All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.Is that the most famous opening line of all time? Up there anyway, so I would have thought that a book about "all unhappy families" would include a study of more than just rich (but wish they were richer/more powerful) Russian Counts and Princes and their marriages to women who may, it turns out, be thinking they could have done better themselves. Anna Karenina is like a Russian version of The Country Mouse and the City Mouse with the pointless court and bureaucratic life of 19th century Moscow and Petersburg juxtaposed against the wholesome, idyllic existence of a rural landowner, and as Tolstoy (himself a rural landowning Count) believed that the true soul of Russia lay in the toil of the land-working peasants, it's the Country Mice who come out the happiest.
Anna Karenina is a love story, comparing the bold carnality of Count Vronsky's conquest of the married Anna to Levin's chaste pursuit of Kitty. City men are expected to have mistresses and spend their evenings at men's clubs while their wives attend salons and the theater (unless, like Anna, you are a pariah and must sit home alone or, like Dolly, have no money and a large brood of children to attend to). Everyone is jealous and accuse their spouses of infidelity, and as everyone blushes guiltily at the mention of some secret crush's name, more than one misguided character contemplates suicide as the only possible solution. Even when love is reciprocated, happiness isn't guaranteed as here with Vronsky:
He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.Anna Karenina is also a political treatise, with many different characters suddenly breaking off into a monologue on the rights of the peasants or the useless proliferation of committees or the disconnect between labour and income. In particular it is said that Levin is a stand-in for Tolstoy himself and this character tries many times to experiment with the feudal system; to find a way to allow the peasants who worked his land to gain more profit from their labour. And while all of this makes for an important snapshot of a time right before the Bolsheviks and Trotsky and the massacre of the Romanovs, I wish it was all in a different book -- this nearly thousand page novel is so compelling in the traditional elements of character and setting and plot that the political digressions (although mostly interesting) detracted from my reading experience.
Anna Karenina is also quite funny in places and I especially enjoyed Levin's relationship with his Steward and peasants. Wanting to introduce a "Rational" approach to farming, Levin would buy all the latest English tools and instruct those who worked his land to use European methods, and although everyone would smile and nod at him, Levin would always return to find that the labourers insisted on sticking to the traditional ways; and in this instance, proved himself to be the out-of-touch City Mouse who grows to see the wisdom of the Country methods. In a similar theme, here is a hunting scene from the perspective of Levin's dog:
Running into the marsh, Laska at once picked up, amidst the familiar smells of roots, marsh grass, rust, and the alien smell of horse dung, the bird smell spread all through the place, that same strong-smelling bird that excited her more than anything else…She had already begun a circle to find the place when her master's voice suddenly distracted her. "Here, Laska!" he said, pointing in a different direction…She obeyed him, pretending to search in order to give him pleasure, ran all over the hummocks and then went back to the former place, and immediately sensed them again.Apparently, many novelists (including Nabokov and Faulkner) consider Anna Karenina to be the greatest novel of all time, and that's no doubt speaking as technicians: the foreshadowing, and the symmetry of various characters' experiences, and the playing out of themes are all achieved masterfully. However, I need to rate books according to my own reactions and I can't help but dock a star for the number of times I became annoyed by the political digressions (which I will admit is paradoxical as I found these monologues, in themselves, interesting enough).
