Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | FICTION TOL | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION TOL | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Wildwood Library (Mahtomedi) | FICTION TOL | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Tolstoy's tragic tale of love, marriage and infidelity.The sweeping love story of two people who defy the conventions of their age to follow the dictates of their hearts. Trapped in a stifling marriage, Anna Karenina is swept off her feet by the dashing Count Vronsky. When the truth about their passionate liaison comes out, Anna's husband is more concerned with keeping up appearances than anything else, but at last he seeks a reluctant divorce. Rejected by society, the two lovers flee to Italy, where Anna finds herself isolated from all except the man she loves, and who loves her. But can they live by love alone? In this novel of astonishing scope and grandeur, Leo Tolstoy, the great master of Russian literature, charts the course of the human heart.
Translated by Aylmer & Louise Maude, with an Afterword by Ned Halley.
Author Notes
Count Lev (Leo) Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born at Vasnaya Polyana in the Russian province of Tula in 1828. He inherited the family title aged 19, quit university and after a period, joined the army, where he started to write. Travels in Europe opened him to western ideas, and he returned to his family estates to live as a benign landowner. In 1862 he married Sofia Behr, who bore him 13 children. He expressed his increasingly subversive views through prolific work that culminated in the immortal novels of his middle years, War and Peace and Anna Karenina . Beloved in Russia and with a worldwide following, but feared by the Tsarist state and excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox church, he died in 1910.
Reviews (3)
New York Review of Books Review
WHAT DIFFERENCE IS there between being repelled, being repulsed, being disgusted and being offended? Not much, perhaps, but consider the scene: Anna Karenina has taken a sip of coffee and raised her eyes to look at Vronsky, her lover, who is watching her. After hundreds of pages of love, lust, passion, fear, exhilaration, disappointment, exhaustion, aggression and, probably most important, jealousy, they are having their final fight. Leo Tolstoy is describing Anna ascribing an emotion to a man whose love she needs so desperately that she is convinced he has stopped loving her. Consider also this: When she lifted her coffee cup, she extended her pinkie away from it - a precious gesture that signals just how far this domesticated, miserable Anna has come from the glamorous young woman she was at the beginning of the novel; she made a sound with her lips - and she realized this when she lifted her gaze and saw Vronsky looking at her. She saw the most painful thing a woman can see: a lover who is turned off by her physical being. In the classic translation by Constance Garnett, "she saw clearly that he was repelled by her hand, and her gesture, and the sound made by her lips." In the popular 2000 translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, she "clearly understood that he was disgusted by her hand, and her gesture, and the sound her lips made." In a new translation by Rosamund Bartlett, she "understood clearly ... that he was repulsed by her hand, her gesture, and the sound she made with her lips." And in another new translation, this one by Marian Schwartz, she "clearly realized that he found offensive her hand, her gesture and the sound she was making with her lips." Surprisingly, all the translators ruled that the part of Anna's anatomy that she believed repelled, repulsed, disgusted or offended Vronsky was her hand and not her arm, though the Russian word ruka can mean either. I happen to think Tolstoy is writing about the arm - one of those two full arms that were so beguilingly set off by the black gown Anna wore to the ball in Part 1, Chapter 22, when she and Vronsky fell in love. Now, in Part 7, Chapter 25, when Anna lifts her coffee cup, the full arm, the pinkie gesture and the noisy lips form a tragic triangle. On the subject of the lips, the two newer translations hew closer to the original Russian on the issue of the intentionality of the sound that Anna thinks annoys her lover: Tolstoy makes it clear that it is Anna making a sound with her lips, not her lips making an involuntary sound. Like the extended little finger, this is a habit that Vronsky may once have found charming - in fact, he may still, for, Anna's jealousy and fears notwithstanding, he still loves her - but she thinks he no longer does. What does she think he feels? If he is