The Anna Karenina Fix

by Viv Groskop

  The desire to identify with Anna Karenina as a character – to believe her to be ‘real’, to believe her to be ‘us’ – is understandable. It’s one of the most attractive things about the novel. Although, on the surface of things, Anna Karenina seems to be a morality tale about a doomed, beautiful but adulterous romance, really this is a book about identity, integrity and our purpose in life. Who are we and why are we here? These questions are deeply embedded in it. They are questions that tortured Tolstoy and, almost as soon as he had published Anna Karenina, they caused him to renounce his work and retreat into himself. It’s partly this feeling of crisis that has made me feel bound to this novel my whole life. It’s a fantastic meditation on identity and what we’re doing here. But it doesn’t really answer any questions. To such an extent that it’s enough to drive you mad. In fact, it almost drove Tolstoy to suicide.

  However, it’s easy to read Anna Karenina without becoming a tortured religious maniac. Because it is a cracking story. Anna Arkadyevna Karenina is the wife of Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, a government minister. She is a woman in her mid to late twenties. Her husband is two decades older. She is bored and disillusioned with her life. She finds herself drawn to an extremely attractive young officer called Vronsky, who is not a particularly unpleasant person but does not have much more than his looks to recommend him. Their love affair is passionate and tender but, ultimately, Anna cannot enjoy it because she feels guilty, not so much because of her irritating husband, Karenin, but because of her maternal responsibilities to her young son, Seryozha, whom she loves very much. (Diminutive alert: Seryozha is short for Sergei.) In the moment that she resolves to divorce Karenin and risk no longer being a part of her child’s life, she loses her nerve and disappears under the wheels of a train. Bad times.

  In the course of the novel, Tolstoy weaves the parallel tale of Levin, a principled, intellectual young man whose character is – surprise, surprise! – not unlike that of our esteemed author (who, at the time of writing, has already had success with War and Peace and is no stranger to Great Literature). Levin is a friend of Anna’s brother Stiva. There’s another link, too: Stiva’s sister-in-law Kitty has attracted the attentions of both Levin and Vronsky (initially, before he becomes involved with Anna). Levin’s emerging relationship with Kitty, one that represents contentment and peace but also (potentially) boredom and predictability, serves as a point of comparison for the romance between Vronsky and Anna, whose union symbolizes anxiety and the breaking of trust but also excitement and risk. This parallel between the two couples is something that is not often noted but it is crucial in understanding the point Tolstoy is making about the nuances of happiness and knowing who we are. Without Anna’s seduction of Vronsky (or vice versa), Kitty might not have been free to go off with Levin. One person’s happiness is often dependent on the unhappiness of another. And what we think of as unhappiness may ultimately lead to happiness. (Kitty is not supposed to end up with Vronsky. They would not have been good together.)

  On the surface, Anna Karenina is about relationships and, more importantly, about the perils of infidelity. But Tolstoy messes up his own message by falling in love with Anna Karenina and by making her supposedly ‘unhappy’ life more ambiguous than perhaps he had intended. There’s a moralistic thread running through the book, certainly. And Anna Karenina herself receives the most severe punishment. But the way Tolstoy writes about her, you can sense that he sympathizes with her. The lesson in the novel is that we must try to know who we really are in order to live an authentic life. Anna realizes that her life with Vronsky is authentic but unachievable, and feels she has no option but to kill herself. If you wanted to read something revolutionary into the novel, that is definitely an option. Instead of a comment on how ‘wrong’ Anna is, her death could represent a judgement on the morals of the society of the time. ‘Look what you’ve made her do, when her only crime was to fall in love and be who she really is.’ If anything, the message Tolstoy imparts in Anna Karenina is a compromised one. Levin’s way of life seems the ‘correct’ one. And yet it is Anna who appears to be truly alive, even though she is ultimately doomed to punishment.

  It is not surprising that Anna Karenina is frequently described as the greatest novel of all time, precisely because of the way it approaches these big questions but without finding easy answers. William Faulkner held this view, as did Dostoevsky. Nabokov – who was an incredibly grumpy person and did not suffer fools gladly (even less so than Dostoevsky, which is really saying something) – said the style was ‘flawless magic’. Tolstoy himself considered it a better novel than War and Peace. In fact, he did not even consider War and Peace to be a novel. He thought it was episodic fiction, a series of short stories. Anna Karenina, however, was a novel and – initially – he thought it was good. I often wonder what Sofya, Tolstoy’s wife, thought about him considering the 2,200-page War and Peace ‘not a novel’. She had to copy it out repeatedly. I imagine she had some other words to describe it, and probably quite diminutive words at that.

