The networks of connections in Anna Karenina are wide-ranging. On the one hand there is a persistent association of trains with death and adultery. Anna and Vronsky meet at a railway station, where they are witness to a tragic accident which later gives rise to recurring nightmares. Vronsky confesses his love for Anna during a stop at a railway station in the middle of the night, and after she has committed suicide by falling under a train, he himself travels to certain death on a train headed for the Serbian front. But there are other, more subtle ways in which Tolstoy conveys his idea that trains are a pernicious symbol of modernity, an evil innovation imported from the West which threatens to destroy what is best about Russian life. Both the Oblonsky children and Anna’s son play games with trains, and danger is present as an element in both cases. Oblonsky finds himself, towards the end of the novel, negotiating for a job connected with the new railways in order to pay off his debts. Trains are nowhere portrayed positively in Anna Karenina, because Tolstoy’s personal attitude to them was supremely negative. When travelling, Tolstoy himself regularly but reluctantly used the ‘iron road’ (the Russian zheleznaya doroga is a straight translation of the French chemin de fer), but he abhorred this intrusion of modern technology into rural Russia. It is striking that a vital moment of epiphany for Levin concerning his love for Kitty takes place when he catches sight of her travelling, at dawn, not at night, and in a horse-drawn carriage rather than a train.
At the other remove are the many tiny connections which may serve to deepen and illuminate Tolstoy’s themes, even contradicting those lying on the surface, or which simply invite the reader to see new patterns in the weft of his design. Kitty’s friend Varenka, for example, first appears at the beginning of Part Two wearing a toadstool hat. In Part Six it is while gathering mushrooms that Koznyshev fails to propose to her. In Part One Kitty imagines Anna wearing a lilac dress to the ball, and in Part Seven, just before she dies, Anna notices that the young girl who has come on an errand, and of whom she is jealous, is wearing a lilac hat. Similarly, the red bag which Anna has with her on her return journey to Petersburg at the beginning of the novel reappears when she undertakes her last rail journey. Words and phrases are repeated in an almost musical way. As well as the idea of not casting stones, drawn from St John’s Gospel, which occurs three times in the novel, associated with three different characters, two characters at separate points in the novel give voice to the idea of giving up one’s cloak to the man who takes your coat, which comes from the gospels of St Luke and St Matthew. Crucial to the artist Mikhailov’s creative process is the notion of removing veils in order to see more clearly, and a similar analogy is made when Levin looks at his wife shortly before she is about to give birth and feels that the veils have been removed. There are also extensive networks of symbols running through the narrative linked to light and darkness, bears and bear hunting, stars and constellations. Attentive readers will be able to thread together for themselves other subtle chains of reference in the novel relating, for example, to French and English themes, or Tolstoy’s dialogue with Plato’s Symposium.
It is when we consider how Tolstoy paces Anna Karenina that we can further appreciate his consummate skill in constructing his narrative. By comparison with the progress of Levin’s and Kitty’s romance, Anna’s and Vronsky’s story seems to hurtle along at breakneck speed, almost like a runaway train. Their association with trains is appropriate, for they seem to be travelling on a fixed track with a single destination. Levin and Kitty, by contrast, embark on a journey which is open-ended. It seems after he is married that Levin has discovered what can give his life meaning, but his disappointment at not being able to share his insights with his wife, who intrudes into his stargazing with a mundane, practical question, suggests no simple endpoint can ever be reached. Time seems to go by with Levin and Kitty much more slowly—witness the long chapters devoted to Levin’s thoughts while mowing or the many chapters describing his wedding to Kitty. Tolstoy’s technique is at other times almost cinematic. We see the horse race from many different angles, for example, and in different time-frames, prompting the great film director Sergey Eisenstein to view this scene as an example of audio-visual counterpoint par excellence, and as prime material for his technique of montage.11 Tolstoy’s own technique of montage, which has him compare, contrast, and mesh at least two different storylines in a seamless way, is unparalleled.
Tolstoy’s methods of narration are also richly varied and boldly innovative, moving unobtrusively from a voice of lofty omniscience to one that is far more intimate, and seemingly coloured with the thoughts and feelings of a particular character, or, in the case of the novel’s contentious final chapters, unmistakably those of the author himself. We see Anna for the first time, for example, through Vronsky’s eyes, and with equal skill Tolstoy filters the events of the fateful ball in Part One through the prism of Kitty’s consciousness. In Part Six the reader experiences the visceral excitement of hunting for snipe in the marshes from the point of view of Levin’s dog, Laska. And we perceive the emptiness and falsity of Anna’s new life because we see it through Dolly’s eyes when she goes to visit her at Vronsky’s country estate; it is a typically Tolstoyan touch that we follow the complex but lucid progression of Dolly’s thoughts as they evolve from a feeling of envy when she is first setting out on her journey to Vozdvizhenskoye, to one of relief and gratitude when she returns home the following day.
In some instances, such as the early chapters describing Oblonsky’s personality or Vronsky’s habits, we can detect a very faint trace of irony in the narration, while a deliberate tone of sardonic humour or satire is perceptible in those sections of the novel dealing with Karenin’s visit to the lawyer and the hypocrisy and pietism of a character like Countess Lydia Ivanovna. The chapters detailing Karenin’s thought-processes abound with an inflexible and lifeless bureaucratic lexicon consonant with his general character, and they form a sharp contrast to the gentle, lyrical language used to depict the scene at the skating rink, for example, or Levin’s unorthodox proposal to Kitty, in which Tolstoy drew on his own experiences of writing the initial letters of words in chalk on a card-table for Sofya Behrs to decipher. The subsequent scene in the church in which Levin is betrothed to Kitty is very moving in its simplicity, but lyricism in this novel is not always where one would expect to find it. It is absent when the narrator describes the consummation of Vronsky’s and Anna’s love, which is likened to an act of brutal murder, but often present when Levin experiences a feeling of being one with nature, such as when he spends a day mowing with his peasants.
‘Between the lines as you read, you see a soaring eagle who is little concerned with the beauty of his feathers. Thought and beauty, like hurricanes and waves, should not pander to usual, conventional forms.’12 Tolstoy is not named in this unfinished fictional fragment Chekhov worked on in the late 1880s, but it is clear which writer his narrator has in mind. Because Tolstoy paid such scant regard to the ‘beauty of his feathers’, it took a long time for critics to perceive the full extent of his artistry in Anna Karenina. And both conservative and radical critics found fault with the ideology of the novel when it was first published in Russia. Dostoevsky, for example, may have been initially generous with his praise of Anna Karenina, which he described as ‘perfection as a work of art’ in the February 1877 issue of his journal Diary of a Writer. After he read the epilogue, however, he excoriated Tolstoy for voicing through Levin the unpatriotic view that the Russian people shared his lack of concern for the Balkan Slavs, and Levin’s unwillingness to kill, even for the sake of preventing atrocities (this embryonic non-resistance to violence would, of course, lie at the heart of the new religious outlook Tolstoy was about to develop). The proto-Bolshevik critic Peter Tkachev, meanwhile, naturally fulminated against the novel’s aristocratic focus.