offended, he is making - or she thinks he is making - a sort of private social commentary on her provincial-aristocracy ways. If Vronsky is repulsed or disgusted, he is - or Anna thinks he is - having a visceral reaction to her very ways of being. If Anna thinks he is repelled, then perhaps she has a fleeting awareness of pushing Vronsky away. To decipher what Tolstoy wanted to say, the translator has to devise an interpretation of Tolstoy's narrative voice in "Anna Karenina." THIS IS an exercise millions of native Russian readers of the novel perform several times in a lifetime. Teenage girls read the novel as melodramatic; adult readers of both genders begin to perceive irony - its amount seems to vary from reading to reading. The author's sympathies, too, invariably appear to shift between characters with every reading; this, combined with ironic distance that is always contracting and expanding, makes the book endlessly rich - and endlessly difficult for the translator, who can never hope to keep pace with the author. How earnest, ironic, condescending, moralistic and simply funny a Tolstoy should the translator inhabit? Perhaps the only way to render Tolstoy's variable voice is to continue producing ever-varying translations. The two new translations bring the number of published English-language versions to at least nine - or 10, if one considers the fact that Constance Garnett's translation was significantly revised by Leonard J. Kent and the great Russian prose stylist Nina Berberova in 1965. Of these, Garnett's and Pevear and Volokhonsky's versions have enjoyed the tightest grip on the market, though it can be argued that neither came by its reputation on the basis of literary merit alone: Garnett for decades had a virtual monopoly on translating Russian classics, and Pevear and Volokhonsky sold hundreds of thousands of copies after their translation was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her television book club. Winfrey, however, had not read the book and chose this particular translation out of consideration of convenience only: It was the most recent and therefore the most widely available at that moment. The Tolstoy of Garnett (one of the few translators to have met the author in person, and the only one of those whose work is still read as current) is a monocled British gentleman who is simply incapable of taking his characters as seriously as they take themselves. Pevear and Volokhonsky, a Russian-American husband-and-wife team, created a reasonable, calm storyteller who communicated in conversational American English. Rosamund Bartlett, a longtime scholar of Russian literature and culture and a biographer of both Tolstoy and Chekhov, creates an updated ironic-Brit version of Tolstoy. Marian Schwartz, Bartlett's distinguished American competitor who has translated a great variety of Russian authors, has produced what is probably the least smooth-talking and most contradictory Tolstoy yet. Schwartz begins by giving the most literal rendition to date of one of the greatest first lines in the history of the novel. "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," wrote Garnett. "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," wrote Pevear and Volokhonsky. Bartlett made the exact same choice of words. Here, meanwhile, is Schwartz: "All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." In her introductory note Schwartz explains her decision: "The first half of this now famous saying is often translated using the word 'alike.' The sentence thus rendered becomes aphoristic: 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' It is a tidy package, but not the package Tolstoy wrote. Tolstoy said not that happy families are 'alike' (odinakovye) but rather that they 'resemble' one another (pokhozhi drug na druga). By not using the expected word in that first half, Tolstoy makes the reader take a second look and points to a more complicated opinion about those happy families." There are two problems with this argument. One, the Russian word odinakovye would not be the expected word at all in this sentence - indeed, it would be jarring there. Two, odinakovye actually means "same," while the English word "alike" is more often used to mean not identical but precisely very similar - it is indeed the best word to express the Russian phrase "resemble one another." But Schwartz's larger point is well taken: Tolstoy's writing is indeed remarkable for its purposeful roughness, the use of repetition and the obsessive breaking of clichés to force the reader to consider the meaning of each word and phrase. "Beginning with Garnett," Schwartz writes, "English translators have tended to view Tolstoy's sometimes radical choices as 