Reviews

Conscience and Compassion:
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
by Marilyn Green Faulkner

“Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” With this famous line Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina, a novel that encompasses all of the triumphs, struggles and crises that occur in families.

Recently I had a letter from a thoughtful reader who questioned some of the selections for the Best Books Club. Though he agreed that such works as Anna Karenina and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn were undoubtedly “classics,” he wondered whether we ought to be reading books that had wicked behavior and sinful people in them. This is a fair question, one that every moral person must address. In order to gain understanding, how much of the negative should we take into our minds? What constitutes a “moral” book, one that adheres to our shared desire to seek after that which is “virtuous, lovely, of good report and praiseworthy?” I don’t profess to hold an easy answer to this question, but I would like to talk a little about morality in literature. April’s selection for the Best Books Club is Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. Called by some the greatest novel ever written in any language, it is a tragic tale of marital infidelity. Like the stories in the Bible, this tale provides an invaluable service: it presents an opportunity to examine the ramifications of wrongdoing without actually having to experience its devastating effects. This is accomplished by the ability of the artist to both engage our emotions and imaginations in order to elevate our level of understanding.

“Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy it its own way.” With this famous line Leo Tolstoy begins a story of that encompasses all of the triumphs, struggles and crises that occur in families: fidelity and infidelity, faith and disbelief, childbirth and death, toil and leisure, sibling rivalry and devotion. For Tolstoy the story of Anna Karenina, a wealthy member of the Russian gentry who falls into an affair that ends in her death by suicide, provided a way to examine the family dynamic from every angle, and into its pages he poured all of his philosophical searching about the meaning of life, religion, social justice and familial love. After finishing it he renounced all of his earlier works and remarked, “I wrote everything into Anna Karenina, and nothing was left over.” At its publication most critics praised Tolstoy for his careful handling of a difficult subject, though some, like my correspondent, questioned his motives. In order to decide whether Tolstoy succeeds in writing a moral book about the subject of immorality, we should look for a moment at what happens when we read a book of this caliber.

You are there.

The effort required to conquer a great book, like that expended to scale a mountain, is rewarded at the peak when a new vista opens up, one that is only available to those who have been willing to make the climb. There is nothing remarkable about the plot of Anna Karenina; countless novels have been written about infidelity in marriage. What makes this a great book? Tolstoy has an incredible gift for description, writes beautiful prose (even in translation) and creates finely detailed, multi-dimensional characters. But there is something more. The genius of a great novel is its ability to literally immerse you in the lives of its characters. After several hundred pages of confusing Russian names, long digressions into philosophy, and more details about Russian daily life than you may have wanted, you find that you have become more than an observer. Through the creative and active involvement of your brain, your imagination, and your emotions, you have become a participant in this drama. This transformation has occurred because the novel is simultaneously stimulating your mind, your emotions, your imagination, your memory and your understanding. As Walter Cronkite used to say, you are there.

In the closing scenes, Anna Karenina moves toward the train station. On one level, we can easily trace the events in the plot that have led up to this moment: her affair with Vronsky, her separation from her child, the slow mental collapse brought about by her tormented conscience. Yet at the same time we are asked to do more: we remember an earlier moment in the novel, hundreds of pages back, when another person fell beneath the wheels of a train, and reflect on the cyclical nature of the story, and of life. We juxtapose Anna’s downward spiral of misery with the upward spiral of happiness growing in Levin and Kitty’s life, and are jolted into a realization of the countless small decisions that have led to the dramatic conclusion of the narrative. We experience, through Anna’s tormented mind, the despairing twists of logic that drive a fine, bright person to suicide, and finally are forced onto the tracks ourselves. “What will she do?” is replaced by “What would I do?” Tolstoy draws us further into the dilemma as he has Levin, the hero of the tale and father of a happy family, entertain thoughts of suicide as well. We realize that it is not just the tragedies of life that make us desperate, but also the fleeting, fragile nature of its joys.

