Anna Karenina

Particularly when it comes to English speakers, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are categorised within the typical binary of Dostoevsky as the psychologist, and Tolstoy as the world-builder. But I don't think this is accurate. Tolstoy's portrayal of Anna is so harrowingly on point - I cannot think of a male author who conveys femininity with such startling accuracy.
It is always difficult to talk about a book that has such a powerful effect on you. I become so acutely aware of the inadequacy of my own vocabulary to even begin to discuss the different parts that had an effect on me.

What is this tendency to treat works of classical literature with this sort of reverence, as if they are untouchable, or beyond criticism?
This also exists alongside a willingness to attribute a profundity to it, that sometimes is quite simply not just there.
Anna Karenina - even as a physical book - is a tower of literature. And yet, there is something so pitiful about its universe - how almost pathetically human its characters are. As the story of Levin is autobiographical for Tolstoy, by extension, how pathetic Tolstoy is.
And this is truly what makes Russian literature so unique. There is none of this attempt to attribute nobility to flaws - you see them, in all of their squalor - with no redemption, with the characters just falling back into the same self-destructive habits, the same agony of inertia.


Anna Karenina suffers the same fate that every piece of Russian literature that ever is translated into another language suffers - it far too often, and unforgivably misinterpreted.
I'm not going to lecture too long about how a lot of meaning is lost in translation, because I think people who tend to do that sound wanky. I'll just give a brief example - many people are familiar with the famous first opening words of Anna - the second sentence of the novel: “Everything was in confusion in the Oblonsky's home.” In Russian text, the word ‘dom' is repeated 8 times in 6 sentences. This solemn reptition ‘dom, dom, dom, dom' tolling, as it does, for doomed family life, is one such way.

The first cardinal misinterpretations is that of Karenina's moral issue. The story is not about oppressive social standards that drive a woman who engages in a forbidden romance to suicide. Nor is the “moral” that Anna, having commited adultery, Anna must “pay” for this (which is the moral of the French piece of trite that goes by the name of ‘Madame Bovary'). Nor are we, as the reader, even expected to sympathise with Anna.

First, regarding the point about how the story is misinterpreted as being about how a parochial, outdated system of social norms stifled and suffocated Anna and Vronsky's passionate love affair. Think of the word of Darya (Kitty's sister), in response to the discussion of Anna's potential divorce: “Anything but divorce! She will be lost!”
I cannot even initiate my analysis of why this is such an incorrect way to interpret the text without fulling getting my feelings about how offended this interpretation makes me off my chest [yes, I'm allowed to be self-indulgent about my own sensibilities, this is my own blog]. Do you really think that Tolstoy is so simple minded that this story is merely a social critique? How could anybody possibly, possibly believe that Russians are so pitifully simplistically minded? In the Russian society that Anna inhabits, affairs were commonplace and known about - and therefore, often the novel is interpreted as exposing the hypocrisy of how this stratified society allows affairs, yet forbids “serious love affairs”. Nothing could be a more perverse interpretation of this text. The conventions of society are temporal - as all conventions are - and have very little to do with the eternal demands of morality which Tolstoy was so paralyzed by.
There's a reason why in a book that is nearly 1,000 pages long, almost no attention is paid to what Anna's social circle is saying.
To interpret Anna and Vronky's pathetic “love affair” (which is being far too generous to either of these selfish hedonists) as two people who were “prevented” from being together not only demonstrates (i) a really awful reading comprehension skill but (ii) a toleration for harmful hedonism which is reminiscent of the nihilism which ironically, Tolstoy himself so detested and feared.

Instead, the moral point that Tolstoy makes is that: when love becomes egotistic, such a love is carnal. Love that is carnal destroys, rather than creates.
The direct juxtaposition of the Lyovin-Kitty story and the Vronski-Anna story hammers this point down.
Lyovin's marriage to Kitty (which is Tolstoy's autobiographical account of his own marriage) is based on a metaphysical concept of love, that includes a willingness of self-sacrifice. Anna's love is so excessively carnal that the egotism it generates borders on the pathological.
Lyovin's love is austere, unromantic, and painfully Christian. The riches of sensual nature are still there, but harmonious in the atmosphere of tenderness, truth and responsibility.
Nothing could be a more harsh contrast than that of Anna, who although appears richly sensual, is entirely spiritually sterile.
Yet this is not to say that we are to take from this a


ANNA'S LAST DAY
The stream of consciousness employed by Tolstoy is noteworthy as a method of expression which is entirely Tolstoy's creation (although admittedly refined and improved later, by James Joyce). The narrative is an erratic record of Anna's mind switching from idea to image without any comment from Tolstoy: “Was that really me? Those red hands? Everything that seemed so wonderful and unattainable is now so worthless, and what I had then is out of my reach forever! How awful that paint smells. Why is it that they are always painting buildings? Dressmaker.” This contrast between the incidental (specific) and the dramatic (general) give the text an almost anxiety inducing quality. To read Anna switch effortlessly from recognising a passer-by, to instantly thinking about how she will never ever again see her son - this instant juxtaposition is utterly terrifying.