The Argumentative Old Git Because I'm worth it

Recently, on the commuter train back home, I finished the seventh of the eight parts that comprise Anna Karenina. I think this is my sixth reading of the book, but I was reading it all as if for the first time.

The tragic climax of the novel occurs at the end of the seventh part: the eighth part (which I started on the commuter train the next morning) is effectively an epilogue. As I was approaching the end of the seventh part, I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading. I really was living and breathing every sentence of it. Throughout the novel, Tolstoy is fascinated by why people think and act and perceive as they do. There is no obvious or easy answer to this; and there is no one reason, or even an identifiable set of reasons. But Tolstoy takes us into the characters’ heads, and, no matter how irrational and even lunatic their thoughts and actions may be, he allows us to see why they are thinking and perceiving in this manner.

Before leaving her husband, Anna had been misinterpreting her husband’s words and actions – and misinterpreting almost deliberately. Almost deliberately: her mind was blocking out anything that it couldn’t handle, anything that was too much for it to take; and she would interpret only in a way that would minimise her mental anguish. She had to imagine her husband as an automaton incapable of human feeling because she would not have been able to live with the thought that she was causing him pain, So, everything her husband said or did, every slightest gesture, she had to interpret in such a way as to confirm this picture of him – this picture that, from the chapters dealing with Karenin, we know is quite false. And perhaps Anna knows it as well, deep down: but to think of her husband as a sentient being capable of feeling pain would have been too much for Anna to have handled.

Now, towards the end, Anna, suffering quite clearly from what nowadays would be diagnosed as severe depression, misinterprets, again almost deliberately, Vronsky’s words and actions; but this time, she misinterprets to cause herself maximum anguish – almost as if she wanted to punish herself. She want to believe that Vronsky is losing interest in her, that he is tiring of her, that he is happy to allow his mother to arrange a suitable marriage for him. None of this, we know is true. And yet, terrible though it is, utterly irrational though it is, Tolstoy convinces us that, yes, this is exactly how she would have acted, this is exactly how she would have perceived.

Throughout this novel, people’s ability to control their thoughts and behaviour is limited. Even when Anna behaves utterly irrationally, Vronsky cannot help reacting in the way he does. Despite his feelings for her, despite having sacrificed just about everything for her sake, he is frustrated by Anna’s mood swings, and can’t understand her irrationality. At one superb moment, Vronsky wants to comfort Anna, but…

He wanted to stop and say a word of comfort to her, but his legs carried him out of the room before he could think of what to say.

– From the translation by Kyril Zinovieff and  Jenny Hughes

And Tolstoy keeps us, effectively, prisoners in Anna’s disturbed mind right up to the very moment of her self-inflicted death. There really is nothing like this in the whole range of literature.

When my commuter train arrived at the station that night, I just had one page remaining of the seventh part. I couldn’t stop there. So I got off on to the platform – it was quite dark by then – sat on a bench, and read that final extraordinary page. Yes – on the platform of a railway station.

Tolstoy didn’t write the novel Darya Oblonskaya. But he could have done. For Darya Oblonskaya – Dolly in Anna Karenina – is, in her own way, just as tragic a figure as is Anna.

I’ve heard it said that Tolstoy didn’t take Dolly’s predicament very seriously. That while he punished Anna’s sexual transgression, the various sexual transgressions of Dolly’s husband Stiva are taken more lightly. I have even heard this excused on the grounds that Tolstoy was, after all, a man of his times, and that he was but reflecting the patriarchal values of his times. So, as a consequence, Anna is punished, but Stiva isn’t.

Quite apart from confusing the values of the author with the values of the society that author is depicting; and, further, seeing quite needlessly in the fates of fictional characters the author’s own judgement on his creations; such views seem to me to the views of people who haven’t read the novel with adequate care. For Dolly, right from the start, is a tragic character.

At the very start of the novel, Stiva is in an awkward situation. His wife has found out about his harmless little affair, and he is forced to sleep on the settee in the library. But what to Stiva is but an awkward situation – and one he quite easily puts out of mind when he goes in to work – is, to Dolly, nothing short of a disaster. Still only in her thirties, she is burdened with all the household responsibilities that her husband finds too uninteresting to bother with; she is worn out with constant childbearing and nursing; and she has lost her youthful good looks, and knows – as indeed, does her husband, honest in this respect if not in all others – that she is no longer loved. And on top of all this is the insult – the sheer humiliation of it all. And yet, what can she do? She has to stay, to continue with this humiliating situation, because, quite literally, she has nowhere else to go to. If this is not tragic, I don’t know what is: if Anna’s tragedy is that of a woman who leaves her family, Dolly’s tragedy is of a woman who doesn’t.

Much later in the novel, when Anna, as a “fallen woman”, is beyond the pale of respectable society, Dolly makes the brave decision to visit her. And on the way there, she daydreams of doing what Anna has done – to leave her family, to relinquish all the worries and troubles that have so devastated her life. Anna, when Dolly sees her, seems at first happy and carefree. But later, Dolly is shocked to see the real mental state of her friend. Anna is what we would now describe as “clinically depressed”: she has to take opium to rid herself, at least momentarily, of those thoughts that torment her so. Dolly returns from her visit thinking that her fate isn’t so bad after all. But she is perhaps mistaken in this. Anna’s tragic fate we all know about: Dolly has to continue with her unloved, humiliating existence, without remission, for the rest of her life, while her husband continues, quite unembarrassed, with a string of further affairs. And Dolly has to accept because, once again, she has literally nowhere else to go.

Tolstoy does not pass judgement, either on Dolly, or on Stiva, or even on Anna or Vronsky or Karenin. Indeed, he made a point of not passing judgement on anyone. He depicted, with utmost honesty, and leaving nothing out – merely trying to understand why people think and act as they do, and to what extent people are morally responsible. Any judgement we form is our own.