Anna Karenina

In the last several weeks I've launched an assault on Leo Tolstoy's novel, Anna Karenina. So far, I'm only 200 or so pages in.  I last read the book almost thirty years ago, and consequently remember almost nothing of my experience with the book.  To support my reading, I viewed the Tom Stoppard movie adaption of the book.  Starring Keira Knightly, the movie is competent but seems to suggest that Tolstoy's books don't really belong on the screen.  With apologies to Greto Garbo, who starred in an early version of the book, no screen version can do justice to the internal debates that constitute so much of the novel's style and substance. 

Stoppard's main innovation in this version of Anna Karenina is that he avoids any pretense of realism by relying on an overtly theatrical mise en scene. While there's nothing wrong with converting the book into a play, it often seems as if this technique is primarily employed to avoid the cost of staging large-scale scenes.  As for the character of Anna Karenina, the new movie version seems to suggest that a lot of her power resides in her physical beauty.  Certainly her lines don't suggest any undue curiosity about the complexity of her life journey.  On the other hand, Jude Law is brilliant as Karnenin. He's dignified, reserved, proud, wounded, and cold--everything Tolstoy seemed to have meant him to be. 

The book itself is going well.  On the negative side, I sometimes wonder what makes the book so beloved.  Unlike the grandeur of the Napoleonic context of War and Peace, Anna Karenina sometimes revolves around an almost intentionally ordinary adultery scandal. On the other hand, Tolstoy does demonstrate an uncanny ability to appreciate both the strengths and the weakness of all of his characters.  As I move further through the novel, the villains seem less and less villainous, and the heroes seem less and less heroic.  That is to say, while Vronsky is somewhat spoiled and immature, he's also capable of behaving with courage and gallantry.  Conversely, while Count Karenin is awkward and off-putting, he exhibits many excellent qualities, including self-control.  But even Kitty's scorned lover, Levin, turns out to be something less than the hero one expects him to be. He's hard-working, loyal, and romantic, but he also lacks many of the wonderful traits of his fun-loving and tactful friend, Prince "Stiva."

To be sure, I'll post again on Anna Karenina as I get deeper into the novel.  But Gary Saul Morson's work of criticism, Anna Karenina in Our Time:  Seeing More Wisely, suggests that my early impressions of the book are not entirely original.  Morson argues that Tolstoy's genius lies in the fact that he often intentionally veers into long descriptions of mundane topics in order to make a philosophical point:  that life isn't made up of a series of meaningful plot points.  Reading 200 pages of Anna Karenina involves one in several narrative dead ends.  For instance, there's no really compelling need for the reader to spend so much time on the details of a hunt, race, or ball. Morson maintains that Tolstoy's decision to spend time on these ostensible plot detours is intentional.  He wants to depict life as it is, as a canvas filled out by as many blank or empty spaces as colorful ones. Of course, Tolstoy has the power to hold our attention even when he's depicting the quotidian details of life.  This is why many people enjoy the society scenes in War and Peace as much as they do the description of the battle of Borodino.   But Morson argues that we become really enthralled with Tolstoy's great works when the blank spots on the canvas convince us that we are finally seeing life "as it really is," with all its highs and lows, and all its detours and dead ends.

Tolstoy's Resurrection

When preparing to read the book, Resurrection, I read some of the reader comments on Amazon. 
I think one reader said that the book helped him to understand the Russian Revolution. I think what he meant was that Tolstoy's depiction of a woman caught up in the courts (and later the prison system), helped him to understand just how bloated, corrupt, and alienating the Russian bureaucracy could be in the late 19th or early 20th century.   At any rate, Tolstoy's Resurrection is also a nice synthesis between the first and second phases of Tolstoy's writing career.  Although the book is overtly Christian, and has a clear didactic purpose, its treatment of the protagonist is nuanced, humane, empathetic, and complex.  Like all of the characters in Tolstoy's best novels, Resurrection's protagonist is filled with complicated, many-layered emotional and intellectual responses to every major decision he confronts.  Didactic or not, Resurrection allows us to understand how even the simplest moral choices turn out to be Matryoshka dolls, filled with other, increasingly intricate moral dilemmas.  More than anything, Tolstoy's Resurrection reminds that his turn toward Christian writing should not be regarded as a descent from the stylistic heights of War and Peace and Anna Karenina.  Like any of his other earlier books, Resurrection is powerfully written, the product of sustained and serious thinking. 

Liza Knapp on Russian Literature

Looking at my poor blog's record of annual activity, I noticed a marked decline in productivity from on year to the next.  Determined to reverse the trend, I will post something very brief today about Liza Knapp's audio lecture series, The Giants of Russian Literature:  Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov.  What shall I say about this Modern Scholar course?  Only that it left little impression on me.  No matter:  today I'm going to be a good student of Soviet production by committing to the quantity rather than the quality of my posts.  Dear reader, the problem is not all on my side:  audio courses about literature rarely seem to succeed.  I'm all for literacy criticism, but most audio courses dealing with novels seem to offer little more than thinly disguised synopses.  While I have nothing negative to say about this particular course, I can't see how it benefits anybody to spend more than fifty percent of a lecture describing how characters move through time toward marriage, or worse, death.  

At any rate, Knapp gives us some biographical detail about these four authors of genius.  We're reminded that Turgenev was a master stylist, an unrepentant Westernizer, the father of an illegitimate girl, the lover of an opera singer (the physical aspect of this relationship not absolutely proven), and the author of a book, Notes of a Hunter, which helped to discredit the institution of serfdom. We're also reminded that Dostoevsky--Christian mystic, Slavophile, and literary innovator (Knapp uses Notes from the Underground as well as the Diary of a Writer to prove the point)--was once condemned to death for joining the ranks of a minor conspiracy against the government.  And Tolstoy?  Knapp discusses his multidimensional life, in which he played a shockingly large variety of different parts, including moralist, landowner, author, aristocrat, Christian penitent, autodidact, translator, bee-keeper, ersatz peasant laborer, patriarch, and saint.  Knapp's emphasis with Chekhov is his dualism as both doctor and writer.  

Knapp's course is long on description but just a little short on analysis.  Her purpose, however, may be limited to getting us interested enough in Anna Karenina or the Underground Man or the Lady with a Dog to go out and read the novels or short story.  Her thesis about the nature of the Russian literature is that it offer English readers something special:  an expanded understanding of the nature of love.  That is to say, the great Russian writers don't limit discussions of love to physical and romantic love.  Instead, they explore many other kinds of love, including love for one's fellow human beings, love of personal or social transformation, and love for the transcendent.