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    Anna Karenina
    Anna Karenina
    Anna Karenina
    Ebook1,337 pages25 hours

    Anna Karenina

    By Leo Tolstoy

    4/5

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    Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Introduction and Notes by E.B. Greenwood, University of Kent.

    Anna Karenina is one of the most loved and memorable heroines of literature. Her overwhelming charm dominates a novel of unparalleled richness and density.

    Tolstoy considered this book to be his first real attempt at a novel form, and it addresses the very nature of society at all levels,- of destiny, death, human relationships and the irreconcilable contradictions of existence. It ends tragically, and there is much that evokes despair, yet set beside this is an abounding joy in life's many ephemeral pleasures, and a profusion of comic relief.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWordsworth Editions
    Release dateOct 1, 2011
    ISBN9781848703469
    Author

    Leo Tolstoy

    Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is the author of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Family Happiness, and other classics of Russian literature.

    Read more from Leo Tolstoy

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    Reviews for Anna Karenina

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    • 4/5
      I saw the movie and thought I would listen to the book. Very enjoyable as an audiobook although very long so it was great for painting my walls. The narrator does a fantastic job with the emotions of the characters. A very good classic.
    • 4/5
      Tolstoy’s greatest novel, what some deem the greatest novel ever written, seems to ‘proceed as plotlessly and accidentally as life itself’ (E. B. Greenwood, Introduction to Anna Karenina, p. xii). Tolstoy contrasts two people of different character and temperament both of whom we squirm, flinch and weep in response to their actions. Anna lives for her own needs, passions and freedom. Levin lives for the good of others and his soul. In this way Anna and her affair with Vronsky depicts so outstandingly what modern philosophers call expressive individualism, where being true to our authentic self by expressing our deepest desires and acting on them is heroic. The Tolstoy critic Andrew Kaufman says in an interview that the 1860s were a time of great transition in Russia whereby the more traditional value system was being replaced by a new value systems. Tolstoy watched his friends and family members were getting divorced at alarming numbers. And this concerned him because in his view, the family is one of the key social units. And when families fall apart, he believed societies begin to fall apart. This is a central theme in Anna Karenina. Tolstoy heard people saying, "maybe marriage isn't the be all and end all of life. Maybe even if you do get married, not having kids might lead to a greater happiness." And, and of course, this is something that's very much echoed in today's world. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy shows that the problem with these arguments is that they come from a false set of assumptions: This idea that more freedom means more fulfillment, that the gratification of one's personal desires, leads to more happiness. Tolstoy came to the opposite conclusion; that in many cases, less freedom can lead to a more abiding happiness because it forces us to make choices to make hard choices, and to commit to those choices with the fullness of our being. And family life is the ultimate embodiment of making those kinds of choices, of limiting our freedom for the sake of love. And so it is the characters who embrace the duties, the pain, the vulnerability of family life—of fatherhood, motherhood, being a son, being a daughter—those are often the characters who in the end, end up achieving the deepest kind of fulfillment.Kaufman gives an example from Tolstoy's own life. While writing War and Peace, he used a very interesting metaphor to describe what he was like before he got married, and what he's like now. It was the metaphor of an apple tree that he described himself as. An apple tree, that once sprouted in all different directions. But 'now, that it’s trimmed, tied, and supported, its trunk and roots can grow without hindrance.' It's a very powerful image. At the heart of it is this idea that sometimes limits are what allow us to grow more fully. And limits are actually what allow us to realise our fullest human potential.So according to Tolstoy a life like Anna's, which looks so romantic and promising, usually ends in tragedy. The reversal of fortunes is shown when Anna and Kitty are contrasted by Dolly (Kitty's sister): “‘How happily it turned out for Kitty that Anna came,’ said Dolly, ‘and how unhappily for her! The exact reverse,’ she added, struck by her thought. ‘Then Anna was so happy and Kitty considered herself miserable. Now it’s the exact reverse.’” (p. 551)Anna becomes a slave to her love/lust for Vronsky and finds herself trapped without access to her son, with excessively jealous of Vronksy, and unable to live without his enmeshed love.Tolstoy contrasts Anna's persist of freedom to desire what she wants to Levin's. Upon his engagement to Kitty, Levin's brother and friends question him about the loss of freedom he will experience when he is married. Levin replies, “‘What is the good of freedom? Happiness consists only in loving and desiring: in wishing her wishes and in thinking her thoughts, which means having no freedom whatever; that is happiness!’” (p. 442). Levin’s desire is not possessive self serving eros (like Anna’s), but generous other-centred agape. The result is that while Levin’s life is not easy, although there is doubt and jealousy and fear and conflict, there nevertheless is true freedom, fulfilment and happiness. He is not enslaved but a servant of love and goodness. I found the book long and tedious at points but I suppose that is because Tolstoy so wants us to “love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations”. He packs in so much of life into the 806 pages, not just in the grand moments but also in the ordinary ones. The result is that you end up on a journey through 19th century Russia, a place and time I have now lived vicariously through. But Tolstoy also takes you on a journey to the very heart of human experience. The plot changes don’t come quickly. Instead Tolstoy spends significant time taking you into the mind and heart of all these different kinds of characters: nobels and peasants, philosophers and farmers, men and women, the promiscuous and duty-bound. Tolstoy draws you in to empathise with all these as you realise you share their same hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, temptations and regrets. The conversions of Karenin, Anna and Levin all demand attention. I am not sure Tolstoy ever really grasps the nature of the gospel of grace. He comes close at points but never really gets there. The closest we get is Karenin’s forgiveness of Anna, Anna’s cry for forgiveness at her death, and Levin’s humble recognition of the gift and goodness of life.I think this novel is like the book of Ecclesiastes: it teaches us about life under the sun and concludes that the meaning of life is “to live for God, to the soul” (p. 785). or as Solomon says, "A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment?" (Eccl 2:24–25)Yes this is the meaning of life, but what does that look like? And how is atonement possible when we fail. Tolstoy raises this question superbly, hints at an answer, but in many ways it's still a mystery. For a clear answer we must turn to the Gospels or perhaps to the novels of Dostoevsky who perhaps understood better the gospel of grace.
    • 5/5
      I read this many, many years ago and always wanted to re-visit it. Suspecting there were too many other books ahead on my list I chose to download the audio version from my library. Upon first reading I was fascinated by the intricacies of social life as described by Tolstoy. This time around what impressed me was the timelessness of his writing. The characters seem as real as those in any modern novel. The social conventions and political discussions were still interesting but it was the characters lives that remained front and center this time around.
    • 4/5
      One of the best things about being a Russian aristocrat has got to be that you can just stop your carriage alongside any field and yell at a random peasant and they will drop whatever dumb peasant job they’re doing and run off to do whatever thing you yell at them to do. “You there! You! Run ahead to the manor and inform the Count’s groom that I wish him to make ready the stables.”“Riiiight. And just who the hell are you?”But they never say that! They just run ahead to make sure the stables are ready. Fantastic.Reading Anna Karenina was part of my reinvigorated program to grab something on my shelf that I’d been meaning to read and just read the bastard, fifty pages a day until it’s done. It's sublime.This is the mastery of Tolstoy: In a thousand pages of interpersonal failures, slights, feuds, marriages, love affairs, elections, engagements, spa treatments, farming, and philosophical banter, with every human virtue and vice on display, he never once tips his hand and telegraphs what we are supposed to think about a character. They are fully-realized human figures, and all you can do is experience and feel with them. If you’re going to judge them for good or ill, you do it on your own. He doesn’t do any of that for you.
    • 4/5
      First, I started this book 4ish years ago. I would read a chunk of it, than stop for awhile, and pick it up a few months later. Its not an easy read - mostly because it seems like the names keep changing. I understand, what a person in Russia is called is dependent on the relationship, but its difficult. It took me awhile to figure it out. It also helped that the last third of the book had less characters. It would have helped to have a list of full names for the characters. Its a difficult book, but the pay off is immense if you can stick with it.This next part has spoilers, so, read at your own risk.Anne Karenina isn't necessarily about Anna - although the other characters revolve around her. This is a story about relationships. Good relationships, bad relationships and how society views relationships depending on gender. Anna is bored wife of a bureaucrat. Her husband provides for her, and lets her do her own thing, he doesn't make her a part of his life, basically ignoring her until he needs her presence. Anna is intelligent, beautiful, and make a whole room light up when she walks in. When she meets a military man named Vronsky, her whole world is turned upside down. He is a cad, leading young women on, and than dropping them as soon as he looses interest. But, Anna seduces him - even after she denies him, he continue to pursue and eventually Anna gives in. Her husband tries to make it work, but the allure of Vronsky calls - Anna eventually leaves him for Vronsky. But, Anna is still not free. Until she is granted a divorce, she is only a mistress and is ostracized from society, living a lonelier life than before. Eventually, this gets to her and she commits suicide by throwing herself before a train.The next couple is Dotty and Oblansky. Oblansky is Anna's brother, and like to spend money, dote on ballerina's, and gamble. Dotty holds the family together - making sure that there is money for the most basic of upper-class necessities. She considers divorcee him a number of times throughout the book, but it would leave her in a similar state as Anna, even though she would be in the right of the law.The last couple is Kitty and Levin. Kitty is Dotty's sister, and she was the young girl Vronsky led on right before Anna. Kitty ends up sick from the whole experience, but ultimately recovers when Levin ultimately proposes to her. They are the perfect couple, in love, and able to talk through problems, understanding each other's personalities, the good and the bad. These three couples form the core of what Anna Karenina is about. There is also a large parts of the book devoted to Levin's thoughts about peasantry, land management, pointlessness of the upper-class life in Moscow, and belief in God. I'm still pondering what this adds to the book, because it seems not to add anything, and at times, its overwritten and tends to ramble. I do think Levin is based off of Tolstoy and his life, but large chunks of this could have been removed to no effect of the rest.
    • 4/5
