Nicola Paget as Anna Karenina in the snow when she is still falling in love with Vronsky (1977 BBC AK)
Friends and readers,
Two summers ago our Trollope and his Contemporaries listserv on Yahoo (Trollope19thCstudies@yahoogroups.com) began nearly 6 months r reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace together, and a few of us watched just some of the many movies made. And to remember it, & make some of the conversations available to others, I blogged on all these. We thought it such a success and enjoyed it so that we repeated ourselves over Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina,starting this past Indian summer. We took less time, 4 months to be accurate; instead of some 1400 pages, we had a book of over 800. We posted less: perhaps the issues of adultery, erotic enthrallment, marital and sexual conflict, class disdain, are less comfortable subjects to exchange thoughts about than sequences of war and sequences about the society that supports this. Although the list of Anna Karenina movies is longer than than that of War and Peace movies, I watched fewer. None had the reputation the War and Peace movies had.
Yet the experience was comparable. I had listened to the book read aloud once before looking at the book as I went along and years ago tried to read it on my own. This with a group was the first time I really read the book slowly and truly. I finished both books with the same group of people convinced they are great literary masterpieces in the novel tradition, and yet have fundamental inescapable flaws: for War and Peace, Tolstoy wants to write history and persuade the reader experience human experience is providential (controlled by some divine purpose); in Anna Karenina he cannot get himself to enter into the full emotional range of motives or sexual experience of verboten adultery, and sees marital experience far more from the point of view of sexual satisfaction and practical money support than genuine mindful understanding and compatible interests.
Again it was the 1970s BBC version of the book that seemed to me the soundest, giving enough time for complexity: the 1977 AK written by Ken Taylor, directed by Donald Wilson, featuring Eric Porter, Nicola Paget, Stuart Wilson — Wilson gave us the 1967-68 Forsyte Saga; and Taylor, the 1987 Jewel in the Crown respectively — compared to the 1972 BBC War and Peace, a Jack Pulman product, featuring Anthony Hopkins, Morag Hood, Frank Middlemass (to name just three). Both books had also prompted comparable recent film adaptations which brought out the disquieting transgressions and marginalized people’s (women mostly) point of view, the 2015 War and Peace scripted Andrew Davies, featuring James Norton, Lily James, Brian Cox (limiting myself to 3), the 2012 Anna Karenina, directed by Joe Wright, scripted by Tom Stoppard (no less),featuring (as usual with Joe Wright, Keira Knightley, Jude Law and Matthew Macfayyen). Here is a list of all the AK films I know of for those interested.
The parallels between the character types in both books, and the contrasts of their ultimate fates are striking. Both books open with an astonishingly persuasive portrait of a central male, in W&P Pierre Bezukhok, a self-doubting socially awkward, yet brilliantly aware character of great integrity; in AK, Oblonsky, known as the contrasting Stiva, Anna’s insouciant socially skilfully comical conventional (unless you have to live with him), utterly amoral, a careless adulterer. Some of us loved the opening skating scene in AK between Tolstoy’s troubled man of integrity, Levin and the girl he eventually marries, Kitty (in type close to the W&P Natasha). The opening two chapters on the Scherbatsky family: this group is the equivalent of Natasha and Rostov family. Very early we see Vronsky will be an inadequate lover-companion for Anna’s need once she defies society to go and live apart with him, Karenin, her aging husband, originally deeply well-meaning, will be unable to flex in a modern amoral environment, and punish them all. Stiva’s long-suffering wife, Dolly who is counseled by Anna to stay with him, and consequently endures yet more wretched years until he finally cannot pay her way, is contrasted to Anna who chooses not to stay, and ends in a tragic obsessively self-destroying life and death.
The issues outside the book we talked of again that are textual include the insoluble problem of and access translations provide. It matters which other language you read the book in and which translation. I found for myself the Maude War and Peace captured the rich texture of the original War and Peace in English, yet a mid-century French translation by Elisabeth Guertik was yet better. For Anna Karenina, the simpler P&V was what was wanted to reach that interior life so crucial to AK, and I just didn’t have, didn’t have time for a French translation (much to my regret as this theme is Writ large in great originally French novels, e.g., Madame de Lafayette’s La Princess de Cleves). I found Tony Tanner’s Adultery in the Novel, which I hoped much from, a disappointment, and we dialogued over this (see comments).
