[ book tip by Robert Adlam ] Anna Karenina is a terrific novel. It gives us a portrait of Russia at the onset of modernity. Deeply naturalistic, at times the text seems to rise out of the ground itself; there are moments when we feel the chill at sunrise, feel the dew on our boots, hear the lark sing, watch the bright moon fade into the light blue sky; But that is almost incidental: wherever the prose may go, it is the relationships that grip us and make for such compelling reading. 

Anna Karenina, the woman, is striking in her beauty, striking in her virtue. She glitters and sparkles - a red ruby scattered over black velvet. I love her passion, her courage, her hypnotic presence. I want her to find enduring happiness; I want her to live happily ever after. But, as Tolstoy gives us his tragic Anna, I realise that this is a novel about the psychology of men.   

Some years ago a quietly desperate woman wrote to the Times Literary Supplement asking the readership to recommend a work of literature to ‘educate’ her ignorant ‘yuppie daughter’. It was a great question. The readers duly sent in their selections and, finally, a list was published: at the top was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. If that woman had asked for a work that might educate the world about men I would choose Anna Karenina. Why? Well, Anna’s husband, Karenin, a person we are supposed to revile, is a profoundly damaged man. Emotionally wrecked, he allows Tolstoy to raise the awful prospect that men who seek power are wounded, pathological people. Count Vronsky, Anna’s lover, although brilliant, urbane and sophisticated, is driven by ambition: he never finds the resources to help Anna through her crises. Stepan, brother of Anna, remains a hopeless sensualist, a chummy but useless bon viveur. Even Konstanin Levin, who trudges manfully through the dramas, is riven by the narrowness of common sense and a gauche naivete. And so it goes on. 

These sketches of individual character merge into the idea of a single, more generalised, male psyche. Tolstoy is uncovering what it is to be a man: he shows us that the best we can ever hope to get is nowhere near perfection.  

[ Favourite quote ] 'Why, even if we suppose the greatest good luck, that the children don't die, and I bring them up somehow: at the very best they'll simply be decent people. That's all I can hope for. And to gain simply that - what agonies, what toil!'

[ book info ] Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina. (Book language: Russian) Heinemann, Moscow, 1901 (1877). ISBN: 978-1-84749-059-9.
Translated from Russian by Constance Garnett