Anna – Oxford

INTRODUCTION
Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot will prefer to treat the Introduction as an
Afterword.
ANNA KARENINA, one of the world's greatest novels, and with justification regarded by many as
Tolstoy's finest artistic work, also marks the culmination of his career as a professional writer. Begun in
1873, when the author was 45 years old, it resumes and develops themes explored in previous works,
most notably the epic War and Peace, which he had embarked on ten years earlier. These themes,
which may be subsumed under the central question 'how to live?', are explored with a pressing urgency
in Anna Karenina, for Tolstoy was increasingly overcome during the novel's protracted composition by
an existential despair which is reflected in its closing pages. While Anna Karenina represents the
summation of the literary journey that Tolstoy had completed thus far, all the way from Childhood, his
first work of published fiction of 1852, the novel also looks forward to what he would write over the
next three decades of his life.
Tolstoy emerged from the spiritual crisis which engulfed him upon completion of Anna Karenina
no longer as a novelist, but as a crusader for his own brand of ethics-based Christianity. He did not
completely forswear the writing of literature, indeed some of his best fiction dates from this next period,
but he resolutely turned his back on publishing novels for what he regarded as the pampered educated
classes. Having been the most highly paid author in Russia, he also now relinquished the earning of fees
and royalties for personal enrichment, and chan-nelled his creative energies into proselytizing his new-
found religious beliefs. Many of their central precepts are adumbrated in embryonic form in Anna
Karenina, and also underpin the enthralling love story which lies at the heart of its narrative, thus
making it a truly pivotal novel in Tolstoy's oeuvre. As a work passionately bound up with ques-tions of
national destiny, Anna Karenina also belongs firmly to the great Russian literary tradition, which reached
its fullest flowering during Tolstoy's lifetime.

Russian literature had developed along very different lines to those of Western Europe by virtue
of the simple fact that there was no tradi-tion of belles lettres until Peter the Great launched Russia on
an accel-erated Westernization programme at the beginning of the eighteenth century, secularizing the
arts in the process. The first Russian novel, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, was not published until 1831 (so
the old Countess who expresses surprise in his story 'The Queen of Spades', written and set in 1833, that
there are any novels written in Russian, is not far from the mark). The belated start, coupled with the
imposition of censorship by the end of the eighteenth century and the general lack of political freedom
in the Tsarist state, ensured that artists in Russia inevitably practised their craft with a greater
seriousness of purpose than elsewhere in Europe. There is, then, a fundamental difference from
Western literature, memorably described by John Bayley as being so 'swaddled in the inertia of its
accomplishment, the complacency of its prolongation', that even at its 'most urgent' it still sounds
literary, with Chaucer's tone 'already professional'. By contrast, he writes, the `critical dicta of the
Russians seem like telegrams exchanged by revo-lutionaries after a coup d'itat has begun, but before it is
known whether it will succeed'.'
The nominally liberal era of Alexander I was replaced in 1825 by the reactionary regime of his
martinet younger brother, Nicholas I, who immediately put his stamp on national life by dealing brutally
with the idealistic young officers who staged the abortive Decembrist Uprising just as he was coming to
power. As time went on, and Nicholas's reign grew more repressive, Russian writers increasingly came
to be seen as bearers of the truth, and as moral leaders, particularly by those young members of the
intelligentsia from a lowly social background who had benefited from a university education. Figures
such as Vissarion Belinsky, Russia's first professional critic, saw literature first and fore-most as a
weapon for social reform, and believed writers had a vital role to play in helping to arouse in the Russian
people a sense of their human dignity and bringing the barbaric institution of serfdom to an end. In
1847, as he lay dying in Germany, Belinsky penned a vitupera-tive letter to Nikolay Gogol, in which he
lambasted him for defending serfdom and absolutist government. Russia did not need sermons and
prayers or an encouragement in the shameless trafficking of human beings, he thundered, but rights and
laws compatible with good sense and justice. The fresh forces trying to break through in Russian society,
he argued, were crushed by the weight of oppression, and so produced only despondency, anguish, and
apathy. Only in literature, he declared, was there life and forward movement, despite the Tatar
censorship.

Tolstoy was 21 when Belinsky's incendiary letter was smuggled into Russia and circulated
secretly in manuscript two years later in St Petersburg. Unlike the earnest and impoverished
Dostoevsky, who was imprisoned and exiled to Siberia for having been present at a reading of Belinsky's
letter, Tolstoy was leading a dissolute life of gambling, carousing with gypsies, and going into society, to
which his aristocratic pedigree gave him an automatic entree. Within a few years, however, he had
joined the army, developed a sense of responsibility, and dis-covered his vocation: to be a writer.
Tolstoy's first work of fiction, the semi-autobiographical Childhood, was published in 1852 while he was
serving in the Caucasus, and was immediately acclaimed for its acute powers of pyschological analysis,
and what the critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky defined as 'purity of moral feeling'. By the time Tolstoy
arrived in St Petersburg in November 1855, straight from the siege of Sebastopol, where he had penned
several outstanding pieces of report-age about the realities of the Crimean War (and become a pacifist
in the process), he was greeted as a conquering hero. He met Turgenev and other luminaries in the
literary community for the first time, but soon fell out with them all and retreated back to his beloved
country estate of Yasnaya Polyana. It was here, as an archetypal 'repentant nobleman', that he would
write War and Peace and Anna Karenina, both works in which peasants are ultimately the sources of the
greatest wisdom.