  Of course, there are many answers in the novel to the question ‘How should you live your life?’ You could choose a simple, unquestioning life of luxury like Anna’s brother Stiva, a man who only drinks champagne with people he likes (and he drinks champagne with everyone). Or you could choose Levin’s path: self-sacrificing, righteous, spiritual. Levin is supposed to be the prototype for happiness – for example, with his steady, even rhythm of life – but he doesn’t in fact seem that happy and frequently tortures himself about whether he should be spending more time ploughing fields.

  There is an intriguing mix of hedonism and self-flagellation in Anna Karenina. Before the author, in the early chapters, has even invited us to the Anglia Hotel for a slap-up meal of oysters and turbot with Stiva (Anna’s brother) and Levin, Stiva’s best friend, Tolstoy has already casually dropped in the Epigraph of Doom: ‘Vengeance is mine. And I will repay.’ It’s a quotation that suggests that, in life, if there is any revenge to be taken, God will sort it out in his own way. You had better not do it yourself. It is an incredibly powerful and disturbing choice of words to slap on the page next to the title of your novel, and one that marks Tolstoy out as someone who is obsessed – or beginning to be obsessed – with God and with the idea that it is foolish to imagine we are in charge of our lives (because we’re not in charge, God is). It sounds very much like the voice of God himself. And it doesn’t exactly mark Tolstoy out as Mr Fun Times.

  The heavy-handed, preachy tone of that scary epigraph is a harbinger of the sort of writing Tolstoy was to specialize in later in life, after he more or less disowned Anna Karenina. Even at the time he was writing the novel, he was already tortured by a lot of the philosophical ideas that came to dominate his thinking and led him to a monk-like existence as a teetotal vegetarian, committed consumer of boiled eggs and serial avoider of pastries. (So often, I’ve wanted to travel back in time and get him to try a jam doughnut. I feel sure he would have written more novels. The man just needed sugary carbohydrates.)

  But it’s also a strange lesson in wishful thinking. I can’t help feeling that Tolstoy wanted God to take his revenge on Anna Karenina (for being a dirty, filthy adulteress) but, at the same time, the human being in him (who had committed a lot of dirty, filthy adultery himself) sees her fragility and attractiveness as a person and wants to forgive her. The contradictory nature of the epigraph is a clue as to why Anna Karenina is such a complicated novel and does not deliver a clear, unambiguous message about how to live. On the one hand, Tolstoy sets out to write a didactic novel where no one dares challenge God’s laws without terrible consequences and where Levin (the ‘good’ Tolstoy) is the hero of the piece. And yet, on the other hand, and almost in spite of himself, he ends up drawing a beautiful portrait of Anna Karenina, infused with empathy and compassion. There’s a way of looking at Anna not just as a character and a woman but as an extension of Tolstoy himself: the ‘bad’ Tolstoy, the foolish side of himself that he wishes didn’t exi
st.

  It’s this contradiction that makes Tolstoy the best guide to life. He is both flawed and honest, and these qualities are not always intentional. In fact, he tries to cover them up. But that only makes him more likeable. Even the most cursory glance at his life shows that he was an immensely and amusingly complex character. That is why – with reservations – I love him. He is a tricky bugger, with many bad character traits and psychological inconsistencies, which plagued him his whole life and which he tried desperately to overcome. But aren’t these very much the qualities anyone should seek in a lifelong friend?

  Everything you need to know about Tolstoy is summed up by what he did to his wife on the eve of their wedding. He was thirty-four. She was seventeen. He felt bad about the fact that he had had a debauched youth, sleeping with prostitutes, Gypsies and parlourmaids. He had fathered a child by one of the serfs on the estate. (I love that in the author biography in the original Penguin edition of Anna Karenina this is described as ‘a life of pleasure’. It’s what my grandma would call the life of Riley.) He felt so bad about all these ‘pleasures’ that he showed his wife-to-be his diaries, which extensively detailed all his exploits and the venereal disease they had resulted in. The same episode plays out, of course, between Levin and Kitty in Anna Karenina. Decades later, in her diaries, his wife wrote that she never recovered from the shock.

