Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Those who had read this book before found that it was more interesting on second reading, and in a way they got more out of it. Especially about the “second story”, Levin and Kitty, since the first time round one naturally focused more on Anna Karenina herself.

Tolstoy wrote the book as a serial. One of the reasons he wrote it was to send a new message to readers, about the relationship between work and education. It is a family story – all the main characters are connected. But between them they represent the whole range of levels of Russian nineteenth-century society. The Shterbatskys – the peasants – Nicholas Levin and Marya Nikolaevna.

Bookclubbers were surprised to find how easy the book was to read, compared with nineteenth-century literature in English. We had read different translations, but no-one had any difficulty in reading it and everyone had found it a compelling read. The chapters are very short, and the language and sentences are clear. The ideas are not necessarily so straightforward or easy to catch. In practically every chapter, there are phrases, sentences and episodes that are loaded with significance – anyone who had a copy of their own and who was in the habit of highlighting meaningful passages, would soon have virtually the whole book covered in yellow stripes.

One of the most fascinating things about the book is the picture it provides of the Russian world of the nineteenth century. It was a world in which money meant everything (as indeed it does in today’s world), whether at the peasants’ level or at that of the upper classes. What was noticeable was the sheer unreality of the lives lived by the nobility. There is a very strongly-marked contrast between the society men who went from soirée to theatre to club (yes, the men’s purposelessness is what strikes one most; I suppose we find it easier to accept the idea of upper-class women leading such a meaningless existence?) and the peasants, with their simple happiness and their farniente, the ability to persevere in hard, gruelling work while taking every opportunity that came along of doing nothing. The peasants are shown as leading happy, even carefree lives. They live on the land and have strong families, companionship, and folk traditions. However, they have neither education nor culture, so their level of happiness is limited and narrow.

The question of religious faith runs through the whole book – it is a question, a problem. It is evident in Karenin, a cold fish who has never really thought about how he ought to treat his wife, or whether their relationship could be different. He has been living an artificial life made up of official duties and official responsibilities, but with no real human relationships and no actual friends at all. He undergoes a religious experience when Anna seems to be dying after giving birth, while still in his house, to Vronsky’s daughter. Karenin finds that he can humble himself, and forgive her and even Vronsky, totally, in a Christ-like way. However, this conversion, real though it is, does not last. Karenin ends up being fascinated by the Christian-Scientist-type teachings of Countess Lydia Ivanovna, even though he realises, deep down, that this new version of Christianity is false and shallow.

Levin himself, who seems to be an autobiographical character for Tolstoy, wrestles much more deeply with his faith, as he does with everything in the intellectual realm. To begin with he tries to make sense of the Russian social set-up as it is at that time, and to rationalise and improve the agricultural work done by the peasants – recently liberated from serfdom. He is foiled by the peasants themselves, who are one and all convinced that any change or innovation must necessarily be bad, and, if proposed by a landowner, must be a trick to get something out of them. Levin is a man of integrity and natural humility, and continues questioning, reading, and arguing about the purpose of life and human nature. However, it is noticeable that again and again, he tries to engage people in discussion about these things unsuccessfully, even when he is sure they have very interesting viewpoints to contribute; and when he argues, he never manages to convince anyone of his point of view.

Levin goes to confession to a Russian Orthodox priest before his wedding, as Church rules require. And, with characteristic honesty (unlike Oblonsky), he says frankly that he doubts the existence of God. The priest is not scandalized, but really does help him to look towards faith instead of away from it. When Kitty has a difficult labour, Levin finds himself praying with real faith, but experiences it more as a feeling that doesn’t last (there is an obvious parallel here with Karenin). However, he keeps on trying to find his way to faith in order to make sense of his life, and human existence. In the end he realises that in all his philosophising, reading and arguing, he has been “seeking food in toy shops and tool shops” – determinedly looking for spiritual sustenance in all the wrong places – and that he really does have a faith on which he can construct his life.

Vronsky and Anna are the main characters of the “first story” in the book, as Levin and Kitty are of the “second story”. Vronsky’s philosophy of life, which seems to be characteristic of his class and generation, was merely a set of hard and fast rules for getting on in society. Practically every time he is mentioned, his “even white teeth” also feature. The most extensive and detailed episode involving him is the horse race where he literally rides his horse to death in an unsuccessful attempt to win; he destroys Anna as he had destroyed the horse. There is an astonishing passage when he and Anna first become lovers, where Tolstoy describes Vronsky’s attitude towards Anna in terms of the attitude of a murderer towards his dead victim. The last time Vronsky comes into the book, on his way to find death at the battlefront, he is suffering from a severe ache in all his teeth.

