Another post on a book I read a year ago, so my thoughts are not as fresh. However, I have thought about the book a lot since then so have more broad-picture type comments.
Anna Karenina is one of the best books I have ever read. Tolstoy's writing is incredibly realistic, complex, deep, moving, and beautiful, and his thinking is prophetic. For me, the best things about this book are:
1. The complexity, coherence and realism of the world that Tolstoy invents. His writing comes as close to representing reality on paper as I can imagine is possible, and he does this in such a way that it feels completely natural. It is also fascinating: he knew such an immense about about so many things! Horse keeping, hunting, domestic life, business affairs, fashion, politics, relationships, gambling, agriculture, adultery, etc, etc. - all topics on which Tolstoy writes in depth and with ease.
2. The complexity, understanding and sympathy with which Tolstoy regards humanity: from the peasant to the nobleman and from the virtuous to the amoral, Tolstoy seems to understand everyone. The grace with which he is able to portray the inner life of various individuals is unparalleled. Anna Karenina is the greatest exception to this sweeping realism: for me she felt (at times) flat and under-explored, which was disappointing. Lyovin, on the contrary, is shockingly real, perhaps aided by the near-autobiographical nature of his character (by many accounts).
I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
I also really enjoyed Anna Karenina, for the same reasons you cite. I previously reviewed The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin, which largely focuses on Tolstoy's theory of history as outlined and embodied in War and Peace, but the title of the essay raises the question of whether Tolstoy was a hedgehog (motivated by a single idea or world view) or a fox (driven no consistent worldview and an appreciation of the variety of life). Berlin says Tolstoy is hard to categorize and concludes that it's because, as an artist, he was the consummate fox - able to appreciate and render every nuance of every facet of life - yet as a man, strove to find a single, satisfying and consistent worldview - accordingly, his greatest gifts conflicted with his greatest aspiration and he repeatedly attempted to deny the validity of his fox-like appreciation of of the variety of life!
ReplyDeleteOh, by the way, I liked War and Peace even more than Anna Karenina!
ReplyDeleteinteresting, I like and agree with Berlin's take on Tolstoy as artist/fox and man/hedgehog-wannabe. :)
ReplyDeleteI just finished re-reading Anna Karenina and still agree wholeheartedly with your assessment – all of the descriptions, of things places and both the inner and external lives of people, are convincingly realized to a degree I have not seen in any other author I have read. I did agree with you, though, that this was less true for Anna Karenina herself than for other characters, although I did feel that this time I understood her better than I had on the previous reading. I had a couple new thoughts about the book. It is widely recognized that the train accident that Anna sees in the early part of the book foreshadows her own death – but this time I was particularly struck by the death, early in the book, of Vronsky’s favorite horse during a race….which seemed to me to foreshadow Anna’s fate, as well as some of the “cause”. Also, I remember feeling dissatisfied or disagreeing with Levin’s thoughts and realizations about God and life that conclude the book – I was curious to see if my attitude towards these considerations had changed….but it had not. This time, though, I was struck by how the structure of the book parallels the “life story” of Tolstoy as discussed by Berlin: almost the entire book is “fox-like”, dealing with the two parallel relationships (Kitty and Levin and Anna and Vronsky), with Tolstoy’s astonishing powers of description and evocation. But the book ends with “hedgehog-like,” focused religious considerations that are given primacy of place, reflecting Tolstoy’s later-life preoccupation with religion.
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