Monday, September 14, 2015

A Review of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina








The hyper-specialization of academia in the past several decades has had many effects, one of which is that most scholarship is focused on very narrow and technical theoretical questions, such as whether subjective ideas or objective economic variables are more influential in causing very specific forms of human behaviour. These kinds of inquiries, although interesting, are, in the grand scheme of things, of relatively little value. Although important in helping to systematize thought and in sharpening our tools to understand some political events, they will not help one live a better life, or make much positive change in the world, or tackle some of the existential quandaries of being alive. The same cannot be said about the book that I will review here, Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina. Unlike the vast majority of academic work, even the most prestigious, in this masterpiece Tolstoy tackles some of the big questions that all thinking people, at one time or another, must face and deal with, such as: what is the nature of love? What is the meaning of life? How should I live my life? In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy does not pretend to provide a solution to those puzzles. But in the development of the characters, and more importantly in the relationships between them, Tolstoy weaves together a story that contains an edifying mix of romance, history and philosophy that constitute a system of thought that gives some tentative and partial answers. Consequently, after reading Anna Karenina, one feels a bit more enlightened, entertained, matured, and enriched. For this, the book merits its place in the pantheon of history’s great novels.

 

All unhappy in their our own ways

 

As the book’s title suggests, a major character in the novel is Anna Karenina, and much of the text is organized around her tragic love affair with Oblonsky which transpires despite her marriage to Aleksey. The love triangle involving Anna, Oblonsky, and Aleksey is strategically juxtaposed with the courtship and marriage of Levin and Kitty. None of these characters are “bad”; in fact all of them are good in their own ways. And yet all, at one time or another, must suffer, although for the latter couple it leads to redemption, and for the former, to tragedy.
 


Kitty and Levin find lasting happiness, although not without difficulties. Kitty is initially infatuated with Oblonsky, and for good reason: his dashing good looks, enticing personality, and high status make him very desirable. At the same time, Levin is in love with Kitty, but as an average looking (although intelligent) landowner and farmer, he does not have Oblonsky’s appeal. At least partly for this, Kitty rejects his marriage proposal. Levin is wounded, but he finds meaning in his work and eventually moves on. Kitty’s hopes are also dashed when Oblonsky falls in love with Anna. This event has a traumatic effect on Kitty and causes a love-sickness that manifests itself as a serious physical illness. Her doctor prescribes travel abroad to a spa, where Kitty meets Varanka, who embodies the ideals that Tolstoy believes provides the ultimate meaning and guide to life: Christian self-sacrifice that puts ethics and the well-being of others before the interests of the egoistic self.

 

Levin, like Varenka, is a literary vehicle for Tolstoy’s philosophy. After Kitty initially rejects him, he goes back to his farm and lives a quiet and productive life even though his dream of building a family is crushed. The death of his consumptive brother, Nikolai, confronts Levin with the reality of the inevitability of death, which leads to an existential crisis. What is the point of life if we must die? In the end, does it matter whether we die tomorrow, next week, or 40 years from now? What kind of force would create us only to live briefly on this earth, to desire and conceive of eternity even while we inexorably must slide into eternal nothingness and oblivion? These are some of the questions that Levin, at the tender age of 30, is tortured with after seeing his brother die. He initially has no answer other than to distract himself through working on the land. All this changes when he encounters Kitty again after not seeing her for at least a year. By then, she has completely healed from the wound inflicted by Oblonsky, and has matured considerably as well, mainly because of the positive influence of Varanka. After a brief courtship, she accepts Levin’s second proposal, and they are happily married. Levin’s dedication to his work and his family provideshim with purpose and satisfaction, but the questions that tortured him remain unresolved, and are always in the background of his consciousness. Kitty’s pregnancy and experience of giving birth is a turning point. While she is in labour, sweating and shrieking in pain, Levin realizes his utter helplessness and inability to provide relief, and is terrorized by the fear that she might die. At that moment, he finds himself on his knees, pleading to God for help. He was an atheist his entire adult life, but this event involuntarily brings him back to the religion of his childhood.  In the process, Levin moves a small step towards discovering the answers to the questions that tortured him.