'mistakes' to be corrected, as if Tolstoy, had he known better, or cared more, would not have broken basic rules of literary language." Fourteen years earlier, in their own translators' note, Pevear and Volokhonsky quoted Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote of a particular case of repetition that it is "characteristic of Tolstoy's style with its rejection of false elegancies and its readiness to admit any robust awkwardness if that is the shortest way to sense." Pevear and Volokhonsky conclude: "In previous English translations such passages have generally been toned down if not eliminated. We have preferred to keep them as evidence of the freedom Tolstoy allowed himself in Russian." The differences between these two translations, in other words, stem not from a difference in goals or attitudes toward Tolstoy's style but from differences in the ways the translators actually read the text. Bartlett, for her part, quotes Chekhov, Tolstoy's contemporary: "'Have you ever paid attention to Tolstoy's language?' Chekhov once said to a friend; 'enormous sentences, one clause piled on top of another. Do not think this is accidental, that it is a flaw. It is art, and it is achieved through hard work.'" Bartlett writes, "This trans- lation seeks to preserve all the idiosyncrasies of Tolstoy's inimitable style, as far as that is possible, including the majority of his signature repetitions, so often smoothed over by previous translators, his occasional use of specialized vocabulary ... and his subtle changes of register, as in those instances where the introduction of an almost imperceptible but unmistakable note of irony is concerned." But though Bartlett shares Schwartz's and Pevear and Volokhonsky's understanding of Tolstoy's intentions - and their appraisal of previous translation efforts - she proposes that Tolstoy was "often a clumsy and occasionally ungrammatical writer, but there is a majesty and elegance to his prose which needs to be emulated in translation wherever possible. Tolstoy loved the particular properties of the Russian language, but he would not have expected them to be reproduced exactly in translation.... The aim here, therefore, is to produce a translation which is idiomatic as well as faithful to the original, and one which ideally reads as if it was written in one's own language." The opposition between the ideal of producing a translation that reads as though the original had been written in the language and one that has an accent, like a Russian character speaking English in a Hollywood movie, is an old one, and convincing arguments have been made on both sides of the debate. In this case, Bartlett, like Pevear and Volokhonsky before her, appears to be on the side of those who aim for idiomatic English, while Schwartz prioritizes formal equivalence. In reality, though, it is Bartlett who sometimes introduces an awkwardness that is absent in the original. In Chapter 25 of Part 7, for example, as Anna and Vronsky initiate their final fight, Vronsky reads from a telegram: "Few hopes." In Russian, just as in English, hope can be used as either a count or a noncount noun, and Tolstoy in this case opts for the more common noncount option, which would have sounded more idiomatic in translation as well: "Little hope," just as Schwartz has it. A few lines later, when Vronsky tells Anna she needs a divorce from her estranged husband, she responds, in Schwartz's version, "Clarity is not in the form but in the love." Bartlett has her say, "Clarity is not a matter of form but of love," introducing an error of syntax that is absent in the original. And neither of the new translations compares to Pevear and Volokhonsky's in its ability to match the pitch and intonation of one of the novel's most important scenes. But while Schwartz seems to have a better ear for the Russian, her translation is often in the end less readable than Bartlett's. At the very beginning of the book, in the second paragraph, where Tolstoy describes his first unhappy family, that of Anna's brother, Bartlett gets tripped up by the use of tenses in Russian and writes, "The wife had found out that the husband was having an affair with the French governess formerly in their house." Schwartz has "The wife had found out about her husband's affair with the French governess formerly in their home" - this is an accurate reflection of the ambiguity of the sequence of verb tenses that makes Russian very different from English, as well as the ambiguity characteristic of all such discoveries: Neither the wife nor the reader can possibly know whether the affair is over. But in her drive to convey the full and complete meaning of every word, Schwartz weighs the paragraph down