Anna Karenina
I'm continuing to read great novels because I feel drawn to it lately (little cosmoses of human nature and the ways of the world). I read War and Peace way back when (Ann Dunnigan trans.), in my main reading days, then upon completion of that mammoth work immediately launched into Anna Karenina only to quit after 300 or so pages. Too much Tolstoy at the time. That was a long time ago. Now I am reading Anna Karenina anew:
Parts: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
I'm reading the Bantam Classics, Joel Carmichael trans.
Started Mar. 25, 2009 ~ Finished Apr. 20, 2009.
13 Comments:
Couple things...
1. Tolstoy references Dickens early on in the novel. I mean a direct reference. It comes across as interesting for some reason.
2. It's interesting to see the timeline of Tolstoy's two great novels (plus his semi-major last novel) with Dostoevsky's own major novels.
War and Peace (1865-67)
Crime and Punishment (1866)
The Idiot (1868-69)
The Possessed (1871-72)
Anna Karenina (1875-77)
Brothers Karamazov (1879-80)
Resurrection (1899)
Interesting that War and Peace and Crime and Punishment were being written at the same time.
I don't see obvious influence one way or the other, though Tolstoy was in more of a position to be influenced by Dostoevsky's stranger output.
I suppose one can see some correlation between Crime and Punishment and Resurrection. (Yes, I know, probably libraries of literary criticism have been written on the subject...)
Initial impression after 66 pages:
This is a great novel. You heard it here first.
What surprises about War and Peace is the same here with Anna K. The cinematic nature and page-turning nature of the novel.
There are more characters to care about though here in Anna K. I suspect.
He even keeps the chapters - or sections really - short to move things along, like in War and Peace.
There is a reason Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are the twin towers of Russian literature.
Also, 66 pages in and Anna hasn't made her appearance yet. And it works. The story, the characters thus far carry things on their own. And you just have something to look forward to.
More subtle irony and satire going on here in AK than in W&P. Some Dostoevsky-esque social observation going on as well.
I have pretty good intuition regarding things like literature. For instance I always sort of knew that when you heard a person say Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's great novel it meant they hadn't read War and Peace.
I'm not sure what Tolstoy is up to in this novel, Anna Karenina. It seems it is a gigantic study in shallow, self-absorbed, insufferable human beings. Comically so. Other than Varenka I can't see any character in this novel that is in the remotest sense truly interesting.
Part of this is the annoyance one always comes to when one is six hundred and some odd pages into a novel, but...
The virtues of the novel are many and great. Of course this is true. I've been writing about some in email that I can't post here because it involves Christian school subject matter that doesn't translate well on a blog like this.
But War and Peace is a work of art. The narrative style itself was part of it. Anna Karenina reads like a cheap romance novel (not an overstatement). I really wonder how many people have *actually* read it *complete* who rhapsodize about this or that aspect of it.
I may be jaded at this point. But just sticking to the characters: dumb oxes who see themselves as the center of the universe. Women more shallow than....(dang, I can't find a word or phrase to show how shallow they are)...
Anna herself is weirdly cruel.
I really think this about this novel: I really suspect Dostoevsky had a big influence on Tolstoy by the time he wrote A.K., and not in some deep artistic way but in a more shallow competitive way, and Tolstoy was attempting to create some Dostoevsky like characters and, for lack of a better word, ambiance. But it comes across as shallow.
And when they are in Italy, it's like an amateur novel. (You can actually see many flavors of 20th century literary novels in this work. You can see Hemmingway - who said he was going to knock Tolstoy out, boxing metaphor - and Fitzgerald and so on. But the poor Russian characters really can't pull off any degree of coolness like a good American or French character. Even beautiful Anna lugs around a bit in the Italian landscape, you sense, in a way where the locals are saying: "Russians." Vronsky seems like Omar Shariff but illiterate.)
I don't even want to go into Levin. Or his dumb half-brother.
