Re-Reading Anna Karenina

I was talking to a friend yesterday about Anna Karenina. In particular, about the scene in it where Vronsky realizes he has inadvertently injured his horse in a race to the state where she is in so much pain she has to be shot dead. He feels so guilty, realizing that he didn't even realize her suffering until it was too late, and that there was nothing he could do to save her. I suppose that, later on, this is supposed to be an allegory for Anna herself.

I love Anna Karenina. I didn't when I first read it. I couldn't understand why Anna left her husband, why Levin was annoyingly unsatisfied with his perfect life... I think I was fifteen or sixteen when I thought this way. What a difference a decade of adulthood makes.

I was searching for a New Yorker article on Tolstoy I'd read a few years ago and came across this one, by Joshua Rothman: Is Anna Karenina a Love Story?

Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” isn’t a love story. If anything, “Anna Karenina” is a warning against the myth and cult of love.

I read the novel as you might read any novel about marriage and adultery. You think about the protagonists and their choices; you root for happy endings. When they come, you applaud, and feel they’re well-deserved; when they don’t, you try to figure out what the lovers did wrong. But this love-story idea of love isn’t really native to “Anna Karenina.” Tolstoy, when he wrote the novel, was thinking about love in a different way: as a kind of fate, or curse, or judgment, and as a vector by which the universe distributes happiness and unhappiness, unfairly and apparently at random.

As Tolstoy began writing “Anna Karenina,” he introduced other characters and other stories, including the love story of Kitty and Levin. But at its core—without the balm of Kitty and Levin’s romance—“Anna Karenina” remains troubled by what happened to Anna Stepanovna. This makes it different from other love stories—in them, love is a positive good. If you have it, you’re glad, and if you don’t have it, you’re not.  

In “Anna Karenina,” love can be a curse as well as a blessing. It’s an elemental force in human affairs, like genius, or anger, or strength, or wealth. Sometimes it’s good, but sometimes it's awful, cruel, even dangerous. It’s wonderful that Levin and Kitty fall in love with one another—but Anna would have been better off if she had never fallen in love with Vronsky. 

Tolstoy... is sensitive to the fact that much of the evil in the world results not from malice, but from ignorance. Anna does bad things, but often only because she underestimates just how bad the consequences of those things will be. Anna doesn’t plan to fall in love with Vronsky... and one of the reasons for her later unhappiness is that, in sleeping with him, she has disappointed herself. In the novel’s (and the film’s) first episode, Anna travels to Moscow to act as a peacemaker between her brother Stiva and his wife Dolly, on whom he has cheated. Leaving, she can’t wait to get back to her family in St. Petersburg: “Thank God,” she thinks, “tomorrow I’ll see Seryozha and Alexei Alexandrovich, and my good and usual life will go on as before.” 

And Tolstoy is careful to show that the same is true, in an obverse way, for Levin and Kitty, who are simply lucky where Anna is unlucky. Levin, it turns out, had been in love with Kitty’s two older sisters; as things worked out, they happened to get married to other men (one of them, Dolly, to Stiva). Had things been different, Kitty might have ended up married to Stiva, not Levin, and Levin to Dolly. At one point, it appears that Levin is about to give up on Kitty completely; but, at just that moment, Kitty’s carriage happens to pass by the field where Levin is walking, deep in the countryside. And, of course, there’s the fact that Levin and Kitty might not be together at all were it not for Anna, who steals Vronsky from Kitty at a ball in the novel’s early pages. Almost as a provocation, Tolstoy places this fact—that Anna’s adultery paves the way for Levin and Kitty’s happy marriage—at the center of his novel, where it sits, a mute and ironic reminder of how much our own successes can depend on others’ disasters. 

Tolstoy, I think, doesn’t know exactly how to think about Anna’s role in her own downfall, just as he doesn’t know exactly how to think about the free will of the soldiers and generals in “War and Peace.” He believes that we make choices, and that our sense of free will is based on something real. But he also has a deep respect for the complexity and power of our circumstances, and he considers our personalities and psychologies to be “circumstances,” too. There are limits to what we can do out there in the world, and there are also limits to what we can feel, endure, know, and imagine within ourselves. These inner limits may be just as permanent as the outer ones. In Anna’s case, she may have been hemmed in on all sides: driven, in her soul, to love Vronsky, while living in a world that made acting on that love unwise and unendurable. Or, she may have made an unwise choice, giving into desires she could have resisted because she underestimated how unyielding the world would be. We will never know what happened, exactly, just as Anna could not know. That’s one of the dreadful lessons of Anna’s story: she herself could not distinguish between what she was choosing to do and what she was driven to do. In life, we sometimes relinquish our freedom too easily, while, at other times, we struggle unwisely against laws that will not change. Give in too easily, and you drift through life; struggle too much, and you suffer for it. 

After Anna dies, much of the end of the novel is devoted to Levin, who struggles to come to terms with the very small role he has played in his own happiness. Levin is likable, thoughtful, and sincere, but he is not particularly wise, experienced, or brilliant... He is like Anna, in that he spends much of the novel debating, in a more overt and deliberate way, the same questions that Anna faces. Should he try to force the people and institutions around him to change, so that he can live in accordance with the dictates of his soul (for example, by remaking his farm along “modern” lines, politically and agriculturally)? Or should he submit to one of the pre-determined possibilities his world offers him and become a completely conventional gentleman farmer? Because he’s a rich, independent man, the stakes for him are lower than they are for Anna, but they’re still substantive: Levin feels that none of the usual ways of life will be meaningful for him, and he doesn’t want his life to be meaningless. 

The thing about Levin is that, through some accident of temperament and circumstances, he ends up figuring things out. He struggles and shapes his own destiny just enough to be happy, while never going out of bounds, and ending up like Anna, or like his brother Nikolai, a political radical, who dies impoverished and angry. Somehow, over the course of the book, Levin achieves everything he wants: he is married to Kitty, and they have a beautiful family. And yet, he senses, he has not really improved himself in his soul, and he has done nothing to deserve his happiness. He still feels powerless, pointless, useless. “Happy in his family life,” Tolstoy writes, “a healthy man, Levin was several times so close to suicide that he hid a rope lest he hang himself with it, and was afraid to go about with a rifle lest he shoot himself.” In the end... he finds his way to a diffuse kind of faith. There will be no radical transformations, he realizes, either romantic or religious. What is, is. He will try his best to be a good person, within the constraints that his circumstances and nature have placed upon him, and that will be good enough: 

In “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin writes that, for Tolstoy, wisdom consists in the ability “to grasp what human will and human reason can do, and what they cannot.” The only way to find those limits is to struggle against them, but gently, with the goal of finding and accepting them. You can’t think your way to the limits. You have to feel your way, learning through experience and suffering. And there is a risk in experimenting with what will and will not work in life, which is that it might not work. You might move to New York to pursue your dreams, and end up with no career to speak of. You might think you can wait to find the perfect spouse, but wait too long, and end up alone. You might think you can have that affair and still have the love of your spouse and children—but you may be mistaken about what’s possible, and lose everything.

There’s a deep conservatism to this way of thinking. It’s fatalistic, in an off-putting way, since it suggests that the limits of what’s possible are just not knowable in advance, and that experience and tradition are probably our best guides. In Anna’s case, it suggests that she should have tried harder to accept her unhappy marriage with Karenin. If she did try, and found herself hemmed in by limits on all sides, then there’s no making sense, in human terms, of her suffering. 

And I wonder, do I spend too much time thinking about my choices?