with detail: She has the children "racing through" the house "like lost souls" while for Bartlett they are "running about the house as if lost." The Russian word poteryanniye indeed suggests that the children are spiritually rather than physically lost, but this exactitude creates the distracting image of souls rushing at breakneck speed, in no way implied by Tolstoy. Schwartz indicates that the cook quit the day before, "during the midday meal," while Bartlett translates the meal simply as "dinner." Technically, Schwartz is right because Russians consume the meal in question later than Americans would have lunch and earlier than they would have dinner - around the time, in fact, when British people would have tea. But the Russian obed is the most important meal of the day, which is why Bartlett's "dinner" accurately conveys the meaning of the cook's insult, if not the timing of the walkout. BUT LET US consider the first line again. Did Tolstoy actually mean that all happy families are alike while each unhappy family enjoys its own form of misery? The structure of the book seems to affirm this view: It tells the stories of many unhappy families and only one happy one, as though the one happy family could represent all the families that are just like it. On second look, however, it turns out that all unhappy families are very much alike - decimated by unfaithfulness, jealousy and lack of trust that work in predictable ways - while the one happy family develops in unpredictable, fascinating detail. Did Tolstoy mean to start the reader off with a false assertion to make his moral point all that much more clearly, or is this reader reading too much into the apparent paradox? The answer colors the reading of much of the text that follows. Take Part 7, Chapter 15, in which Kitty, the wife in the book's sole happy family, gives birth to a son - an event the anticipation of which is described in excruciating detail: Kitty even goes weeks past her due date. In Bartlett's version, her husband's first encounter with the baby goes as follows: "As he gazed at this tiny, pathetic creature, Levin tried vainly to find some signs of paternal feeling in his heart. He felt only disgust for it." Schwartz's image of Levin is essentially the same as Bartlett's: "Levin gazed at this tiny, pitiful being and made vain efforts to find in his heart some signs of fatherly feeling toward it. All he felt for it was revulsion." In both of these translations, Levin's fears, described over hundreds of preceding pages, have been realized: For all his efforts at building the perfect family, he cannot rise to the challenge of fatherhood - he is undeserving of happiness, just as he suspected. The ending of the chapter therefore cannot redeem him. Bartlett: '"Look now,' said Kitty, turning the baby towards him so that he could see it. The wizened little face suddenly wrinkled up even more, and the baby sneezed. "Smiling and barely able to hold back tears of tenderness, Levin kissed his wife and went out of the dark room. "What he felt for this little creature was not at all what he had expected. There was nothing jubilant or happy about this feeling; on the contrary, it was an agonizing new fear. It was the consciousness of a new area of vulnerability. And this consciousness was indeed so agonizing at first, and the fear that this helpless creature might suffer so intense, that he failed to notice the strange feeling of absurd joy and even pride he experienced when the baby sneezed." Russian uses the same pronouns for both animate and inanimate objects, so Bartlett's choice of "it" for the baby serves to underscore Levin's failure to relate to the baby in a way that is absent in the original. Schwartz uses "him." She also uses the word "emotion" where Bartlett has "tenderness"; "anticipated" rather than "expected"; "cheer" and "joy" over "jubilant" and "happy"; "terror" rather than "fear"; and "senseless" rather than "absurd." None of these distinctions, however, change the narrative: Levin appears to be failing, and the birth of the baby is likely the point at which this family, too, starts on its path to failure. Pevear and Volokhonsky, in their 14-year-old translation, rendered Levin's initial reaction to the baby not as disgust or revulsion but as squeamishness. And that changes everything. ANNA KARENINA By Leo Tolstoy Translated by Rosamund Bartlett 847 pp. Oxford University Press. $29.95. ANNA KARENINA By Leo Tolstoy Translated by Marian Schwartz 754 pp. Yale University Press. $35. MASHA GESSEN'S seventh book, "The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy," will be published in April. Did Tolstoy actually mean that all happy families are alike and all unhappy families unique?