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Eric Porter as Karenin when Anne is trying to tell him she loves Vronsky (1977 BBC AK)
Sex and Marriage
About half-way through Diane Reynolds wrote that she had been reading Joel Fassler’s collection of essays, Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process; Mary Gaitskill had written there of how she felt inspired by Anna’s deeply felt impulsive cry after coming near death in childbirth (from a pregnancy by Vronsky), and begging the returned Karenin to forgive her — that she has two selves, and her real self is the presence who pleaded with Karenin to return to him, while the self in love with Vronsky (we know loathes sex with her husband, Karenin) is “another woman in me, I’m afraid of her,” someone she “cannot forget, the one who is not me.” Stoppard picks up the importance of this scene and moment and has Keira Knightley as Anna say
“Oh, my dear [to Karenin] don’t look at me like that. I am not the one you think. I’m afraid of her, She fells in love with another man. I’m the real one. But I’m dying now, then she’ll be dead too. Poor man! [meaning Vronsky?] Let him come in. Alexis! Alexis!”
Now it’s not clear which Alexis as that is both their names. This might startle some readers were they to pay attention. Our modern predilection is to see the coerced self as the married women, not the fleeing one. Once Anna recovers in Wright/Stoppard’s film, she behaves like a hateful tigress to Jude Law as Karenin. In the 1977 BC AK Eric Porter captures the feel of a Karenin who wants to love and to forgive, to bring Anna’s daughter by Vronsky up as his own, but before the onslaught of society’s scorn for him, and her behavior, is puzzled, hurt, cold and finally subject to religious delusions invented by a woman who flatters and soothes him. All the Vronskys in the films I saw were true to the book as they tried to but could not be content with Anna. Tolstoy’s Vronsky needs social prestige, to be active and admired in the world, to be integrated as a landowner and his society will not permit this as long as he lives openly unmarried with Anna.
One reading is that Tolstoy thus indicts society for twisting the characters and/or refusing to understand and act with empathy. Another is Anna is turned into this another dark self as in Robert Louis Stevenson’s explanation for Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: a doppelganger, a motif for expressing an atavistic self underneath our civilized selves, perhaps an amoral self whose appetites take over at night, or a sick self in reaction to the society that married a young innocent woman off to Karenin who has learned to dislike sexuality with him (this is not that far from Tolstoy in his Kreutzer’s Sonata. Yet Anna’s real self is that of a mother too; she misses her son truly; does not want a divorce if this means permanent separation from him. She does or can not understand that once she has left her husband, she will never have her boy back.
In the novel Anna’s frantic visit to her son once she and Vronsky return to Moscow: early in the morning, at dawn practically, laden with gifts, preceded by two scenes: the first of Seyozha with his Slav tutor, Vassily Lukich, and his especial friend, the hall porter, Kapitonych. He is presented as happy but nervous, proud of his father for winning awards for his gov’t work on behalf of the people of Russia; underneath is stress (he cannot bear the religious woman Lydia, whom he is sent to): he has not learnt the lesson, he cannot learn it, but no one presses him. The father comes, means to show affection, but is so cold and hard because the boy cannot produce the answers. We are told it’s not that he’s stupid or didn’t read the passages, they just mean nothing. He has been told his mother is dead and we are told also he refuses to believe it. Then Anna’s visit: disguised, how she is not let in at first, how the servant disobeys what he knows is wanted, and stands up for this because Anna never was unkind to him ever. In the end the child is confused, he is punished for not knowing his lesson; all the better he thinks, he can stay with his tutor, they build windmills. All he wants to do is forget her. The word love is used of all Anna’s feeling towards her son repeatedly; she says she is worthless (note that) and her husband a good man but when she encounters her husband fleeing his own house, all she feels are spite and hatred.