      (Original Review, 1981-02-24)If you're not familiar with the The Orthodox Church's intricacies, don't bother reading the novel. It might also to understand the social context in which Anna Karenina is set, which Tolstoy doesn't explain because he was writing for fellow members of the Orthodox Church who would have understood the particular nuances. For Russian society at the time, an immoral act was one that offended all Creation and therefore God himself - it is quite common for Russian priests even now to admonish those confessing to serious sins by telling them that they are 'spitting in Christ's face'. Yet there are subtleties to Anna's predicament that are probably lost on Westerners: unlike the Roman Catholic Church, which forbids divorce for any reason, the Orthodox Church permits this where a marriage has irrevocably broken down, on the basis that it was never based on true love in the first place and thus null and void. So in the novel it is only Karenin's pride (which for the Orthodox is the greatest sin of all) that stands in the way of dissolving his tragically unhappy marriage. Anna's action challenges the hypocrisy of society and she brings down the anger of the hypocrites upon herself because she has the barefaced cheek to expect people to behave towards her as they did before her "fall" from grace. Her "friends", such as the poisonous Princess Betsy, desert her because she is an uncomfortable reminder of their own failings.In fact, I'd go a little further and suggest that the absence of clearly defined mores has led to the proliferation of petty judgementalism infiltrating every aspect of life. It's like Jacques Lacan said about Dostoyevsky's famous quote, ('If God is dead, everything is permitted'), accurately turning it around to say "If God is dead, nothing is permitted." And so we all throw the first stone at one another...The great Victorian judge and political philosopher James Fitzjames Stephen said that the main deterrent to crime is not the law, but public opinion. He was right. One of the reasons Arab countries have such a low crime rate is that a thief would be shunned by his family and wider community. The most judgmental people I know are self-described non-judgmentalists: they hate (straightforwardly) judgmental people, i.e. people with personalities, who don't have to cling on to PC BS in order to create a persona for themselves.PS. Something I didn't know until recently was that Vronsky, like Levin, was based on Tolstoy's own experiences. He represented Tolstoy's own shallow, artificial lifestyle that he gave up and was ashamed of. Vronsky is mature, attractive and amoral. He sees nothing wrong with pursuing a married woman because society's hypocrisy allows for that, but he gets in deeper than he intended. Not the deepest of characters, but Vronsky's casting in this film was absolutely ridiculous.
    • 5/5
      “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So begins this novel, with one of it’s most famous lines, but only one of many in which the author makes broad and though-provoking statements about human nature. Anna Karenina is a study of relationships, love, and adultery - especially Anna’s passionate affair with Count Vronsky. This simple description of the plot, however, hides the truly staggering depth of the novel. Along with Vronsky and Anna’s relationship, the many other romantic relationships presented raise questions about the nature of love; about the way society views men and women differently for their romantic choices; and about what it means to be happy.The writing in this book was a pleasure to read, one of those books were you savor the sentences. The author is often funny, dry, or witty in his insights into human nature. The characters are all amazingly well developed, with both good and bad qualities and believable motivations. Even when characters don’t seem very sympathetic at first, Tolstoy does an incredibly job pulling you into each character’s world view and making you feel for them. The relationships are as complex as the characters and could be difficult to follow. Fortunately, Tolstoy introduces characters clearly and slowly so his readers can keep up. My only complaint would be that he often uses full names, titles, and Russian nicknames for characters, which does make it harder to keep track of who is who.One complaint you’ll often hear about this novel, is that Tolstoy enjoys his digressions. There are hunting expeditions, local elections, and so many character’s philosophical musings, none of which advance the romantic plots that pulled me in. Some of these didn’t bother me, since I enjoyed the book for the author’s study of human nature. Still, I was going to give this novel four stars for the philosophical discussions of things that interest me less than love and relationships, such as the Russian economy. But when I sat down to write the description, I realized that this was a novel so good, I didn’t feel I could do it justice in my description. Anna’s bravery and passion for life captured my heart, as she has the hearts of so many others. Read this one for the characters, the commentary on life, but mostly for the experience of meeting Anna because no one but Tolstoy can really do her justice.
    • 4/5
      I have my own personal category for certain types of novels: "Stupid People Doing Stupid Things, and Why Should I Care?" The characters in Anna Karenina mostly fall into this category, still, somehow, Tolstoy makes the novel interesting. Levin and Kitty are pretty much the only characters who are sympathetic. Anna Karenina is totally self-absorbed and self-pitying. I felt no pity whatsoever for her. I realize Tolstoy was making social statements about Russian culture at that time, but it might have worked better if Anna was a better person who was victimized by society and fought bravely rather than being pretty much a basket case. SPOILER ALERT:When Anna comitted suicide, I didn't care, was glad to get this character out of the novel.The translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is suberb. Years ago, when I was 14 I read War and Peace, translated by Louise and Alymer Maude with a forward by Clifton Fadiman. That was a good translation as well. Later, in my 30s, I tried to read War and Peace again, the Constance Garnett translation. It was, for me at least, pretty bad. A few years ago I bought War and Peace, the Pevear and Volokhonsky version and expect that to be a fine translation when I try reading the novel again.
    • 5/5
      Beautifully written.
    • 5/5
      Truly one of the benchmarks against which any work of fiction may be measured. I got so much out of a second reading that I missed in the first pass...age and experience changes the book.
    • 3/5
      So i did like it but was not a book that blew me away. This was another story written for the rich of the times since they were the only ones who could read. However; i loved the build up of characters and truly got to know some of them in a very deep way. Was also interesting to find out what Russia was like before communism set in. Tolstoy's writing is wonderful; but the story just wasn't one that gabbed me.
    • 2/5
      I think that somewhere among the endless digressions there is a plot but don’t ask me to summarise it because I can’t remember.I do recall the occasional scene that interested me, hence why I’ve rated it two stars instead of one, but in a book of this epic length, “occasional” interest is pretty lame.I remember being irritated by the amount of characters that kept being introduced for no real purpose and how slow-paced the narrative is. Most readers may consider this a classic, but I like something with a small cast of vivid characters and a definitive plot, not passive prose, excess characters, and boring digressions that are designed for the author’s satisfaction.
    • 2/5
      This book was not for me! I listened to the audio book and had to check it out multiple times in order to get through it. I even sped up the track to get through it faster. I didn't like any of the characters and I didn't enjoy any of the politics. I know some people love this book but, again, it wasn't for me. I pushed through it just because it is on the "Must Read" lists.
    • 4/5
      If your only acquaintance with Anna Karenina in the movies, just be aware that she is NOT the heroine of this very long book. Anna is the example of what a woman should bot be.. Instead, the real heroine is Princess Kitty, the young woman who is initially in love with Count Vronsky, but ultimately marries Levin who is clearly Tolstoy's alter ego as Tolstoy has Levin spouting page after page of Tolstoy's own half-baked theories on the superiority of rural over urban life and the superiority of the peasants over the aristocrats.Kitty comes to realize that she needs to exchange her city luxuries for the simpler country life and in caring for Levin's tubercular. brother at the end of his life, Levin comes to recognize her superior nature.Anna, in her obsessive love of Vronsky becomes a harridan, and in the end, outcast from polite society, ends her life. Once you wade through all of Tolstoy's philosophy, you realize why the movies boiled the story down to its tragic essence.
    • 3/5
      ** spoiler alert ** We all know Tolstoy could write. His prose is beautiful, giving you glimpses into the minds and feelings of his characters and creating settings that feel real and tangible. The narrative builds in an engaging and entertaining way with progressions that make sense and seem realistic, even at our historical remove.That being said: my goodness, this book was unwieldy. I blazed through the first half and then slowly dragged my way through the rest. Excellent writing only carries me so far, particularly when I find it so difficult to connect with any of the characters in a serious way. Levin was endlessly irritating and self-important. Anna is an immensely sympathetic character, her internal monologue is one of the most realistic representations of severe depression I’ve ever read. That being said, I find it hard not to feel Vronsky and Anna are the architects of their own destruction. I guess that’s the point, but I still struggled with them both.I hated the decision to continue the book after Anna’s death. I couldn’t help but feel the emotional impact of her death was lost by refocusing on Levin. Those final chapters feel superfluous and disruptive to the symmetry of the story. Frankly, it seems a disservice to Anna. To me, the book is her narrative and closing it out with her last thoughts would have been a more appropriate conclusion to the story that bears her name.
    • 2/5
      Alright, I may get thrown lettuce and tomatoes for this comment but I did not like this book. Like I said for my previous book, it’s just not my cup of tea. This seems to be a trend for me. Most of the literary classics I read I don’t like all that much. I can’t say why exactly. I must not like life stories all that much. I’m much more into adventure and action I guess. I’m a fantasy fan foremost. And unfortunately I don’t think that will ever change. I do however want to broaden my horizons, which is why I joined the group read in the first place. If I hadn’t be part of the group read and felt a sort of obligation I might not have finished this book. As it was I spent many hours cross-stitching and listening to this book and hoping it would end soon. There is a great deal of patience needed to listen to or read this book. There is tons of detail here. I mean a lot. It’s over a thousand pages. I guess I didn’t mind the plot and the inherent warnings/lessons/however you want to take it, but the amount of time it took to get the story out was very long. It certainly gave me time to get to like the characters. The only problem was, I didn’t much like any of them. Maybe I just couldn’t individually relate to them. I’m young and I grew up in the twenty-first century. My world is very different from the time and setting in this book. I also like strong female protagonists. And for me, Anna was not an independent or very strong woman. I did not understand why she let love and lack of love control her so much. Again this could just be because I’m young but I don’t relate all that well with protagonists who let things like love control their actions. I’ll admit that I don’t know what choices women did have in those days, but I still wished for something different. Anyways, all of this combined made for a book that I couldn’t get into. I’m not sure I could have got through it so quickly if I hadn’t been alternating it with another audio book. But I’m sure that other readers very well may love the book. I on the other hand am glad I finally finished it.
    • 5/5
      great way to kick off '09. loved it. probably in my top 10 favorite books ever if i kept a list like that..
    • 5/5
      Well, that was a pretty good book.