Tolstoy re-entered civilian life at an exciting time in Russian his-tory. After Nicholas I died in
February 1855, the new Tsar, his son Alexander II, allowed scores of political exiles to return from
Siberia, amongst them surviving Decembrists and Dostoevsky, and it became easier for Russians to
travel abroad. The censorship was relaxed, pav-ing the way for the foundation of new journals such as
the Russian Messenger in 1856, and books and articles by Western thinkers sud-denly became
accessible. A number of important new cultural institu-tions opened, amongst them public libraries, the
Mariinsky Theatre, the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and the St Petersburg
and Moscow Conservatoires. To accompany Russia's belated embrace of industrialization, an extensive
national railway net-work was finally inaugurated, with lines converging on the emerging business
metropolis of Moscow. In 1867 a station on the main line to Kursk opened at Yasenki, a few miles from
Yasnaya Polyana, enabling Tolstoy to make the two-hundred-mile journey north to Moscow in half the
time it had previously taken. And, most importantly, the great `Tsar Liberator', as Alexander II came to
be known, also introduced a number of far-reaching political reforms at the beginning of his reign, chief
of which was the long-awaited Abolition of Serfdom in 1861. These new developments naturally exerted
an impact on all the Russian arts, including Russian literature, which in the 186os entered a glorious
decade.

The era of the great Russian realist novel began in the dynamic early years of Alexander II's reign
with the publication of Turgenev's Rudin in 1856. His masterpiece, Fathers and Sons (1862), provides a
vivid depiction of the social ferment in Russia in the immediate aftermath of the abolition of serfdom,
but sparked controversy by presenting an ambivalent portrait of a nihilist from the new revolutionary
generation. Incensed on behalf of this new generation, Chernyshevsky responded with his novel What Is
To Be Done? (1863), in which he creates a wholly positive revolutionary hero, and advocates woman's
liberation and free love. Dostoevsky also concerned himself with contemporary Russia in his new, post-
Siberian fiction, but diverged dramatically from both the urbane Westernizer Turgenev and the radical
atheist Chernyshevsky. Beginning with Notes from Underground (1864), he launched a sus-tained
assault on the Western political and philosophical ideas of uto-pian socialism he believed were
contaminating Russian youth. In 1866 Crime and Punishment appeared in the Russian Messenger
alongside the first chapters of War and Peace. Tolstoy shared his fellow writers' preoccupation with
Russia, and their strong moral impulse, but was highly unusual in choosing to deal with an earlier
historical period in his fiction during such a turbulent time.

By 1875, when Tolstoy began publishing Anna Karenina in monthly instalments (also in the
Russian Messenger), Alexander II had been on the throne for twenty years, and much of the optimism
which had greeted his accession had subsided. The terms of the emancipation proved to be so
unsatisfactory that the radical intelligentsia began immediately to contemplate revolution, and the first
assassination attempt was made on the Tsar's life in 1866. Even those of a more liberal persuasion were
disconcerted when their peaceful attempts to inculcate the peasantry with a desire to embrace
socialism failed in 1874. Amidst waves of arrests and a rapid deceleration in the progress of reform,
hardened Populists turned to terrorism. The new mood of uncertainty and unease pervading Russian
society is reflected in Anna Karenina. 'Everything was confusion in the Oblonskys' house', we read in the
opening lines of the novel. Everything was also confusion in Russia. It is thus understandable why, at a
time of such social and political upheaval, some of Tolstoy's more progressive readers were nonplussed
by the idea of a novel about an aristocratic woman who has an affair with an army officer. It seemed out
of date to them, and their author out of kilter with his age. But of course Anna Karenina is very much
more than a society novel. Through his characters Levin and Kitty, who embrace traditional values,
Tolstoy constructs his own response to Chernyshevsky's inflammatory text and its utilitarian ideas, and
the extensive sections in Anna Karenina devoted to agrarian issues engage in a very practical way with
the seemingly intractable problems facing Russian rural inhabitants (who made up most of the
population) as they struggled to survive in conditions which proved to be barely viable and highly
unstable.

There was, however, nothing premeditated about the way in which Tolstoy began writing Anna
Karenina. He first conceived the idea of writing about a high-society woman who has committed
adultery a year after completing War and Peace in 187o, when his imagination was briefly struck by the
idea of making her character pitiable but not guilty. At the same time, he began drafting an article about
the 'woman question', a topic debated as hotly in Russia as elsewhere in Europe during this period. John
Stuart Mill's influential The Subjection of Women had just been published, but the conservative Tolstoy
rejected his call for equality between the sexes, and agreed with an article on the subject by Nikolay
Strakhov, who argued that a woman's place was in the home. No doubt Tolstoy had also found much to
concur with in Schopenhauer's article 'On Women' (1851), which he would have devoured along with all
the German philosopher's other works in 1869, and which negated the idea of women's independence.