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Stuart Wilson as Ferdinand Lopez in Phineas Redux (1974 Pallisers, scripted Simon Raven): there is a closely similar shot of him as Vronsky (1977 BBC AK)
Frederick March played Vronsky in the 1935 AK with Greta Garbo as Anna (his is the strongest performance)
In reading the book, its story is so familiar and the types Tolstoy’s characters correspond to are superficially and functionally in the story part of commonplace moral lessons or protests so the reader is in danger of understanding what he or she is reading in stereotypical framed ways. It’s reading the details that bring out what makes it alive, thought- and feeling-provoking, original and effective. Vronsky as a character suffers a lot here: he is often underestimated, dismissed as a shallow cad, utterly egoistic; in some of the films he is treated this way too.
For example, after Vronsky and Anna’s first erotic encounter at the train station, Vronsky visits Stiva and when he learns Anna is there, he tries to flee. Yet he wanted to see her again intensely. The narrator says: “he raised his eyes, saw her, and something ashamed and frightened appeared in his expression;” then when Stiva tries “loudly” to usher Vronsky in, we are told his was a “soft, gentle and calm voicing … declining.” Anna blushes and thinks she understands why he came to Stiva’s and and then didn’t come in. But all she says is “he thought it was late.” At the dance it is Kitty’s jealous POV which thinks “Anna was drunk with the wine of rapture she inspired”. It’s not the admiration of the crowd, Kitty thinks, “but the rapture of one man. Each time he spoke with Anna, her eyes flashed with a joyful light and a smile of happiness curved her red lips.” Vronsky “wishes to fall down before” Anna, and “in his glance there was only obedience and fear.” His glance seems to say he wants “to save himself:” “There was an expression on his face that she had never seen before” There’s an “irrepressible tremulous light in [Anna’s] eyes and [her] smile burned him as she said it.” Then it’s the narrator and Anna who “feel themselves alone and this crowded ballroom.” Again from Kitty on Vronsky’s face “that expression of lostness and obedience that had so struck her, like the expression of an intelligent dog when it feels guilty”. Kitty finds “something alien and demonic” in Anna. Earlier Kitty had seen that Anna was “serious,” had a “sad expression” on her face; “in her some other higher world of interests, inaccessible to her, complex and poetic.” We should recall that Vronsky grieves in mortification when Anna loves Karenin during the childbirth, and shoots himself in the chest afterwards, does attempt to remain faithful to Anna until her crazed needy vulnerability hazes him ceaselessly for a peace of mind (“repos” in French) not in him to give himself, much less anyone else.
For several other nuanced close readings across the book see the Trollope and his Contemporaries archives.
After the lovers flee, Vronsky is intensely desirous to believe he and Anna will be accepted and to do all he can to promote this. He needs this. He tries his sister-in-law but she says she can’t visit them; the sleazy amoral Betsy comes stays briefly and offers a return visit at a specific time, Anna knows that means that Betsy will set up the evevning so that no one who matters will be there, and says, that is precisely the time she cannot come (this is kept in the 1977 BBC AK), and Betsy sends a note she is sorry she will not see Anna and Vronsky before they leave.
Key incidents in the Vronsky threads:
Before he and Anna consummate their love at the racrtrack. First, where Vronsky goes into the stable to look at his prize horse. It seems to me the mood of the felt detail makes an analogy with Anna, and the way Vronsky rouses, pets, and soothes the horse is analogous to the we are to imagine he rouses, pets and soothes Anna. Emphasis is laid elsewhere on how calm and gentle he can be and still convey physical strength. Calm down, calm down he says to the horse. Tolstoy enters into the consciousness of the horse without having to make thoughts for it: lean head, shining merry eyes, nose widening, flaring. The English jockey tells Vronsky too he must not be upset when he rides – and he does become upset because Karenin (I half remember) shows up and Anna must move to her husband’s place.
It’s a very subtle far more carefully version of what Trollope shows us in Burgo Fitzgerald vis-a-vis Lady Glencora Palliser. Trollope is coarses, not as subtle — Burgo will mistreat the horse, pressure it too much despite his fondness for it – -the fondness is seen as a distance as about what it’s worth (the money).