      Not, like, a ton of dirty parts.
    • 1/5
        This book was definitely not written for me. I'm glad I can say I finally read it, well listened to the audiobook, but that's about all I can be thankful for. The narrator had a pleasing voice and did a good job on the reading. I just didn't like the book. It was very boring in my opinion and just didn't interest me.
    • 3/5
      I read this for a book club. I almost quit immediately as it starts out with a political meeting and discussion. I found these to be least appealing parts of the book, and the mowing, and Levin's philosophing on religion.

      Other than those areas, I enjoyed the character development and various storylines.

      I did expect much more to happen than it actually did. It's not an "eventful" piece but worth reading nonetheless.
    • 4/5
      Epic, certainly. I felt confused for the first half of the novel as to why it is considered such a great book but the second half was so incredibly engaging. I developed strong feelings for the characters (not necessarily of love) and questioned my own understanding of relationships, society's morality, and faith. I'm still reeling a bit from the philosophy and questions of the character Levin and have continued to feel no sympathy or warmth for the novel's namesake, Anna Karenina. What an interesting book.
    • 4/5
      I have always enjoyed crime and action novels, but having reached the age of 75 feel that it is time to catch up on the classics. Leo Tolstoy is one of my targets at the moment and AK seemed to be the best place to start. It was long (even on my Kindle!) and philosophical, but I enjoyed Tolstoy's views on life, love and Russian politics. He uses the character Levin to out pour his rather verbose view on religion and life and I found this a bit trying to get through at times. His story could have ended with the demise of Anna, but unfortunately carried on for too many more pages. I am glad that I have mastered this classic!
    • 4/5
      This is a great translation with wonderful notes.
    • 3/5
      Well, by today's standards, I think most readers would put this book down and not finish it. Tolstoy goes to great lengths to describe scenes, emotions, character physique and personality quirks that really don't add to the story, but they help to paint an elaborate picture in the mind of life in Russia in the 1800's. For me, it was a great lesson in using detail to enhance a story. But, I think Tolstoy lost some balance in storytelling and painting a picture with words.Tolstoy should have ended the book earlier after the climax.The vocabulary and diction were superb.
    • 3/5
      I ended up not liking AK all that much, the constant philosophical debates, and introspective musings, got on my nerves big time. Really? All those pages for all that?I gave it three stars as it is a classic, Tolstoy certain can write well, and there are some redeeming qualities in terms of character development and the plot lines. But "frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn".
    • 4/5
      SPOILERS APLENTY Don't read this if you're worried about spoilers. It's not really a review, but some thoughts that came up from reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.Maybe because I'm cold and heartless, I found Anna's high-pitched emotionality grating. Once she got on the Vronsky train, she gradually (or not so gradually) transformed from an elegant, composed, thoughtful woman into a caterwaul. Obviously, a major reason for this was the tension caused by her complete obsession with Vronsky - he was her only hope, as she says more than once - and the disapproval of society wherever they went. (An idyll in Italy is the exception, but they find it unsatisfying). By the end, Anna's obsessive jealousy and desperate need for more of his love has her destroying their relationship. Vronsky isn't exactly admirable, so dumping him would have been fine, but of course the only solution she finds is to commit suicide by throwing herself under a train.Levin (someone said he's an autobiographical character for Tolstoy) and Kitty, with their measured, thoughtful and largely graceful love, were a huge relief throughout for me from the Anna-Vronsky high-pitched passion. Tolstoy of course works that contrast in dramatic ways through much of the book. Levin and Kitty for some reason made me think of Louisa May Alcott's books. The plane they operated on was beautiful to read about. Also, Jane Austen came to mind, as Kitty first foolishly turns down Levin's proposal due to an infatuation with Vronsky, and learns to regret it before she and Levin finally are reunited.What kept running through my mind was, what would Anna be like today in this situation? Would pharmaceuticals help alleviate her anxiety, and enable her to deal more rationally with her life? Soften that irrepressible hatred for Karenin, allow her to visit more reasonably with her son, help her avoid her irrational desperation toward Vronsky and find a way to happiness? What about easy, no-fault divorce? Instead of the sturm and drang with Karenin, just go your separate ways, marry that putz Vronsky, and carry on. How about a more progressive society, with much less of the shunning?I know, she's the title character, very important, look at all we'd lose. But would we? If a more sensible Anna made more sensible choices in a more sensible world, would we still care about her? I'd be willing to find out, if only to get some relief from her clanging emotions, particularly toward the end. (I'm fine with emotional characters generally, but the increasingly falling apart Anna I'd had enough of). And maybe a more sensible Anna would mean we could get more of Levin and Kitty's story, which would be fine with me. (I could do with a whole lot less of Levin's religious and philosophical questioning, by the way, but we'll leave that for another day). We might end up with Alcott-like or Austen-like characters sorting it out. If we wanted to keep a similar dynamic, Anna could be a Lydia-equivalent I suppose, with Vronsky as Wickham.All right, enough carping. The Maude translation was smooth and engaging. There were beautiful stretches in the book, like Levin mowing with the peasants, and the birth of Levin and Kitty's son, with Levin desperately frightened that Kitty might not survive. The latter was well-contrasted with Anna wishing she had died in childbirth, as that would have "solved everything." I was also struck at the end by Vronsky's trying to remember Anna as she was at the beginning of their relationship, rather than the "cruelly vindictive" (from his POV) Anna at the end.I'm glad I read Anna Karenina, but you can tell it will never be up there as a favorite for me.
    • 4/5
      I will not attempt to summarize this work of literature. The plot is well-known and other reviewers have done an excellent job doing so. Themes of the book are adultery, including the church's attitude toward it. the political changes occurring in Russia at the time, and attitudes toward religion. Anna was not that likeable of a character. She abandoned her child. She would ask for something to happen and then refuse it when the opportunity presented itself. I enjoyed many of the descriptions, particularly those set on the farm. Tolstoy did a great job in developing characters. The book still has relevance for today's readers and is why it is still considered to be one of literature's all-time classics.
    • 5/5
      What I love about this novel is, although it was published over a hundred years before I was born, takes place in a country different from my own and is written (though translated) in a different language, I can relate to the characters so closely as they struggle with insecurity similar to my own. Though the logistics are not quite the same, Tolstoy gets to the heart of issues and in doing so makes his characters and their problems timeless. He has a knack for describing perfectly the way they think and feel. In each character you can see how God's presence or absence in their life affects the way they relate to others.This novel made me extremely grateful for friendship. There are two characters whose interactions with each other are seen but twice in the novel, but have left an impression on me. One says to the other "I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, and not as you like them to be". I am fortunate to have a few friends in my life to whom I feel I can share anything and they will not love me any differently.
    • 4/5
      Really well written. I wish authors today would create books this epic - I think Tolstoy really shows a lot of things that modern authors would be content to tell, in a major way.
    • 5/5
      This book is much more than a look at adultery. Tolstoy wrote a novel around eight characters that develop throughout the novel. Their stories entwine and grow with interest that will keep you engaged the whole time. I really enjoyed the ability of Tolstoy to capture characters that struggle with their relationships and why they actually act in ways counter to their desires. So true to life.A warning that there are chapters focused on politics and philosophy of labor, that may be unattractive to the general reader.By far one of my top 50 novels of all time.