At the age of nineteen I read Anna Karenina for the first time and felt (as Tolstoy intended me to feel) that I had lived Anna’s life with her, every step of the way. I could no longer think of myself as a person who would never step onto those tracks, for I had been there with her. I could see, and feel, what she should have done, and yet empathize with her inability to do it. Tolstoy was teaching me conscience and compassion at the same time. For a moment, at nineteen, I was lifted beyond my years and my limited understanding into another life. That new depth of insight was then available to me as my own life unfolded. Now, thirty years later, I have recently reread Anna Karenina, and find that I can combine its insights and beauties with experiences and thoughts from three decades of living since my last encounter with the novel, adding new levels of enrichment to the experience. In this way a great book is interactive; we bring our best to it and it offers its best to us. When an author combines brilliant artistry with the desire to uplift and edify, as Tolstoy does, we will reach the end of the book with a deepened sense of what it is to be human and what it means to reach for the divine.

Re-imagine your world

The careful and compassionate observation of the human soul is the great gift that a great novel brings us. We cannot live everywhere. We cannot be everyone. But we can read, and when we read we can send out a thread of connection to another kind of human, and then another, and then another, until we are reinvented by our interconnectedness with our race. This is what great novelists do for thoughtful readers. Great books teach us about the shared experience of living, the complexities of the human psyche and the simplicity of the human heart. It is difficult to read great literature and be narrow and prejudiced, and it is easier to understand our own experiences when they can be examined and illuminated through fictional lives. Tolstoy said, “Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen.” In order to accomplish this, the best fiction may also show us, in heartbreaking detail, how human beings fail.

Tolstoy’s life was full of contradiction and struggle: he envisioned an ideal and could never quite reconcile his life to meet it. In later life he considered himself more of a sage, and attempted to teach his idea of Christianity to his followers. Basically he believed in five leading ideas: first, that human beings must control their emotions, especially anger; second, that absolute celibacy outside of marriage was required; third, that men should not swear oaths; fourth, that men must not resist evil (an idea that inspired Gandhi) and finally, that men must learn to love their enemies. He believed that the secret to changing the world lay in education, and had a life-long interest in educational theory and practice. His fiction grew out of his own diaries, in which he strove to understand his feelings and actions. Thus, his fiction is characterized by a curious realism that pays attention to the smallest details of life, while at the same time reaching deep into the most complex emotions and ideas. The composer, Peter Tchaikovsky, described Tolstoy’s gift in this way:

“The main feature, or rather the main note which resounds through every page of Tolstoi, even the seemingly unimportant ones, is love, compassion for Man in general, pity of some sort for his weakness, his insignificance, for the shortness of his life, the vanity of his desires.Yes, Tolstoi is for me the dearest, the deepest, the greatest of all artists.”

There are a few books that, when completed, will never be forgotten. For me, Anna Karenina was such a book, as it has been for millions of thoughtful readers. Though each of us must decide for ourselves what books fit the description of “virtuous, lovely, of good report and praiseworthy,” I believe we must remember that virtue is innocence tried in the fire of tribulation and transformed into righteousness. This process involves some interaction with the difficult realities of this world. Through the best fiction we can grow in wisdom and virtue without the devastating effects of disobedience, while at the same time growing in compassion for and understanding both of others and ourselves.

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, is the April selection for the Best Books Club, a group of like-minded individuals who read the classics together and discuss them via the Internet. Log on to our website at www.thebestbooksclub.com. Here is our reading schedule for January – Jun, 2003:

January/February: The Forsyte Saga, John Galsworthy

March: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

April: Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

May: Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton

June: Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens

July: Watership Down, Richard Adams

Readers’ Comments on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

I’ll never forget the day in read that special book. I will be forever grateful to my Grandmother who shared the wonder she was experiencing in reading it herself. I was intrigued and went home to North Carolina and found a copy for myself to read.

What a magical place that book created in my heart. It was not until years later that I understood why the book was so magical to me. I can say, though, that it gave me a window into the world I had previously only seen glimpses of on the nightly news and in the US News and World Report Magazine. I became aware of the reality of a very different world than the one my parents had created for me to dwell so safely in. Lynette

Our website: www.thebestbooksclub.com

2002 Meridian Magazine.  All Rights Reserved.