Dostoevsky *knew* these characters.
Tolstoy knew life and death and war and society and agriculture and nature and so on. He's having a harder time in this novel of presenting inner lives in a way that doesn't come across as either intentional satire (in an extremely unspoken sense) or as a failed Dostoevsky imitation.
Necessary caveat: it's a great novel. When criticizing a great novel it always sounds like you aren't seeing anything good in it.
The novel is alive, it has deep understanding (that's why I say if it is intentional satire on common human nature then fine, but I don't sense Tolstoy was intending this), and as with War and Peace you can see how the style alone influenced the 20th century novel from the Manns to the Hemingways to the American blockbuster.
I'm still a War and Peace person though.
Further note: to be fair there aren't many interesting male characters in War and Peace either. Russian character really doesn't lend itself to that.
Dholokov was anti-heroish, but had a small part. The women as well are a bit common. Dostoevsky is very good at creating interesting women. I'll stop now. The entire experience of War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky's great works are mandatory and part of the few influences available that challenge and give real understanding. You just have to put up with the typical Russian uncoolness and quirkiness.
I think to get slotted (by birth) onto Russian soil you have to have one foot of your soul in hell, and God is letting you know your situation, and so Russian works of art tend to display what this situation involves.
I just re-read my last comment above, and I made it sound too negative towards the novel. Any great novel makes you react to the characters like I have been, one way or another. I did the same with Crime and Punishment. I might be seeing too much of myself in the characters (see in yourself what you dislike in others, this is how you begin to awaken to yourself), and in that sense it is great art to be able to do that.
On my saying War and Peace is better: when I read War and Peace I was exactly ready for it, and it played the role of a culminating work of literature (imaginative literature) in my development, so that plays into my opinion of it vis-a-vis Anna Karenina.
I've got 300 pages or so left. I'll finish it shortly then maybe have a more higher-perspective take on it.
[An email to a person who doesn't like what I'm saying about Anna Karenina...]
M***, don't take too seriously what I'm saying about Anna Karenina. It's just, how many marshes do I have to be marched through for snipe hunting? Seriously, the characters are shallow and very asleep to themselves ("I'm happy. I'm sad. I'm annoyed. I was happy, now I'm annoyed. At first I approved at what I was looking at, now I disapprove." Tolstoy makes these characters out to be cardboard with their self-awareness, or lack thereof.
Yet, I like the accomplishment of reading and finishing these big, great novels. It puts me in the 'great conversation', as Adler called it.
Funny, I use to think I needed to read Tolstoy to cleanse me of Dostoevsky, now it's just the opposite. I need to read Brothers Karamazov to cleanse me of Anna Karenina.
Though it's not that simple.
It's just a novel a little too soap-opera-y for me. Which is why I read War and Peace back when in the first place. I could intuit and discern which direction to go.
I still have 230 some pages to go. The final pages could redeem or reveal things Tolstoy is up to. Maybe not, but it's OK, I take the novel for what it is. A picture of real life, as annoying as that can be.
Because I consider the act, the effort, to read a great book (complete) as having worth in and of itself I don't really care about style or how entertained I am in the course of it. Some books are obviously over-rated, but a great, time-vetted novel like Tolstoy's Anna Karenina will have enough in it of worth to not be a waste of time. Having said that, in the last three hundred pages I've read there is about 270 pages of 'padding.' I know this novel was serialized. That in the 19th century was a great contributor to padded-out novels. I didn't expect this from Tolstoy though. And when I say 'padded-out' I mean to an extreme degree. Banging your head against the wall as you are reading paragraph after paragraph of white space filler. There are dramatic events coming in the last 150 pages. They have to. I know they are coming. But Tolstoy is really taking his time getting to them.
But starting and finishing a great book has virtues in it that ride high above the imperfections of the work itself.