    Book preview

    Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

    Anna Karenina

    Leo Tolstoy

    with an Introduction and Notes

    by E. B. Greenwood

    WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

    Anna Karenina first published by Wordsworth Editions Limited in 1995

    New introduction and notes added in 1999

    Introduction and notes © E. B. Greenwood 1999

    Published as an ePublication 2011

    ISBN 978 1 84870 346 9

    Wordsworth Editions Limited

    8B East Street, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 9HJ

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    For my husband

    ANTHONY JOHN RANSON

    with love from your wife, the publisher

    Eternally grateful for your

    unconditional love

    Contents

    General Introduction

    Introduction

    Bibliography

    Anna Karenina

    Part One

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Chapter 8

    Chapter 9

    Chapter 10

    Chapter 11

    Chapter 12

    Chapter 13

    Chapter 14

    Chapter 15

    Chapter 16

    Chapter 17

    Chapter 18

    Chapter 19

    Chapter 20

    Chapter 21

    Chapter 22

    Chapter 23

    Chapter 24

    Chapter 25

    Chapter 26

    Chapter 27

    Chapter 28

    Chapter 29

    Chapter 30

    Chapter 31

    Chapter 32

    Chapter 33

    Chapter 34

    Part Two

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Chapter 8

    Chapter 9

    Chapter 10

    Chapter 11

    Chapter 12

    Chapter 13

    Chapter 14

    Chapter 15

    Chapter 16

    Chapter 17

    Chapter 18

    Chapter 19

    Chapter 20

    Chapter 21

    Chapter 22

    Chapter 23

    Chapter 24

    Chapter 25

    Chapter 26

    Chapter 27

    Chapter 28

    Chapter 29

    Chapter 30

    Chapter 31

    Chapter 32

    Chapter 33

    Chapter 34

    Chapter 35

    Part Three

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Chapter 8

    Chapter 9

    Chapter 10

    Chapter 11

    Chapter 12

    Chapter 13

    Chapter 14

    Chapter 15

    Chapter 16

    Chapter 17

    Chapter 18

    Chapter 19

    Chapter 20

    Chapter 21

    Chapter 22

    Chapter 23

    Chapter 24

    Chapter 25

    Chapter 26

    Chapter 27

    Chapter 28

    Chapter 29

    Chapter 30

    Chapter 31

    Chapter 32

    Part Four

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Chapter 8

    Chapter 9

    Chapter 10

    Chapter 11

    Chapter 12

    Chapter 13

    Chapter 14

    Chapter 15

    Chapter 16

    Chapter 17

    Chapter 18

    Chapter 19

    Chapter 20

    Chapter 21

    Chapter 22

    Chapter 23

    Part Five

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Chapter 8

    Chapter 9

    Chapter 10

    Chapter 11

    Chapter 12

    Chapter 13

    Chapter 14

    Chapter 15

    Chapter 16

    Chapter 17

    Chapter 18

    Chapter 19

    Chapter 20: Death

    Chapter 21

    Chapter 22

    Chapter 23

    Chapter 24

    Chapter 25

    Chapter 26

    Chapter 27

    Chapter 28

    Chapter 29

    Chapter 30

    Chapter 31

    Chapter 32

    Chapter 33

    Part Six

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Chapter 8

    Chapter 9

    Chapter 10

    Chapter 11

    Chapter 12

    Chapter 13

    Chapter 14

    Chapter 15

    Chapter 16

    Chapter 17

    Chapter 18

    Chapter 19

    Chapter 20

    Chapter 21

    Chapter 22

    Chapter 23

    Chapter 24

    Chapter 25

    Chapter 26

    Chapter 27

    Chapter 28

    Chapter 29

    Chapter 30

    Chapter 31

    Chapter 32

    Part Seven

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Chapter 8

    Chapter 9

    Chapter 10

    Chapter 11

    Chapter 12

    Chapter 13

    Chapter 14

    Chapter 15

    Chapter 16

    Chapter 17

    Chapter 18

    Chapter 19

    Chapter 20

    Chapter 21

    Chapter 22

    Chapter 23

    Chapter 24

    Chapter 25

    Chapter 26

    Chapter 27

    Chapter 28

    Chapter 29

    Chapter 30

    Chapter 31

    Part Eight

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Chapter 8

    Chapter 9

    Chapter 10

    Chapter 11

    Chapter 12

    Chapter 13

    Chapter 14

    Chapter 15

    Chapter 16

    Chapter 17

    Chapter 18

    Chapter 19

    General Introduction

    Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

    General Adviser

    Keith Carabine

    Rutherford College

    University of Kent at Canterbury

    Introduction

    The status of the book and the history of its composition

    There are good reasons for regarding Anna Karenina, rather than War and Peace, as the greatest novel ever written. War and Peace mixes history and fiction in a disconcerting way and, particularly in the second half, becomes overburdened with sometimes tendentious theorising and discussion on the author’s part. Anna Karenina is a purer fiction. It is set in the author’s own time and any tendentiousness is distributed dramatically among the characters. In an unsent letter to a fellow novelist in 1865 Tolstoy wrote:

    Problems of the zemstvo, literature and the emancipation of women etc. obtrude with you in a polemical manner, but these problems are not only not interesting in the world of art; they have no place there at all . . . The aims of art are incommensurate (as the mathematicians say) with social aims. The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless inexhaustible manifestations. If I were to be told that I could write a novel whereby I might irrefutably establish what seemed to me the correct point of view on all social problems, I would not even devote two hours to such a novel; but if I were to be told that what I should write would be read in about twenty years time by those who are now children, and that they would laugh and cry over it and love life, I would devote all my life and all my energies to it. [1]

    Anna Karenina is the product of such devotion and energies. Social problems of the day enter it, but they are subordinated to the loves and fates of the book’s vivid characters.

    When he finished War and Peace in 1869, Tolstoy was exhausted. The Russian critic Boris Eikhenbaum has called the gap between the completion of this great work and the start of Anna Karenina in 1873 ‘an unhappy period of doubts, struggle, and self-searching’. [2] Eikhenbaum sees Tolstoy’s position on the Russian intellectual scene as curiously ill-defined. He was regarded as a reactionary by left-wing progressives and as a nihilist by conservatives. At first he withdrew from literature and became extremely depressed. His reading of the German philosopher and pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation in August 1869 (just in time to influence the philosophic epilogue to War and Peace) may have confirmed him in his gloom. He resumed his interest in the education of the peasantry (the bulk of the Russian population) and wrote for his reading primer a story called ‘A Prisoner in the Caucasus’. From spring 1870 to the winter of 1872–3 Tolstoy considered writing a historical novel about the times of Peter the Great, but he could not make the psychology of the characters of those distant times come alive. They were beyond living memory. He could not, in short, create characters who would absorb himself and his readers. Schopenhauer’s rejection of history as a source of significant knowledge about the will in Section 54 of The World as Will and Representation would certainly have chimed in with Tolstoy’s views on this matter. Schopenhauer writes: ‘No man has lived in the past, and none will ever live in the future; the present alone is the form of all life . . . ’ [3] In the essay ‘On History’ in the supplementary volume to his work he adds: ‘In truth, the essence of human life . . . exists complete in every present time, and therefore requires only depth of comprehension in order to be exhaustively known.’ [4] Only the events of the individual life have moral significance. In particular, ‘Only the events of our inner life, in so far as they concern the will, have true reality . . . ’ [5] These are the kind of events which are prominent in Anna Karenina.

    As early as 24 February 1870, however, an overview of a story of contemporary life very like that of Anna seems to have occurred to him. The entry in the Appendices to his wife Sonya’s Diaries for that date runs:

    Yesterday afternoon he told me he had had the idea of writing about a married woman of noble birth who ruined herself. He said his purpose was to make this woman pitiful, not guilty, and he told me that no sooner had he imagined this character clearly than the men and the other characters he had thought up found their place in the story. [6]

    Then on 4 January 1872 occurred the suicide of Anna Pirogova, the mistress of a local landowner and acquaintance of Tolstoy’s, A. N. Bibikov. Jealous of the beautiful German governess with whom he had fallen in love, Anna Pirogova left Bibikov’s house and went to a nearby railway station where she threw herself under a goods train. Sonya writes in the Appendices to her Diaries:

    Then there was a post mortem. Lev Nikolaevich attended, and saw her lying there at the Yasenki barracks, her skull smashed in and her naked body frightfully mutilated. It had the most terrible effect on him. [7]

    The affair with the governess is transferred in the novel from the Anna story to the Oblonsky-Dolly story where it precipitates acute jealousy, but not suicide. It is interesting also that towards the end of the novel in Part 8, Chapter 5, when Vronsky rushes to see Anna’s body in the railway shed, the mangling of the body is strongly emphasised, but it is stressed that the head is undamaged. This is no doubt so that Tolstoy can emphasise its accusing facial expression which is so wounding to Vronsky.

    But Tolstoy did not begin work on the novel until more than a year after his attendance at the post mortem following the suicide of Anna Pirogova. Sonya writes in the Appendices to her Diaries for 19 March 1873 that Tolstoy had been stimulated by reading Pushkin’s prose Tales of Belkin to start a novel ‘about the private lives of present-day people’. [8] Boris Eikhenbaum writes:

    Indications have been preserved that, after reading the first lines of the fragment ‘The guests were assembling at the dacha,’ Tolstoy exclaimed: ‘How charming! That is how one ought to write. Pushkin gets right to the point. Another would have begun to describe the guests, the rooms, but he leads into the action straight away.’ [9]

    Tolstoy disliked static introductions and background painting. He preferred to plunge directly into the middle of an action among persons unfamiliar to the reader so that the reader would be drawn into their situation like a participant, and not remain aloof like a mere observer.

    A full account of the early vicissitudes of the composition of Anna Karenina can be found in C. J. E. Turner’s book A Karenina Companion, published by the Wilfrid Laurier Press, Waterloo, Ontario, in 1993. Tolstoy began the novel on 18 March 1873 and finished it by July 1877. Serial publication in Katkov’s Russian Herald started in January 1875, but the nationalistic Katkov disapproved of the criticism of the Serbian war in the eighth and final part due in May 1877, and refused to publish it, so Tolstoy brought it out separately in July 1877. The first edition in book form (in which Tolstoy’s friend the critic Strakhov helped with revisions) appeared in January 1878. Turner also points out that the first draft, influenced by Pushkin, opens with material which corresponds to that in Part 2, Chapters 6 and 7 of the novel where the guests arrive at Princess Betsy Tverskaya’s salon. Tolstoy undoubtedly admired the spare, rapidly moving prose of Pushkin. But his own writing in Anna Karenina remains very different from Pushkin’s. As early as 31 October 1853, Tolstoy had written in his Diaries:

    I read The Captain’s Daughter and, alas, I must admit that Pushkin’s prose is now old-fashioned – not in its language, but in its manner of exposition. Now, quite rightly, in the new school of literature, interest in the details of feeling is taking the place of interest in the events themselves. Pushkin’s stories are somehow bare. [10]

    In Anna Karenina Tolstoy evinces his gift for what the Russian critic Constantine Leontiev nicely called ‘psychological eavesdropping’. [11] We are plunged not just into the actions of unfamiliar characters, but into the strange transitions of their inner feelings, the dialectic of their hearts. What is so marvellous about Anna Karenina is the perfect balance between the handling of outer events and inner feelings which characterises it.

