Customer Reviews

Anna Karenina

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." That line opens and sets the tone of "Anna Karenina," a tangled and tragic tale of nineteenth century Russia. Tolstoy's story of lovers and family is interlaced with razor-sharp social commentary and odd moments that are almost transcendent. In other words, this is a masterpiece.

When Stepan Oblonsky has an affair with the governess, his wife says that she's leaving him, and now the family is about to disintegrate. Stepan's sister Anna arrives to smooth over their marital problems, and consoles his wife Dolly until she agrees to stay. But on the train there, she met the outspoken Countess Vronsky, and the countess's dashing son, who is semi-engaged to Dolly's sister Kitty.

Anna and Vronsky start to fall in love -- despite the fact that Anna has been married for ten years, to a wealthy husband she doesn't care about, and has a young son. Even so, Anna rejects her loveless marriage and becomes the center of scandal and public hypocrisy, and even becomes pregnany by Vronsky. As she prepares to jump ship and get a divorce, Anna becomes a victim of her own passions...

That isn't the entire story, actually -- Tolstoy weaves in other plots, about disintegrating families, new marriages, and the melancholy Levin's constant search for God, truth, and goodness. Despite the grim storyline about adultery, and the social commentary, there's an almost transcendent quality to some of Tolstoy's writing. It's the most optimistic tragic book I've ever read.

For some reason, Tolstoy called this his "first novel," even though he had already written some before that. Perhaps it's because "Anna Karenina" tackles so many questions and themes, and does so without ever dropping the ball. No wonder it's so long and imposing -- Tolstoy covered a lot of ground in here.

And while "Anna Karenina" was not the first book he wrote, it is probably the deepest and most moving. Tolstoy steeps the book in social commentary, and his personal philosophies. It's also one of those books that takes a very long time to move itself forward -- Tolstoy's writing is slow and ponderous, with a lot of serious discussion about religion and relationships. But his intense, slightly rough writing is worth it.

In some tragic books, you get the feeling that the author really despises his characters, and doesn't really care what happens to them. Tolstoy never gives you that feeling -- no matter how annoying his characters are, they always have something interesting or endearing. No caricatures at all -- even Anna's irritating, arrogant brother is given some quirks to make him seem real.

Oddly enough, the most moving character here is not Anna, but Konstantin Levin -- the tortured, passionate landowner is so earnest that it's difficult not to care about him. Apparently he was Tolstoy's alter ego, which explains his depth. But Anna and Vronsky are strong leads, a passionate pair who are both selfish and seductive, but never boring.

A beautiful look at living right vs. living wrong, "Anna Karenina" is a truly magnificent book. This book is undoubtedly Tolstoy's opus, and a stunning look at human nature.

This is a rather daunting undertaking, but so worth it in the end. The book is incredibly long and detailed. But it is also engaging, heart-wrenching and realistic. The emotions, motivations, private heartache, and public reactions of his characters ring true to the reader. Anna Karenina broke my heart. I sobbed as I read it. The broken relationship between Anna and her son was more than I could bear at times. I had to take breaks while reading to quell the oppressing sadness with which this book filled me.

Going through the particulars in pertinance to Anna Karenina (the story that is) would be somewhat redundant. That is, anything I could possibly say about such story would be tautology at this point. However, I can praise this Signet Edition of Anna Karenina for its more-than-adaquate hoisting of Tolstoy's masterful work. The language used is kept relatively bare as Tolstoy himself wrote, e.g. the traditional Russian patricarchal titles are simplified and an English system of address is used. This leaves the gipping tale of love, deception, etc. (really, its universality is quite surprising; on many the occasion does an event within my own life coinside with that of the world of Anna Karenina), to come through, free of technicality, in true romantic form.

Anna Karenina provides well a window into the rich diversity and complexity within human nature. Tolstoy, relentlessly rich in details, paints characters so deep and natural, that as a reader, I could relate with all the characters, at least in some way.

Their emotions and problems are real: Anna and her adulterous love affair with Vronsky, and Lenin, with his painful pursuit of purpose in this life. Oblonsky struggles to find substance in his "play-acted" life, and Kitty realizes only too late she spurned the man she truly loves. One could go on and on...so much life and human color is contained within the pages.

The novel is down to earth and beautifully written, and provides a wonderful depiction of 19th century Russia.

If you struggle in relationships, question God, or doubt the purpose of it all, this book is for you. I promise you'll find yourself in all the characters...I sure did.

Tolstoy had talent most of us can only dream about. In Anna Karenina he examines the central problem of life through two distinct lenses - Anna, whose discontent is acknowledged in the affair with the dashing Vronsky, and Konstantin, also disillusioned, at first spurned, and later rewarded for accepting what seem to be Tolstoy's views of the truest of virtues.

The novel is brimming with ambitious ideas about love, family, society, religion, service, deceit, you name it. In addition, the writing is well exectuted and highly compelling even to the modern reader. Without giving away the ending I would simply say that the outcomes both follow the logic of Tolstoy's opinions about right and wrong. A long novel that one only wishes could never end.

Before the Russians were allow to read the Bible, they had the authors Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. This book by Tolstoy has all the elements of sin, redemption, sanctification, and renewal. The character portraits are amazing. Tolstoy provides an interlocking profile of three marriages and a relationship, each with its own distinct character. As the opening sentence implies, some of the relationships are more harmonious than others.

Tolstoy was a master of depicting character - a few pages into the story and Oblonsky comes to life for the reader. The same is true of Ann, Kitty, Levin, and all of the other main characters. Tolstoy often achieves an immediate characterization by describing one character through the eyes of another, as in the early description of Kitty through Levin's love-struck eyes.

One of the best books ever written.

This is a delightful soap opera which is as current now as it was when it was written. There's lots of history and lots of description and its fascinating to think that it was written over 100 years ago. I loved it.

This 80000000000000000000 page "book" isn't just boring and depressing, it's frighteningly so. Tolstoy wasn't just writing a boring book, he was trying to convince us that life is boring and dull. He deliberably avoids any sort of plot developement that might spark the slightest shread of joy, excitement, or even mild interest (One might point out Anna's collision with the train, but I did not find this interesting. It was malevolent, sad, and in the context of the rest of the book, spooky in an ill-defined sort of way, but it was not interesting.) He has here milked life of all it's flavor and left us a soggy tale to digest. It's no wonder that Levin finds himself retiring into morbid preoccupations with his own death, feeling himself unable to enjoy anything in his life. This whole novel seems to have been generated in such a pessimistic mood. In the preface to my edition (which gives an account of the history of Tolstoy's progress on the novel, and amazingly manages to surpass the novel's dullness with its rediculous redundancies about the dates of Leo's stops and starts on the novel.) Tolstoy is quoted, "if only someone would finish Anna Karenina for me." The writer himself was bored with this pulseless corpse of a book. No one does anything in this book, and barely anything happens. Levin spends a whole constipated summer with Kitty living down the road from him, and aside from accidentally passing her carriage on the road one morning, absolutely NOTHING becomes of this. Characters have to be sent out into the woods to shoot at birds for lack of anything better to do. Newlyweds are made to spend continuous chapters at a dying man's bedside just so the author can make sure that the slightest fly-speck of happiness isn't allowed admittance to the musty cell where this crap was composed. Several scenes are bungled and character's are often left without discernable motivation. Why does Anna fall for Vronsky? Who knows. They have hardly said four words to each other in print before they end up in bed together. Everything else that proceeds their consumation must have happened off stage somewhere. As far as the final pages of the book, where Levin discovers "faith", some weak-headed folks might find this inspiring, but I was disgusted. Levin's epiphany is less about faith as it is about giving Tolstoy an oppurtunity to spit in the face of reason. (As an illustration of what goes through a person's mind when turning to faith, I think it unintentionally sheds a lot of light on all the disgusting rationalizations a person is making in such a moment.) Why this book is considered a classic, and what sort of enlightment and enjoyment anyone is expected to get out of it, is beyond me. It must appeal to some masochistic element that makes people feel that the revolting boredom that this book induces is somehow their fault and their duty to overcome, (like the guilt people feel in church when the preacher makes them drowsy.) Tolsoy, of course, was a realist and he argued, in effect, that that he was protraying life without "implausable" flights of imagination or wildly extrodinary people or events. But a life without flights of imagination or extrodinary events is not worth living, (nor is it, in my experience, very realistic.) This so-called classic WREAKS.......

For the longest time I have been reticent to write a review of Anna for fear of not being able to do the book justice. I still have that fear, but the time has come to at least say that this is my favorite novel of all time. I refer to the Magarshack translation which I have read and now re-read. I can't imagine a more intriguing story... admittedly however, it would help if the reader had an interest in the world that Tolstoy inhabited. There are so many (often lengthy) asides into his thoughts on abstention from worldly riches / social reconstruction etc. Tolstoy gets his character Levin to do reams of his own preaching on these subjects but again, because I find Tolstoy himself to be one of the most interesting characters Russia has ever produced, I don't mind finding him so obviously entrenched in his own story here.

But "Anna" is first and foremost a LOVE story which depicts the fleeting and disastrous effects of tempestous/undisciplined love (Anna and Vronsky) over against the lasting and mutually beneficial results of patient/disciplined love (Levin and Kitty). This book is an important masterpiece without rival in literature. Reading such a book on one's death-bed would not be a waste of time.

When I think of Anna, I am reminded of something that Solzhenitsyn made one of his fictional characters say in his book The First Circle: "In the 17th century there was Rembrandt, and there is Rembrandt today. Just try to improve on him. And yet the technology of the 17th century now seems primitive to us. Or take the technological innovations of the 1870's. For us they're child's play. But that was when Anna Karenina was written. What can you name that's superior?"

Read Anna... and you will be as silent as I am on that one!

There are two stories in this novel, which are connected at the beginning but become pretty much completely separate in the end. There's the title story of Anna, who runs off with a good-looking army officer leaving behind her stolid politician husband and young son. Then there's the highly autobiographical story of the quiet, unconfident Levin, who's quite happy to live a peaceful life in the countryside (and gets regarded as a fool as a result), except when he ventures into society (quote unquote) to try and woo the woman he loves, who sadly has eyes only for the man Anna fixes her attention on.

I have to confess that I found Levin's story a lot more interesting than Anna's. I sympathised a lot with his lack of confidence and search for purpose in life, and ended up rushing the bits about Anna to read about him.

However, both are well-excecuted, Tolstoy's piercing insights into human nature creeping in. Levin's behaviour in particular was eminently understandable and recognisable.

I have a hard time deciding whether I enjoyed War and Peace or this more - certainly the character of Levin surpasses the ones in War and Peace. Read them both, that's my advice.