Most of the time I’m bored by Trollope’s scenes of racing horses, hunting, but not here. Tolstoy has filled the scene of Vronsky with his cronies and then at the races and especially close up to his horse, Frou-frou — what a name. It resonates sexually, trivializng femininity. Tolstoy seems to be able to come close into realities of the presences, man, horse, the interaction of people. I suggest we are to feel that Vronsky has last his “cool” because for the first time in his life he is truly emotionally engaged with someone (Anna) and this spills over into the rest of his life .He cares more if he wins or loses, or he cares differently. A deep relationship between the man and the animal is felt. Then when it lays there all quivering and he must kill it, have murdered this horse. I suggest the horse can stand in for Anna too. She is becoming herself nervous, losing her calm and I would say unjustly and unfairly hates her husband. But before we exculpate Vronsky into a man of sensibility, notice how he kicks the horse. I felt that as a shock. We are to bond with this poor creature driven to race for these selfish aristocrats.
From the talk we can gather that there was an anti-hunting, anti-racing group of people — this is a circus spectacle.
After they have run away, had the child, gone to live together in Italy, found it impossible there and in the country and return to Moscow:
The humiliating incident in the theater — dramatized (like the horse race where Vronsky loses, shoots his horse dead, and Anna exposes her attachment to all). Vronsky’s mother’s exultation. Vronsky’s military mates act to accept Anna and to support him but it’s not enough. He rushes back after her and they have this scene where he agrees they must leave immediately, it’s too painful and then is forced to say how much he loves her. But he is now intensely put off. He cannot stand her beauty. In the 1977 BBC film he is not alienated as yet, not hostile, and doesn’t become so until near the end. The word love is only used by the characters when it’s this frantic clinging emotion of Anna towards the first child which we are told was the result of her not loving its father, her husband; the baby girl she feels little for. Or when you no longer feel it as Vronsky doesn’t or are demanding it because you have lost your identity. But this is an anti-adultery reading. People living apart form society who have left partners can adjust, can feel love, do not crack so quickly and often it’s for other reasons than the adultery or separation (as in Tolstoy’s case).
Part of their misery is they are surrounded by hangers-on, phonies. The carelessly flirting male cousin Levin kicked out is here flirting with Anna — and note she doesn’t mind nor Vronsky. But he’s a mindless limpet. Princess Varvara – Stiva’s aunt — is there because she gets free meals and a place to live. She’s utterly phony another limpet. Then there’s the male counterpart to Betsy who we now know told Anna unless Anna is married she will not see her. These are people who simply hide their amoralities — like Vronsky’s mother. Anna bursts out about Betsy: “Au fond c’est la femme le plus deprave qui existe.” (Ruth Wilson enacts this to a T in the 2012 Wright/Stoppard film.)
Vronsky is trying for respect by building his hospital and going to meetings and begin a responsible landowner in the community. But it’s the social activity they share that somehow they fight over. We see it doesn’t satisfy him and the functionaries in the hospital are not good enough as guests. He wants the relationship legitimized, and his children legitimized. We feel he wants children. Anna must beg Karenin for a divorce: she finally bursts out she can’t stand the humiliation and thinks she would not get one. She also doesn’t want to give up her son. We see she is not able to love her daughter in these circumstances. She can’t indulge in “that inexhaustible intimate conversation” she says she longed for. She does say not an hour goes by but she doesn’t think of this divorce matter, doesn’t reproach herself. She then preys on Vronsky, asking him for what is not in him to give, full validation, companionship which looks nowhere else, and when he does not give it, she accuses him of not loving her, of betrayal and he breaks out in frustrated fury.
Stuart Wilson played the part in the 77 series and also Ferdinand Lopez in the film adaptation of The Pallisers — we are going to be watching that one all spring — whether 24 or 26 episodes, it’ll take us into summer. One can do that with films. Transfer one actor into another film or book: Wilson played a type that included Vronsky, Lopez (a hard mean man in the novel) and a cold predatory cad in The Raj Quartet who lures Sarah to go to bed with him, challenges her and when she’s pregnant her mother insists on an abortion. He was tall dark and handsome, very thin. A critic made fun of this type in Jeremy Irons: tall, thin and tortured is the way women viewers like this hero type. Is it still the fashion somewhere? or are characters made too hard?
