Anna Karenina

by Lisa Appignanesi

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

All novelists wish they had written the first line of Anna Karenina – and not
only because of its aphoristic brilliance. Tolstoy's opening cuts straight to the
heart of much of 19th and indeed 20th century fiction. The novel is, apart
from all the other things it may also be, the complex and variegated story of
the making and breaking of families. Most novelists highlight only one or
another aspect of this intricate process. Jane Austen emphasizes courtship and
seduction. George Eliot, in Middlemarch, focuses in on the pitfalls of
marriage. Dickens, in David Copperfield, on the fate of the orphaned child.
Balzac, in Le Père Goriot, on the subverted authority of the father. Flaubert,
in Madame Bovary, on infidelity. Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, that novel of
novels, does it all and a lot more besides.

By linking the individual's happiness or unhappiness to the state of the

family, Tolstoy underscored what was to become a major preoccupation for
the Freudian century. And like Freud who said, after all, that he had gone to
school to the novelists, Tolstoy located one crucial barometer for that
happiness in the condition of women. Both Tolstoy and Freud are severe
critics of their epoch's sexual morality and see in the conflict between the
constraints of marital duty and passionate extra-marital desire a source of
misery not only for the suffering individual but for the family – that
cornerstone of society - as a whole. Tolstoy may have become, like Freud
though with a very unFreudian recourse to religion, a social conservative. But
in Anna Karenina, he is so alert to the plight of 19th century woman that we
could say for him as Flaubert did for his adulterous Madame Bovary - Anna
Karenina, c'est moi.

Needless to say, when I first read Anna Karenina as a seventeen-year-old I

was far more interested in Anna's tragic infidelity than in anything else in this
great, baggy novel which seems so artlessly to encompass the vast geography
of Russia, not to mention the individual's relations to the land, to society, to
change, to ideas and to God. Anna, for me, was the quintessential heroine, the
woman love brings to life and then to death - that suicide which is the acme
of romantic destinies. Maybe it was the superabundance of vitality that
Tolstoy endows her with which blotted out much of the rest of the book for
me. Her entrance into the novel may not come until the 13th chapter, but then
he writes of her: `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. She deliberately extinguished the light in her eyes, but it
shone against her will in a barely noticeable smile.'

This is seen from the point of view of Count Vronsky, her eventual lover, but
there is always a `surplus' in Anna, an excess, something which escapes her
conscious control. Without being told, we know it is her passionate nature,
her sexuality. It manifests itself in her quick, white hands, her gleaming
rounded shoulders, her dark, curling hair, even in her intensely physical
relationship with her small son. She has the passion which fuels
transgression. In contrast, her husband Karenin is a desiccated bureaucrat
with veined hands and a high-pitched squeaky voice, perhaps physically
repulsive to his creator and to us even before he becomes so to Anna. Tolstoy
sets it up so that we want Anna and Vronsky to come together whatever the
social cost and whatever ominous portents herald their fate.

In retrospect I suspect that Anna and Vronsky's story took over the novel for
me, so that for years I had no accurate recollection of the parallel and equally
important story of the courtship and marriage of Kitty and Levin. Most of my
reading until then had been in the 19th century English novel or what we
could call the tradition of the great renouncers. Women's passion was either a
question of property or locked up in the attic - certainly not something to be
given into unless one wanted to be a stray, subsidiary character. Indeed, with
many of Henry James's heroines, like Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady,
the greatest passion goes into the act of renunciation. Tolstoy may have
embraced faith and traditional religion as Levin, his fictional alter-ego, does
by the end of Anna Karenina, but he was no puritan. Sexual desire, rampant
jealousy, the humiliations, the bondages, the power plays of passion were all
part of his fictional vocabulary. In Anna Karenina he diagnoses and
illuminates them so that the lives of his characters at times become more
vivid to us than those of the people we know.

Reading Anna Karenina after a hiatus of some twenty years I am struck by

more things than I can list here. The new Penguin translation by Richard
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky has a wonderful ease and matter-of-factness
about it so that the comedy of manners comes to the fore. As a result, Anna's
brother Prince Stepan Oblonsky, an ebullient, kind-hearted philanderer who
can never say no to life's delights takes on a striking vivacity and emerges as
a worthy comic foil to his tragic sister. It is Stepan's family who is unhappy in
its own fashion at the start of the novel. His wife Dasha has learned of his
affair with the children's governess. She is on the point of leaving him when
Anna arrives to attempt to patch up the marriage. By one of those perverse
ironies that rupture life's course, Anna stumbles into her own adultery, one
society will not tolerate because its passion is too transgressive, while
smoothing over her brother's acceptable one.