Tolstoy next proceeded to throw his energies into compiling a '700-page ABC book designed to
help teach millions of illiterate Russian children how to read and write, and into trying to write a novel
about Peter the Great. Two years later, however, a concatenation of chance occurrences served to bring
the idea about the adulterous woman back into Tolstoy's mind. In January 1872 he was shaken after
attending the autopsy of a young woman of his acquaintance called Anna Pirogova. Spurned by her
lover, she had thrown herself under a goods-train at Yasenki, the railway station close to Yasnaya
Polyana which had opened only five years earlier. Then, in the spring of 1873, Tolstoy was very taken
with the analysis of marriage he read in a much-discussed art-icle by Alexandre Dumas fils, for whom the
struggle between man and woman was the central conflict in life. Prompted by reactions in the press to
a controversial trial in which a husband was given a light prison sentence for murdering his unfaithful
but estranged wife (divorce being illegal in France between 1816 and 1884), Dumas argued in L'Homme-
femme (1872) that a husband ultimately had the right to kill an unfaithful wife. Finally, in March '873
Tolstoy also stumbled across an unfinished sketch for a story by Pushkin, the immediacy of whose
narrative style launched him straight into the first draft of the opening of Anna Karenina.

Chance also plays an important role within Anna Karenina, which in its revelation of the often
unconscious motivation behind human behaviour is a strikingly modern novel for its time, which was the
high-water mark of Russian realism. Tolstoy depicts everyday life in an unidealized, objective way,
indeed his dissection of the shifting states of emotional experience is often executed with a surgical
preci-sion, but a key element of his realism is also to depict his characters, Anna and Vronsky in
particular, doing or saying things they had not intended. This technique certainly illustrates Tolstoy's
acute powers of psychological analysis, and his frequent use of the word 'involun-tary' when describing
behaviour betrays his debt to Schopenhauer's concept of the Will'—that blind force driving the futile
engine of human striving, and which can only lead to suffering. Along with the introduction of many
random details, however, which appear to have no apparent function in the plot, symbolic or otherwise,
this technique also provides us with a reminder of the contingency of being, thereby demonstrating a
sensibility more readily associated with twentieth-century modernism. While Tolstoy never consciously
allied himself with the artistic avant-garde, or indeed with any artistic group at all (although he was a
modernist avant-la-lettre in his pioneering use of stream of consciousness), he did nevertheless set out
to write a novel about modernity. While War and Peace is a retrospective work extolling the golden age
of the Russian nobility and its patriarchal values in the era of the Napoleonic Wars, Anna Karenina is
quite deliberately set in what Tolstoy shows us to be the much more disturbing present of 1870s Russia,
in which those values are in the process of being eroded by the repercussions of very recent political
reform.

The composition of Anna Karenina was in fact so contemporaneous with the times that events
such as the Serbo-Turkish War, which broke out in June 1876, are not merely woven into the backdrop
but inform the narrative: in the last part of the novel, completed in the spring of 1877, Vronsky enlists as
a volunteer. By this time four years had passed since Tolstoy had started writing the novel, a challenging
period dur-ing which he had begun to call into question his entire belief-system and, as a consequence,
his attitude towards his fictional characters, who develop in sometimes unexpected ways and are rarely
static. A sign of what was to come can be found in the stridency of the anti-militarist views Tolstoy puts
forward in the final part of Anna Karenina, which he submitted for publication in April 1877, just as
Russia declared war on Turkey. Like most Russian novels, Anna Karenina had been appear-ing in serial
form as each part was completed, and when the patriotic editor of the Russian Messenger took issue
with Tolstoy's pacifism and refused to include the book's conclusion in his May issue, a scandal ensued
which naturally only increased its popularity with the public. St Petersburg's leading bookshop sold an
unprecedented five hundred copies on the day Anna Karenina first became available as a separate work
in early 1878.3

Tolstoy confided in his wife that whereas in War and Peace he had loved the 'national idea as a
result of the war of 1812', in Anna Karenina he loved the 'family idea'. While the tumultuous story of
Anna's adul-terous liaison with Vronsky takes centre-stage, it is important to rec-ognize that, being the
kind of writer he was, Tolstoy could not have proceeded very far without a counterweight. In fact, we
have two: the troubled marriage of Stiva and Dolly Oblonsky, and the far happier one of Levin and Kitty.
It is by telling their stories side by side, at times interweaving them, and by touching on many other
stories of family life in Anna Karenina that Tolstoy is able to write a peerless work of fiction which is also
an investigation of the institution of marriage, the nature of love, the destiny of Russia, and ultimately
the meaning of life. It may be tempting to view the many chapters devoted to such pursuits as mowing,
portrait-painting, mushroom-gathering, and participating in local elections as extraneous to the main
story, and nothing more than a pleasant diversion. Film adaptations of the novel understand-ably tend
to focus almost exclusively on Anna and Vronsky's passionate love affair, which is characterized by high
drama and romance, but this is to illuminate just one layer of what is an extraordinarily complex work of
art in which not one word is extraneous. Closer acquaintance with the novel's intricate structure reveals
that everything in the novel is interconnected and contributes in some way to its central theme.