    The genre

    If War and Peace is a chronicle novel that ends happily, Anna Karenina is, in substance, a tragedy with a double ending: the finality of Anna’s death and the open-endedness of Levin and Kitty’s problematic family life. What do I mean by saying that it is, in substance, a tragedy? Its form is that of a novel for private reading rather than that of a dramatic spectacle for public performance like Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. It has the substance of tragedy in that in it, as Aristotle required, a person neither of superlative goodness nor repellent wickedness (i.e. a character whom we can sympathise with, even love) makes a mistaken choice or set of choices. Aristotle called this mistaken choice hamartia. When this choice leads to a situation from which there is no way out but suffering, we have tragedy. Both Greek and Shakespearean tragedy involve poetic stylisation and elevation and actions out of the ordinary. Tolstoy’s tragedy comes much closer to the type of tragedy described by Tolstoy’s favourite philosopher Schopenhauer in Section 51 of The World as Will and Representation.

    Finally, the misfortune can be brought about also by the mere attitude of the persons to one another through their relations. Thus there is no need either of a colossal error, or of an unheard-of accident, or even of a character reaching the bounds of human possibility in wickedness, but characters as they usually are in a moral regard in circumstances that frequently occur, are so situated with regard to one another that their position forces them, knowingly and with their eyes open, to do one another the greatest injury, without any of them being entirely in the wrong. This last kind of tragedy seems to me to be far preferable to the other two; for it shows us the greatest misfortune not as an exception, not as something brought about by rare circumstances or by monstrous characters, but as something that arises easily and spontaneously out of the actions and characters of men, as something almost essential to them, and in this way it is brought terribly near to us . . . We see the greatest suffering brought about by entanglements whose essence could be assumed even by our own fate, and by actions that perhaps even we might be capable of committing, and so we cannot complain of injustice. Then, shuddering, we feel ourselves already in the midst of hell. In this last kind of tragedy the working out is of the greatest difficulty; for the greatest effect has to be produced in it with the least use of means and occasions for movement, merely by their position and distribution. [12]

    As we shall see, Tolstoy shows his supreme skill in Anna Karenina in positioning and distributing the events so naturally that the novel seems to proceed as plotlessly and accidentally as life itself. In a letter dated 23 and 26 April 1876, Tolstoy wrote as follows to his friend Strakhov about what constitutes the unity of the book:

    In everything, or nearly everything I have written, I have been guided by the need to gather together ideas which for the purpose of self-expression were interconnected; but every idea expressed separately in words loses its meaning and is terribly impoverished when taken by itself out of the connection in which it occurs. The connection is made up, I think, not by the idea, but by something else, and it is impossible to express the basis of this connection directly in words. It can only be expressed indirectly – by words describing characters, actions and situations.

    Later in the same letter he adds:

    . . . people are needed for the criticism of art who can show the pointlessness of looking for ideas in a work of art and can steadfastly guide readers through that endless labyrinth of connections which is the essence of art, and towards those laws that serve as the basis of these connections. [13]

    It is as though Tolstoy is anticipating the philosopher Wittgenstein’s distinction between what can be shown (gezeigt) but cannot be said (gesagt). [14] Tolstoy’s notion of the novel is one in which the web of connections between ideas, people and events is never explicitly stated but woven into the form of the novel itself. The task of the critic or reader is to uncover and piece together for themselves the strands of this web in a meaningful way.

    An acquaintance, S. A. Rachinsky, complained to Tolstoy about the double plot, the alternating Anna/Vronsky, Levin/Kitty material, saying that the two sides were unconnected. Tolstoy replied on 27 January 1878:

    Your opinion about Anna Karenina seems to me to be wrong. On the contrary, I am proud of the architecture – the arches have been constructed in such a way that it is impossible to see where the keystone is. And that is what I am striving for most of all. The structural link is not the plot or the relationships (friendships) between the characters, but an inner link. [15]

    Tolstoy does not just cut discontinuously from one episode to another. He makes us well acquainted with interconnected groups of characters whose lives and fates he follows continuously through the novel. There is no confusion. It is now time to look more closely at how Tolstoy constructs his ‘labyrinth of connections’.

    Some critical observations

    Anna Karenina must have one of the best openings in world literature. We are immediately thrust into the chaos of the Oblonsky household, yet guided through that chaos with the sure authoritative hand of the narrator. In March 1877 Sonya recorded in the Appendices to her Diaries Tolstoy’s remark:

    My ideas are quite clear now. If a work is to be really good there must be one fundamental idea in it which one loves. So in Anna Karenina, say, I love the idea of the family, in War and Peace I loved the idea of the people . . . [16]

    This theme of family life is sounded at the outset, first by the teasing, and even slightly annoying, opening aphorism on the topic, and then by the presentation of a household in turmoil at the discovery by the wife of the husband’s infidelity. The keynote of the human, all too human self-indulgence of the husband Stephen Oblonsky, who is to be such an important character in linking the diverse social worlds of the novel, is wonderfully captured in the following passage from Chapter 2 about his attitude to his wife Dolly:

    He even thought that she, who was nothing but an excellent mother of a family, worn-out, already growing elderly, no longer pretty, and in no way remarkable – in fact, quite an ordinary woman – ought to be lenient to him, if only from a sense of justice. It turned out that the very opposite was the case. [p. 3]

    Tolstoy writes in brief dramatic chapters, keeping things moving and preserving a balance between narrative, description, dialogue and his favourite device of internal monologue which monitors the thoughts and feelings of the characters.

    I have already mentioned in Part 2 that Tolstoy’s narrative seems to move as plotlessly and accidentally as life itself. This has led many critics, for example Matthew Arnold, Henry James, Prince Mirsky and Philip Rahv, mistakenly to assume that what we have here is life not art; that, in Rahv’s words: ‘ . . . in a sense there are no plots in Tolstoy.’ [17] Henry James even referred to Tolstoy’s novels quite inappropriately as ‘loose baggy monsters’. [18] In one way all these critics are right. We do indeed have a wonderful realism and lifelikeness, but this lifelikeness is produced by the life of a classic art which conceals art. Tolstoy avoids both naturalistic objectivism and static aesthetic fine writing. Both of these tend to go with a purely spectatorial attitude to human affairs. Tolstoy encourages us to be suffering quasi-participants rather than distanced ironic observers.

    Already in the second chapter we learn casually that Anna Arkadyevna Karenina, Stephen Oblonsky’s favourite sister (and the figure who will develop into the tragic heroine of the book) is coming to Moscow from St Petersburg to effect a reconciliation between Stephen and his wife Dolly, after Dolly’s discovery of his unfaithfulness. But before we meet Anna, we meet Constantine Dmitrich Levin, the character who will be the main counterpart to Vronsky in the Vronsky-Anna, Levin-Kitty double plot. Levin is the character nearest in habits and views to the author himself, though, of course, without his literary genius. Whereas Oblonsky’s marriage gives all the signs of breaking up, unless Anna can save it, his friend Levin’s intention is to embark on marriage with Kitty, Dolly’s younger sister. That is why he has come to Moscow from the country, which he much prefers. We have a wonderful contrast in the next few chapters between Levin and Oblonsky. The self-indulgent urbane Oblonsky loves the Liberalism exemplified in his newspaper ‘as he loved his after-dinner cigar, for the slight mistiness it produced in his brain’ (p. 7). He relishes the pleasures of the restaurant and the bedroom. The cranky, countrified, Rousseauistic Levin criticises the conspicuous consumption of the idlers in the restaurant they go to by comparing their fare with the frugal meals of those who work in the country, among whom he includes himself. The latter cannot linger over their food. Their breaks have to be short, so they can get on with their work (p. 35). Levin also has a very idealistic attitude to the love and marriage Oblonsky takes so lightly, if half guiltily. When Oblonsky says his situation is ‘ a terrible tragedy ’ (p. 41), Levin cannot resist objecting. There can be no tragedy for the ‘ Thank you kindly for the pleasure, good-bye ’ sort of love (p. 41). We do not know, of course, at this point, that it is because she will not be able to take her love for Vronsky lightly, that Anna herself will become a tragic figure. When we reread the novel, however, we see that Levin functions as a moral chorus on her fate in his comments, and that a major reason for the greatness of Anna Karenina is that the parts continually resonate with each other richly.

    In this same Chapter 11 Oblonsky gives Levin the unpleasant news that he has a rival for Kitty’s hand, an army officer, Count Vronsky, ‘ a very fine sample of the gilded youth of Petersburg ’ (p. 38). The fact that at this point they are rivals for the same woman Kitty (whom Vronsky will, in effect, jilt for Anna) serves to throw into high relief the contrast between Levin and Vronsky which will run all through the novel. For example, Part 1, Chapter 16 opens:

    Vronsky had never known family life. His mother in her youth had been a brilliant Society woman, and during her married life had had many love affairs, known to everybody. He hardly remembered his father, and had been educated in the Cadet Corps. [p. 55]

    A little later in the same chapter we learn:

    Marriage had never presented itself to him as a possibility. Not only did he dislike family life, but an accordance with the views generally held in the bachelor world in which he lived he regarded the family, and especially a husband, as something alien, hostile, and above all ridiculous. [p. 56]

    Levin, on the contrary, like his creator Tolstoy, is in love with the idea of the family. In Part 1, Chapter 27 Tolstoy tells us that Levin could scarcely remember his mother, and that his conception of her was sacred. Tolstoy continues:

    He could not imagine the love of woman without marriage, and even pictured to himself a family first and then the woman who would give him the family. [p.93]

    Marriage, for Levin, ‘was the chief thing in life, on which the whole happiness of life depended’ (p 93). But Tolstoy, for all his love of the idea of the family, is not, of course, as the creator of the novel, limited to Levin’s perspective. Through the trials of Oblonsky’s wife, Kitty’s elder sister Dolly, he can show us the hardships of family life, the painful pregnancies, the difficulties of bringing up children. Much later in the book, in Part 6, Chapter 16, Dolly, on the way from Levin’s estate to Vronsky’s, recalls a talk she had had with a peasant wife:

    ‘I had one girl, but God released me. I buried her in Lent.’

