Tormented by this ignorance

I've added the 'fiction review' label to this well aware that it was first published in book form in 1878 and that what I have to say about Anna Karenina comes nowhere near to being a review.

But if one does a website that claims to be at least in part about books one can hardly let the day on which one finishes such a book pass without marking the occasion.

For much of the way I wasn't entirely convinced it belonged alongside Proust, Joyce, George Eliot and all. Tolstoy paints a very broad canvas and, like Julius Caesar in Shakespeare's play, Anna doesn't have as big a part in the work she gives her name to as one might imagine. There's plenty of essay mileage to be had cross referencing her with Emma Bovary and Dorothea Brooke but she's nothing like the whole point and nothing but the point.

I gave myself a bit of a rest by not taking notes and page references, or not until part 8 ( of 8). Tolstoy has been brilliant in documenting the Anna/Karenin/Vronsky triangle but is building towards a wider perspective and the politics of C19th Russia takes up as much space as the emotional struggles. While Levin isn't exactly Tolstoy in the same way that Stephen Daedalus isn't Joyce, Paul Morel isn't Lawrence and Marcel isn't Proust, we know they are to some considerable extent and, as will become more apparent in A.N. Wilson's biography, Tolstoy- like Hardy and, quite possibly, Shakespeare - wasn't happily married.

If Julius Caesar only makers it to about halfway through his own play, Anna at least makes it to the end of part 7 of her novel. That last chapter is a highlight of all writing, and translation, but that is the end of her story and she casts less of a shadow on part 8 than you might think if the book's really about her. Tolstoy, like Julian Barnes more recently, likes to ruminate at some lengths over the consequences and so part 8 is Levin, Tolstoy's representative in the story, coming to terms with himself.

The only page reference I had noted was at three-quarters of the way through where an infant boy dies of croup. My few encounters with croup had previously been Private Pike in Dad's Army explaining to Capt. Mainwaring that his mother insists on him wearing his scarf to prevent him from catching it and for years I had taken it to be not only a droll but a fictitious one, too. Many years after I was taken aback to find out it was real. And now Tolstoy is responsible for me finding out it could be fatal. Anna Karenina was thus nearly as much a humbling voyage of self-discovery for me as it is for Levin.

He starts echoing things one recognizes, reading 'non-materialist' philosophers like 'Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer before,

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any possibility of knowing what he was and why he was living in the world, tormented by this ignorance...

and we need not pursue the sentence any further without it getting out of hand. But he is finding 'inner peace'. A major theme and conflict for Anna, among others, has been between the sophisticated, often duplicitous city life in Moscow and Sr. Petersburg and the simpler, but less immediately stimulating, rural life.

Levin works his way towards an idea of 'good' that is outside of cause and effect, some sense of self that looks to me, as many such abiding within contradictions and difficulties do, like 'negative capability'. That would have been fine. Stop there. But Tolstoy can't stop writing and has to take it on a few more pages yet and allow him to rediscover his Christian 'faith'. 

D'oh. But it was the 1870's and Tolstoy was well ahead of his time.

 

Having sneaked a look at A.N. Wilson's foreword to the biography, he sets the scene and gives us some context, making a comparison between the flowering of C19th Russian literature with that of Elizabethan England and citing Pushkin as literature's equivalent of Mozart.

So, we'll get some Pushkin lined up for once the biography has been dispatched in what might be fairly short order. 500-odd pages. That's no time at all when something's any good.