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A review by xgigglypuff
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
slow-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
This is the only novel ever written and the best novel I have ever read.
This review will contain many spoilers.
From the beginning, Tolstoy’s writing ability stands out. He masterfully and seamlessly weaves together the characters and their separate storylines. As we are being introduced, the story is woven together without us even noticing. Instead of drastic shifts and new chapters from other perspectives, we spend time with one character, Oblonsky, and with both Dolly and Oblonsky while they are together, and then we leave with Dolly. When Anna visits her, we then leave with Anna. And so on and so forth but it somehow always ties together beautifully and without loose ends. There is nothing I appreciate more than a subtlety in writing, how he always shows us without quite telling us.
I’ve seen many criticisms of Tolstoy as a patriarchal man and writer, but I think of this book from a feminist lens. When the affair happens, both Anna and Vronsky equally take part, but we are shown how Anna is shunned from society while Vronsky is not. We see how the same actions affect the woman and not the man. He leaves and enjoys positions of power. He attends high society balls. He is respected by many. Meanwhile, she cannot leave the home. She is trapped in Moscow. There is nowhere that she can go where she is accepted. She has lost all of her friends. While, none of Vronsky’s friends abandoned him.
We can see Anna’s contrast with her brother Stiva Oblonsky. Oblonsky enjoys affairs, regularly cheating on his wife Dolly, and the affairs are not even for love…simply for sexual gratification and amusement. Yet, he is not treated as Anna is. He maintains his position with all of his friends and his wife and within society. He faces essentially no consequences after his wife soon forgives him. And the IRONY of it all is that Anna convinced his wife to forgive him and saves him from any consequences, but he is unable to convince Anna’s husband Karenin to save her in the end. Instead of telling us that women are treated unfairly, that the rules for them are different, the consequences different—which likely wouldn’t have been well-received at the time—Tolstoy simply shows us and says nothing of it.
Anna feels so much frustration with Vronsky because she has given up everything for their love, and he has not. He thinks he has but he simply has not. The circumstances will never be fair or equal for them because he can live with most of his former life and she is not allowed to. If he truly gave up everything, he would’ve cast out society until society accepted Anna. He would’ve removed friends that accepted him and not Anna. We recognize that it was not his fault, it was society’s, but I believe Anna needed in her heart for him to correct society’s injustices. She needed him to make things fair for them, somehow, someway. And he couldn’t seem to realize it. I almost believe that he would’ve just done it for her, that he would’ve done anything for her, if he could’ve understood. But he just couldn’t understand it fully because he’s never experienced it himself. While she was also mentally ill and likely suffered from borderline personality disorder, I believe she also just needed a full and complete love, she needed him to give back an equal amount of the sacrifices that she gave in order to feel whole. She gave so much of herself and did not receive the same amount of him in order to feel complete.
I could also say so many things about Oblonsky as a character, who I found interesting and greatly enjoyed. I think Tolstoy accurately represented so much of the privilege of Russian aristocracy. I love Oblonsky even more when he’s the only one in the room of men to stand up for women’s education. At the beginning, he seems to patronize and not respect his wife, Dolly, as an equal, giving in to his own physical desires, but he grows into much less of a villain, as every character in this story has their own nuance and complex characterization. While he is seen as a classic example of a bad husband and maybe even a misogynist at the beginning, he is the one who always respects Anna, who always vouches for her and does not even see anything wrong with her doings in the end.
I thought it was very powerful to hear another woman, Vronsky’s mother, condemn Anna in the end. She, like society, blames Anna entirely for everything that Vronsky contributed to equally. She expects that women are simply to obey the man in their lives, not to follow love, and to serve them without complaint.
While Anna acted in so many ways that were wrong, I understand her. She wants so badly to stop criticizing and being upset with Vronsky, because she loves him so much, but she just cannot. She is unhappy, and he is happy, and it is all so unfair. She only had one way to escape, and she took it. I understand her wholeheartedly.
Karenin changed throughout the novel so much as well and at a point was one of my favorite characters. My heart ached for him when he loved Anna but could not express and love her the way she needed to be loved until it was far too late. He was bitter and only concerned with that which concerns society until his dear Anna was on her deathbed. My heart moved when he forgave her and simply allowed himself to love her and express his emotions.
And at the end of all this, the main character is somewhat his self-insert character, Constantine Levin, but there’s so much to say about so many characters and their growth and complexities I don’t know how long this could be.
There are so many things I could say about this book that I don’t know if it’s even ethical for me to take up this much space on the review page while others are trying to browse and decide whether or not to read it.
Some quotes that I will never stop thinking about :
“He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it.”
“What is the difference between me and a chemist?
This review will contain many spoilers.