    ‘And are you very sorry?’ asked Dolly.

    ‘What’s there to be sorry about? The old man has plenty of grandchildren as it is. They’re nothing but worry. You can’t work or anything. They’re nothing but a tie . . . ’

    This answer had seemed horrible to Dolly, despite the good-natured sweetness of the young woman’s looks, but now she could not help recalling it. In those cynical words there was some truth. [p. 598]

    Tolstoy’s irony, unlike that of Hardy, for example, arises perfectly naturally from the convincing unfolding of the casually interwoven events. Anna, coming to heal the rift in her brother’s marriage, meets Vronsky, the man who will cause the break-up of her own. At the same time, in turning Vronsky’s head, she frees Kitty from his pursuit, and though this causes much initial unhappiness it opens the way for Kitty’s marriage to the idealistic Levin. In Part 6, Chapter 2, Dolly herself reflects on this:

    ‘How happily it turned out for Kitty that Anna came,’ said Dolly, ‘and how unhappily for her! The exact reverse,’ she added, struck by her thought. ‘Then Anna was so happy and Kitty considered herself miserable. Now it’s the exact reverse! I often think of her.’ [p.549]

    Anna had travelled to Moscow in the same compartment as Vronsky’s mother to whom she had recounted her sorrow at being parted from her son Serezha. Vronsky’s mother says by way of comfort, ‘ But please don’t fret about your son, you can’t expect never to be parted ’ (p. 62). This is another of the sentences of the book that resonates on a rereading. Vronsky’s mother has no inkling of the fact that it is her own son who will precipitate the break-up of Anna’s marriage and cause her deep unhappiness by bringing about a permanent separation from her son.

    Vronsky is so infatuated with Anna’s terrible and cruel charm that he, in effect, jilts Kitty. On the train returning to St Petersburg he says what Anna’s ‘soul desired but her reason dreaded’ (p. 101), and the snowstorm outside parallels the emotional turmoil within her. Having met Vronsky she notes, for the first time, defects in her husband. His gristly ears ‘pressing as they did against the rim of his hat’ (p. 102) repel her as he meets her at the station. His habit of cracking his fingers to tranquillize himself begins to grate on her (pp. 142–3). It is typical that he only notices something is wrong because he notices that society has noticed. The situation comes to a climax in the famous steeplechase scene in Part 2, Chapters 25 and 28, when Vronsky falls killing his mare and Anna cannot conceal her agitation. She had already become his mistress in Part 2, Chapter 11, in a scene in which Tolstoy obviously found it difficult to strike the right note in handling the sexual side of this relationship. But one sentence really does strike home – when Anna cries, ‘I have nothing but you left. Remember that’ (p. 147).

    It is another feature of the novel’s greatness that Tolstoy makes us feel and sympathise with the suffering of the cold, mechanical, careerist civil servant Karenin, a type who would have been antipathetic to him, just as much as he makes us sympathise with the suffering of Anna. Perhaps the doctrine of Christian forgiveness so central to the later Tolstoy intrudes a little when Tolstoy makes Karenin momentarily forgive Anna. He thinks she may die of puerperal fever after giving birth to her little girl by Vronsky. Here Tolstoy makes feeling break through Karenin’s usual crust of principle:

    He was not thinking that the law of Christ, which all his life he had tried to fulfil, told him to forgive and love his enemies but a joyous feeling of forgiveness and love for his enemies, filled his soul. [p. 407]

    But Tolstoy shows us convincingly how Karenin succumbs to what he feels is the ‘coarse power’ (p. 413) of society. In any case, his initial magnanimity had oppressed Anna, so that she had determined to refuse the divorce that his momentary generosity has made him sadly accept.

    In the end she goes abroad to live with her lover in Italy. But Vronsky, to whom she was once everything, now grows restive at having renounced his career: ‘Soon he felt rising in his soul a desire for desires – boredom’ (p. 460). Anna longs for her son Serezha; but meanwhile the momentarily magnanimous Karenin has fallen under the spell of the malign religiosity of a society lady, Countess Lydia Ivanovna. There is now no hope of a divorce or of the custody of Serezha. Though Vronsky can still move in Russian society after their return from Italy, Anna is soon cruelly shown that she cannot. Tolstoy skilfully builds up to a final dramatic misunderstanding. After a terrible quarrel, Vronsky goes for a brief visit to his mother in the country. Anna sends him an urgent request to return, but, through mischance, it does not reach him in time. Full of jealous imaginings, Anna decides to pursue him. She sets off for the station. Here, in Part 7, Chapters 30 and 31 of the novel, Tolstoy gives her an interior monologue which embodies one of the greatest negative visions in world literature. Everything she sees seems to exemplify an ugly neo-Darwinian, egoistic struggle for existence. She sees the world as a whole as Schopenhauer’s evil world of Will. She herself even wills to punish Vronsky by her suicide under the train, but then she has an involuntary childhood memory of making the sign of the cross and her last words are: ‘God forgive me everything’ (p. 755).

    There is still an eighth book of about fifty pages. This is the section Katkov rejected because in it, Tolstoy, through Levin, criticises the factitious poisonous Slav nationalism which is leading Russians to volunteer to fight for the Serbs against the Turks. This is the war in which the morally shattered Vronsky goes off to seek his death. Some critics regard the concluding chapters about Levin’s married life and philosophical perplexities as too autobiographical and Levin as a prig and a bore. But these chapters deal dramatically with the sort of moral and philosophical issues every reflective person has to come to terms with. Moreover, in their tentative hopefulness, they form a neat counterbalance to the tragic darkness and despair we have just witnessed.

    In ‘On Death . . . ’ Schopenhauer writes: ‘ . . . without death there would hardly have been any philosophising.’ [19] The only chapter with a title in Anna Karenina, Chapter 20 of Part 5, is called ‘Death’. In it Tolstoy gives a harrowing description of the death of Levin’s brother Nicholas. Only Kitty’s help enables Levin to overcome his grief. The fact that life ends in death naturally gives rise to the question of what confers significance on life itself. Some turn to natural science for the answer because it gives the fullest knowledge of cause and effect in the material world. But if we assume that natural science alone will answer the questions about time, love and death which trouble us, then, as the philosopher Wittgenstein says in Culture and Value, we are falling into a trap. [20] Tolstoy, through Levin’s doubts and reflections, anticipates Wittgenstein’s repudiation of the scientific optimism of the Enlightenment. But Levin also rejects the Schopenhaurian pessimism embodied in the despairing Anna’s final vision. He reaches a sort of critical and sceptical compromise with the Christian moral tradition. The total rejection of Christian morality which was later to be expressed by Nietzsche would have held no attractions for him. At the same time he respectfully acknowledges the existence of other faiths outside whose traditions he stands. He also recognises, like Kant, that our vision is bound by the limits of what we can perceive in this present life. He prays, even though he recognises the senselessness of his prayer that Kitty and the baby should not have been struck by lightning (p. 798).

    Levin appreciates how hard it is for human beings to be just in moral disputes in which they are parties. The much discussed epigram to the novel, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay’, is surely meant to emphasise not the vengefulness of God but the fallibility of human beings when they make moral judgements. Yet our fallibility does not mean that we can simply repudiate judgement altogether.

    After he had completed Anna Karenina in 1877, Tolstoy’s own life entered a period of moral torment which lasted till his death in 1910. In A Confession (1879), he condemns the period of youthful aristocratic selfishness and dissipation before his marriage in 1862 (a period from which he may have drawn material for his portrayal of Vronsky in Anna Karenina). He emphasises the guilt of the privileged. He rejects church ritual and dogma and Orthodoxy’s claim to exclusive truth, but ends with a resolution to separate the true from the false in the claims of religion. He tries to formulate the results of his task in What I Believe (1884). Here, he repudiates the metaphysical side of Christianity, putting all the emphasis on a moral teaching involving the repudiation of violence, of wealth and of sexual pleasure: the three principal doctrines of Tolstoyanism. In his later fiction, notably The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), The Kreuzer Sonata (1889) and Resurrection (1899), the preacher sometimes takes over from the artist. In this period, Tolstoy entered into sad and bitter conflict with his wife Sonya, the person best placed to know how often he failed to live up to his own precepts. The family life so dear to Levin in Anna Karenina now became a torment to his creator. In its place, Tolstoy adopted a moral absolutism which combined both grandeur, as in his attacks on the growing militarism in Europe, and absurdity, as in some of his behaviour towards Sonya.

    In the light of this later period, Tolstoy’s achievement in Anna Karenina stands out all the more markedly. For here, as perhaps nowhere else in the literature of any period, fiercely conflicting viewpoints and their dramatic interaction are presented with artistic sureness and an overriding sense of moral equilibrium. The claims of society, of morality and of history are shown at work on the lives of characters without the individual’s capacity for thought and for change ever seeming swamped by such claims. At the same time, Tolstoys’s dense and subtle orchestration of the developing lives of multiple characters never loses sight of the claims of readability. The novel is underpinned by a relentless narrative drive which sweeps the reader constantly forward to the conclusion. If Anna Karenina stands as a colossus of world literature, it is not through any attempt to achieve within art an Olympian detachment from human concerns. Rather, its grandeur stems from the force of sympathy and forgiveness through which it compels the reader to confront and to recognise all that is most human.

    E. B. Greenwood

    University of Kent at Canterbury

    Notes to the Introduction

    1. Tolstoy’s Letters, selected, edited and translated by R. F. Christian, University of London, the Athlone Press, London 1978, Vol. I, p. 197

    2. Boris Eikhenbaum, Tolstoi in the Seventies, translated by Albert Kaspin, Ardis, Ann Arbor 1982, p. 28

    3. All references to Schopenhauer are from Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne, in two volumes, Dover Publications Inc., New York 1958. The reference here is to Vol. I, p. 278.