 

His spiritual journey is impacted by other factors. Levin finds insight on how to live meaningfully, not from history’s great writers and thinkers, but from the peasants who live and work on his farm. Levin is educated and well-read, and even wrote a book on the question of agricultural production in Russia. But he is suspicious of intellectuals like his brother Sergey, the type who can cite at will all the great philosophers and who express much concern about the plight of lower classes, and who personally endorse policies to help them, even while pursuing a life of comfort and prestige that his inferiors could never achieve. In marked contrast to his brother, Levin actually lives and works with peasants; he is intimately involved in the minutiae of their daily lives, and this personal experience nourishes his genuine affection for them. By his actions he treats them as equals and shows the hollowness of those, like his brother Sergey, who pretend to be compassionate by expressing the latest intellectual fads of social justice for the peasants.

 

Through his genuine intermingling and affection for those below him in socioeconomic status, Levin discovers their way of life, and realizes that it contains an answer to some of the questions that tortured him. It can summed up as: simplicity. The peasants are not disturbed by the inevitability of death because for them, life has a simple rhythm of work, family, and faith. Death, evidently, is just part of the natural rhythm of life, and hence it is pointless to philosophize about it. Here, Tolstoy reveals his anti-intellectualism even though he himself was a great writer and thinker. Levin (who is Tolstoy’s projection of himself) has a prodigious mind, and this produced a kind of intellectual pride that was shattered after witnessing the death of Nikolai. The ensuing crisis was  not resolved by reading theology or philosophy. Rather, a resolution occurred after observing the birth of his son, which, by reminding him of his essential helplessness, brings him to the faith of his childhood, and also from his intimate knowledge of the life of his peasants, where he discovers that the purpose of life is the simplicity that is etched in their rhythms of life.

 

Whereas Levin and Kitty discover marital happiness and spiritual fulfillment, the relationship between Anna and Oblonsky ends in tragedy, and Tolstoy is clearly using them as a warning about the destructiveness of egoistic love. As mentioned above, Anna is married to Aleksey, and together they produce a son who Anna adores. But their union is loveless, in part, because of the personality of Aleksey. He is the embodiment of the cold, efficient, rational, knowledgeable, rule-following, and ambitious official that arguably is the archetypical modern man. Although he is devoted to his wife and child, he is seemingly incapable of feeling or expressing genuine emotion. Anna is desperate for feeling, and at one point even says that she would prefer for Aleksey to kill her than the current state of affairs, as this would at least mean that he felt angry. For Anna, any emotion, it seems, is better than none. It was this loveless and robotic marriage that makes Anna ripe for an affair, and when the handsome, daring, and passionate Oblonsky enters the picture, and both instantly feel attracted to each other, it is only a matter of time before their desires are consummated even though Anna tried—she really did—to be a good wife and resist him. She eventually becomes pregnant with Oblonsky’s baby, and when Aleksey discovers this, he does his best salvage the marriage, not because he wants to become a loving husband, but rather because it would be humiliating in the eyes of his peers for him and Anna to get a divorce. In a moment which shows that even men like Aleksey, somewhere buried within them, have compassion and feeling, after Anna gives birth to Oblonsky’s baby and almost dies in the process, Aleksey forgives her and expresses delight towards the new baby even though it was not his. At this point, one gets the impression that to save his marriage, Aleksey would be willing to raise the little girl who was conceived illegitimately by Oblonsky. But it was not to be. Anna chooses to take the baby and travel abroad with Oblonsky, and they begin to build a life together full of the love and passion that Anna desired and that Aleksey could not provide.

