and pondering, and scratching his chin through his beard.*
The intrusion of the teacher into the artist's domain is, as I have remarked already, not always clearly defined in Tolstoy's novels. The rhythm of the sermon is difficult to disentangle from the rhythm of this or that character's personal meditations. But sometimes, rather often in fact, when pages and pages follow which are definitely in the margin of the story, telling us what
As an example, the agrarian problems discussed in the book, especially in relation to Lyovin's farming, are extremely tedious to foreign-language readers, and I do not expect you to study the situation with any degree of penetration.
Artistically Tolstoy made a mistake in devoting such a number of pages to these matters, especially as they tend to become obsolete and are linked up with a certain historical period and with Tolstoy's own ideas that changed with time. Agriculture in the seventies does not have the eternal thrill of Anna's or Kitty's emotions and motives. Several chapters are devoted to the provincial elections of various administrators. The landowners through an organization called
It is not my custom to speak of plots but in the case of
One of the most attractive heroines in international fiction, Anna is a young, handsome, and fundamentally good woman, and a fundamentally doomed woman. Married off as a very young girl by a well-meaning aunt to a promising official with a splendid bureaucratic career, Anna leads a contented life within the most sparkling circle of St. Petersburg society. She adores her little son, respects her husband who is twenty years her senior, and her vivid, optimistic nature enjoys all the superficial pleasures offered her by life.
When she meets Vronski on a trip to Moscow, she falls deeply in love with him. This love transforms everything around her; everything she looks at she sees in a different light. There is that famous scene at the railway station in St. Petersburg when Karenin comes to meet her on her way back from Moscow, and she suddenly notices the size and vexing convexity of his huge homely ears. She had never noticed those ears before because she had never looked at him critically; he had been for her one of the accepted things of life included in her own accepted life. Now everything has changed. Her passion for Vronski is a flood of white light in which her former world looks like a dead landscape on a dead planet.
Anna is not just a woman, not just a splendid specimen of womanhood, she is a woman with a full, compact, important moral nature : everything about her character is significant and striking, and this applied as well to her love. She cannot limit herself as another character in the book, Princess Betsy, does, to an undercover affair. Her truthful and passionate nature makes disguise and secrecy impossible. She is not Emma Bovary, a provincial dreamer, a wistful wench creeping along crumbling walls to the beds of interchangeable paramours. Anna gives Vronski her whole life, consents to a separation from her adored little son—despite the agony it costs her not to see the child—and she goes to live with Vronski first abroad in Italy, and then on his country place in central Russia, though this 'open' affair brands her an immoral woman in the eyes of her immoral circle. (In a way she may be said to have put into action Emma's dream of escaping with
*
VN continued, but then deleted, 'and then getting cross with his wife Sofia Andrevna for letting a noisy visitor into the neighboring room.' Ed.
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Rodolphe, but Emma would have experienced no wrench from parting with
While Anna bears the brunt of society's anger, is snubbed and snobbed, insulted and 'cut,' Vronski, being a man—a not very deep man, not a gifted man by any means, but a fashionable man, say—Vronski is spared by scandal: he is invited, he goes places, meets his former friends, is introduced to seemingly decent women who would not remain a second in the same room with disgraced Anna. He still loves Anna, but sometimes he is pleased to be back in the world of sport and fashion, and he begins occasionally to avail himself of its favors. Anna misconstrues trivial unloyalties as a drop in the temperature of his love. She feels that her affection alone is no longer enough for him, that she may be losing him.
Vronski, a blunt fellow, with a mediocre mind, gets impatient with her jealousy and thus seems to confirm her suspicions.*
Driven to despair by the muddle and mud in which her passion flounders, Anna one Sunday evening in May throws herself under a freight train. Vronski realizes too late what he has lost. Rather conveniently for him and for Tolstoy, war with Turkey is brewing—this is 1876—and he departs for the front with a battalion of volunteers. This is probably the only unfair device in the novel, unfair because too easy, too pat.
A parallel story which develops on seemingly quite independent lines is that of the courtship and marriage of Lyovin and Princess Kitty Shcherbatski. Lyovin, in whom more than in any other of his male characters Tolstoy has portrayed himself, is a man of moral ideals, of Conscience with a capital C. Conscience gives him no respite. Lyovin is very different from Vronski.
Vronski lives only to satisfy his impulses. Vronski, before he meets Anna, has lived a conventional life: even in love, Vronski is content to substitute for moral ideals the conventions of his circle. But Lyovin is a man who feels it his duty to understand intelligently the surrounding world and to work out for himself his place within it. Therefore Lyovin's nature moves on in constant evolution, spiritually growing throughout the novel, growing toward those religious ideals which at the time Tolstoy was evolving for himself.
Around these main characters a number of others move. Steve Oblonski, Anna's lighthearted good-for- nothing brother; his wife Dolly, born Shcherbatski, a kindly, serious, long-suffering woman, in a way one of Tolstoy's ideal women, for her life is selflessly devoted to her children and to her shiftless husband; there is the rest of the Shcherbatski family, one of Moscow’s old aristocratic families; Vronski's mother; and a whole gallery of people of St. Petersburg high society. Petersburg society was very different from the Moscow kind, Moscow being the kindly, homey, flaccid, patriarchal old town, and Petersburg the sophisticated, cold, formal, fashionable, and relatively young capital where some thirty years later I was born. Of course there is Karenin himself, Karenin the husband, a dry righteous man, cruel in his theoretical virtue, the ideal civil servant, the philistine bureaucrat who willingly accepts the pseudo-morality of his friends, a hypocrite and a tyrant. In his rare moments he is capable of a good movement, of a kind gesture, but this is too soon forgotten and sacrificed to considerations of his career. At Anna's bedside, when she is very sick after bearing Vronski's child and certain of her impending death (which, however, does not come), Karenin forgives Vronski and takes his hand with a true feeling of Christian humility and generosity. He will change back later to his chilly unpleasant personality, but at the moment the proximity of death illumes the scene and Anna in a subconscious way loves him as much as she loves Vronski: both are called Aleksey, both as loving mates share her in her dream. But this feeling of sincerity and kindliness does not last long, and when Karenin makes an attempt at securing a divorce—a matter of not much consequence to him but which would make all the difference to Anna—and is faced with the necessity of submitting to unpleasant complications in the course of obtaining it, he simply gives up and refuses ever to try again, no matter what this refusal may mean to Anna. Moreover, he manages to find satisfaction in his own righteousness.