  This information about Tolstoy’s character has always been out there and has been easy to find if you were looking for it. However, in the past decade in Russia, there has been a resurgence of interest in Tolstoy the real person (as opposed to Tolstoy the great genius) thanks to Flight from Paradise, a fascinating biography by Pavel Basinsky. This book is a controversial account of Tolstoy’s final days and won Russia’s national book prize. Until recently in Russia, and since the dawn of time in academia, looking too deeply into a writer’s biography has been frowned upon, because this is seen to lead to a shallow appreciation of the important thing: the writing. But something about Basinsky’s book broke the spell for Russians, and everyone became fixated by it. An entire nation thought to themselves: ‘What if we looked at Tolstoy as an ordinary person who struggled with his emotions, got very angry with his wife and had very particular feelings about serving suggestions for eggs?’ This was the Tolstoy Basinsky uncovered, and Russians loved it. I have no evidence that egg sales from Arkhangelsk to Vladivostok soared, but I like to pretend to myself that they did.

  Here was a man who was difficult, infuriating, sometimes rather cruel to his family and tortured by his own nature. This, at least, explained a lot of the contradictions and complexities in his work, including why the themes in Anna Karenina can be so hard to pin down. Basinsky’s book also sought to give some context to what is perhaps the most shocking act of self-loathing in literary history. Almost as soon as Tolstoy finished the novel, he renounced all artistic work in favour of what he called a ‘spiritual rebirth’. As discussed, I know we are not supposed to read too much into authors’ biographies. But I really don’t think you can ignore the fact that someone writes a novel full of emotion and passion which becomes known as one of the greatest works of art ever created and then they turn around and basically say, ‘Well, that was a disgusting waste of time. I am going to go and be a peace-loving vegetarian now.’

  If anything, Tolstoy’s new reputation as a more rounded person who ate boiled pears to aid his digestion (no wonder, with all the eggs) – rather than some kind of literary demigod – has enhanced the understanding and appreciation of his work. I certainly feel better for knowing that the eighty-two-year-old Tolstoy went around wearing two hats because he felt the cold on his head, that he loved beans and Brussels sprouts (a rare break from the eggs) and that, on one occasion, his wife was so angry with him for leaving the house without telling her that she stabbed herself with knives, scissors and a safety pin. (Theirs was an extraordinarily volatile relationship, especially in later life, and it was exacerbated – understandably – by Tolstoy’s desire to renounce the works that supported the family financially. Not to mention Sofya Andreyevna’s role as Chief Copier-Outer of the novels.)

  In Flight from Paradise, Basinky also revealed Tolstoy to be someone suffering from a lot of problems we would judge as uniquely modern. Whenever any of us reads about someone being hassled on social media and what a contemporary phenomenon this is considered to be, we should think about Tolstoy. He routinely received death threats via telegram, letter and parcel. On his eightieth birthday in 1908, he received a large box containing a length of rope. It’s all very well someone sending you a poison-pen letter. But a length of rope? That is hardcore. The letter accompanying the rope was signed ‘A mother’. His wife, Sofya, opened it and wrote in her diary that the message with it read: ‘There is nothing left for Tolstoy to do but wait for and wish for the government to hang him, and he can save them the trouble.’ Sofya noted that she assumed the woman had lost a child in the revolution in 1905 and blamed Tolstoy for it.

  Whenever Tolstoy travelled, he was subject to constant distractions, bombarded by other people’s opinions, thoughts and arguments; it was as if a Twitter-come-to-life materialized before him. (Genuine report: ‘Can I get your autograph, Lev Nikolayevich? By the way, would you ever go in an aeroplane?’ He gave the autograph and said that aeroplanes were a bad idea, as only birds should fly.) At home, it wasn’t much better: people continually came to his house (interrupting, at least, the frequent deliveries of rope) to ask for work or money, or to show him their terrible manuscripts. The only way he could get away from them was to go and visit his sister in the monastery where she lived, which was in itself really stressful, because he had been excommunicated by the Church and was not at all welcome there. Poor Tolstoy.

