“Anna Karenina”: She loves him, she loves others not, but at least we're Russian and not French!

Instead of a cookie-cutter wrap-up, or a point-for-point address of the points in my last post, I'm just going to cover a few of the aspects that were most essential to my reading of Anna Karenina.

First off, I like quotes. Here's a few noteworthy ones:

Favorite Anna Karenina Quote:

“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow” (40).

            Before Stepan Arkadyevitch slips this gem into the tail end of his soliloquy, a naïve, pre-rejection Levin talks of love, and explains that in romantic love, there can be no real tragedy. I feel that, having gone through the gauntlet of emotions that Russian aristocracy (apparently) demands, Levin, once a cynic, would now agree to this insightful quote that he had previously dismissed as the musings of a romatic. If Anna Karenina has a protagonist, Levin is the closest we get: his journey from rejected bachelor to rural patriot/conscientious brother to family man and beacon-of-honesty is a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman, from what I can gather. The quote itself sums up the most positive outlook one can imagine for the rest of the novel: for every shadow—every midlife crisis, every hint of infidelity, every ominous reminder of one’s mortality—there somewhere corresponds beauty and light in the world. The shadows cast by Anna's handiwork are foiled by the light in the Levin's lives.

Honorable Mention for Favorite Quote:

“She felt herself clad in an impenetrable armor of falsehood” (132).

            Anna Karenina, what a mess you made of your life. This early quote comes from Anna’s consciousness, wherein she marvels at how naturally, how effortlessly she can deceive her husband to whom she had so long been faithful. “Clad in armor” writes Tolstoy, a phrase that suggests how safe she feels, as though she were vulnerable before, and now she, Anna, is battle-ready, eager for the coming war. Later, encountering her husband for the last time, Anna acknowledges his tenderness (seemingly for the first time), but “some strange force of evil would not let her give herself up to her feelings, as though the rules of warfare would not permit her to surrender” (637). This substantiates the anecdote/cliché that “the woman’s war is in the home,” although not in a sense that is supportive of the female perspective. That Anna feels empowered by an armor of “falsehood” was originally disconcerting; in retrospect, it is an indictment of her flawed character, and ironic in the sense that someone so armored could be so prone to insecurity.

Least Favorite Quote:

“Yes, you have conquered me, and I am yours” (394).

            I have yet to see any film of AK, but I am willing to bet that of all the quotes in the novel, this one makes it into the film, and is overdramatized for its romanticism the reckless abandon so glorified in the film medium.

Set apart from the novel, this quote might inspire love, passion, and all that one aspires to have in a relationship. Perhaps if Kitty had spoken this, then that sentiment might resound. But it is Anna that speaks this quote, and Anna’s romantic life can hardly be idealized.
Conquered? Can the conquering of a married woman be something transcendent? I say no. If anything, Anna conquered Vronsky, with the supernatural allure she emanates over the opposite sex. Vronsky merely followed the scent, and gave her the opportunity to betray her loyalty to her husband.
Is Anna really Vronsky’s? Again, her devotion wavers. She risks her affair to return her attention to Seryohza. She goes out into a ball comprised only of her husband’s friends only to return in tears: a desperate plea for attention, and for her past life. She shows no maternal love for Annushka, and is satisfied in being unable to birth any more children to Vronsky; an attitude that shocks and appalls those in the know.
Anna’s sentiment in being conquered is more an omen than a new dawn, and this quote inspires resentment in myself toward her.

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Some final musings…

Anna is Pretty Damn Bipolar

“There is another woman in me…  I’m not that woman” (375).

“Gaiety and grief and despair and tenderness and triumph followed one another without any connection, like the emotions of a madman” (619).

Halfway through the text, in a rare confrontation with her husband in which she is candid, Anna lets slip the suggestion that there is an alternate Anna. Perhaps Anna has been overcome by a sleeping giant: an unfaithful doppelganger, if you will believe. This is Anna at her most sincere, or so it appears, until the next shift in emotion dissolves this theory…

“Her only desire was to be rid of [her husband’s] oppressive presence… ‘My God! Why didn’t I just die!’” (384).

So the other woman took back over? Or what?

