Anna Karenina

Just like War and Peace, Tolstoy presents two worlds: the external, societal relations, and then the worlds within each character’s mind. To present Anna Karenina as a romance story is simplistic to a fault. Having read War and Peace prior, Anna Karenina seems to be a more focused counterpart to War and Peace in which instead of narrating history, Tolstoy narrates personal affairs as means to human nature. On the surface the main plot is the eponymous Anna’s affair of passion with Count Vronsky and her subsequent fall, yet just as interesting if not more is co-protagonist Konstantin Levin’s journey through courtship, love, and family all the while serving as Tolstoy’s voice of social criticism in the unique age of industrialism and budding communism.

The important point that struck me was the almost deterministic nature that events unfolded, as if Tolstoy is narrating the trajectory of billiard balls when he knows all their physical properties. Much of it is because the novel is presented in omniscient view, where we know most of what goes on in characters’ minds in every detail. It could not have been otherwise when Anna, whose passion “so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will” on meeting Vronsky at the train station that she would not act on her desires. It could not have been otherwise that Anna would wear the modest lilac dress when her very nature drove her to wear the sensual black velvet dress to the ball. And, it could not have been otherwise that coupled with a high-flying and rational husband that the passionate Anna felt oppressed and suffocated. The knowing of characters’ inner thoughts gives the novel its life, and at the same time determines the novel’s ends.