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| Anna Karenina |
Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina with a line about unhappy families being unhappy in their own particular ways, and then builds a novel that demonstrates the proposition at full length. The book moves between two families and two kinds of life, and the contrast that emerges is one of the most complex moral arguments in fiction — complex because Tolstoy refuses to make it simple, refuses to declare a winner.
Anna herself is one of literature's most fully realized women: intelligent, magnetic, constrained by a society that expects her to inhabit the wife-and-mother role without complaint. Her marriage to Karenin is not a bad marriage in any dramatic sense — he is cold and formal but not cruel — and this is part of Tolstoy's point. The cage that confines Anna is built from propriety and convention, not from individual villainy.
Count Vronsky arrives in her life like a disruption of gravity. He is handsome, attentive, unattached, and the society she moves in is full of women who would welcome his attention without consequence. Anna cannot have that. When she chooses passion over respectability, the social machinery that had always supported her turns against her with complete efficiency. The gossip, the exclusions, the small and large denials of ordinary social existence — Tolstoy catalogues them with devastating attention.
Running parallel to Anna's intensifying catastrophe is Levin's quieter, stranger story. Levin is awkward with abstraction and comfortable with physical work, an intellectual who distrusts his own intellectualism, a man looking for a way to live that makes honest sense. His courtship of Kitty Shcherbatskaya, his failed attempt at organizing collective farming, his sustained wrestling with the question of what constitutes a meaningful life — these sequences are not subplots but the novel's other argument, conducted at a lower emotional temperature but with no less seriousness.
Levin's search ends in something provisional and personal, a moment of spiritual clarity he cannot quite articulate, achieved while mowing hay with peasants on a summer afternoon. Anna's search ends differently. Tolstoy's structural decision — to let the two narratives inform each other without resolving each other — is the source of the novel's greatness.
Anna Karenina is a book about what happens when desire exceeds what a particular society can accommodate, and about what happens when a person finds a way to live that their society might not recognize as sufficient. That neither story fully answers the other is not a failure of vision but evidence of how seriously Tolstoy took the questions he was asking.
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