Rereading Anna Karenina: Part 8 and the ending

1/ Nabokov’s lecture on Anna Karenina (from Lectures on Russian Literature) is a great companion to Tolstoy’s novel.

One of his most interesting points in the lecture is time: it’s not mentioned anywhere in the novel but Nabokov calculates that the action of Anna Karenina starts at 8am on Friday, February 11th (old calendar) in 1872 and Anna commits suicide on a Sunday evening in May 1876. 

He explains: 

“Oblonski reads in his morning paper about Count Beust, Austrian Ambassador to London, traveling through Wiesbaden on his way back to England. […] This would be just before the thanksgiving service for the recovery of the Prince of Wales, which took place Tuesday, February 15/27, 1872; and the only possible Friday is Friday 11/23 of February, 1872.”

The year of Anna’s suicide is easier to deduce because in the following chapter after her death, Tolstoy mentions the Serbian- Turkish wars, which started in June 1876.

Nabokov provides a more detailed timeline of Anna and Vronsky:

“The political events on the eve of the Turkish War, as alluded to in the last part of the novel, set its end at July 1876. Vronski becomes Anna's lover in December 1872. The steeplechase episode occurs in August 1873. Vronski and Anna spend the summer and winter of 1874 in Italy, and the summer of 1875 on Vronski's estate; then, in November, they go to Moscow, where Anna commits suicide on a Sunday evening in May 1876.”

Another interesting thing Nabokov points out is the time difference between the Anna strand and the Levin strand: even though Tolstoy moves harmoniously between the 2 strands of story and creates the illusion of parallels, in some parts there’s a gap of about a year or more than a year—Anna’s story moves faster than Levin’s, as Anna and Vronsky gallop to their destruction whereas the journey of Levin and Kitty is more open-ended.

2/ After Anna’s death at the end of Part 7, Tolstoy begins Part 8 by writing about Sergey Ivanovich Koznyshev (Levin’s half-brother, the Turgenev character). It works perfectly: generally in the novel, Tolstoy follows a strand of story and builds it up, and when it gets to the peak, he switches to the other strand till it gets to the peak, and switches again (the same rule for telling parallel stories in cinema). After the emotionally draining chapters that lead up to Anna’s suicide, he has to switch to something still, quiet, and that is Sergey Ivanovich’s story. By writing that Sergey Ivanovich, after the failure of his book, gets interested in the Serbian wars and is now on the way to see Levin, Tolstoy can let him, and thus the reader, meet Vronsky at the train station.

In Anna Karenina (and other works), Tolstoy has 2 main ways of moving between strands or groups of characters: either the narrator makes a jump (when the story gets to the peak), or a character moves from one place to another and the narrative then follows another character who appears in the same scene. There’s lots of travelling, and everything feels natural and harmonious.

At the train station, before seeing Vronsky, Sergey Ivanovich meets Oblonsky. As usual, he’s jolly and cheerful—nothing can hurt him deeply, nothing can sadden him for long, even his sister’s recent terrible death.    

“‘You don’t say!’ he exclaimed when the Princess told him that Vronsky was going on this train. For a brief moment Stepan Arkadyich’s face expressed sadness, but a minute later, when, with a slight spring in his step and smoothing his whiskers, he went into the room where Vronsky was, he had already completely forgotten his desperate sobbing over his sister’s dead body, and saw in Vronsky only a hero and an old friend.” (P.8, ch.2) 

Later: 

“‘There he is!’ said the Princess, indicating Vronsky in a long overcoat and a black, wide-brimmed hat, walking along with his mother on his arm. Oblonsky was walking beside him, talking avidly about something.

Frowning, Vronsky was looking straight in front of him, as if not hearing what Stepan Arkadyich was saying.” (ibid.) 

Looking at (Stepan Arkadyich) Oblonsky, I can’t help thinking of this Hamlet soliloquy:

“O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed 

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter. O God, God,

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on't! ah, fie, ‘tis an unweeded garden

That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely. That it should come to this:

But two months dead, nah, not so much, not two…” 

(Hamlet, Act 1 scene 2)

What’s a life worth if it’s forgotten so soon after death?

Vronsky however is nothing like Oblonsky. Nor is he like Emma Bovary’s lovers, Rodolphe and Léon. Again, placing Madame Bovary next to Anna Karenina, one can’t help seeing a smallness to Emma’s character—she is hollow and her affairs all seem so futile and stupid. Anna and Vronsky do love each other, even if their love is in some way destructive. His mother, Countess Vronskaya, doesn’t get it but he feels deeply. The Vronsky that loves Anna, I can’t help thinking, is different from the Vronsky that plays with Kitty’s feeling at the beginning of the book—his love for Anna ennobles him.

It’s a heart-rending scene, all the more because of the casual way Countess Vronskaya dismisses it and the way almost everyone, including Oblonsky, seems to just move on with their lives. 