One of Tolstoy's many, almost uncanny talents as a novelist is the way in

which he allows his character's unconscious desires to peak or poke through
the fabric of everyday life and disrupt their best intentions. Although Anna
Karenina begins with Stepan Oblonsky’s dream in which carafes of wine are
also dancing women, it is not only in his characters’ dreams that these desires
emerge. Levin often says what isn't on his mind. Kitty's blushes and eyes
betray her wishes in advance of her knowledge. Vronsky-in-love pursues
Anna with an animal look of blind obedience which turns into a murderer's
mastery the moment passion is consumed. He inadvertently breaks Anna in
the way he has broken his thoroughbred's back in the ardour of the race.

Tolstoy's psychological intelligence remains astonishing. Without

belabouring any points or losing a narrative beat, he shows us how Anna's
guilt vis à vis her husband Karenin only makes her hate him more, until she
denies his presence altogether. Meanwhile, his visible magnanimity weighs
down on her like a sadistic act, aimed solely at her humiliation. Later on in
the book when Karenin finds solace in fashionable piety, Tolstoy lets us see
that Karenin clings to this `born-again' faith, this imaginary salvation as if it
were real because it allows him, `despised by everyone', to despise others.

The double-backed beast of jealousy is one Tolstoy knew only too well and it
plays a prominent role in Anna Karenina, moving contagiously between the
characters. At once sign and signal of love and potential destroyer, jealousy
haunts Levin's courtship of Kitty and almost prevents their union. Once
engaged, Levin, like Tolstoy himself had done with his fiancée, gives Kitty
his diaries of past exploits to read thus engendering her jealousy which
continues to move between them, eternally demanding reinvention and
assuagement. When Anna and Vronsky return from Italy to set up together in
the Moscow which ostracizes her, her social abasement feeds the tortured
jealousy she suffers at Vronsky's continuing freedom. She half knows that her
scenarios of other women are projections of her own imprisoned state, her
own wish to move and think freely if only she could. But she is utterly tied,
utterly dependent, more so than her sister-in-law Dasha ever was in her
betrayed, jealous state at the start of the novel.

Virginia Woolf called Tolstoy `the greatest of all novelists'. She might almost
have added the greatest writer about women at the cusp of a new century. I
can think of no earlier descriptions of childbirth in fiction than that of Kitty
and Levin's son and none more poignant. Experienced from the uxorious
 Levin's point of view, it nonetheless encompasses the ravages, the fears, the
pain and finally the sense of miracle which attends the new life.

When Dasha, mother of five living and two dead children, in a bleak moment
does her mental accounts of fifteen years of marriage, they read like a
feminist litany:

`pregnancy, nausea, dullness of mind, indifference to everything, and, above

all, ugliness. ...then nursing, the sleepless nights, the terrible pains [from
cracked nipples]. Then the children's illnesses, this eternal fear; then their
upbringing, vile inclinations… And all that for what?'

Despite all this, in what must be the first frank conversation about birth
control in fiction, Dasha repudiates the methods Anna, ever the transgressor,
uses. Tolstoy, we know, was on Dasha's side yet his sympathy for Anna is
palpable.

He astutely depicts Anna's conflict over her children, the first by Karenin, the
second by Vronsky. The choice between love for her son and passion for her
lover is no real choice, since it only becomes clear once she has given in to
her passion that a choice had to be made and by then it is too late. Anna is
bound to Vronsky. It is almost as if she represses her love for her son, blinds
herself to it, puts it into abeyance until it surges forth to make her loathe her
lover. At the same time, Anna cannot bring herself to love her daughter by
Vronsky because the little girl is the very sign of her bondage, her fall into an
abject state.

A woman who is not a wife to one man or another is nothing. The inner
monologue which accompanies Anna's last desperate journey towards
Vronsky (who is, ironically, with his mother) and death is a howl of pain,
lurching between love and hate. In its opium-induced discontinuities, its
random juxtapositions of the mundane and the profound, it harks forward to
James Joyce and Woolf, herself.

In its sprawling flow, Anna Karenina may seem as artless as life itself. And
that is the greatness of Tolstoy's art.

Lisa Appignanesi's latest novel is Sanctuary (Bantam). Her family

memoir Losing the Dead, is available from Vintage. She is also the co-
author, with John Forrester, of Freud's Women (Penguin).

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