In the aftermath to Anna’s suicide Tolstoy avoids Vronsky at first and sets it two months later: we only see him from the outside. Well the last shot of Wilson as Lopez show his face in a frozen horrified look, so dark and brooding are his eyes. I’ve not forgotten that moment in the mini-series: it’s the last shot of that episode. I now transfer the look of Wilson’s face to Vronsky in the novel by Tolstoy. In the film adaptation we never see Vronsky again after he drives off in his carriage. I thought they did that because they ran out of time and didn’t have enough for a 11th episode and hadn’t planned one. The look in his face could also be Anna’s look as the train comes hurtling at her.
I will talk of Eric Porter’s performance as Karenin in the 1977 BBC production and Jude Law in the 2012 film as in both cases these conceptions and actors went beyond even the brilliance of the book.
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Robert Swann as Levin and Caroline Langrishe as Kitty ice-skating (early joyous scene, 1977 BBC AK)
Some readers are led to find the Levin story superfluous (not connected to Anna) or not what they are reading for (no matter how dull utterly persuasive) as at the same time this story matter increasingly takes up much of the space of the novel. Levin is Tolstoy the way Pierre was Tolstoy; his ideal, again here when first met (and at the last) the nervous person who doesn’t fit in. When Levin returns to his home after his first attempt in the book to win Kitty, he is so relieved to be in a world he has created for himself. But this takes strength too — you must be satisfied by living in and on yourself, believe in your goals, which differ from others. When Levin first arrives, he thinks he can do it, but even with his housekeeper’s kindness and companionableness, the memories of the outside world are a continual leaking poison. For example he wanted Kitty and couldn’t have her, so he thinks another woman will do as well, but he soon gives that up. After his hard work on his farm, with his peasants, we get a paragraph about how “doubts, an eternal dissatisfaction with yourself, vain attempts to improve, and failures and an eternal expectation of happiness” elude him and make him have to strive to be at peace.
This is as important in life as eros. It’s how Levin differs from Vronsky in a deep way and why he’s a worthwhile human being. He has original depths, he has real feelings and thoughts; he need not in his behavior mirror society’s norms as he has examined them and found them wanting. I found Tolstoy’s depiction of the naturalness of the animals in this world of nature also such a relief. The calf that seeks its mother and wags its tale. I read this in context as showing (for Levin and me) how animals are superior to human beings with all their phony subtexts. I was startled but won over by how Tolstoy entered the consciousness of a dog.
The deeper truer point about Levin is not that he’s exemplary but struggling against other human beings who just don’t take anything seriously but their own appetites. So he can’t get his workers to work — even if he paid them more – -the way he would. He can’t get things done even if he does some of it because he needs the others to. In my life I’ve never been part of team really but can guess from very early projects in school with others how frustrating this is — why people appreciate those who will work. I’m impressed by how deeply into the sense of the realities of agricultural worlds Tolstoy gets — Hardy tries but does not reach this. The 2013 film adaptation Far from Madding Crowd tried to by showing us the actors/actresses in the fields close up working.
An opposition in the novel is those who feel deeply good humane emotions (Anna, her husband, Dolly, Kitty, Kitty’s father, Levin’s brother) someone with much self-thought (Agafa Mikhailovna) and the cold performative manipulative types (Vronsky, Stiva instinctively, Betsy): not everyone falls into these two types but close enough as a theme. His brother, Nikolai, is the vulnerable idealist whose ideals of equality do not extend to women; whether Tolstoy meant us to see they do not extend to people beneath his class whom he is in intimate contact with rather than women, his behavior shows that too. He’s in fact a frustrated domineer; yet unhappy because he does not know how to live out his communist ideals (the society leaves no room for him as some of us may have experienced it leaves no room for parts of us central to us that don’t fit in)
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Anna’s throwing herself under a train.
Vivian Leigh in the final sequence of the 1948 movie
Trains matter in the novel, are focused on — as well as the brilliant movie, The Last Stationby Jay Parini, with a good movie by Michael Hoffman I blogged about years ago.
