Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)

Today we spent three hours talking about Anna Karenina in my class on Adultery in Nineteenth Century Fiction.  Three hours was not nearly enough and yet the class has to move on to Jude the Obscure.  I could talk about this book for several more classes.

I learned more about Tolstoy.  As many of you may know, he was a Count and very well educated.  He became religious in later life.  Tolstoy despised the society of St. Petersburg.  He had something like thirteen children with his wife and many other children through his liaisons.  It took him many years to complete this novel and Tolstoy was most like the character Levin.

This is a novel of such incredible scope.  There are of course the relationships-the marriages and the liaisons.  Dolly and Stefan, Anna and Karenin, Anna and Vronsky, Levin and Kitty, Dolly and Kitty’s parents, who have one of only two happy marriages in the book.  (The other happier relationship is a peasant couple.)  There are themes of city versus country, accepting or not accepting the boundaries of marriage, doing what is expected/not expected of one in society, motherhood, aristocrats as compared to laborers, religion and, I am sure many more.

I have loved reading this novel.  The scenes are beautifully rendered whether it is Anna and Vronsky’s first meeting, a ball, a wedding, hunting in the country, etc.  The characters have depth and generally, like real human beings, have complex emotions and are not always consistent.

It is a big commitment to read AK.  It has taken me the better part of a month.  It has been time incredibly well spent.  I remember that, as a child, for the longest time I thought the word Classic translated to boring.  That changed when I read Little Women.  If you think that classics are not for you, think again.  This is a wonderful novel.  I liked it much more than Madame Bovary which I previously blogged.  Pick it up and see what you think!