Chekhov famously said about Anna Karenina that not a single prob-lem was resolved, but it was
a novel which nevertheless fully satisfied, as all the problems were correctly stated.4 The central
problem, of course, relates to the fate of Tolstoy's captivating heroine Anna. Much of the attention of
the considerable body of critical literature devoted to Anna KarenMa is directed at exploring the cause
of Anna's tragedy, particularly with respect to the novel's epigraph: Vengeance is mine; I will repay. If it
is God taking revenge on Anna for committing adul-tery, it has reasonably been asked, then why are all
the other adulterous characters in the novel not punished too? Why do Anna's philander-ing brother
Stiva Oblonsky and her depraved friend Betsy Tverskaya escape divine justice? Or are we meant to
understand that it is Anna who wreaks vengeance onVronsky? Or that it is Tolstoy wreaking vengeance
on Anna for the crime of being a beautiful and intelligent woman who dares to break the mould, and
seek a fulfilling life, free from the con-straints imposed on her gender by a hypocritical, patriarchal
society? That was certainly the view of D. H. Lawrence, who was indignant that Anna had apparently
fallen victim to Tolstoy's didactic urge. There is, in fact, no agreement amongst critics on whether Anna
is a victim or not, and whether or not she is responsible for her own destiny. Tolstoy complicates
matters considerably by not completing the epigraph: the words `saith the Lord' are missing. So who is
speaking?

What is successful about Tolstoy's characterization of Anna is her complexity. We are drawn to
Anna when we first meet her for her warmth and generosity, and we are sympathetic to her desire to
follow her heart and live life to the full after the sterility of her marriage to a dry bureaucrat of a
husband to whom she has been married off at a young age. We admire her for wanting to live truthfully
and openly, and suffer with her when she is forced into a new life of sterility when society closes its
doors to her, while still welcoming Vronsky. And yet is it not also true that she rejects her role as wife
and mother and becomes increasingly narcissistic? So much of her behaviour with Vronsky is taken up
with the attention he pays to her, yet there is little evidence of what she gives to him. Dolly notices
Anna's new habit of screwing up her eyes when she goes to visit her, as if she is unable to face reality.

Rather than take responsibility for her own actions, Anna alights on omens—the accident at the
railway station, her recurrent dreams—and prefers to blame fate. Just as there are times when Karenin
is not an unsympathetic character (as when he is filled with compassion after the birth of Anna's
daughter, for whom he feels a tender affection), there are times when the reader's identification with
Anna is chal-lenged by her wilful and egotistical behaviour. If Tolstoy's characters change during the
course of the novel, it was because his attitude towards them changed as his own thinking developed. It
is, therefore, not wholly surprising that Anna Karenina can be seen 'as an array of readings that
contradict and diverge from each other, and that cluster around an opposition between personal truths
and universal truth', as Vladimir Alexandrov has shown in his examination of the novel's many possible
meanings.'

Levin similarly is a complex character, whose path to personal fulfil-ment and happiness is far
from smooth. But it is as if he and Kitty inhabit a different novel. Anna seems to want to live like a
romantic heroine, inspired by all the English fiction she reads, and the story of her love affair with
Vronsky is full not just of drama, but melodrama. Ultimately, Anna's fate bears witness to her inability to
gravitate from romance, which by its nature is not reality, to love, which is a far more prosaic and
demanding proposition, as Levin and Kitty discover in the first months of their marriage. As Gary Saul
Morson observes, the novel explicitly 'tries to redirect our attention to aspects of every-day living: love
and the family, moral decisions, the process of self-improvement, and, ultimately, all that makes a life
feel meaningful or leads us to contemplate suicide'.6 Can we really see Anna's fate, then, in tragic
terms? Tolstoy seems to invite us to subscribe to conventional views of romance because his Olympian
narrator remains impersonal. It is easy, for example, to succumb to the idea that the horse race is an
allegory of Vronsky's relationship with Anna, and that he is to blame for its failure, just as he is to blame
for breaking his horse's back. But to some scholars this interpretation now seems a little too pat.

Tolstoy was naturally well aware of works such as Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) and Zola's
Therese Raquin (1867), but he wanted to write more than just another novel of adultery. He was also
very fond of what his son Sergey called 'English family novels', whose faint shadow can be discerned
behind the plot-lines and characterization of Anna Karenina. The stiff, aristocratic statesman
Plantagenet Palliser, from Anthony Trollope's six 'Parliamentary Novels' (1864-79), seems in certain
respects like a benign Karenin (with elements of Lady Glencora and Burgo Fitzgerald in Anna and
Vronsky), while Anna shares certain physical traits with Hetty Sorel in George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859),
to name just a few examples. Tolstoy had little interest, however, in emu-lating what he saw as a
favoured plot-line of English novels, in which the hero 'puts his arm around her waist, then they get
married, and he inherits an estate and a baronetcy'.' He was much more interested in what happens
after his characters get married. The high incidence of marital discord Tolstoy depicts in Anna Karenina
conveys a rather bleak vision of family life, but there were compelling artistic and moral reasons for why
he ended his novel not with the melodramatic death of his adulterous heroine, but with a mundane
conversation his hero Levin has with his wife on the veranda on a summer night after contemplating the
stars. They have everything to do with the literary tradition in which Tolstoy was nurtured.