It’s a long deeply eloquent pictorially realized sequence; the choice of words to capture her intensely depressed state of mind is to me perfect. There are many words about light and darkness. But mostly her mind goes over and over again the recent incidents that have led to Vronsky fleeing, and she backtracks to the whole situation they are in, and she has truthful accurate remarkable insights into how he feels about her, and why she is so tormented. I wrote too much at length in response to Light into Dark so I won’t go into these: we’ve covered them, e.g., he’s tired of her, resentful, angry at the situation; she keeps asking him for what he cannot give her, all his self and a whole reason to live. She is preying on him (she doesn’t put it this way).
Anna does not know what to do with herself. She asks her maid, what should she do? Vronsky will not come back to help her.
She feels her views are clinched when she visits Dolly for advice and comfort. Alas Kitty is there and immediately it’s clear Kitty does not want to see her as a stigmatized “wicked” women. Anna speaks plainly that she sees this so of course Dolly denies it, and Kitty comes out and we see Kitty immediately soften, be attracted to this still beautiful women, drop her jealousy and be kind. But it’s too late
Tolstoy captures the confusion of mind such a state encompasses and (to me most impressive) the kinds of bad thoughts that revolve through the mind. I’ve had psychiatrists ask me when I say I had bad thoughts all night, what kinds are these, could you tell me them and I can’t because it’s too embarrassing — they are like Anna’s and thus probably common as types: seeing everyone in the world as angry or unhappy or looking at you and despising you; interpreting everything as ugly, cruel, miserable, resolving to do things you know you can’t do or fix and you feel absurd and know you will be told this is skewed by someone’s else “rational” mind. One problem in the way Vivien Leigh enacted this one is she over-did, she was over-the-top neurotic and we had no over-voice to listen to her reasoning because it’s a form of reasoning that leads to a desire to escape the world. I now think Nicola Paget’s quiet enactment much closer. But what’s needed is voice-over, and quotation quite literal from the novel – this P&V translation is very good.
I suspect thus far every single movie has been too embarrassed, unwilling really to put this before us. Telling that Andrew Davies at any rare was willing to put before us a slow agonizing secular-like death. I wonder if he has the guts to put this death before us. The point that such a scene needs is suicide makes sense for Anna — as it made sense for Richardson’s Clarissa.
Anna’s suicide is so interior, so much an extended almost stream of conscious that it would be extremely difficult to convey what Anna is feeling. A voice over would have to be done very carefully and directly from Tolstoy in order not to drown the scene in bathos. A series of images flashing or firing through her mind as she heads toward the scene and perhaps slo mo flings herself in front of the train could work. Especially if we have seen them before, if they replayed distorted to be uglier, meaner, more nightmarish we would understand that, though not if it were overdone in any way. This is a place where the genres don’t mesh easily.
It’s a hard scene to film and all the movies struggle with it. In this case I thought the most successful the 1948 film directed by Julian Duvivier, scripted by him and Jean Anouilh with Vivian Leigh as Anna, Ralph Richardson as Karenin. Leigh was superb at enacting the neurotic (the heroine for A Streetcar named Desire, for The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone). There is a consciousness so deeply gone into when Tolstoy takes the plunge, we are persuaded we are experiencing life. In Phineas Redux where Wilson in the film as Ferdinand Lopez throws himself under a train, we similarly have a long extended stream of consciousness, about Lopez’s shame (he is killing himself like other males in Trollope who does this because they have lost their place in the world after being publicly humiliated — far worse than Mr Slope); Trollope’s novel gives us an astonishing paragraph of metaphor about being smashed to smithereens. Tolstoy stays longer and more resolutely still the character’s mind, until she realizes she doesn’t want to do but it’s too late to pull back. In Trollope’s Nina Balatka, the heroine is about to jump the Charles Bridge into the river and is pulled back by the arm by a friend (a Jewish Rebecca character), but she was hesitating and slightly moving into the “wait a minute” mode, but there was no train on top of her going at high speed.
All comparable achievements.
Film-makers hesitate at the voice-over; maybe they fear audiences will be put off by the emotionalism. It’s said by film critics it’s thought of as feminine, as too intellectual for the average movie-goer, but I love it. I think it makes the Outlander series far better and deeper because it is used so often (and the words taken literally from the book). I’ve been watching Bergman this week; he uses it all the time in his and often Woody Allen (who was much influenced) does it too. It would jar with the sudden train so there’s a media conflict.
