This is by far one of my absolute favorites of all time and secured the fact that I was head over heels in love with Tolstoy. I went on to read War and Peace which I also enjoyed, but this book is my first love. I am certainly one of those people that falls into the camp that this is one of the greatest novels of fiction ever written. Yet, it isn't because of the title character. Nope, I really didn't like Anna Karenina when I first encountered her. Oh yeah, I was judgy. I was similar to the society that ends rejecting and turning its back on her. " Girl, are you really going to separate yourself from your son and everyone around you for this young fella?" Vronsky was a cad and as Anna succumbed to him, I was relieved that darling Kitty was saved from him.

Tolstoy was able to understand men and women and show them to be more than just " good" or "bad" From the worn-out Dolly to the idealistic Levin, this book just completely captured my heart.

One of the best novels I've ever read and expect to read. Levin's farming dilemmas were as interesting – if not more so – than the central romantic tragedy. I hope to return to it again and again. The grand variety of life – from the sublime to the ridiculous – is in these pages. I bow down to Tolstoy, the master, who sees and knows all.

Ethan Hawke recommended this book in Entertainment Weekly. When the man who helped create "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset" says something, I listen.

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

So begins "Anna Karenina." This is a Russian novel, by Leo Tolstoy no less, so any brief summary is impossible. Instead, I will summarize the summary.

There is the Oblonsky family: Stiva, the cheating husband and Dolly the long-suffering wife (apparently Russians were really keen on American nicknames back in the day). Dolly's sister, Kitty, has two suitors: Levin, a farmer, and Vronsky, a dashing cavalryman. Kitty chooses Vronsky over Levin, breaking Levin's heart, but Vronsky soon falls for Anna, who is married to a bureaucrat named Alexei.

Vronsky and Anna's first meeting is described:

"In that brief glance Vronsky had time to notice the restrained animation that played over her face and fluttered between her shining eyes and the barely noticeable smile that curved her red lips. It was as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her smile."

Eventually, Levin wins Kitty and they get married. The book then follows their relationship as it parallels that of Vronsky and Anna. Four million pages later, the story ends. The mirror-twinning is simplistic, as is the moralizing (no Dostoyevsky-like depths of psychological insight here). Clearly, Levin and Kitty represent the right way to do things, while Vronsky and Anna represent the shortest route to the eternal fires of hell. Still, you don't go to Tolstoy for his insight. You go to him for his scope and breadth of imagination. There are dozens of characters, locations, and plots, all going at once. You have to love the guy, and his books, for ambition alone. Someone once said, "If the world could write, it would write like Tolstoy." And it's true. He creates and populates a world on the page. His characters are all a bit one note (Levin = noble peasant; Kitty = purity and goodness; Alexei = boring civil servant; Anna = whore; Vronsky = pimp); however, despite additional dimensions, they are fully realized. In other words, the most complex one-note characters I've come across.

I cannot recommend the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation highly enough. I'd always been afraid of Tolstoy on the basis of density alone. But this translation in the bee's knees. It's clean and literate and - I've been told - really captures the essence of Tolstoy's work. The prose can be quite beautiful. Sometimes you forget you're reading a Russian novel (then Tolstoy reminds you by having Levin engage in a 4,000 page discussion of community property and peasant rights with his brother Sergei; apparently this meant something to 19th Century Russians). There are vivid descriptions of life on Levin's farm, train rides across the steppes, and lavish balls. I especially liked a passage in which a smitten Levin divides all the women in the world into two types: the first type constituted all those women with imperfections and shortcomings; the second type was Kitty. Really - isn't that how each of us falls in love?

The first part of the book sets up the relationships. The next three million pages are devoted to following each couple. Kitty/Levin take the high road; Stiva and Dotty attempt to reach that lofty plain; Anna and Vronsky descend into the pits of despair and guilt and utter ruin. I will not spoil their fate, but it is truly Russian. We all have to pay for our sins.

My gripes. First, there is a lot of foreign languages bandied about. Tolstoy liked to show off. The Russian has been translated to English; however, the French, German, and Klingon phrases are not translated, so you have to keep looking down at the footnotes. This isn't as big a deal as it is in "War and Peace," but it can be distracting. Also, we come to the controversial end of the book. Now, the title is "Anna Karenina," so you might expect the book to end with her storyline. WRONG. You simple fool. It does not end there. No, you have to slog through approximately 12 billion pages of Tolstoy's characters ruminating on the war with Turkey. Then there's Levin's religious rebirth, as he discovers the meaning of life (yes, his meaning is as banal as you'd expect). Some people might think this section of the book is a good reminder of all the wonderful ideas that Tolstoy had; indeed, that he was more concerned with those ideas than his story, and that the tragic love of Anna the Whore and Vronsky the Pimp was but the tree upon which to hang his ideas.

I don't agree. I think the end is a didactic, pedagogic, vaguely misogynistic load of crap. It's like a 19th C. version of "The Purpose Driven Life" has been appended, rather haphazardly, to the end of an otherwise great novel. If I wanted a lecture from a long-dead Russian author, I would've built a time machine, gone back in time, and asked for one.