    4. Schopenhauer, Vol. ii, p. 441

    5. Schopenhauer, Vol. ii, p. 443

    6. All the references to Sonya’s diaries are from the following edition: The Diaries of Sofia Tolstaya, edited by O. A. Golinenko (and others), translated by Cathy Porter, Jonathan Cape, London 1985. The reference here is to p. 845.

    7. ibid., p. 855

    8. ibid., p. 848

    9. Eikhenbaum, p. 128

    10. Tolstoy’s Diaries, edited and translated by R. F. Christian, abridged one-volume version of Harper Collins two vols., Flamingo, London 1994, p. 63

    11. Cited in D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, edited by Francis J. Whitfield, Vintage Books, Random House, New York 1958, p. 263

    12. Schopenhauer, Vol. i, pp. 254–5

    13. Tolstoy’s Letters, Vol. i, pp. 296–7

    14. Proposition 4.1212 of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1969, p. 50

    15. Tolstoy’s Letters, Vol. i, p. 311

    16. Sofia’s Diaries, p. 849

    17. Philip Rahv, Literature and the Sixth Sense, Faber and Faber, London 1970, p. 135

    18. Henry James, New York edition preface to The Tragic Muse, reprinted in The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, edited by R. P. Blackmur, Charles Scribner’s Sons, London 1950, p. 84

    19. Schopenhauer, Vol. ii, p. 463

    20. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, edited by G. H. Von Wright, translated by Peter Winch, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1980, p. 56e

    Bibliography

    Biographical material

    Aylmer Maude, The Life of Tolstoy, World’s Classics (reprinted two vols in one, Oxford University Press 1953

    Sofia Tolstaya, The Diaries, edited by O. A. Golinenko (and others), translated by Cathy Porter, Jonathan Cape, London 1985

    Leo Tolstoy, Tolstoy’s Diaries, edited and translated by R. F. Christian, Flamingo abridged one-volume version of Harper Collins two vols, Flamingo, London 1994

    Leo Tolstoy, Tolstoy’s Letters, 2 vols, edited and translated by R. F. Christian, University of London, The Athlone Press, London 1978

    A. N. Wilson, Tolstoy, Hamish Hamilton, London 1988

    Criticism

    R. F. Christian, Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1969

    Boris Eikhenbaum, Tolstoy in the Seventies, translated by Albert Kaspin, Ardis, Ann Arbor 1982

    Henry Gifford, Leo Tolstoy: A Critical Anthology, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1971

    Henry Gifford, Tolstoy (Past Masters), Oxford University Press, 1982

    E. B. Greenwood, Tolstoy: The Comprehensive Vision, J. M. Dent and Son, London 1975; reprinted as a University Paperback by Methuen and Co. Ltd, London 1980

    Malcom Jones (ed.), New Essays on Tolstoy, Cambridge University Press, 1978

    W. Gareth Jones (ed.), Tolstoi and Britain, Berg, Oxford/Washington DC 1995

    A. V. Knowles (ed.), Tolstoy: The Critical Heritage, Routledge and Kegan Paul, Henley and Boston 1978

    Ralph E. Matlaw (ed.), Tolstoy: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1967

    Logan Speirs, Tolstoy and Chekhov, Cambridge University Press, 1971

    G. W. Spence, Tolstoy the Ascetic, Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh and London 1967

    C. J. G. Turner, A Karenina Companion, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada 1993

    Articles

    Matthew Arnold, ‘Count Leo Tolstoi’, in Essays in Criticism; Second Series, Macmillan and Co. Ltd., London 1898), pp. 253–99 .

    Henry Gifford and Raymond Williams, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Anna Karenina’, reprinted in Russian Literature and Modern English Fiction, edited by Donald Davie, Gemini Books, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 1965). The articles were originally in Critical Quarterly, vol. i, no. 3.

    E. B. Greenwood, ‘The Unity of Anna Karenina’, Landfall, vol. 15, 1961, pp. 124–34

    Barbara Hardy, ‘Form and Freedom: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina’, with An Appendix: A Note on Certain Revisions in Anna Karenina, in The Appropriate Form: An Essay on the Novel, University of London, The Athlone Press, London 1971

    F. R. Leavis, ‘Anna Karenina: Thought and Significance in a Great Creative Work’, in Anna Karenina and Other Essays, Chatto and Windus, London 1967, pp. 9–32

    Thomas Mann, ‘Anna Karenina’ (1939), in Essays of Three Decades, translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter, Secker and Warburg, London 1947

    Lionel Trilling, ‘Anna Karenina’, in The Opposing Self, Secker and Warburg, London 1955, pp. 66–75

    Anna Karenina

    Vengeance is mine; I will repay.

    Part 1

    Chapter 1

    All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

    Everything was upset in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered an intrigue between her husband and their former French governess, and declared that she would not continue to live under the same roof with him. This state of things had now lasted for three days, and not only the husband and wife but the rest of the family and the whole household suffered from it. They all felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that any group of people who had met together by chance at an inn would have had more in common than they. The wife kept to her own rooms, the husband stopped away from home all day; the children ran about all over the house uneasily, the English governess quarrelled with the housekeeper and wrote to a friend asking if she could find her another situation; the cook had gone out just at dinner-time the day before and had not returned; and the kitchen-maid and coachman had given notice.

    On the third day after his quarrel with his wife, Prince Stephen Arkadyevich Oblonsky – Steve, as he was called in his set in Society – woke up at his usual time, eight o’clock, not in his wife’s bedroom but on the morocco leather-covered sofa in his study. He turned his plump, well-kept body over on the springy sofa as if he wished to have another long sleep, and tightly embracing one of the pillows leant his cheek against it; but then suddenly opened his eyes and sat up.

    ‘Let me see what was it?’ he thought, trying to recall his dream. ‘What was it? Oh yes – Alabin was giving a dinner-party in Darmstadt – no, not in Darmstadt but somewhere in America. Oh yes, Darmstadt was in America, – and Alabin was giving the party. The dinner was served on glass tables – yes, and the tables sang "Il mio tesoro . . . no, not exactly Il mio tesoro," but something better than that; and then there were some kind of little decanters that were really women.’ His eyes sparkled merrily and he smiled as he sat thinking. ‘Yes, it was very nice. There were many other delightful things which I can’t just get hold of – can’t catch now I’m awake.’ Then, noticing a streak of light that had made its way in at the side of the blind, he gaily let down his legs and felt about with his feet for his slippers finished with bronze kid (last year’s birthday present, embroidered by his wife); and from nine years’ habit he stretched out his arm, without rising, towards where his dressing-gown usually hung in their bedroom. And then he suddenly remembered that, and why, he was not sleeping there but in his study. The smile vanished from his face and he frowned.

    ‘Oh dear, dear, dear!’ he groaned recalling what had happened. And the details of his quarrel with his wife, his inextricable position, and, worst of all, his guilt, rose up in his imagination.

    ‘No, she will never forgive me; she can’t forgive me! And the worst thing about it is, that it’s all my own fault – my own fault; and yet I’m not guilty! That’s the tragedy of it!’ he thought. ‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ he muttered despairingly, as he recalled the most painful details of the quarrel. The worst moment had been when. returning home from the theatre merry and satisfied, with an enormous pear in his hand for his wife, he did not find her in the drawing-room nor, to his great surprise, in the study, but at last saw her in her bedroom with the unlucky note which had betrayed him in her hand.

    She sat there: the careworn, ever-bustling, and (as he thought) rather simple Dolly – with the note in her hand and a look of terror, despair, and anger on her face.

    ‘What is this? This?’ she asked, pointing to the note. And, as often happens, it was not so much the memory of the event that tormented him, as of the way he had replied to her.

    At that moment there had happened to him what happens to most people when unexpectedly caught in some shameful act: he had not had time to assume an expression suitable to the position in which he stood toward his wife now that his guilt was discovered. Instead of taking offence, denying, making excuses, asking forgiveness, or even remaining indifferent (anything would have been better than what he did), he involuntarily (‘reflex action of the brain,’ thought Oblonsky, who was fond of physiology) smiled his usual kindly and therefore silly smile.

    He could not forgive himself for that silly smile. Dolly, seeing it, shuddered as if with physical pain, and with her usual vehemence burst into a torrent of cruel words and rushed from the room. Since then she had refused to see him.

    ‘It’s all the fault of that stupid smile,’ thought Oblonsky.’ But what am I to do? What can I do?’ he asked himself in despair, and could find no answer.

    Chapter 2

    Oblonsky was truthful with himself. He was incapable of self-deception and could not persuade himself that he repented of his conduct. He could not feel repentant that he, a handsome amorous man of thirty-four, was not in love with his wife, the mother of five living and two dead children and only a year younger than himself. He repented only of not having managed to conceal his conduct from her. Nevertheless he felt his unhappy position and pitied his wife, his children, and himself. He might perhaps have been able to hide things from her had he known that the knowledge would so distress her. He had never clearly considered the matter, but had a vague notion that his wife had long suspected him of being unfaithful and winked at it. He even thought that she, who was nothing but an excellent mother of a family, worn-out, already growing elderly, no longer pretty, and in no way remarkable – in fact, quite an ordinary woman – ought to be lenient to him, if only from a sense of justice. It turned out that the very opposite was the case.