Then the fiction switches to Levin until the end of the book …
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Tolstoy in his study (1891, Ilya Repin)
Which story was the afterthought? According to A.N. Wilson, Tolstoy began the book when he had experienced a prolonged period of depression, and been told the real life story of the mistress of a man who lived nearby and who had thrown herself under a train when he tired of her. Tolstoy poured his depression into Anna; Levin came as a relief. But together, they create a thickly felt set of realities, specially criss-crossed by Anna’s brother, Stiva, and his relationship to Levin’s wife’s sister, Dolly.
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Matthew MacFadyen stars as Oblonsky in director Joe Wright’s bold, theatrical new vision of the epic story of love, Anna Karenina, a Focus Features release. Credit: Laurie Sparham
Anna and Levin, heroine and hero; Dolly and Stiva, contrasts: another angle
Both Anne and Levin are characters of integrity, sensibility, who cannot quite fit in. Levin is given far more slack; Anna easily ends up outside this realm of safety and acceptance. Much of the later part of the novel is given over to the Levin group partly perhaps because Tolstoy cannot get inside Anna and Vronsky in the same way — he cannot believe that they are living in similar nuanced conditions. Everything must be overshadowed by their adulterous relationship, but in fact that didn’t have to be. Levin is overwhelmed by “frivolous” people and wishes he could escape. He is not presented as alienated as he might be — finally again Tolstoy is wholesome. To them of course this that they are expending their lives on is not frivolous; the trivia of existence – water in jam, picking mushrooms is what matters or how they live.
Stiva comes to visit Levin many times and Levin overjoyed because Stiva will sit and listen to him. He has so much to say in himself he’s no one to say it all to. I feel for him — again like Pierre in W&P, socially naive, but not putting himself out for others, working for himself whose proceeds he puts back into the land. Ironically Stiva is not really pleasant, it’s that he’s indifferent to all but himself. When Levin tries to elicit a response, Stiva’s half-listening because he wants to produce a speech on “political economy” (conservative laissez-faire politics for the sake of impressing others) not the rural experience Levin is describing. Levin exposes his concern for Kitty– for himself and Stiva’s off-hand discreet comment about how interesting “Ossianic women — women of dreams are” is him musing over the women he has affairs with. How cold his heart to others – -this warm man. Tolstoy conveys this and I remember the deep feeling Dolly.
The two plot-designs are drenched in deep sex, one about fucking (Anna, Vronsky, Karenin) and other about a woman’s body producing a child (Levin, Kitty, her family). We do know that these things don’t have to be on everyone’s mind. I thought too Levin’s memory of his brother’s death and his seeming lack of memory of his difference from this older brother worth noting.
Kelly MacDonald as Dolly (2012 Joe Wright AK)
Dolly, Oblonsky’s wife, Kitty’s sister. Dolly goes for a visit to Anna and Vronsky: of course it’s her POV, but she is deeply sympathetic even and has every reason (as her thoughts tell her for 3 hours on the way there) to reprehend everything about the way marriage is practiced in her society and wish she had done what Anna stopped her from doing: while she was still young enough, a couple of pregnancies before, she should have left Stiva she thinks, tried to divorce or separate herself. Then she might have had a chance to find someone who would truly love, care, protect her – – the way Levin is doing for Kitty. She has utterly unspeakable thoughts about motherhood. What does she get for it? a worn body “Nothing but trouble. No work, no nothing. Just bondage.” She resists this thought by saying to herself she can’t live without them now but they suck the life out of her. One of the most interesting moments in the text is silence — Anna reveals to Dolly something that is so shocking Tolstoy gives us ellipses. I surmised it’s some form of contraception physically; they use anal intercourse or some form of ejaculation where she’s not inseminated by him. Dolly is horrified but remembers other couples with just two children.
Why horrified? If she would suggest this to Stiva, he might go along? or would it interfere with his pleasures. The BBC 1977-78 does try to dramatize this hard material including Anna’s choosing not to have a child and Vronsky’s hard resentful response to this to Anna’s face. This is not in the book, for it seems Tolstoy cannot get himself to question endless pregnancies inflicted on women even if he sees how motherhood is such an ambivalent and sometimes destructive experience for women.