What one gains from reading classics is an embodied understanding that people in the past – those whom we now consider the characters of history – did not feel as though they were part of history, part of a time already gone. To them, the world unfolded everyday much the same as it does for us. They couldn’t possibly have known about the known or unknown unknowns awaiting them in the year 2021; they were merely going forward, in the “current” year of 1786, 1883, or 1924. One aspect of humanity is constant, linking the current generation to previous generations, to those very same years mentioned, possibly even further back. This link has been rock-solid for hundreds of millions of years, predating the human species. This link is emotion.

Emotion is where we begin with Anna Karenina, with one of the most quoted first lines in literature (possibly second only to A Tale of Two Cities): ”All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This stream of emotion continues throughout the novel, one that can actually be called a novel, as opposed to the living, breathing body of work that is War and Peace. Many were quick to tell me that it was ridiculous to try and compare the pace of Anna Karenina to that of War and Peace, and I see their point. The same undercurrent of emotion makes for a constant whirlwind reading experience, and the 800 pages don’t feel nearly as long, whereas the 1200 or so pages of War and Peace felt like nearly double the length. So why did I feel more exhausted at the end of this book than the other? Again, emotion. This is not to take anything away from Natasha, Pierre, or Andre. They are once-in-a-lifetime characters, they inhabit a universe all on their own… but it was only through reading about Levin, Vronsky, Kitty, Dolly, Oblonsky, and of course, Anna, that I realized that I may have been looking at the cast of War and Peace with an academic indifference, perhaps at best an academic interest. I can’t begin to count the number of times where I felt exalted, excited, dejected, or crushed. Round and round I went, cycling through this mammoth, and I have now had some time to think about what stood out for me.

First, hardly a ground breaking piece of analysis, but it is apparent to me that Levin is the Tolstoy stand-in. In a way, he is the character most lovingly created, crafted to mirror the author’s life in an almost perfectly synchronized manner. The novel was split up into 8 parts, and each part had a number of very short chapters. We would be taken back and forth between the narratives of Levin and Anna in 4-5 chapter chunks, and I could not help but find myself more attracted to the story of Levin! I guess I have a type: give me a main character that is struggling with existence and the meaning of life over one who is lost in love any day of the week, although the latter is still marvelous.

The prose! I was in love, taking time to walk around and read certain paragraphs out loud. There were some choice tidbits of nature writing that I would want to frame and come back to. Hardly a surprise, as Tolstoy enjoyed spending time in the country. When I get the chance, I myself love to get away from the city and spend a few days in cottage country – reading about the foaming springs, the morning mist, the old grass, the meadows… what a treat. Certainly an underrated part of the book, I feel. Here is how I imagined it:



Despite the beauty of the nature writing and innovative use of POV at times (we even get to see the thoughts of a dog for a few sentences), the idea of jealousy is what has stuck around for me. First of all, the experience. How claustrophobic is it to sense the pangs of this feeling? How shameful? Is there any other emotion so innately taboo? We are more than happy to cover up any signs of jealousy and envy from the perception of others, but we are especially skilled at doing so with ourselves. Anger is a convenient substitute, often finding its target in the beloved. But what about the mental gymnastics? What if we have admitted to ourselves, through sheer will power or luck that we are jealous? How do we express it? Do we come out with it, laying it out in a “healthy manner”, communicating and trying to straighten out our feelings? Perhaps. What then, when the beloved denies what we know to be true? What is next? You have made the first move, and you have lost. Do you persevere? Seems like a losing battle to me. The growth of that hostile and secretive dynamic, that ball of implicit emotion in between the two partners, is it inevitable at a point? This will be with me for a while.

All in all, a must-read. Once again, we see the intensely observant nature of Tolstoy as a human being. To have the ability to cover so much is monumental – he touches on the usual, philosophy, loss of faith, meaning of life, existential crises, the role and benefit of religion, etc. But he also discusses less “abstract” concepts – the sheer happiness of seeing your children achieve, the calm joy of a comfortable relationship, the rewards of connection with new acquaintances. There is plenty for everyone. In order to stay true, however, I must point out my main gripe with Tolstoy. It is obvious that he is a writer that can transcend himself constantly, writing eternally true nuggets into all of his works. We won’t argue that. But he has a not-so-subtle way of proselytizing, openly preaching about his ideals and philosophy – 6 or 7 times out of 10, this is accompanied with an eyeroll from the reader. Why is this genius taking entire chapter-long breaks in the middle of the most intense parts of the narrative to discuss peasant/serf uprisings and whether this is moral? Why are we discussing the issue of virtue signalling and war when it has nothing to do with the flow of the story? As I have been poking around in Nabokov’s lectures on Russian literature, I see that he agrees with me. This makes me feel even more justified in my belief, because…well… Nabokov. I will end with his view on the topic, because I don’t want to end every review with a positive closer:

n  ”Many people approach Tolstoy with mixed feelings. They love the artist in him and are intensely bored by the preacher; but at the same time it is rather difficult to separate Tolstoy the preacher from Tolstoy the artist – it is the same deep slow voice, the same robust shoulder pushing up a cloud of visions or a load of ideas. What one would like to do, would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under his sandalled feet and then lock him up in a stone house on a desert island with gallons of ink and reams of paper – far away from the things, ethical and pedagogical, that diverted his attention from observing the way the dark hair curled above Anna’s white neck.”n