From the beginning, Tolstoy’s writing ability stands out. He masterfully and seamlessly weaves together the characters and their separate storylines. As we are being introduced, the story is woven together without us even noticing. Instead of drastic shifts and new chapters from other perspectives, we spend time with one character, Oblonsky, and with both Dolly and Oblonsky while they are together, and then we leave with Dolly. When Anna visits her, we then leave with Anna. And so on and so forth but it somehow always ties together beautifully and without loose ends. There is nothing I appreciate more than a subtlety in writing, how he always shows us without quite telling us.
I’ve seen many criticisms of Tolstoy as a patriarchal man and writer, but I think of this book from a feminist lens. When the affair happens, both Anna and Vronsky equally take part, but we are shown how Anna is shunned from society while Vronsky is not. We see how the same actions affect the woman and not the man. He leaves and enjoys positions of power. He attends high society balls. He is respected by many. Meanwhile, she cannot leave the home. She is trapped in Moscow. There is nowhere that she can go where she is accepted. She has lost all of her friends. While, none of Vronsky’s friends abandoned him.
We can see Anna’s contrast with her brother Stiva Oblonsky. Oblonsky enjoys affairs, regularly cheating on his wife Dolly, and the affairs are not even for love…simply for sexual gratification and amusement. Yet, he is not treated as Anna is. He maintains his position with all of his friends and his wife and within society. He faces essentially no consequences after his wife soon forgives him. And the IRONY of it all is that Anna convinced his wife to forgive him and saves him from any consequences, but he is unable to convince Anna’s husband Karenin to save her in the end. Instead of telling us that women are treated unfairly, that the rules for them are different, the consequences different—which likely wouldn’t have been well-received at the time—Tolstoy simply shows us and says nothing of it.
Anna feels so much frustration with Vronsky because she has given up everything for their love, and he has not. He thinks he has but he simply has not. The circumstances will never be fair or equal for them because he can live with most of his former life and she is not allowed to. If he truly gave up everything, he would’ve cast out society until society accepted Anna. He would’ve removed friends that accepted him and not Anna. We recognize that it was not his fault, it was society’s, but I believe Anna needed in her heart for him to correct society’s injustices. She needed him to make things fair for them, somehow, someway. And he couldn’t seem to realize it. I almost believe that he would’ve just done it for her, that he would’ve done anything for her, if he could’ve understood. But he just couldn’t understand it fully because he’s never experienced it himself. While she was also mentally ill and likely suffered from borderline personality disorder, I believe she also just needed a full and complete love, she needed him to give back an equal amount of the sacrifices that she gave in order to feel whole. She gave so much of herself and did not receive the same amount of him in order to feel complete.
I could also say so many things about Oblonsky as a character, who I found interesting and greatly enjoyed. I think Tolstoy accurately represented so much of the privilege of Russian aristocracy. I love Oblonsky even more when he’s the only one in the room of men to stand up for women’s education. At the beginning, he seems to patronize and not respect his wife, Dolly, as an equal, giving in to his own physical desires, but he grows into much less of a villain, as every character in this story has their own nuance and complex characterization. While he is seen as a classic example of a bad husband and maybe even a misogynist at the beginning, he is the one who always respects Anna, who always vouches for her and does not even see anything wrong with her doings in the end.
I thought it was very powerful to hear another woman, Vronsky’s mother, condemn Anna in the end. She, like society, blames Anna entirely for everything that Vronsky contributed to equally. She expects that women are simply to obey the man in their lives, not to follow love, and to serve them without complaint.
While Anna acted in so many ways that were wrong, I understand her. She wants so badly to stop criticizing and being upset with Vronsky, because she loves him so much, but she just cannot. She is unhappy, and he is happy, and it is all so unfair. She only had one way to escape, and she took it. I understand her wholeheartedly.
Karenin changed throughout the novel so much as well and at a point was one of my favorite characters. My heart ached for him when he loved Anna but could not express and love her the way she needed to be loved until it was far too late. He was bitter and only concerned with that which concerns society until his dear Anna was on her deathbed. My heart moved when he forgave her and simply allowed himself to love her and express his emotions.
And at the end of all this, the main character is somewhat his self-insert character, Constantine Levin, but there’s so much to say about so many characters and their growth and complexities I don’t know how long this could be.
There are so many things I could say about this book that I don’t know if it’s even ethical for me to take up this much space on the review page while others are trying to browse and decide whether or not to read it.
Some quotes that I will never stop thinking about :
“He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it.”
“What is the difference between me and a chemist?
Answer, a chemist makes solutions which do not make anyone happy, but I have made a dissolution and made three people happy. ”
-Oblonsky
“I think... if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts.”
And my favorite of all:
“Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand." - Anna
-Oblonsky
“I think... if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts.”
And my favorite of all:
“Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand." - Anna
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide