What many judge as the greatest novel ever written, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, strikes me as a beautiful parable of the core meaning of what it means to lose life and to find it.
After a few chapters of the book, it becomes clear that the novel should more accurately be called Anna and Levin, for it contains the distinct stories of two characters. Anna moves to center stage because of her intensely enchanting power and the web of intrigue and self-deception she spins around her adulterous affair. But always the camera angle shifts away to Konstantin Levin who is living out an entirely separate plot, most of which takes place on his country estate.
Two more unlike characters could not have been devised. Anna, a sophisticated, urbane princess, could sweep into a room with her low-cut ball gown and reduce all talking to hushed whispers about Ser. She could pursue fluid, fascinating conversation on any subject with any guest while she was simultaneously sizing up the dress and hairstyle of other women in the room. On a train ride from Moscow to Petersburg early in the book, Anna attracts a dashing young cavalry officer, Count Vronsky. Their affair, its effect on Anna’s family, and ultimately its death-grip on Anna herself consume most of the novel’s plot.
AII the while Tolstoy provides a nearly comic relief to the passion of Anna’s life by involving the country bumpkin Levin, who fits best in a world of hay and piglets and farm implements and ignorant peasants. Yet he is never quite content. He ought to be happy with his gentlemanfarmer’s life of snipe-shooting and forest hikes, but he’s not. While other wealthy landowners are enjoying the fruits of one of the greatest concentrations of wealth in history, Levin is off brooding about the philosophical and moral implications. He’s haunted by Christianity as he watches his brother die and as he observes the simple faith of the peasants and of his wife Kitty. Why can’t he believe?
Anna, meanwhile, tours Europe with chivalrous Vronsky, has a child by him, gardens at his estate in the country, and charms whomever she contacts. Everything she wants in life-social standing, attention, love, adventure-she gets. In contrast, if Levin does get what he wants, he’s so melancholy he fails to recognize it.
Tolstoy’s powerfully told tale spotlights the activities of these two: Anna, who seems to be finding herself, and Levin, who always seems to be losing his life. If the two were alive today, I imagine Anna would be hailed as a competent, independent woman who has learned how to “look out for number one” and could qualify as an assertiveness-training leader. Levin, on the other hand, would sorely need a subscription to Psychology Today and Esquire, where he could perhaps learn how to take charge of his life. Obviously, he has a self-image problem.
The PBS series on Anna Karenina ended with the famous scene of Anna’s suicide. Though she had attained everything she wanted, Anna found herself tormented by greed, doubt, and jealousy. What if Vronsky loved another woman the way he loved her? What if Vronsky only wanted her for her body, and if so, what if her body lost its appeal to him? How could she cling to those things she had fought for? Ultimately, she decided that death was “the only way of restoring his love for her in his heart, of punishing him, and of gaining the victory in the fight which an evil spirit was waging against him in her heart.” She threw herself under the great iron wheels of a steam locomotive.
Though the PBS series ended with that scene, Tolstoy did not. He takes us back to the country, to Levin. Levin had been wrestling with love for his wife and his young son, Mitya. Why was it he did not feel intense caring for his young son? Was something wrong with him? He had decided to invest himself in his farm, in his family and his neighbors and his servants, but still he was torn by doubt. Was his decision a mistake?
One event cauterized his doubts and supplied for him the faith which had always eluded him. A sudden Russian summer thunderstorm came up and Levin discovered Kitty and Mitya were missing. As lightning struck their favorite oak tree with a great crash, he felt himself breathing a desperate prayer: “Dear Lord, dear Lord, not on them.”
“And though he thought at once how senseless was his prayer that they should not be killed by the oak that had already fallen, he repeated it, for he knew that he could do nothing better than to utter that senseless prayer.”
Kitty and Mitya were safe, but Levin remained deeply moved by the experience. In that moment of crisis, his true love for them had crashed down upon him. An instinctive, visceral surge of faith and dependency on God washed him with a consciousness that even he, troubled, doubting Levin, could believe.
Tolstoy ends his brilliant epic with two paragraphs which chronicle Levin’s Christian awakening. They were missing from the PBS series and, in fact, from the first edition of Anna Karenina which was serialized in a literary magazine. Tolstoy had included them, but his editors decided the tragedy was the place to end, not this shift to Christian hope, which they saw as appended propaganda.
Fortunately, later versions of the novel included Tolstoy’s ending, though it still attracts a barrage of literary criticism. The structural merits may be debatable, but to me they finish out the logical consequences of Anna’s and Levin’s lives. One found her life and discovered it lost; she was consumed by her own selfishness. Another lost his life in others and abruptly discovered he had found it. Here is what he found:
“This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy and enlightened me all of a sudden as I had dreamed it would-just the same as with my feeling for my son. There was no surprise about it either. But whether it is faith or not-I don’t know what it is-but that feeling has entered just as imperceptibly into my soul through suffering and has lodged itself there firmly.
“I shall still get angry with my coachman Ivan; I shall still argue and express my thoughts inopportunely; there will still be a wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife, and I shall still blame her for my own fears and shall regret it; I shall still be unable to understand with my reason why I am praying, and I shall continue to pray-but my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, every moment of it, is no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an incontestable meaning of goodness, with which I have the power to invest it.” -Philip Yancey
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