If Russian novelists trod a different path with regard to the content of their works, they also saw
no reason to capitulate to the Western model in terms of form. As Tolstoy put it himself in one of the
draft prefaces to War and Peace, 'in the modern period of Russian literature there is not one work of art
in prose even slightly better than average that could fully fit into the form of a novel, epic, or story'.8
Tolstoy was doing more than making a statement of fact by pointedly calling Anna Karenina a 'novel', for
he had never previously used the term to describe anything he had written. There is also a possible
degree of hidden provocation contained in this appellation, because deeper familiarity with the text of
Anna Karenina encourages the interpret-ation of the Anna and Vronsky plot-line, partnered as it is by far
less romantic stories, as almost a parody of the European novelistic tradi-tion and the expectations
engendered by it in the reader. Certainly it is important to resist the temptation to view Anna Karenina
as exem-plary of the European nineteenth-century realist novel, with which it is often identified, despite
the many valid areas of correspondence. Its scope is far wider, and its richly symbolic structure, replete
with recurring dreams and careful juxtaposition of contrasting stories and themes (such as Levin and
Kitty's lawful wedding, followed by Vronsky and Anna's cohabitation abroad; and Nikolay Levin's death,
followed by discovery of Kitty's pregnancy), is too much at odds with any perceived objectivity of
depiction.

Even before Tolstoy self-consciously became a religious crusader, he was a religious artist who
claimed that his real hero was the truth. With the Russian Orthodox Church in an increasingly moribund
state after Peter the Great subordinated it to the state by abolishing the Patriarchate in 1721, it is
possible to argue, as Richard Gustafson has done, that in the nineteenth century literature became a
kind of substi-tute for the icon, which had traditionally fulfilled the role of theology and was now in
decline. Seen in this perspective, Tolstoy's fictional works function as 'verbal icons' of his religious world-
view, which is why his realism is inherently 'emblematic'.9 This certainly offers us a way of
understanding Tolstoy's characteristic use of repetition, a cor-nerstone of his literary style, as well as the
proliferation of important symbols embedded in the structure of Anna Karenina, which are both
fundamental attributes of Russian religious art.

Tolstoy was not interested in preaching Russian Orthodox dogma, as he was a non-believer like
Levin while he was writing Anna Karenina, and Levin's painfully articulated spiritual journey mirrors the
trajec-tory of his own thought (and was one of the reasons he did not keep a diary at this time). Having
been raised in the Orthodox Church, however, Tolstoy could not help emulating its artistic methods
while conducting his quest in Anna Karenina for a divine love which might provide solace when even
love within an essentially happy marriage fails to be enough. He felt compelled to propose a positive
alterna-tive to the ultimately one-dimensional, self-centred love which Anna and Vronsky's story
represents. This is why Tolstoy follows Levin and Kitty past their marriage (at the exact halfway point of
the novel), past their first painful months together as man and wife, and even past the birth of their first
child (an event seen unusually through the eyes of the father). It is also why he was so meticulous with
the novel's con-struction, as his meditations on love and marriage, the nature of artis-tic creation, and
the meaning of life itself are communicated as much obliquely through the myriad connections he
forges between charac-ters, themes, and situations as they are openly articulated by means of dialogue
and description.

The text of Anna Karenina is like a Persian carpet of intricate sym-metrical design, whose
workmanship can only be appreciated by seeing the reverse side. Tolstoy found this novel immensely
difficult to write, but he was nevertheless proud of his skill as an architect, seeing his novel as a building
whose arches had been joined in such a way that it was impossible to see the keystone. Naturally,
identification of this `keystone' has dominated much of the research into the novel. Some regard
Oblonsky's dinner party as the key to the whole, or Mikhailov's portrait of Anna as the essential link,
while others see as the crux Anna's meeting with Levin, when the two storylines of the novel finally
converge through the agency of the ever-emollient Oblonsky. Certainly Tolstoy takes pains to align these
two central characters who, as Donna Tussing Orwin has commented, are 'in touch both physically and
spiritually with the illogical forces that govern life from minute to minute'.'° By contrast, both Vronsky
and Karenin, who share the same first name, have a carapace of rules to buffer themselves against the
storms of life.
The networks of connections in Anna Karenina are wide-ranging. On the one hand there is a
persistent association of trains with death and adultery. Anna and Vronsky meet at a railway station,
where they are witness to a tragic accident which later gives rise to recurring night-mares. Vronsky
confesses his love for Anna during a stop at a railway station in the middle of the night, and after she has
committed suicide by falling under a train, he himself travels to certain death on a train headed for the
Serbian front. But there are other, more subtle ways in which Tolstoy conveys his idea that trains are a
pernicious symbol of modernity, an evil innovation imported from the West which threatens to destroy
what is best about Russian life. Both the Oblonsky children and Anna's son play games with trains, and
danger is present as an element in both cases. Oblonsky finds himself, towards the end of the novel,
negotiating for a job connected with the new railways in order to pay off his debts. Trains are nowhere
portrayed positively in Anna Karenina, because Tolstoy's personal attitude to them was supremely
negative. When travelling, Tolstoy himself regularly but reluctantly used the 'iron road' (the Russian
zheleznaya doroga is a straight trans-lation of the French chemin de fir), but he abhorred this intrusion
of modern technology into rural Russia. It is striking that a vital moment of epiphany for Levin
concerning his love for Kitty takes place when he catches sight of her travelling, at dawn, not at night,
and in a horse-drawn carriage rather than a train.