3/ The great thing about Tolstoy’s characters is that his characters, like real people and better than any other writer’s characters, are complex and full of self-contradictions. But at the same time they’re still recognisably themselves and can’t help being themselves: Oblonsky for example is a man of pleasure and cannot feel anything very deeply; Levin always tries to be better, etc. Their essences, to use James Wood’s word, are always the same. 

Tolstoy often uses leitmotif, which makes it easier for readers to remember his vast range of characters, such as Oblonsky’s beaming smile, Kitty’s innocent eyes and radiant smile, Karenin’s shrill voice and the way he cracks his fingers, Anna’s round arms and shoulders, Veslovsky’s fat legs, etc. 

Vronsky’s leitmotif is his strong, even teeth and the last time we see him, he’s having a toothache.

4/ Anna dies, but the novel doesn’t end. There is another tragedy and that is Dolly’s tragedy of being married to a man like Oblonsky—she is not any less of a tragic figure than Anna has been. 

“Two weeks earlier a penitent letter from Stepan Arkadyich had arrived for Dolly. He begged her to save his honour by selling her estate to pay his debts. Dolly was in despair, she hated her husband, despised him, pitied him, made up her mind to obtain a divorce and refuse him, but she ended up agreeing to sell part of her estate.” (P.8, ch.7)

In the novel, the Anna strand and the Levin strand act as counterpoint to each other, and it may be argued that through the two couples, Tolstoy contrasts two kinds of love—passionate love (like between Anna and Vronsky) and a more prosaic love, based on compatibility, trust, and understanding (like between Kitty and Levin)—but the characters are not complete opposites. In fact, I would say that all four characters have something in common: they are all truthful, and all feel deeply. Part of Anna’s tragedy is that she feels tormented and cannot live in deceit like many others do in high society. Vronsky himself also wants truth and clarity. More importantly, for all of their faults, they both have depth of feeling. 

Oblonsky, in contrast, doesn’t. He cannot feel anything deeply. He cannot feel bad for long, and has no guilty conscience about cheating on his wife and neglecting his children. And he lives for only himself, and his own pleasures. 

5/ Unlike some readers, I find Levin’s conversion in the final part of the novel fascinating. It’s partly because Levin’s thoughts act as a counterpoint to Anna’s thoughts before her suicide (though some of his thoughts actually echo hers), and partly because his existential crisis, especially when he watches the peasants and thinks that they all are going to die and be buried, makes me think of Hamlet’s Yorick speech. I don’t think the chapters are didactic because Levin still has a questioning attitude, as he does for the entire novel. He still has some questions and is by no means certain about anything. 

See Levin, when he thinks he has found the meaning of life: 

“He now perceived his brother and his wife and the unknown visitor in a different way than before. It seemed to him that his relations with everyone would be altered.” (P.8, ch.14) 

The feeling doesn’t last long. Soon after, a coachman gets on his nerves. 

“This sort of interference riled him just as much as it always did, and it was with sadness that he immediately recognized how mistaken he had been in presuming that his spiritual state of mind could instantly change him when he came back into contact with reality.” (ibid.) 

And later: 

“He recalled that he had already managed to lose his temper with Ivan, treat his brother coldly, and talk in an offhand manner to Katavasov.

‘Was that really just an ephemeral state of mind which will vanish without trace?’ he thought.” (ibid.)

It reminds me of Kitty’s time in Germany—inspired by Varenka, she wants to change, to make sacrifices and live a simpler life, but cannot change herself. Levin cannot change himself either. As we see in his conversation with the over-intellectual and idealistic Koznyshev and some others, Levin remains the same.

And yet something is different. To steal Himadri’s line, “the possibility of a new approach to life has dawned on him: and on this note – a note not by any means of certainty – the novel ends.” (full post) 

6/ The final chapters of Anna Karenina are also fascinating because there are 3 main things happening: Levin’s conversion, the debate about the Serbian-Turkish wars, and Levin’s married life.

The debate is interesting because, as I’ve written before, Tolstoy depicts different perspectives and different voices, and we can see the difference between Levin and his idealistic half-brother Sergey Ivanovich Koznyshev. This is a character I didn’t remember after my last read, but I think now I’m going to remember him—it’s not hard to guess what his politics would be if he were alive today.

But the best part of the last chapters is the way Tolstoy writes about Levin’s married life, especially that scene of Kitty giving a bath to their baby Mitya. 

“The point was that Mitya had clearly and unmistakably begun to recognize his own family that day.

As soon as Levin had come up to the bath an experiment was carried out in front of him, and the experiment was a complete success. The cook, who had been specially summoned for this, replaced Kitty and bent over the baby. He frowned and started shaking his head. Then when Kitty bent over him, his face lit up with a smile, and he pushed his little hands into the sponge and burbled with his lips, making such a happy and strange sound that not just Kitty and the nanny but also Levin were lost in unexpected admiration.” (P.8, ch.18) 

This is magnificent. Levin has begun to love his baby. 

(These passages come from Rosamund Bartlett’s translation). 

After nearly 5 weeks, I have now finished rereading Anna Karenina. It is perhaps the greatest novel of all time. Nothing else like this (except War and Peace).

I love it even more than I thought. What a wonderful novel.