  Knowing that Tolstoy suffered all this after he had renounced Anna Karenina has helped me to be more patient about trying to understand the book’s messages. It is one of the strangest novels, in that it reads so beautifully and easily and is full of light and warmth. And yet, when you sit back and think about its ultimate meaning, it is like the breath of Satan. Its ultimate message? ‘Don’t want anything too selfish because you will end up killing yourself.’ And while the novel has so much soulful joy and gentle humour, and even elements of self-deprecation (especially in Tolstoy’s portrait of Levin, the character most like himself), there is an oddness to the book, a disturbing sense of unresolved conflict.

  It doesn’t help, for example, that the heroine doesn’t appear until Chapter Eighteen. When you read this novel for the first time, you also spend a great many pages (sixty or seventy, depending on which edition you’re reading) thinking, ‘Yes, yes, that’s all very well. Some very nice vodka parties and excellent ice skating. But where is – drum roll – Anna Karenina? Isn’t this supposed to be a book about her?’ The moment when she arrives is almost an anticlimax. It’s sudden and brief. Considering this is arguably the greatest heroine in literary history, our first meeting with Anna Karenina is tantalizingly delayed and strangely underwhelming. ‘Vronsky followed the conductor to the carriage and at the door to the compartment stopped to allow a lady to leave.’ A lady! It is the lady! Has there ever been a more low-key introduction? First, the scary, vengeful epigraph. And now this weird lack of focus on the heroine.

  Let’s revisit this for a moment. He ‘stopped to allow a lady to leave’. That’s it? That’s her entrance? Really? This is typical Tolstoy. Bring on the most important character seemingly in passing and disturbingly late in the day. Let her emerge out of the background. Don’t make a big deal about it. It’s a deferred entrance that credits the reader with a lot of intelligence, not to mention the patience of a saint. We immediately sense – without having to be told – that the train lady is Anna. We understand (or at least assume) her significance. But the writer respects us enough not to push her in our faces. He does not want to do us the disservice of announcing: ‘Look! It’s Anna Karenina! And she’s doomed! Doomed, I tell you!’ (I can’t help feeling that, if this were Dicke
ns, a passing tramp would announce this. No offence, Dickens.) Of course, by doing something so unusual, so bold and so seemingly discreet (blink and you’ll miss her), Tolstoy presents his heroine even more ostentatiously than if he’d delivered her bursting out of a train-shaped cake dancing the can-can and singing ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’.

  The funny thing is, the whole of the first part of the book is about Stepan Oblonsky – Stiva (yes, it’s the diminutive again) or, in some crazy translations which totally disregard all laws of transliteration and common sense, ‘Steve’ – Anna’s brother, a civil servant and man about town. If the first sixty pages of this novel were anything to go by, then it should be called ‘Anna Karenina’s Brother’ or, perhaps, ‘The Book of Steve’. Although it’s really not a good idea to think of his name being Steve, as these misguided translations suggest. He’s really not a Steve. A Steve would not order oysters and turbot and drink champagne with ladies of dubious morals doused in vinaigre de toilette, a nineteenth-century perfume consisting of plants, woods and spices. If this were not Anna Karenina and instead ‘The Book of Steve’ (sorry, Stiva), I guess this would happen on every page. (I know I’m contradicting myself here, by the way, because I said earlier that I am not fussy about names. But, seriously, Stiva Oblonsky is not a Steve. This is one occasion where correct transliteration is necessary and warranted.)

  Arguably, Oblonsky – who goes to meet Anna off the train, where, during the journey, she has just sat next to Vronsky’s mother – is the glue of the whole book. Anna is his sister. Levin is his best friend. Vronsky is his (sort of) work colleague. Stiva is a civil servant and Vronsky is a cavalry officer. They are both members of the aristocracy, and Stiva would make it his business to know everything about everyone in high society. But, of course, this is not a novel about Stepan Oblonsky. It can’t be. Because he is a supposedly happy man who has figured life out. It is a novel about Anna Karenina. It has to be. Because she is an unhappy woman who has not got life figured out. Although there’s already a contradiction here. We can see that Anna’s brother is supposed to be ‘the happy one’. And yet we know that his merry and debauched life has led to misery. He’s having an affair. His wife knows about it, and she’s distraught. He’s devastated, in turn, to have upset her. This is why Anna has come to visit: to console her brother’s wife and plead his case. And this is supposed to be the version of ‘the happy family’. Clearly, we are not meant to take everything at face value.