“The baby girl—his child—was so sweet, and had won Anna’s heart, that Anna rarely thought of her son” (423).

Well that’s not very endearing. Compare that to a letter sent thirty pages later, where she is “miserable  at being separated from [her] son” (466). Much later, her feelings for Annushka evaporate: “I love … more than myself two creatures, Seryozha and [Vronsky]” (579). Who is the real Anna? Why does her heart sway on a whim and with such momentum, as a gondola ride in an amusement park? This eventually infects her feelings for Vronsky:

“At one time she would seem in love with him, and then she would become cold, irritable, and impenetrable” (481).

Her rock, on whom she relies to balance the ebb and flow of crazy Anna, is not immune to the slippage, the undertow of Anna’s tide. This was perhaps the most compelling plot of the later novel: Anna’s emotional betrayal of Vronsky, despite his devotion and sacrifice for her. She begins to flirt with other men in his presence (491), seemingly to get a rise out of him, to bittersweetly remind him of that lightning-in-a-bottle quality about herself, which he first became enamored by. The realization is that he, too, could fall prey to it.

All this capitulates in Anna’s unstable meltdown: after failing to balance Vronsky, Seryozha, and the “other Anna,” she kills herself, only in the most bipolar way imaginable! She is ready to jump off the traincar, into the wheels that will end her life. She is sure of life’s ugliness. Until her childhood flashes before her, and she becomes sure of life’s beauty. Only, by that time, she is being bludgeoned to death.
How fitting?

Possessed by the French, and The Woman Question Revisited

The discussion of “querelle de femmes,” or “woman question,” began to take serious shape in France, as I alluded to in my video post. Knowing this, it is curious how Tolstoy incorporates the French language into his character’s conversations and arguments. To speak French among the Russian elite was a sign of status and being cultured, but I think Tolstoy specifically, almost exclusively, utilizes French speak as “the language of infidelity,” or immorality, in AK.

Early on, Levin notes that he would censor his kin from learning French (248). As a protagonist and Tolstoy-esque figure, this indictment carries weight more weight than the typical small talk of the novel. But this is bachelor-Levin speaking; does his opinion change as he comes into his own? Once they’ve settled down, a man subtly flirts with Kitty, and she responds positively (although with guilt). Levin chastises her in French (544), which comes off as a sarcastic use of the language. However, Levin himself succumbs to the French sensuality after beholding Anna’s presence and beauty. Levin states that the French style is realistic, no matter how unrefined, and that realism, that honesty, is to them poetry. This endears Anna to him, and endears the French to him subconsciously:

“Levin said that the French had carried conventionality further than anyone, and that consequently they see a great merit in the return to realism. In the fact of not lying, they see poetry” (631).

Anna and Vronsky both have nightmares in French, wherein both are attacked in French: Anna by a doctor who says she will die in childbirth; Vronsky by a decrepit peasant (325, 330). Anna’s portrait in Vronsky’s home, painted abroad, is in the French style (424), and Anna is later mocked in French for her sensuality (497).

Can this all be taken as an indictment of French influence on marital relations? I’d say so. Tolstoy comes off as an isolationist, almost blaming the French for such liberal sensuality, if Levin’s words can be taken as his own perspective, and if we are to view Anna’s spell over him as something to be admonished.

“Whether love is to be put higher than worldly considerations” is what the sleazy guest proposes to Kitty, and can stand alone as the central argument of the novel (543). Anna cast aside her family and responsibilities for love; perhaps Tolstoy would against this thesis use Levin's argument: that passionate love is not worth tragedy, and only the more platonic developed over time like Levin and Kitty is legitimately worthwhile.

It’s hard to pin down exactly why Tolstoy portrayed the most central character of the novel so negatively, but it does not seem to reflect well on his opinion of extra-marital affair and the woman question. Anna is perfectly hedged between two women: Dolly, her sister-in-law, who will never happy in her marriage to a man who cheats on her without regard, and Kitty, whose suitor Anna stole, and who ends up close to perfectly happy in her marriage to a man who is carefully devoted to her and their child. Yet I sympathize with those two, and feel critical of Anna. What’s more, I cannot imagine that AK can be interpreted with much wiggle room from that.