We move very slowly through all this experience, many many pages devoted to slowly seeing Vronsky and him finally opening to Dolly and ditto for Anna, and how at the end Dolly wants to escape and quickly. Vronsky is as good a manager as Levin or Karenin and good thing (though we wonder where he gets the money from — the house is an old family house-heirloom) for they are emotionally miserable at the gut level. Lovely envious surroundings do help is the moral here, but are not enough. Basically they are not enough for one another, and neither has some inner goal or vocation to make up for the loss of society. I would like to suggest there are such people since I think Jim and I were all-in-all but I have to admit in the same breathe we were married and lived conventionally enough to him to maintain a full time job in the fed gov’t of some responsibility.
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Ralph Richardson as Karenin, one of the politicking scenes (1948 AK)
Politics, religion, art. There’s a lot more here than is ever discussed: Levin, Karenin and Vronsky all go to political meetings, and in all these Tolstoy dramatizes what he sees as the uselessness of what happens from the point of view of doing any good for society as a whole. Karenin is outwitted by a conniving man who deludes Karenin’s people into accepting an exaggerated version of doing good and then that is rejected as unrealistic; Levin cannot interact well at all (his brother can but is only interested in issues abstractly), he cannot even figure out what is going on it’s all so implicit, nuanced, morally reprobate at core; Vronsky is a personal success in the same meeting and ends inviting the vicious man who behind the scenes manipulated factions to win the high powerful place to a dinner Vronsky pays for. Tolstoy more than once blames the victims who are subdued for allowing themselves to be subdued. In one-on-one vignettes: Karenin with the lawyer; Karenin and the religious fanatic lonely woman, Lydia, with the religious charlatan; in group scenes of trying to get people to change their ways to be more productive for themselves and work less hard, Levin fails; Stiva has the greatest political successes in what he tries to do (win money and position for himself). the extraordinary protracted death scene of Levin’s brother where instead of validating a religious point of view (as in Andrei’s death in W&P) it is wholly a biological process.
There are also brilliant chapters on art — the way there are in War and Peace. Vronsky is imitating being a great painter and Tolstoy tries to explain why: he has nothing to communicate deeply through his art, no emotion he cares about. Anna understands art in ways that Vronsky can’t even if she can’t be a writer for in writing she has nothing she wants to do for real — acting for the social benefit of others or for something to do or prestige produces schlock.
Much of this is omitted in all but the 1948 and 1977 films — where the actors playing Karenin are so strong the film-makers kept some of this material. It is important; it is the deep background to Anna’s stranded tragedy as an outcast. It takes chapters after Anna’s suicide where we are with characters who are minor and care nothing for our major presences. When we finally hear from someone who supposedly cares it’s Vronsky’s vicious mother. Anna is a bad vile woman she says; why? because she acted out of the sincerity of her heart — and yes body. When last heard of Vronsky is taking a job to where slavs are suffering very badly. This will get him back into the military. Although his behavior has been enough to allow people never to appoint him again, since this is a job no one wants, he gets it. Will he do any good for these ethnic minorities. We are supposed to remember that Karenin’s important rules and laws to put in place have been defeated.
So the last chapters are about Levin and how he is coping with the idea he has that the world is meaningless — there is no God in this world. This time Tolstoy will not nag us for chapters on end to accept his providential ideas about history but instead presents Levin as wrong, not seeing deeply enough while Kitty his wife so unintellectual does. Levin has learned how difficult it is to reform anyone and loses himself in coping everyday with the selfishness of everyone else and their problems. We are told Dolly and her children are now his province. Levin considers suicide when he starts to think about life and read his philosophy so this matches what happened to Anna, but unlike her he is embedded in his society as a landowner, husband, father, brother-in-law,in doing a little good, so he has little time to think about suicide much less do it. Very like Pierre at the close of W&P proper (not the coda where we hear of his gross political mistakes years later which end him in Siberia for years, the idea Tolstoy had about Pierre as he started W&P).
And so the second long masterpiece ends. Tolstoy did not write a third.
Ellen
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