After reading War and Peace a couple of years ago, Anna Karenina was the inevitable follow-up after I had immersed myself in the grand world of Tolstoy’s first great masterpiece. Anna Karenina is perhaps even more acclaimed. Unfortunately, this reader so far does not find the book to his taste. Over the last two weeks of my reading it, the plodding pace, the insufferable characters and the mind-numbing vignettes of farm life have hampered my enjoyment of the novel.
So far, the doomed love affair between Anna and Vronsky (the core narrative in the novel) and the aborted romance between Levin and Kitty, is what has kept me interested and involved in the story. These storylines are continuously cut across by pages and pages in which Tolstoy meticulously covers each and every aspect of Levin’s agricultural adventures. The society aristocrats feel like staid caricatures of the worst sort of cosmopolitan snob, gossipy puppets that Tolstoy has created to villainise his own class. Anna herself is defined entirely by the tragedy of her doomed dalliance with Vronsky, and her unhappy marriage. The sense of inevitability about her situation makes it difficult to invest much in her as a character. Her husband, equally, lacks any real weight as a character – a vain, plodding bureaucrat animated by little other than the good opinion of society and a desire for personal promotion, in other words, the perfect caricature of an unsympathetic 19th-century Russian aristocrat. He does not love his wife but realises the need to keep up appearances, and his anger at her is more to do with his wounded pride and fear for what scandal could mean for his prospects than any feelings he might have had for her as a person.
Levin, with his woolly-eyed romanticisation of the peasantry, is clearly modelled on Tolstoy himself, and the bizarre socio-political ideology he was formulating at this period in his life. His ignorant, didactic paeans to the purity of country living as opposed to the stuffiness and corruption of the city is so much moralistic garbage. For all Tolstoy’s efforts, I cannot bring myself to like him at all, though he is perhaps less worthy of contempt than many other characters in the work.
Thus far, 300 pages in, we do not have a work which approaches the glory of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a book which situates you in a world that feels real, that vividly recreates the social dynamics of a small pre-Victorian English town, and creates characters who, even at their worst, are sympathetic and three-dimensional. This dimensionality is thus far lacking in Tolstoy’s own approach to characterisation. It is hard not to see Vronsky as being much more than a cliched ‘rake’ archetype, albeit his love for Anna seems sincere. The world of Anna Karenina does not feel as ‘lived in’ as Middlemarch, in which characters both major and minor felt essential to every aspect of the plot. Tolstoy’s bloated cast feels bland in comparison. Time will tell if I revise my opinion of the book.