy’s women, the primary thing that struck me is how much better he and his 19th century male contemporaries were at writing women than their 20th century (and in some cases even 21st, though it’s improving) successors. These men might moralize about adultery (the great fascination of 19th century literature), they might tend to see women’s inner lives as inevitably focused on the domestic world of personal relationships, household management and religion. But within that, their women are all individuals wrestling with their own issues and sometimes skilled in surprising areas, as here with Anna’s writing of children’s books and the countess who—in the guise of hostess—manages the politics of visiting delegations. (And indeed, of the four major male characters, only Levin has a full inner life that’s quite apart from his outer one.) They’re never limited to sex objects, their secondary sex characteristics are barely mentioned let alone substituted for personality, their lives aren’t all about men and they have strong relationships with each other. That was especially notable to me here: the strong relationships and real emotion among Anna, Dolly, Kitty, and Kitty’s friend Varenka. No one would have thought up the Bechdel test in the 19th century, not because they were benighted but because, in that regard, they weren’t. I recognize these women as people leading real lives, in a way later male authors often failed to achieve. Of course part of this no doubt is that Tolstoy was an exemplary writer who did his homework and saw all his characters as people, but even authors like Dickens, who had issues with women, did better than almost all the male writers of the subsequent and officially more egalitarian century.

- Of course that said, this is very much a 19th century novel—you can tell by the adultery, as great a fixation of that century’s writers as war would be in the 20th, and diversity thus far in the 21st. And there’s a moralistic aspect to Tolstoy’s writing, though not in the after-school-special sense; it’s more that he clearly wanted to do more than just entertain. Much of the book actually seems geared toward making readers understand and sympathize with Anna (as indeed Levin comes to do, after declaring at the beginning that he could never have anything to do with a fallen woman). I think we’re supposed to come away with mixed feelings about her.

- Levin: Many readers hate Levin and his farm management plotline. But I liked it. Okay, I did sometimes dislike Levin himself—he’s a conservative landowner who, at least early in the book, thinks bringing education and health care to the peasants is pointless—but he’s also doing something more unique than boinking, and I respect that he’s on an ethical and intellectual journey while his contemporaries are satisfied with surface-level answers. There’s a telling scene in which Stiva is blithely unapologetic about his own privilege, even as it harms others, and Levin finds this upsetting. It’s interesting to see someone from a world very different from mine really confronting the big questions of life and death and how to be in the world, and there is more substance to Levin’s plotline than Anna’s. That said I think the idea of Levin as a stand-in for Tolstoy himself only makes him worse, so I’m going to view him as his own character who might have had some commonalities with the writer but is not his avatar.

- Still, in the end my favorite characters were Dolly (I retain the hope that she’s finally about to leave Stiva), and to my surprise, Alexei Alexandrovich (I expected Anna’s husband to be a villain, but wound up finding him relatable even before his big moment). For that matter I also expected Vronsky to be worse than he was, especially given how terrible seduction was considered at the time. It’s amusing to see just how seriously first heartbreak is taken in 19th century fiction—as with Marianne of Sense and Sensibility, Kitty’s health is considered very much in danger after her youthful disappointment (though Kitty is much steadier than Marianne), and no one ever dismisses these girls with a “they’ll get over it.”

Probably enough rambling for now. I certainly recommend the book, and look forward to future discussions about it. And I need to read more Tolstoy. ...more

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Dec 22, 2013 Ysawv rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is one of my favorite books. I read it when I was a teenager, it has stayed with me all this time. Now as an adult woman this book is still with me. It still surprises me how Tolstoy understood how trap women were and are. How it was so difficult for women to exercise their free will. It is remarkable of him. This story is relevant today as it was back then. It is not the easiest book to read, but what a joy is if you can.

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