Tolstoy clumsily scrapped this novel together. Anna changes so much, but chaotically from one portion devoted to her to another (and they are actually quite few, unfortunately). Something strange is we don't even know Anna is a voracious book reader until about the page 700 something. That is something we should have known early on. Her problem with her husband just came across as her being shallow and cruel because Tolstoy didn't develop her character enough for the reader.
But anyway it's all a hodge-podge, badly constructed, in need of a good editor. Because Tolstoy's style is not conducive to elegant, symmetrical form, but this story cries out for it.
The book is carried by Tolstoy's ability to portray a panorama of society and people and events and customs and so on. It's worth reading for this. I am a bit beyond this myself, i.e. if this is all a novel has to offer it's not enough for moi at this point of my development. Only Homer, and the Bible, and deep, practical theology is left for me.
~:| Because I'm a genius.
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I still have 140 pages to go, with some fairly dramatic events left to be narrated. This will probably be my last comment though. I'm glad I'm reading Anna Karenina and that I've read it. Each person will get different things from it, and maybe not be so annoyed by aspects of it I have been annoyed with.
I can't believe Oprah actually finished this novel. I don't believe it, actually. I don't see Oprah reading almost 180 pages on snipe hunting. I just don't see it.
I've been wondering if the translation of Anna Karenina I've been reading is a good one. It's an 'Americanization', and I hadn't noticed that word in relation to it. I found this page which goes into A.K. translations very thoroughly:
http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/1842/1845/1/whole%5B1%5D.doc
That's a document. The html version may not render since google makes them for each search, but here it is:
http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:nKEpRXFXpkwJ:www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/1842/1845/1/whole%255B1%255D.doc+%22Joel+carmichael%22+translation+of+anna+karenina+is+horrible&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
The essay discusses five famous translations of A.K. up to Pevear and Volokhonsky. Joel Carmichael (the one I'm reading) is mentioned also, but not as one of the five, and rather positively, so...
In the end the writer of the essay concludes that Constance Garnett's trans. is still the best, but the essay is interesting to read anyway.
I am partial to Garnett myself simply in an intuitive, psychological way. I may spot read her trans. of A.K. to see if this Carmichael trans. has really been steering me wrong. I doubt it, but there are quirks to it, and a possibility that he's been making the characters 'sound' dumber than maybe Tolstoy did in the original. The Tolstoy style I know from War and Peace and the short works is not found in this translation (or novel, if it's not the translation), and I miss it. - C.
Sorry about my kvetching about Anna Karenina. It's like watching a movie and complaining about the movie all the way through.
A. It's a great novel.
B. I'm a little hypersensitive to any kind of human shallowness at this point of my life.
C. A.K. surprised me in that it is basically about common human behavior depicted honestly leaving the reader with no 'out' in that there is no character one can identify with who is above the fray or has developed some unusual level of understanding.
D. War and Peace was a different enterprise. More spiritual. Tolstoy was more in his wheel house as well with the subject of war.
E. I'm glad I've read Anna Karenina, and one always gets more out of giving real time and energy to a great book than one knows at the time of making the effort.
The last part of Part 7 of Anna Karenina fills the emptiness of what up until then was no depiction of understanding in any of the characters. It's redeemed. Read from the beginning, though, if you decide to read it. If you havn't already.
Anna's definitely going through something torturous, or internally revolutionary - baptism of fire - throughout this novel. The development of understanding was kept pretty buried in the narrative underneath the romance material.
It's been a couple of days since I finished Anna Karenina. The novel leaves a melancholy aftertaste because you feel you were only just really getting to know the character Anna K. by the time she has died and the novel has ended.
Leading up to Anna's death Tolstoy gives her four chapters of internal monologue in which she really shows a new level of self-awareness and understanding that she has reached. Her separation from the world, from society, her family, friends, and finally her lover has overwhelmed her, but that hardcore separation is what produces the new and real understanding. I like to think in real life the same Anna K. would not have ended her life. That she had developed enough in her core essence to be able to withstand the shock of separation from the world.
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