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.
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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