Anna is, of course, a much more interesting character, and we come much closer to her than we ever do to Vronsky. What ruins her life is firstly her inability to love her husband, and secondly, her pathological jealousy. Neither of these is entirely her fault, but she never had any help in tackling these problems. Nowadays she is generally seen as a tragic heroine. It is easy to see how this view can do a lot of harm: a woman who is not entirely happy in her marriage for some reason, reads Anna Karenina and thinks, “Ohh how romantic – just like me – I’m just like her…” and looks for a way of escape, instead of looking to see where the problem lies (including in her own behaviour) and trying to solve it and put her marriage on a better footing.

There are masses of other characters in the book, all of whom are compellingly realistic even though they are relatively “minor parts”.

It is a fascinating book to read from all sorts of different angles. At the level of sociology, it is worth comparing with books about other societies – most obviously, of course, Dickens, Gaskell, and other nineteenth-century English writers who describe the whole range of society; and writers of similar scope in other countries.

Tara Road by Maeve Binch

Maeve Binchy, Tara Road

The discussion about Tara Road focused mainly on four points: Characters; quality of writing; what value there might be in reading a well-told story with bad morals; and whether we would recommend it to other people. It’s only fair to say that opinions on all four points were very diverse! What follows is a bit of a summary, leaving out all the debating.

The characters provided plenty to talk about: everybody disliked and despised Danny Lynch for his all-round cheating – basically the person he was in love with was himself –, and Rosemary Ryan for pretending to be Ria’s friend while having an ongoing affair with her husband; it was hard to understand how anyone could be so steely and selfish.

Some people thought Ria was excellently drawn and others felt she was too naïve to be true; it was noticeable that the house-swap enabled her to change conclusively and face life in a way she had never done before.

For more than one reader, the catastrophically inappropriate schoolboy Brian was a favourite. Colm Barry was intended to be a sympathetic and attractive character, but there was too much missing that one would want to know about him, as though time or space constraints had forced the author to leave, or cut, parts of the story out.

At least one reader felt that all the older-generation Irishwomen – Nora Johnson, Danny’s mother, Martin Moran’s mother – were depicted as poor-spirited and bitter. We talked about that generation of Irish people – women – in Catholic parishes in England: a generation of talented women, hard workers, unbelievably generous with their time and efforts, who have found that there is no-one to take over from them because their children, the next generation, are totally different and have no intention of following in their footsteps in any way at all.

The question arose of why Danny turned out the way he did: was it because his parents seemed incapable of family relationships and had no “parenting skills” whatsoever, and so he had had no proper family upbringing?

It was felt by some that the characters were shallow stereotypes, a neatly-chosen range of stock figures with which to decorate the stage, and that there was simply not enough depth in them to make a satisfying read.

The quality of writing: like all Binchy novels it’s popular fiction. It makes exciting reading, and Binchy manages to keep all the characters before our eyes, with short episodes, conversations and events, moving rapidly from one to another all the time. 

The introduction of Marilyn, and her story, halfway through the book, is very well done indeed by means of the telephone conversation.

The mirroring between Ria and Marilyn is too obviously contrived for art: each simultaneously goes through a sense of anger towards the other, and then each simultaneously discovers a highly significant fact about the other’s life, which she realises she can never tell the other about; each then reacts by feeling protective and positive towards the other.

On the other hand, there are sentences here and there throughout the book where the reader feels, “She just dashed this down meaning to go back and write it properly later, but then forgot…” Plus what we said about   the character of Colm Barry above.

Why read a book like this – easy reading, good story, about people with really bad morals? For people who read it uncritically, just for entertainment, there is a lot in it that would be really harmful, simply because it presents really wrong choices and situations as ordinary – the way everyone lives, the things everyone does. So people are helped to accept and do these things themselves and never see anything wrong with them. That is the way immoral literature, at the highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow levels, has been working for the last century or so, and has done a huge amount of harm to society.

But if you read Maeve Binchy critically, it can, we thought, be very useful too. In the first place, it helps to put ourselves in the places of the many people we know who do live in that way and understand where they are at. Secondly, you can ask yourself, “At this point, this person made a really bad choice. What would have been a good choice for him or her to make? What could have helped him or her to make it? What would have been some likely results?” A very useful exercise indeed in many ways!

Would we recommend this book to anyone else, and if so, to whom and what for? It turned out that none of us would recommend it just as a good read. It would be an entertaining and relaxing book to read, for instance, while convalescing - but there are plenty of other books which are equally entertaining, more relaxing, better written, and without the unpleasantness of this one. It has its usefulness only as a critical teaching tool in the right hands.