Choice Review
An award-winning author and translator, Bartlett offers a fluid, conversational British English rendition of Anna Karenina. In common with earlier translators (from Constance Garnett to Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky), Bartlett sought to offer a translation that is both idiomatic and faithful to the original--which is the central challenge of translating this, or any, novel. Tolstoy had a penchant for repeated words and long, clause-laden sentences, and translators have sometimes "refined" the prose by deploying synonyms and smoothing out syntax. Bartlett respects Tolstoy's deliberate repetitions. However, where Tolstoy varied adjectives, Bartlett repeats her favorites, especially awful and smart, and she repeats the colloquial phrase "off you go," suggesting a dismissal that is not always indicated in the Russian. More grating is her preference of was over the correct conditional were (as in "it's just as if I was doing homework" [part 6, chapter 3]) and of like over as (as in "and like a hungry animal will pounce on every object it comes across" [part 5, chapter 8]). Pevear and Volokhonsky are more felicitous, preserving Tolstoy's repetitions and offering more nuanced translations where appropriate, with grammatical consistency. Still, this is a solid translation, and Bartlett includes an excellent introduction and indispensable endnotes. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, general readers. --Nancy Tittler, SUNY at Binghamton
Guardian Review
Nothing like a dose of abolitionism or spinning instructions to make you yearn for a good old-fashioned novel to paint huge cloudy symbols of a high romance and stir your soul. The problem is, which? No one will agree about which 12 novels changed the world; it has to be subjective. Besides, a novelist's aim is less to change the world than to change one's perception of it. I didn't consider Middlemarch , which in any case only comes these days abridged. Having failed to track down The Power and the Glory , my favourite Graham Greene read by Andrew Sachs, though it is still around, I've settled for Tolstoy's least heroic novel, despite protests. Adultery and suicide, I am advised, are not appropriate scenes and set a bad example for young people. Why not Robinson Crusoe ? Because I don't want to be edified, I want, like Anna, to feel passion, despair, ecstacy, betrayal, resignation, resolution - the whole thing. No one immerses you in the business of life, its ebbs, flows, agonies and raptures, as comprehensively as Tolstoy. Flawed as she is, Anna tells me more about the eternal condition of woman than a score of tracts by Wollstonecraft, Stopes, George Eliot or Germaine Greer. Maybe it's a woman's book; it certainly underlines the differences between the sexes. Caption: article-audio13.2 Nothing like a dose of abolitionism or spinning instructions to make you yearn for a good old-fashioned novel to paint huge cloudy symbols of a high romance and stir your soul. The problem is, which? No one will agree about which 12 novels changed the world; it has to be subjective. Besides, a novelist's aim is less to change the world than to change one's perception of it. - Sue Arnold.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Since Anna Karenina was published in 1877, almost everyone who matters in the history of literature has put in his two cents (and a few who stand out in other realms--from Matthew Arnold, who wrote a cogent essay in 1887 about "Count Tolstoy's" novel, to Lenin, who, while acknowledging his "first class works of world literature," refers to him as "a worn out sniveller who beat his breast and boasted to the world that he now lived on rice patties"). Dostoyevsky, a contemporary, declared Anna Karenina perfect "as an artistic production." Proust calls Tolstoy "a serene god." Comparing his work to that of Balzac, he said, "In Tolstoi everything is great by nature--the droppings of an elephant beside those of a goat. Those great harvest scenes in Anna K., the hunting scenes, the skating scenes . . ." Flaubert just exclaims, "What an artist and what a psychologist!" Virginia Woolf declares him "greatest of all novelists. . . . He notices the blue or red of a child's frock . . . every twig, every feather sticks to his magnet." A few cranks, of course, weigh in on the other side. Joseph Conrad wrote a complimentary letter to Constance Garnett's husband and mentioned, "of the thing itself I think but little," a crack Nabokov never forgave him. Turgenev said, "I don't like Anna Karenina, although there are some truly great pages in it (the races, the mowing, the hunting). But it's all sour, it reeks of Moscow, incense, old maids, Slavophilism, the nobility, etc. . . . The second part is trivial and boring." But Turgenev was by then an ex-friend and Tolstoy had once challenged him to a duel. E. M. Forster said, "Great chords begin to sound, and we cannot say exactly what struck them. They do not arise from the story. . . . They do not come from the episodes nor yet from the characters. They come from the immense area of Russia. . . . Many novelists have the feeling for place . . . very few have the sense of space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoy's