For ten years Marilyn Green Faulkner has been writing a column for Meridian titled “Back to the Best Books.” Each article focuses on a classic work of literature. Hundreds of readers have joined Marilyn’s Internet “Best Books Club” to read and discuss the classics together. (To join the discussion, contact Marilyn at www.thebestbooksclub.com.)
Now Marilyn has featured 36 of these great works in her new book, Back to the Best Books. Each of the twelve chapters offers three book selections, and Meridian will be running a chapter each month. Great ideas for ward book groups or casual readers who are ready to take it up a notch! The following is taken from Chapter One: Families First.
Chapter One: Family First
The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.
—Erma Bombeck
Beginning with Adam, Eve, and their troublesome offspring, the family has been the central focus of oral and written literature. Each of us belongs to one or more families, and we could all use a little more wisdom about how to manage those tenuous connections.
Submitted for your consideration: three unforgettable families, ranging in class and origin from Russian aristocrats to London merchants to Welsh coalminers. The Karenins, the Forsytes, and the Morgans offer portraits of families in crisis, and if there is one thing that we can be sure of in family life it is this: the crises will come. How we face them is up to us. Each of these three novels offers a picture of family life that may enlighten you about your own “little band of characters,” and encourage you to strengthen the ties that bind you together.
Conscience and Compassion: Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
“Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy it its own way.” With this famous line Leo Tolstoy begins a tale that encompasses all of the triumphs, struggles and crises that occur in families: fidelity and infidelity, faith and disbelief, toil and leisure, sibling rivalry and devotion, birth and death.
For Tolstoy the story of Anna Karenina, a wealthy member of the Russian gentry who falls into an affair that ends tragically with her suicide, provided a way to examine the family dynamic from every angle. 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 questioned his motives, and wondered whether it was possible to write a moral book about the subject of immorality. It was, and from the day of its publication to this, Anna Karenina has captivated readers all over the world.
Synopsis
Anna Karenina is actually the story of two marriages, one in decline and one in ascendance. Anna and her husband, Karenin, lead the average life of an aristocratic couple, caring for their son and attending to social duties, until Anna meets the dashing soldier Vronsky, with whom she falls passionately in love. Vronsky has been courting a young woman named Kitty who is also pursued by a man named Levin. When Vronsky becomes enamored of Anna he abandons Kitty and she falls ill. Eventually, she renews her relationship with Levin and they marry.
The tragic decline of the Karenins’ marriage is juxtaposed upon the steady progress of the relationship between Kitty and Levin. Anna seeks a divorce from her husband (which never actually occurs) and abandons her son to go with Vronsky to Italy, where she becomes pregnant with his child. Eventually they return to Russia, where she is ostracized from society because of her affair. She becomes increasingly paranoid and depressed and eventually throws herself under a train. Meanwhile, Levin and Kitty have a son and grow to truly love and value each other.
What Makes it Great?
There is nothing remarkable about the plot of Anna Karenina; countless novels have been written about infidelity in marriage. So what makes this book a classic?
To begin with, 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, and each novelist employs various tactics to this end.
One way that Tolstoy accomplishes this is through his sheer volume of detail. After several hundred pages of confusing Russian names, long digressions into philosophy, and more details about Russian daily life than we may have wanted, we find that we have become more than observers of Anna’s world; we’re members of the family. We’ve been required to expend some effort to stay with the story, and through the creative and active involvement of our brains, our imaginations, and our emotions, we have come to feel like participants in this drama. This transformation has occurred because the novel is simultaneously stimulating the mind, emotions, imagination, memory and understanding. To paraphrase Walter Cronkite, we are there.
(Warning: One of the great challenges in reading Russian literature is dealing with all of the names. Karenin becomes Karenina when applied to a woman, and everybody seems to have two or three forenames and a couple of nicknames as well! Many novels kindly list the cast of characters at the front of the book: most helpful. Still, fortitude is required to keep it all straight. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)
From the opening lines, Tolstoy pulls us inextricably into the everyday existence of this extended family. Notice how he opens the narrative with a disarming description of the infidelity of a minor character — foreshadowing the tragedy to come — yet treating it in a light manner, drawing us in with his casual tone. Nothing about the opening warns us that this is a story of a tragic love that ends in suicide. We sense no danger; certainly the situation is serious, but not dire; some resolution may yet be possible:
“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 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.” (1)
Oblonsky’s marital troubles and the resulting emotions felt by his wife and children are so succinctly expressed here that one is startled. We’re not even to the second paragraph and we have heard so much, so soon! Because of the light, easy tone, we feel interested in this situation, we want to see what will happen, and thus Tolstoy has captured us.