At the other remove are the many tiny connections which may serve to deepen and illuminate
Tolstoy's themes, even contradicting those lying on the surface, or which simply invite the reader to see
new pat-terns in the weft of his design. Kitty's friend Varenka, for example, first appears at the beginning
of Part Two wearing a toadstool hat. In Part Six it is while gathering mushrooms that Koznyshev fails to
propose to her. In Part One Kitty imagines Anna wearing a lilac dress to the ball, and in Part Seven, just
before she dies, Anna notices that the young girl who has come on an errand, and of whom she is
jealous, is wearing a lilac hat. Similarly, the red bag which Anna has with her on her return journey to
Petersburg at the beginning of the novel reappears when she undertakes her last rail journey. Words
and phrases are repeated in an almost musical way. As well as the idea of not casting stones, drawn
from St John's Gospel, which occurs three times in the novel, associated with three different characters,
two characters at separate points in the novel give voice to the idea of giving up one's cloak to the man
who takes your coat, which comes from the gospels of St Luke and St Matthew. Crucial to the artist
Mikhailov's creative process is the notion of removing veils in order to see more clearly, and a similar
anal-ogy is made when Levin looks at his wife shortly before she is about to give birth and feels that the
veils have been removed. There are also extensive networks of symbols running through the narrative
linked to light and darkness, bears and bear hunting, stars and constellations. Attentive readers will be
able to thread together for themselves other subtle chains of reference in the novel relating, for
example, to French and English themes, or Tolstoy's dialogue with Plato's Symposium.

It is when we consider how Tolstoy paces Anna Karenina that we can further appreciate his
consummate skill in constructing his narra-tive. By comparison with the progress of Levin's and Kitty's
romance, Anna's and Vronsky's story seems to hurtle along at breakneck speed, almost like a runaway
train. Their association with trains is appropri-ate, for they seem to be travelling on a fixed track with a
single des-tination. Levin and Kitty, by contrast, embark on a journey which is open-ended. It seems after
he is married that Levin has discovered what can give his life meaning, but his disappointment at not
being able to share his insights with his wife, who intrudes into his stargaz-ing with a mundane, practical
question, suggests no simple endpoint can ever be reached. Time seems to go by with Levin and Kitty
much more slowly—witness the long chapters devoted to Levin's thoughts while mowing or the many
chapters describing his wedding to Kitty. Tolstoy's technique is at other times almost cinematic. We see
the horse race from many different angles, for example, and in different time-frames, prompting the
great film director Sergey Eisenstein to view this scene as an example of audio-visual counterpoint par
excellence, and as prime material for his technique of montage." Tolstoy's own technique of montage,
which has him compare, contrast, and mesh at least two different storylines in a seamless way, is
unparalleled.

Tolstoy's methods of narration are also richly varied and boldly innovative, moving unobtrusively
from a voice of lofty omniscience to one that is far more intimate, and seemingly coloured with the
thoughts and feelings of a particular character, or, in the case of the novel's contentious final chapters,
unmistakably those of the author himself We see Anna for the first time, for example, through Vronsky's
eyes, and with equal skill Tolstoy filters the events of the fateful ball in Part One through the prism of
Kitty's consciousness. In Part Six the reader experiences the visceral excitement of hunting for snipe in
the marshes from the point of view of Levin's dog, Laska. And we perceive the emptiness and falsity of
Anna's new life because we see it through Dolly's eyes when she goes to visit her at Vronsky's country
estate; it is a typically Tolstoyan touch that we follow the complex but lucid pro-gression of Dolly's
thoughts as they evolve from a feeling of envy when she is first setting out on her journey to
Vozdvizhenskoye, to one of relief and gratitude when she returns home the following day.