divine equipment." After finishing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy himself said (to himself, in his journal), "Very well, you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Molière, or than all the writers of the world--and what of it?" More great essays than I can recount here have been written about the book, especially those by George Steiner, Gary Saul Morson, Eduard Babev, and Raymond Williams. Tolstoy criticism continues to thrive, and now includes its own home called the Tolstoy Studies Journal. Resorting to any library today, one can page through recent articles with titles like "Tolstoy on the Couch: Misogyny, Masochism, the Absent Mother," by Daniel Rancour-Lafarriere; "Passion in Competition: The Sporting Motif in Anna Karenina ," by Howard Schwartz; "Food and the Adulterous Woman: Sexual and Social Morality in Anna Karenina ," by Karin Horwatt; and even "Anna Karenina's Peter Pan Syndrome," by Vladimir Goldstein. What's left, in the year 2000, for me to say? Once, when I was a girl of eleven or twelve, sprawled on a sofa reading, an adult friend of the family noticed that I went through books quickly and suggested that every time I finished one, I enter the name of the author and title, publisher, the dates during which I read it, and what my impressions were on a three-by-five index card. That kind of excellent habit is one we can easily imagine cultivated by the young Shcherbatsky princesses, when we first meet them "wrapped in a mysterious poetical veil." Levin wonders from afar, "Why it was the three young ladies had to speak French and English on alternate days; why it was that at certain hours they took turns playing the piano, the sounds of which were audible in their brother's room . . . why they were visited by those professors of French literature, of music, of drawing, of dancing; why at certain hours all three young ladies, and Mademoiselle Linon, drove in the coach to Tverskoy Boulevard, dressed in their satin cloaks, Dolly in a long one, Natalie in a shorter one, and Kitty in one so short that her shapely little legs in tight red stockings were exposed." Of course, I was an American girl, not a Russian princess, and instead of foreign languages and piano tutors what I had was outside. From dawn to dusk, all summer, we ran to the woods, scavenging lumber, hauling boards, digging holes to build forts that were rarely completed; but we became muddy and tired. I never followed the family friend's good advice. Now I wish I had. A reason to keep a reading journal would be to compare the experience of the same book met at different ages. It could provide the deepest kind of diary. Anna Karenina, War and Peace, In Search of Lost Time and Middlemarch hold sway over a reader for weeks, months, a whole summer, and so we tend to remember our lives along with them, the way we would someone we'd roomed with for a period of months and then not seen again. I remember Tolstoy's novels personally--where I was when I first read them, for whom I was pining or from whom I was recovering. (For me, the novels were a bit long to read in the throes.) Tolstoy himself kept just such a diary, his biographers tell us, a journal of "girls and reading. And remorse." He presented these journals, with all their literary impressions and squalid confessions, to his young fiance, Sofia Behrs, as Levin does to Kitty in Anna Karenina. In the novel, as in Tolstoy's life, the squalor got all the attention from the young bride to be. But for history, as it might have been for Tolstoy later in his life, his youthful writing about books proves to be not only more important but more personal. Though I didn't keep a journal of reading, I did keep journals of "feelings," largely of boys whose names the black-bound volumes record. A list of those names no longer conjures the faces or characteristic gestures. But I remember where I was the first time I read Anna Karenina. I was at Yaddo, a writers' colony in upstate New York, during the high season, and I felt distinctly outside the community's social world. Another young female writer arrived with, it seemed to me, a better wardrobe. I found myself checking what she was wearing at every meal. I hadn't considered that I was visiting a town that for more than 150 years had been a summer "watering hole." A small backpack held all my clothes for the summer. A pretty orchestra conductor with whom I jogged examined a pin-sized stain on my best white blouse. "I wouldn't wear it," she said. I was twenty-four years old and, I'll admit it, I read the novel to learn about love. I was at the beginning of my life and I'd come from one of the unhappy families Tolstoy mentions. I was, in my own oblique way, writing about that circus in all its distinction. But I wanted my own life to be one of the happy ones and I felt at peace there, in my studio on the second story of an old wooden, formal house. I had the time to lie on my white bed with the pine fronds ticking the window and learn how. I felt enchanted, as any girl might be, with the balls, the ice-skating parties, most especially with Kitty's European tour to recover from heartbreak. I identified with Anna and with Kitty, never for a second with Varenka, whose