When Anna enters the picture we already feel a part of her extended family. Tolstoy has let us in a side door (perhaps through the servant’s entrance) and we are part of the action as it unfolds.
Time and again when the tension grows overwhelming Tolstoy will lighten up and treat us to a day scything wheat with the servants, or sledding on a snowy hillside. He has a way of making everything interesting; we love to share in this world. Then suddenly, Tolstoy jolts us, making us look beyond the action to the deeper meaning of events. Here, for example, Vronsky (Anna’s lover) finds that he irritable and easily offended, and suddenly realizes that his grumpiness is symptomatic; it is a result of his guilt. This easy move from events to their deeper meaning is a mark of greatness:
“He was angry with everybody for their interference, just because he felt in his soul that they were right… The recollection of incidents often repeated rose vividly in his mind, where lies and deceptions revolting to his nature had been necessary. He remembered most vividly having more than once noticed her feeling of shame at the necessity for this deception and lying. And he experienced a strange feeling which since his union with Anna sometimes overcame him. It was a feeling of revulsion against something, against Karenin, or against himself, or against the whole world — he hardly knew which. But he always drove away this strange feeling.” (168)
Good People, Bad Choices
This is not a book about bad people. It is a book about good people who make bad choices and suffer the consequences, and we suffer with them. In the closing scenes, Anna Karenina moves toward the train station and her doom. 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: through the use of foreshadowing Tolstoy causes us to remember an earlier moment in the novel, hundreds of pages back, when another person fell beneath the wheels of a train, and this device causes us to reflect on the cyclical nature of the story, and, by extension, of life. 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?”
Even as she throws herself onto the tracks she questions her decision, and we are drawn right into her dying thoughts: “A feeling seized her like that she had experienced when preparing to enter the water in bathing, and she crossed herself. The familiar gesture of making the sign of the cross called up a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness, that obscured everything for her, broke and life showed itself to her for an instant with all its bright past joys…. And at that same moment she was horror struck at what she was doing. ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Why?’ She wished to rise, to throw herself back, but something huge and relentless struck her on the head and dragged her down. ‘God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling…” (695)
Crossing the Fragile Line
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. Tolstoy juxtaposes Anna’s downward spiral of misery upon the upward spiral of happiness growing in Levin and Kitty’s life, and we are reminded of the countless small decisions that have led to the tragic conclusion of one narrative and the happy resolution of the other. With a few subtle changes, all could have ended differently.
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 a greater level of wisdom. That new depth of insight was then available to me as my own life unfolded. Now, thirty-five years later, I have recently reread Anna Karenina, and find that I can combine its insights and beauties with experiences and thoughts from over three decades of living since my last encounter with the novel, adding new levels of enrichment to the experience.
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.
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. And that cumulative vote makes it a classic.
Quotations taken from Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. A Norton Crictical Edition. W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1995.
About the Author: Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy was a man of passionate extremes, vacillating between extreme self-indulgence and self-denial in his lifetime. Born in 1828 to an aristocratic family in central Russia, Tolstoy spent his early years living an idyllic life on the family estate, coddled by aunts and grandparents after the death of his mother. Then, just after the family moved to Moscow so that the boys could attend school, his father died suddenly, and Leo seemed to lose his emotional balance.
At age sixteen, Tolstoy entered the university to study Arabic languages, yet fell into a pattern of dissipation, gambling, and debt. He struggled over the next several years, repeatedly writing to his aunts about his resolution to reform, and then falling again into his bad habits. Eventually he entered the army with his brother and served in several campaigns.
At the age of 34, Tolstoy fell in love with Sonya Behrs, the 19-year-old sister of a friend, and changed his life for the better. Together they had twelve children, and Sonya became his personal assistant, typing manuscripts and helping him finish his landmark novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
Tolstoy suffered bouts of depression, questioning his own motives and his desire for security and prosperity. Eventually he gave up all of his possessions, including the family estate, to live as a peasant, surrounded by acolytes who believed in his teachings. Estranged from Sonya and rejected by all but his youngest daughter, Tolstoy eventually died in a train station in 1910.
Thousands paid their respects at his simple funeral.
Though friends told him that his rambling, introspective style would make his books irrelevant in the literary tradition, Anna Karenina and War and Peace were recently cited in Time Magazine’s “Ten Greatest Books of All Time,” in places one and three respectively.
Sources:
The Literature Network
Orwin, Donna T. The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Next week: Back to the Best Books, Chapter One: Families First continues with “People as Possessions: The Forsyte Saga, by John Galsworthy.”
