Anna Karenina - a review

Leo Tolstoy begins this love story / tragedy with a powerful opening sentence: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”.   The reader knows right away that we’re going to live through the many differences between a happy family and a few unhappy ones. This truth emerges gradually throughout the story as the primary characters struggle with those meaty human questions of purpose, love, and our place within our own social institutions.

This story is awash in juxtapositions, most notably the love affair between Anna and Vronsky against the love between Levin and Kitty.  The first is a carnal based affair, that latter deeper, infused with enduring Christian love.  Tolstoy reveals such truth when Levin and Kitty speak of their marriage and Levin states, “I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to be.”  In other words, not just the convenient parts.  Good advice for advancing and enhancing lifelong love.

Tolstoy’s characters are so familiar to us, we can empathize with most of them, to greater and lesser degrees.  We know elegant, graceful, beautiful ladies who can charm any man, who carry burdens never evident to the world outside.   We know the “man’s man” (Vronsky), military man, horse racer, hunter, and charming with the ladies, while also distant and eerily selfish and less than empathetic toward the woman he worships.  Anna’s husband Alexei is a classic plugger, selfish but diligent, bright but dull.  And of course, everyone’s favorite fun guy, Sergei, Anna’s brother and Dolly’s husband, is the life of the party, a rogue, reckless, and often a burden to others without even realizing it.

Meanwhile Kitty, Levin’s love, and a fairly single dimensional character until her marriage, evolves into a force, when Levin faces his brother Nikolai’s death.  Nikolai’s unrestrained lifelong hedonism led to personal self-destruction, and not coincidentally, pain for Levin, as well as for Nikolai’s insufferable partner, Mary Nikolaevna.  Death is no easy subject, and especially when Levin’s faith is still uncertain and unresolved.  Kitty brings grace and strength that Levin cannot muster, as she emerges as the rock that Levin can rest upon. 

Tolstoy's characters emerge quickly and effectively, carrying the plot when our primary characters leave the limelight. 

A central theme is quintessentially Russian: suffering.  Pain and heartache, achieving nothing.  While suffering is universally human, we can choose to direct that suffering; toward building something, toward helping others, as opposed to standing still while suffering pursues us so relentlessly.  In Tolstoy’s Russia, suffering is occasionally juxtaposed against great joys or great achievements.  Ultimately unbalanced toward suffering, but offset here and there with unbridled love or epiphanies of truth and reconciliation with our Maker.

“To judge anything, you need to know everything.  But we cannot know

everything…”. 

This is one element of Anna’s tragedy.  Stuck between a loveless marriage and deep love for another man her all-encompassing love was not enough for Russian high society, where affairs and dalliances were common, but carefully hidden.  Anna’s great failure in this milieu was her overt lack of discretion, openly, unabashedly.  Being shunned at the opera was a painful reminder of the moral duality between men and women.  Vronsky never suffered from his peers as Anna did.  It is generally accepted that this moral duality makes Anna Karenina a woman’s story.  

Spoiler alert, it ends badly for Anna and Vronsky, while Levin’s reconciliation with his faith and the man he has grown to be is an inspiration for anyone wrestling with God, seeking purpose in life, and deeper meaning for our time on earth.  Speaking of time, it’s always worth the time to get through the world’s greatest literature, and Anna Karenina is no exception.