Truth and consequences
WHAT IS it about Anna Karenina that gives it special status among the great novels? How is it that a sensational romantic tragedy of tsarist high society, interspersed with digressions into 19th-century Russian agricultural policy, written in a seemingly plain, straightforward style across 900 pages, still provokes both excitement and respect from readers as diverse as J M Coetzee, Jonathan Franzen and Oprah Winfrey, and lures Tom Stoppard to write the script for the latest of a dozen film adaptations?
The book floats in some charmed section of the lake of literary opinion, where the ripples from modernism and the ripples from Hollywood overlap without merging.
It is more admired than learnt from. Anna Karenina couldn’t be less like a conventional modern novel. Instead of a barrage of metaphors describing things in terms of other things that they resemble, Leo Tolstoy seeks the precise word for the thing itself. Instead of the solipsistic modern mode of events being experienced from the point of view of a single character, Tolstoy slips in and out of the consciousness of dozens of characters, major and minor. At one point he tells us what a character’s dog is thinking.
Tolstoy doesn’t believe in ‘‘show, don’t tell’’. He likes to show and tell. The teller, the narrator of the book, is a formless, omniscient voice with no elaborate Rothian construct to justify his role. No first-person or free-indirect speech here.
Even while we’re in a character’s head, it’s the narrator who recounts the character’s experiences through liberal use of unfashionable phrases such as ‘‘she thought’’, ‘‘he felt’’ and ‘‘it seemed to him that’’.
Tolstoy creates a space for the narrator’s independence – the narrator is close enough to the characters to rely on them for his existence, but free enough to pass unchallenged judgment on their actions, and to tell us things about them that they don’t know about themselves. The most powerful passages are those where Tolstoy slows time down to note each thought, gesture and feeling of Anna and her lover, Vronsky, with a third entity present – the narrator – not only lodged deep in the two psyches, but standing back to tell us the ways one is misunderstanding the other.
Each time I reread Anna Karenina, a new layer of his craft emerges. For all my admiration of Joyce, Beckett and Kelman, I begin to question whether the novel form isn’t too artisanal a medium for the surface experimentation of the modernist project ever to transcend the flexing of space and time that apparently conventional language can achieve in the hands of a master.
I had noticed before that Tolstoy, whose characters spend so much time in Moscow and St Petersburg, barely describes these cities.
Reading Anna Karenina again, I see that it’s more extreme than that. Urban buildings and landscapes are practically invisible, whereas the countryside is described in exquisite detail.
To Tolstoy, the city is a static, artificial place. It is as if he does not believe cities are permanent, as though he feels that if he ignores them, they will go away.
It turns out that everything Tolstoy cares about, everything he describes taking place outside the characters’ heads, is alive and moving, in the non-human world of dogs and horses and leaves as in the human world.
No human action is too small to be recorded: Karenin’s knucklecracking, Anna screwing up her eyes, Vronsky touching the ends of his moustache. The characters are always smiling, frowning, blushing, twitching, fidgeting, touching, kissing, bowing, sobbing and deconstructing these signs in each other.
They come to us alive with intentionality, describing themselves in movement, waltzing through the ballroom, trudging through the marsh after wildfowl, racing horses and cutting hay.
As busily as Tolstoy’s creations move through space, so plausibly they move through time.
How hard it is in narrative fiction, be it novel or film, to represent the chaotic reality of the passage of time, when the way a person acts or thinks one moment doesn’t necessarily have a direct connection to the way that person acts or thinks 10 minutes later, or the next day or for the rest of their life.
No other novelist I can think of takes the risks Tolstoy does with the readers’ understanding of what his characters are by allowing the characters to be so true to the emotions of each
Tolstoy was torn between compassion and moral rigour, between lust and self-denial, between loving his wife and being bored by her.
particular moment, even when those emotions contradict the overall portrait. The most odious characters are never beyond momentary redemption, and the most admirable characters must endure patches of vileness.
All Tolstoy’s mastery of time, space and language come together in a single moment in the middle of the book, when Anna’s estranged husband, Alexei Karenin, a dry, stiff government minister, and her lover, Vronsky, a handsome young cavalry officer, meet beside the bed where Anna lies gravely ill after giving birth to Vronsky’s child. Grief-stricken and ashamed, Vronsky is covering his face with his hands; Anna orders her husband, who is also weeping, to pull the hands away and expose her lover’s face. With that gesture, Anna effects a reversal in the status of the two men.
Vronsky, who had despised Karenin because he wouldn’t fight a duel, is now humiliated and dishonoured; Karenin, flooded with forgiveness for everyone, wins back Anna’s respect.
In that moment of time, with Anna seemingly dying, the transformation is quite real, but time shifts, and the old reality comes back.
Anna gets better and hates Karenin more than ever for his forgiveness. Vronsky restores his honour by shooting himself (he misses). The arc of Anna’s destruction resumes. In the novel there are no turning points, only points, and characters travelling through them.
The tragic consequences of the pursuit of love for love’s sake, in defiance of the rules laid down by one’s peers and one’s family, is an eternal story, and that story is in Anna Karenina, but it is not, by itself, the book Tolstoy wrote.
Anna Karenina is no Romeo and Juliet story of star-crossed teenagers unjustly destroyed by their elders’ cruel laws, but a story of adults vexed by boundaries. It is the portrayal of a clash between an old world of rigid religious codes, duels, fixed gender roles and strict class division and a new world of divorce, separation, custody battles, women’s selfdetermination and uncertain moral rules.
It’s not that Tolstoy sympathises with high society’s mixture of moral outrage and gladiatorial blood lust over Anna and Vronsky’s affair. While it’s true he allows Anna not a moment of sexual pleasure, he had censors to contend with, and makes it clear how unsuitable a partner for Anna her husband is.
As the book goes on, in step with Tolstoy’s religiosity and his disenchantment with the project, he does put an emphasis on women’s role as mothers. But none of this means he ever loses compassion for or patience with the painful, intricate detail of Anna’s dilemmas.
I’m not sure Tolstoy ever worked out how he actually felt about love and desire, or how he should feel about it. He was torn between compassion and moral rigour, between lust and selfdenial, between loving his wife and being bored by her.
His uncertainty is reflected in the dual portrayal of his wife in Anna Karenina – as the virtuous, somewhat frumpy Dolly, worn out by childbearing, like the woman his wife was when he was writing the book, and as the feisty, pretty teenager Kitty, like the woman his wife was when he married her.
They must have seemed to contradict each other, yet each was true to her time; and Tolstoy, for all that he was a master of time, was only a slave to truth.
opens on Thursday. Read Sarah Watt’s review on e37.