In some instances, such as the early chapters describing Oblonsky's personality or Vronsky's
habits, we can detect a very faint trace of irony in the narration, while a deliberate tone of sardonic
humour or satire is perceptible in those sections of the novel dealing with Karenin's visit to the lawyer
and the hypocrisy and pietism of a character like Countess Lydia Ivanovna. The chapters detailing
Karenin's thought-processes abound with an inflexible and lifeless bureaucratic lexicon consonant with
his general character, and they form a sharp contrast to the gentle, lyrical language used to depict the
scene at the skating rink, for example, or Levin's unorthodox proposal to Kitty, in which Tolstoy drew on
his own experiences of writing the initial letters of words in chalk on a card-table for Sofya Behrs to
decipher. The subsequent scene in the church in which Levin is betrothed to Kitty is very moving in its
simplicity, but lyricism in this novel is not always where one would expect to find it. It is absent when the
narrator describes the consummation of Vronsky's and Anna's love, which is likened to an act of brutal
murder, but often present when Levin experiences a feeling of being one with nature, such as when he
spends a day mowing with his peasants.

`Between the lines as you read, you see a soaring eagle who is little concerned with the beauty
of his feathers. Thought and beauty, like hurricanes and waves, should not pander to usual,
conventional forms.” Tolstoy is not named in this unfinished fictional fragment Chekhov worked on in
the late 188os, but it is clear which writer his narrator has in mind. Because Tolstoy paid such scant
regard to the 'beauty of his feathers', it took a long time for critics to perceive the full extent of his
artistry in Anna Karenina. And both conservative and radical critics found fault with the ideology of the
novel when it was first published in Russia. Dostoevsky, for example, may have been initially generous
with his praise of Anna Karenina, which he described as 'perfection as a work of art' in the February
1877 issue of his journal Diary of a Writer. After he read the epilogue, however, he excoriated Tolstoy
for voicing through Levin the unpatriotic view that the Russian people shared his lack of concern for the
Balkan Slays, and Levin's unwillingness to kill, even for the sake of preventing atrocities (this embryonic
non-resistance to violence would, of course, lie at the heart of the new religious outlook Tolstoy was
about to develop). The proto-Bolshevik critic Peter Tkachev, meanwhile, naturally fulminated against the
novel's aristocratic focus.

The views of critics did nothing to dent the popularity of Anna Karenina with all sections of the
Russian reading public, and persist-ent rumours about Tolstoy being embroiled in a fracas with his editor
(which ultimately proved to have substance) only served to increase their interest. Due to its depiction
of both old- and new-world nobil-ity and its contemporary setting, this was the very first Russian novel
certain members of the aristocracy deigned to read, having previ-ously only considered French literature
worth their trouble. So great, indeed, was the enthusiasm for Anna Karenina amongst St Petersburg
high-society salons that some ladies with connections to the court even contrived ingenious measures to
obtain the proofs of instalments before their publication. But the novel made an even greater impact on
ladies without connections, who, like Anna Karenina, had fallen foul of society's strictures, or longed for
love. Tolstoy struck a chord with thousands of female readers suffering unhappy marriages when he
wrote Anna Karenina. Few had the bravery of Anna Arkadyevna, but they all identified with her.

The paradox of Tolstoy writing with such sympathy about Anna while at the same time writing a
novel which clearly condemns adul-tery is perhaps partly explained by the fate of his younger sister
Maria, whose unhappy experience of marriage was one of the many life stories which served as the raw
material for his 'family' novel. In the early 1860s, after fleeing abroad from her abusive husband, she had
given birth to an illegitimate daughter, but she was ashamed to bring her back to Russia and face the
opprobrium of society. In a particularly desperate letter she sent to her brother in March 1876 (by which
time she was a widowed single mother), she spoke of the bitter life lessons she had learned, and directly
identified with his literary heroine. 'If all those Anna Kareninas knew what awaited them,' she wrote,
'how they would run from ephemeral pleasures, which are never, and cannot be pleasures, because
nothing that is unlawful can ever constitute happi-ness."3 This was essentially Tolstoy's own view, but it
was complicated by the realities of the relationships of his own family, many of which were highly
unorthodox. His brother Dmitry lived for several years with a former prostitute (as does Levin's brother
Nikolay in Anna Karenina), his brother Sergey had several illegitimate children with his gypsy mistress
before he married her, and even his wife's mother was illegitimate.

Russian society began to change rapidly in the 186os, but the patri-archal structures enshrined
in law by the Tsarist government remained in place. Divorce became possible in the English court of civil
law in 1857, but in Russia, where it lay under the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Church, marital separation
remained extremely difficult. In the eyes of the Church, not only was marriage a holy sacrament which
could not be dissolved, but illegitimate children had no rights, and the Russian law-code specifically
upheld male authority and female subservience. The Tsarist government had a particular interest in
supporting such patriarchal structures, as it equated domestic stability with political stability.
Nevertheless, despite the stigma attached to it, the number of divorces in Russia rose steadily during the
186os and 1870s. Tolstoy could have picked no better way of portraying the disintegration of late
imperial Russian society than by writing a novel with the theme of the 'family'.