    ‘How awful! Oh dear, oh dear, how awful!’ Oblonsky kept repeating to himself, and could arrive at no conclusion. ‘And how well everything was going on till now – how happily we lived! She was contented, happy in her children; I never interfered with her but left her to fuss over them and the household as she pleased . . . Of course it’s not quite nice that she had been a governess in our house. That’s bad! There’s something banal, a want of taste, in carrying on with one’s governess – but then, what a governess!’ (He vividly pictured to himself Mlle Roland’s roguish black eyes, and her smile.) ‘Besides, as long as she was in the house I never took any liberties. The worst of the matter is, that she is already . . . Why need it all happen at once? Oh dear, dear, dear! What am I to do?’

    He could find no answer, except life’s usual answer to the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: live in the needs of the day, that is, find forgetfulness. He could no longer find forgetfulness in sleep, at any rate not before night, could not go back to the music and the songs of the little decanter-women, consequently he must seek forgetfulness in the dream of life.

    ‘We’ll see when the time comes,’ thought Oblonsky, and got up, put on his grey dressing-gown lined with blue silk, tied the cords and drawing a full breath of air into his broad chest went with his usual firm tread toward the window, turning out his feet that carried his stout body so lightly, drew up the blind and rang loudly. The bell was answered immediately by his old friend and valet, Matthew, who brought in his clothes, boots, and a telegram. He was followed by the barber with shaving tackle.

    ‘Any papers from the Office?’ asked Oblonsky, as he took the telegram and sat down before the looking-glass.

    ‘They’re on your table,’ answered Matthew with a questioning and sympathizing glance at his master – adding after a pause with a sly smile: ‘Some one has called from the jobmaster’s.’

    Oblonsky did not answer, but glanced at Matthew’s face in the looking-glass. From their looks, as they met in the glass, it was evident that they understood one another. Oblonsky’s look seemed to say: ‘Why do you tell me that? As if you don’t know!’

    Matthew put his hands into the pocket of his jacket, put out his foot, and looked at his master with a slight, good-humoured smile.

    ‘I ordered him to come the Sunday after next, and not to trouble you or himself needlessly till then,’ said he, evidently repeating a sentence he had prepared.

    Oblonsky understood that Matthew meant to have a joke and draw attention to himself. He tore open the telegram and read it, guessing at the words, which (as so often happens in telegrams) were misspelt, and his face brightened.

    ‘Matthew, my sister Anna Arkadyevna is coming to-morrow,’ he said, motioning away for a moment the shiny plump hand of the barber, which was shaving a rosy path between his long curly whiskers.

    ‘The Lord be thanked!’ said Matthew, proving by his answer that he knew just as well as his master the importance of this visit: namely, that Anna Arkadyevna, Stephen Arkadyevich’s favourite sister, might help to reconcile the husband and wife.

    ‘Is she coming alone, or with Mr. Karenin?’

    Oblonsky could not answer as the barber was busy with his upper lip; but he raised one finger, and Matthew nodded to him in the glass.

    ‘Alone. Would you like one of the upstairs rooms got ready?’

    ‘Ask Darya Alexandrovna.’

    ‘Darya Alexandrovna?’ Matthew repeated, as if in doubt.

    ‘Yes, tell her. Give her the telegram, and see what she says.’

    ‘You want to have a try at her?’ was what Matthew meant, but he only said: ‘Yes, sir.’

    Oblonsky was washed, his hair brushed, and he was about to dress, when Matthew, stepping slowly in his creaking boots, re-entered the room with the telegram in his hand. The barber was no longer there.

    ‘Darya Alexandrovna told me to say that she is going away. He may do as he pleases – that is, as you please, sir,’ he said, laughing with his eyes only; and, putting his hands in his pockets, with his head on one side, he gazed at his master. Oblonsky remained silent, then a kind and rather pathetic smile appeared on his handsome face.

    ‘Ah, Matthew!’ he said, shaking his head.

    ‘Never mind, sir – things will shape themselves.’

    ‘Shape themselves, eh?’

    ‘Just so, sir.’

    ‘Do you think so? – Who’s that?’ asked Oblonsky, hearing the rustle of a woman’s dress outside the door.

    ‘It’s me, sir,’ answered a firm and pleasant woman’s voice, and Matrena Filimonovna, the children’s nurse thrust her stern pock-marked face in at the door.

    ‘What is it, Matrena?’ asked Oblonsky, stepping out to her.

    Although he was entirely guilty and was conscious of it, almost every one in the house – even the nurse, Darya Alexandrovna’s best friend – sided with him.

    ‘What is it?’ said he mournfully.

    ‘Won’t you go and try again, sir? By God’s grace you might make it up! She suffers dreadfully; it’s pitiful to see her, and everything in the house is topsy-turvy. You should consider the children! Own up, sir – it can’t be helped! There’s no joy without. . .’

    ‘But she won’t admit me!’

    ‘Do your part – God is merciful. Pray to Him, sir, pray to Him!’

    ‘All right – now go,’ said Oblonsky, suddenly blushing.

    ‘I must get dressed,’ said he, turning to Matthew, and he resolutely threw off his dressing-gown.

    Matthew blew some invisible speck off the shirt which he held ready gathered up like a horse’s collar, and with evident pleasure invested with it his master’s carefully tended body.

    Chapter 3

    When he was quite dressed Oblonsky sprinkled some scent on himself, pulled down his cuffs, and as usual distributing in different pockets his cigarette-case, matches, pocket-book, and the watch with its double chain and bunch of charms, he shook out his handkerchief, and feeling clean, sweet, healthy, and physically bright in spite of his misfortune, went with a slight spring in each step into the dining-room where his coffee stood ready. Beside the coffee lay letters and papers from the Office.

    He read the letters, one of which impressed him unpleasantly. It concerned the sale of a forest on his wife’s estate, and came from a dealer who wanted to buy that forest. This forest had to be sold; but until he was reconciled with his wife the sale was quite out of the question. What was most unpleasant was that a financial consideration would now be mixed up with the impending reconciliation. The idea that he might be biased by that consideration, might seek a reconciliation in order to sell the forest, offended him. Having looked through his letters, Oblonsky drew the Departmental papers toward him, and turning over the pages of two files made a few notes on them with a big pencil; then pushing them aside, began to drink his coffee.

    At the same time he unfolded the still damp morning paper, and began reading. Oblonsky subscribed to and read a Liberal paper – not an extreme Liberal paper but one that expressed the opinions of the majority. And although neither science, art, nor politics specially interested him, he firmly held to the opinions of the majority and of his paper on those subjects, changing his views when the majority changed theirs, – or rather, not changing them – they changed imperceptibly of their own accord.

    Oblonsky’s tendency and opinions were not his by deliberate choice: they came of themselves, just as he did not choose the fashion of his hats or coats but wore those of the current style. Living in a certain social set, and having a desire, such as generally develops with maturity, for some kind of mental activity, he was obliged to hold views, just as he was obliged to have a hat. If he had a reason for preferring Liberalism to the Conservatism of many in his set, it was not that he considered Liberalism more reasonable, but because it suited his manner of life better. The Liberal Party maintained that everything in Russia was bad, and it was a fact that Oblonsky had many debts and decidedly too little money. The Liberal Party said that marriage was an obsolete institution which ought to be reformed; and family life really gave Oblonsky very little pleasure, forcing him to tell lies and dissemble, which was quite contrary to his nature. The Liberal Party said, or rather hinted, that religion was only good as a check on the more barbarous portion of the population; and Oblonsky really could not stand through even a short church service without pain in his feet, nor understand why one should use all that dreadful high-flown language about another world while one can live so merrily in this one. Besides, Oblonsky was fond of a pleasant joke, and sometimes liked to perplex a simple-minded man by observing that if you’re going to be proud of your ancestry, why stop short at Prince Rurik and repudiate your oldest ancestor – the ape?

    Thus Liberalism became habitual to Oblonsky, and he loved his paper as he loved his after-dinner cigar, for the slight mistiness it produced in his brain. He read the leading article, which explained that in our time it is needless to raise the cry that Radicalism is threatening to swallow up all Conservative elements and to maintain that the Government should take measures to crush the hydra of revolution; for, on the contrary, ‘in our opinion the danger lies not in an imaginary hydra of revolution but in an obstinate clinging to tradition which hampers progress,’ etc. He also read the finance article in which Bentham and Mill [1] were mentioned and hits were made at the Ministry. With his natural quickness of perception he understood the meaning of each hit, whence it came, for whom it was meant and what had provoked it, and this as usual gave him a certain satisfaction. But to-day the satisfaction was marred by the memory of Matrena Filimonovna’s advice, and of the fact that there was all this trouble in the house. He went on to read that there was a rumour of Count Beust’s [2] journey to Wiesbaden; [3] that there would be no more grey hairs; that a light brougham was for sale, and a young person offered her services; but all this information did not give him the quiet, ironical pleasure it usually did.

    Having finished the paper, his second cup of coffee, and a buttered roll, he got up, flicked some crumbs off his waistcoat, and, expanding his broad chest, smiled joyfully, not because there was anything specially pleasant in his mind – no, the smile was but the result of a healthy digestion. But that joyful smile at once brought everything back to his mind, and he grew thoughtful.

    Then he heard the sound of two childish voices outside the door, and recognized them as the voices of his eldest daughter, Tanya, and of his little boy Grisha. They were dragging something along, and had upset it.

    ‘I told you not to put passengers on the roof,’ the girl shouted in English. ‘Now pick them up!’

    ‘Everything is disorganized,’ thought Oblonsky; ‘here are the children running wild –’ and going to the door he called them in. They left the box, which represented a train, and came to their father.

    The girl, her father’s pet, ran boldly in, embraced him, and hung laughing on his neck, pleased, as she always was, to smell the familiar scent of his whiskers. Having kissed his face, flushed by stooping and lit up by tenderness, the girl unclasped her hands and was going to run away, but he held her back.

    ‘How’s Mama?’

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