 

But they do not live happily even after. The intensity of their passion is directly proportional, and even causes, the intensity of their suffering. With love comes vulnerability, and this takes an extreme form in Anna. She has become emotionally enslaved, so to speak, because her well-being is directly tied to how Oblonsky feels for her. And when she senses, sometimes accurately, that Oblonsky’s love for her has diminished, she suffers greatly. This also leads to petty jealousies that sometimes take the form of paranoid fantasies. Any little inconsistency on the part of Oblonsky is interpreted by her as evidence of a change of feeling or sexual betrayal. Even worse, she does not seem to love the baby that they produced. This is one of the odd ironies of the book: she feels a deep love for the son produced with the loveless Aleksey, while she does not feel the same for the daughter produced with Oblonsky, the man she was madly in love with. Anna deals with her misery in a number of ways, some helpful and others destructive. She adopts a poor English girl and makes an effort to raise her well. She reads voraciously, and is up to date on all the latest ideas. She also becomes addicted to morphine. Through these various ways of self-medicating, Anna deals with the suffering involved in her relationship with Oblonsky. But it could not be suppressed for long, and as the book proceeds, their quarrels become more and more intense, frequent, and maddening. Their last fight causes unspeakable emotional pain for Anna, and she subsequently commits suicide by throwing herself under a train.

 

 

And so we come back to the one of the puzzles mentioned above, namely, what is love? The not-coincidental comparison between, on the one hand Kitty and Levin and, on the other Anna and Oblonksy provides Tolstoy’s answer, and it is that there are several kinds of love. One is carnal and untethered to broader ethical and social considerations. It is based mainly on physical attraction and the need to satisfy our desire for the ecstasy that only sexual activity can produce. It is spontaneous, visceral, and capricious, and when it happens it can only be resisted by much effort, if at all. This is the love that was shared between Anna and Oblonsky, and it led to ruin. The other kind of love is embodied by Kitty and Levin. This kind does not exclude physical attraction, but it seems much less prominent (Kitty was gorgeous, but Levin was average looking). It is a kind of love that is embedded in a system of ethics that takes account of the reproduction and well-being of the community. It happens slowly, and requires the consent of the families of the parties. Most importantly, perhaps, is that it is sustained by spiritual maturity. Kitty’s moral transformation after befriending Varanka, and Levin’s discovering the ethics of self-sacrifice after his brother’s death, and from observing the peasants’ lives, are no coincidence; these events are catalysts in their spiritual growth that provides the bedrock of their marriage. It is this that will ultimately help them get through the difficult times, such as financial difficulty, or events that force one of them to choose whether to supress egoistic sexual impulses or infidelity. Levin is faced with such a dilemma when he is seduced by the unhappy Anna. Had he pursued his desires, Kitty would have been understandably devastated. But happily for them both, Levin does not.

 

Anna, it seems, was doomed from the start. Had she stayed with Aleksey, she would have conformed to broader societal expectations and obtained some happiness through the deep love she felt for her son, even while remaining in the unhappy marital union. She decides to follow her passions, and although this provides transient moments of happiness and ecstasy, she loses the son she loves and, ultimately, her life. Her first option, it seems, was the lesser evil and, from Tolstoy’s perspective, the most ethical. Kitty and Levin are perhaps Tolstoy’s way of saying that true happiness is possible in this life, even while all must face the inevitability of death. But it can only happen though a kind of spiritual development that places the interest of others before the satisfaction of egoistic desires. Through his characters, Tolstoy is also telling us that the life of the mind is overrated, and that we will ultimately not find real purpose and succor by reading the works of history’s great thinkers. Rather, the answer to the existential questions of life, the kinds that tortured Levin and that all thinking people must face, can be found in the simple and humble lives of the peasants. Tolstoy’s answer to life’s existential quandaries might not convince everyone. But he attempts to provide an answer while telling a compelling and memorable story. Most scholarly writing does not even come close to approaching such lofty heights.

 

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