The Great Reforms, urban growth, and the expansion of educa-tion inevitably stimulated new
attitudes towards marriage, divorce, and the position of women—issues which lie at the heart of Anna
Karenina. While it is easy to dismiss Tolstoy's views on these topics as misogynist, perceptive feminist
critics have shown why they deserve much more careful consideration. That Tolstoy was deeply
exercised by the nature of beauty and the objectification of women can be seen by the scrupulous
attention he devotes in Anna Karenina to the way in which his heroine is viewed or 'framed', not just in
the flesh, but in the three different portraits of her, one painted by a 'famous art-ist' in St Petersburg,
one by Vronsky, and one by the artist Mikhailov (the last of which we see again towards the end of the
novel through Levin's eyes). For Tolstoy, these issues are intimately bound up with the perils of romantic
convention, both in art and in real life. As Amy Mandelker puts it, in Anna Karenina: `Tolstoy conflates
the aesthetic question—what is the beautiful and can it be represented? What is its nature? What can it
show us?—with the woman question—what is woman and what is her proper role in life?—to
interrogate the literary conventions of realism and the social conventions of romantic love and
marriage."4 In true Tolstoyan style, his novel poses a formidable chal-lenge to conventional assumptions
on every level.

PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS AND GUIDE TO PRONUNCIATION

Russian Names EACH Russian person has, in addition to a surname, a patronymic. This is a middle name
ending either in `-ovich' or `-evich', meaning 'son of (e.g. Sergey Ivanovich, Stepan Arkadyevich), or in `-
ovna' or `-evna', meaning `daughter of (e.g. Darya Alexandrovna, Anna Arkadyevna). The first name with
patronymic is used as the most common polite form of address, in contrast to the practice of combining
title with surname which is customary in English-speaking countries. And when speaking or thinking
about a third person, Russians commonly use only the surname, which appears brusque if translated
directly. When the narrator describes Vronsky first seeing Anna at the railway station before he has
been introduced to her, for example, we read: `Vronsky remembered now that this was Karenina.' In
these cases 'Madame' has to be interpolated. Surnames decline according to gender, thus Konstantin
Levin is married to Kitty Levina.

First names on their own are used only between family and friends, and an additional level of intimacy
or familiarity is introduced by diminutives. Konstantin, for example, becomes `Kostya', Ekaterina
becomes `Katya' or `Katenka', and Sergey becomes `Seryozha'. Patronymics can also have diminutives,
and they are used for many of Tolstoy's male characters, so that Arkadyevich' becomes Arkadyich' and
`Kirillovich' becomes `Kirillich'. Russians can even address each other by their patronymics alone, so that
at the peak of early Soviet adulation of Lenin, the Soviet leader was referred to in an officially
affectionate and familiar way as `Ilych' in certain particular circumstances. In Anna Karenina, the
Karenins' doorman is known famil-iarly as `Kapitonich', a diminutive of `Kapitonovich'. It is notable that
nei-ther Anna nor Vronsky use diminutives with each other, nor do their friends use diminutives to
address them; Vronsky is invariably referred to by his surname only, and only his mother calls him by the
affectionate Alyosha'. Karenin, however, is usually referred to by his name and patronymic. This is all
deliberate practice on Tolstoy's part, as manner of address is an intrinsic part of his characterization.' A
case in point is the comic character ofVasenka Veslovsky, who not only is always referred to by the
diminutive of his name (short for Wasily), but by the diminutive of the diminutive (`Vasenka' rather than
Wasya'). We never learn his patronymic. Conversely, we never learn Countess Lydia Ivanovna's surname,
but the repeated refrain throughout the narration of 'Countess Lydia Ivanovna' is also telling in its own
way. The proliferation of English nicknames (Stiva, for example, which is a Russian version of 'Steve') is
unusual, but denotes a particular fashion. The previ-ous French vogue is reflected in old Prince
Shcherbatsky being known as `Alexandre'.

Names In Anna Karenina

Names are therefore important in Tolstoy. It was clearly not carelessness on his part that he chose to
give Karenin and Vronsky the same first name, or that Anna, her daughter Annie, her maid Annushka,
and her ward Hannah all share the same name (Anna being derived from the Hebrew `Hannah'). There is
also the original meaning of names to consider, many of which are of Greek origin and arrived in Russia
along with the adoption of Christianity (`Platon', the name of the wise peasant Levin hears about, for
example, naturally means wisdom). Many of the invented surnames in the novel have symbolic
meanings or associations, some of which are humorous. The surname of the waspish Princess
Myagkaya, for example, means 'soft'. The new passion which Tolstoy developed for learning Greek in
the early 187os is reflected in the etymology of `Karenin' (derived from the Greek word for head:
Kapivov). Tolstoy's known enthusiasm for Xenophon, meanwhile, may have generated the name of
Levin's friend Katavasov, which would seem to be derived from the Greek latabasis' Occra(3aivco),
defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as: 'A going down; a military retreat, in allusion to that of the
ten thousand Greeks under Xenophon, related by him in his Anabasis.' Katavasov, of course, as an
incisive polemicist, does not like to retreat. Other names in Anna Karenina follow Tolstoy's practice of
adapting familiar Russian ones, such as his invented `Oblonsky', which is close to `Obolensky'.
The following list of principal characters has been organized into families, households, and groups. To
assist the reader, stressed syllables are marked with an acute accent wherever there might be lack of
clarity.