Chance also plays an important role within Anna Karenina, which in its revelation of the often unconscious motivation behind human behaviour is a strikingly modern novel for its time, which was the high-water mark of Russian realism. Tolstoy depicts everyday life in an unidealized, objective way, indeed his dissection of the shifting states of emotional experience is often executed with a surgical precision, but a key element of his realism is also to depict his characters, Anna and Vronsky in particular, doing or saying things they had not intended. This technique certainly illustrates Tolstoy’s acute powers of psychological analysis, and his frequent use of the word ‘involuntary’ when describing behaviour betrays his debt to Schopenhauer’s concept of the ‘Will’—that blind force driving the futile engine of human striving, and which can only lead to suffering. Along with the introduction of many random details, however, which appear to have no apparent function in the plot, symbolic or otherwise, this technique also provides us with a reminder of the contingency of being, thereby demonstrating a sensibility more readily associated with twentieth-century modernism. While Tolstoy never consciously allied himself with the artistic avant-garde, or indeed with any artistic group at all (although he was a modernist avant-la-lettre in his pioneering use of stream of consciousness), he did nevertheless set out to write a novel about modernity. While War and Peace is a retrospective work extolling the golden age of the Russian nobility and its patriarchal values in the era of the Napoleonic Wars, Anna Karenina is quite deliberately set in what Tolstoy shows us to be the much more disturbing present of 1870s Russia, in which those values are in the process of being eroded by the repercussions of very recent political reform.
The composition of Anna Karenina was in fact so contemporaneous with the times that events such as the Serbo-Turkish War, which broke out in June 1876, are not merely woven into the backdrop but inform the narrative: in the last part of the novel, completed in the spring of 1877, Vronsky enlists as a volunteer. By this time four years had passed since Tolstoy had started writing the novel, a challenging period during which he had begun to call into question his entire belief-system and, as a consequence, his attitude towards his fictional characters, who develop in sometimes unexpected ways and are rarely static. A sign of what was to come can be found in the stridency of the anti-militarist views Tolstoy puts forward in the final part of Anna Karenina, which he submitted for publication in April 1877, just as Russia declared war on Turkey. Like most Russian novels, Anna Karenina had been appearing in serial form as each part was completed, and when the patriotic editor of the Russian Messenger took issue with Tolstoy’s pacifism and refused to include the book’s conclusion in his May issue, a scandal ensued which naturally only increased its popularity with the public. St Petersburg’s leading bookshop sold an unprecedented five hundred copies on the day Anna Karenina first became available as a separate work in early 1878.3
Tolstoy confided in his wife that whereas in War and Peace he had loved the ‘national idea as a result of the war of 1812’, in Anna Karenina he loved the ‘family idea’. While the tumultuous story of Anna’s adulterous liaison with Vronsky takes centre-stage, it is important to recognize that, being the kind of writer he was, Tolstoy could not have proceeded very far without a counterweight. In fact, we have two: the troubled marriage of Stiva and Dolly Oblonsky, and the far happier one of Levin and Kitty. It is by telling their stories side by side, at times interweaving them, and by touching on many other stories of family life in Anna Karenina that Tolstoy is able to write a peerless work of fiction which is also an investigation of the institution of marriage, the nature of love, the destiny of Russia, and ultimately the meaning of life. It may be tempting to view the many chapters devoted to such pursuits as mowing, portrait-painting, mushroom-gathering, and participating in local elections as extraneous to the main story, and nothing more than a pleasant diversion. Film adaptations of the novel understandably tend to focus almost exclusively on Anna and Vronsky’s passionate love affair, which is characterized by high drama and romance, but this is to illuminate just one layer of what is an extraordinarily complex work of art in which not one word is extraneous. Closer acquaintance with the novel’s intricate structure reveals that everything in the novel is interconnected and contributes in some way to its central theme.
Chekhov famously said about Anna Karenina that not a single problem was resolved, but it was a novel which nevertheless fully satisfied, as all the problems were correctly stated.4 The central problem, of course, relates to the fate of Tolstoy’s captivating heroine Anna. Much of the attention of the considerable body of critical literature devoted to Anna Karenina is directed at exploring the cause of Anna’s tragedy, particularly with respect to the novel’s epigraph: Vengeance is mine; I will repay. If it is God taking revenge on Anna for committing adultery, it has reasonably been asked, then why are all the other adulterous characters in the novel not punished too? Why do Anna’s philandering brother Stiva Oblonsky and her depraved friend Betsy Tverskaya escape divine justice? Or are we meant to understand that it is Anna who wreaks vengeance on Vronsky? Or that it is Tolstoy wreaking vengeance on Anna for the crime of being a beautiful and intelligent woman who dares to break the mould, and seek a fulfilling life, free from the constraints imposed on her gender by a hypocritical, patriarchal society? That was certainly the view of D. H. Lawrence, who was indignant that Anna had apparently fallen victim to Tolstoy’s didactic urge. There is, in fact, no agreement amongst critics on whether Anna is a victim or not, and whether or not she is responsible for her own destiny. Tolstoy complicates matters considerably by not completing the epigraph: the words ‘saith the Lord’ are missing. So who is speaking?
What is successful about Tolstoy’s characterization of Anna is her complexity. We are drawn to Anna when we first meet her for her warmth and generosity, and we are sympathetic to her desire to follow her heart and live life to the full after the sterility of her marriage to a dry bureaucrat of a husband to whom she has been married off at a young age. We admire her for wanting to live truthfully and openly, and suffer with her when she is forced into a new life of sterility when society closes its doors to her, while still welcoming Vronsky. And yet is it not also true that she rejects her role as wife and mother and becomes increasingly narcissistic? So much of her behaviour with Vronsky is taken up with the attention he pays to her, yet there is little evidence of what she gives to him. Dolly notices Anna’s new habit of screwing up her eyes when she goes to visit her, as if she is unable to face reality.
Rather than take responsibility for her own actions, Anna alights on omens—the accident at the railway station, her recurrent dreams—and prefers to blame fate. Just as there are times when Karenin is not an unsympathetic character (as when he is filled with compassion after the birth of Anna’s daughter, for whom he feels a tender affection), there are times when the reader’s identification with Anna is challenged by her wilful and egotistical behaviour. If Tolstoy’s characters change during the course of the novel, it was because his attitude towards them changed as his own thinking developed. It is, therefore, not wholly surprising that Anna Karenina can be seen ‘as an array of readings that contradict and diverge from each other, and that cluster around an opposition between personal truths and universal truth’, as Vladimir Alexandrov has shown in his examination of the novel’s many possible meanings.5