position might have actually been closest to my own. In fact, I was young enough to remember a particular magazine I'd read while in a toy store as a child, no doubt published by the Mattel Corporation, that chronicled a holiday week in the life of a doll called Barbie. Like the characters in Anna Karenina, Barbie also went to an ice-skating party and wore a muff. Barbie also owned formal gowns. Barbie, too, sat to have her portrait painted. I mention this not to call attention to the rather girlish and unsophisticated imagination I still had but rather to show how far into a child's fantasy Tolstoy ventures before then shocking us by rendering our heroine's aversion to touching her husband. And here I'm not talking only about Anna. He makes mention of Kitty's "revulsion" toward Levin as well. I read--that first time--for the central characters, to see whom they married; to decide what was dangerous in a man, what fulfilling; what kind of love to hope for, to fear. I didn't like Vronsky. Or I did, but I was afraid of him. Vronsky says something at the beginning of the novel that the repeat reader will never forget. We meet him, in his first appearance, as Kitty's suitor, and already fear--as her mother will not quite let herself--that he will turn out to be a cad. The conversation in the parlor turns to table-rapping and spirits, and Countess Nordston, who believed in spiritualism, begins to describe the marvels she has seen. Vronsky says, " '. . . for pity's sake, do take me to see them! I have never seen anything extraordinary, though I am always on the lookout for it everywhere.' " He says this in Kitty's living room, in her presence. Of course, he has not yet seen Anna. That night, after flirting with Kitty, he goes straight home to his rented room and falls asleep early, musing, "That's why I like the Shcherbatskys', because I become better there." His yearning for the extraordinary, the small account he gives to the peace-giving quality of the Shcherbatskys, tells his whole story, the way a prologue often announces the great Shakespearean themes. Kitty's father has never liked or trusted Vronsky, while her mother favors him, considering Levin only a "good" match, but Vronsky a "brilliant" one. The dangers and glory of that kind of exceptionalism--in love--were for me, that first time, the subject of the novel. That question of the viability of extraordinary and ordinary loves was even more riveting for me, at twenty-four, than the differences between happy and unhappy families. This dilemma, in fact--along with work and how to get by on little money in New York City--was the main thing my friends and I talked about. How X loves Y, but Y loves Z, but Z loves . . . all coming down to whether we would have great loves or have to "settle," as we put it. Of course, we all want to have something extraordinary, in love. None of us, at twenty-four anyway, wants to settle or be settled for. Part of what is touching, on a second reading, is Vronsky's first meeting with Anna. If you had asked me about that scene before I reread the book, I would have relied on convention and said that Vronsky met a beautiful woman at the train station. But on first seeing Anna--who will be for Vronsky the great love--Vronsky sees her full of life, but not necessarily exceptional. He glances at her once more "not because she was very beautiful" but because of an expression on her face of "something peculiarly . . . soft." Vronsky has not had an ordinary family life. He doesn't much remember his father, and his mother, now "a dried-up old lady," had been "a brilliant society woman, who had had during her married life, and especially afterward, many love affairs notorious in all society." Tolstoy makes it clear that Vronsky does not love or respect his mother. Anna says, " 'The countess and I have been talking all the time, I of my son and she of hers.' " Vronsky recognizes Anna first as a mother, a mother miserable to be away--for only a few days--from her beloved son. We might say that what seemed extraordinary for him was just the quality of ordinary maternal devotion his own mother never had. And here we feel the tragic parallel. Anna is bound to become a woman like Vronsky's mother, notorious for her affair. Later on, her great concern will be that her son may lose respect for her. Vronsky will wish for nothing more than to make his daughter legitimate and to marry Anna, in the usual way. " 'My love keeps growing more passionate and selfish, while his is dying, and that's why we're drifting apart,' " Anna says, near the end. " 'He is everything to me, and I want him more and more to give himself up to me entirely. And he wants more and more to get away from me. . . . If I could be anything but a mistress, passionately caring for nothing but his caresses; but I can't and I don't care to be anything else. And by that desire I rouse aversion in him, and he rouses fury in me, and it cannot be different.' " There, Anna is, I believe, talking about sex. But by then, Vronsky wants the precious ordinary: a marriage, a family--which is as unattainable for him as his heightened passion is for Kitty or Levin or Dolly or even Stiva. Excerpted from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
