Anna Karenina and the Joys of Locomotive Engineering
Russian literature and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
What is there even to say about Anna Karenina that hasn't been better said by better men? It frequently gets called the greatest novel ever written and for damn good reason. It would certainly be in the conversation if one could agree on such a ridiculous accolade. Tolstoy is so beloved in his mother Russia that in his day he was thought of as a kind of a spiritual guru for the Russian people, and was given an almost religious significance. Like if David Foster Wallace or Cormac McCarthy became so famous for their writings that they started a cult with a fair degree of political power. I shudder to think. In Tolstoy's case, there might be something to it. At the very least, his novels are less bleak.
Anna Karenina starts off with the classic observation: Happy families are all alike, unhappy families are unique in their unhappiness. Like in the Cain and Abel story, sin is evil invited into the home and then strengthened by a brand of malicious creativity. Not that it takes much ingenuity to start sleeping with the French governess, which is exactly what Stepan Oblonsky is doing. And driving his wife, Dolly, into fits of hysterics. Stepan isn't the main character of the work, but he certainly sets a tone. He is everything wrong with the culture of the upper-class Russian gentry. Self-absorbed, unconsciously cruel, liberal in his politics but aristocratic in his expectations, he is someone who is carried by the cultural tide of the day by a kind of intellectual osmosis. It is the air he breathes and the water he swims in. Stepan reads all the most fashionable papers and therefore espouse the most fashionable beliefs, like caring deeply for the poor and for the moral standards of himself and his countrymen.
However, despite his personal beliefs, Stephan is still firmly a member of the Russian upper-crust, and his feelings towards the peasantry are less about morals and more about skin-saving. The aristocracy is being made forcibly aware of the rampant unfairness of their economics, the self-serving nature of their politics, and just how two faced and sanctimonious they are in advocating for the poor (in ways that do nothing to actually improve the lives of said poor and in most cases backhandedly support the status quo). Stepan is an almost perfect example of the facile nature of the average wealthy Russian. And he gets about fifty pages for him to sort out his marriage, or at least enough that his wife forgives him. He decides that if he is ever to stray again, it must be with a woman that does not reside in his household, because dealing with an angry wife is far too emotionally stressful. Note that there is no consideration given to the feelings of his wife, or anyone other than himself.
So the Russian aristocracy is spiritually dead, self-centered, over-educated, and intellectually fraudulent. The culture creates deadwood, people who work government jobs in the labyrinthian, Kafkakafka-eqsue bureaucracy that is the social services and expect to be compensated handsomely for doing jobs that don’t need to exist. Most of them are also living on debt and borrowing and barely maintaining their current living standard while insisting on only the best. It seems to be a fact of human nature that the upper-middle class can fall to this very specific kind of cultural disease. In this empty, vapid culture, two people fall authentically in love. Anna Karenina falls for the dashing Count Vronsky while Konstantin Levin falls for the demure if slightly undercooked Kitty. Calling the novel a love story or a tragic romance is to reduce the scope of the novel. Tolstoy uses the framing of the love story to analyze spirituality, the logical end-points of our deepest religious convictions, and how they can lead us astray.
It's no secret that Tolstoy's Levin is a self-insert for Tolstoy's own spiritual development. Lev is a bright-eyed, apple-cheeked rural noble. He spent most of his childhood in the Russian countryside. By the standards of the gentry, a hopeless hayseed. Undereducated and socially inept, charmingly naïve, a romantic soul in a deeply cynical era. Also, a very ironic reversal. The real Tolstoy was a notorious womanizer, one that spent most of his formative years chasing tail like a nearsighted cocker-spaniel. He also gave his wife a diary full of his sexual exploits on their wedding night, recounting his “activities” in enough detail to emotionally disturb his very sheltered bride for weeks. It is also possible he suffered from a few STDs. Lev, however, is not a womanizer, and absolutely hopeless in the fine art of chatting up dames. He has fixated himself on Kitty, the daughter of some minor nobility who make up for their quietly desperate financial straits by sheer unfiltered snobbery. His approach to wooing mostly involves following her around like a stray puppy. When they go ice skating together, he stammers and blushingly tells her that the length of his stay in Moscow depends on whether she gives him an answer for a question he cannot reveal to her quite yet. Kitty, not being a moron, is everything that he isn't. Sophisticated, educated, raised in the center of Russian culture, she initially finds Levin to be far too nice, the sort of man that she bats around at balls and parlor rooms. She talks circles around him, deflecting his declarations of feelings with little effort and quiet amusement, until she rejects him and sends him home in shame.
Kitty has no interest in some country boy, even one that is extremely land rich, which quite upsets her father. Kitty wants only the best, the most cultured, the most connected nobility. Like Count Vronksy, who is all those things plus a cavalry captain. Kitty throws herself at Vronsky, and is summarily rejected with the same casual brutality that she rejected Levin. Like in all things, there are levels to this, and Vronsky is orders of magnitude above Kitty. So the game of love is played, and it is both loveless and brutally political. Vronsky, after introducing himself as a cynic in all matters of the heart, runs into Anna Karenina, Kitty's dear friend and Dolly’s sister. A moment of eye contact, a second spent together in a train car, and they are hopelessly in love. This is where the story really starts, maybe one hundred odd pages in.
One interesting thing about Anna Karenina is just how modern, dare I use the word relevant, it is. A lot of the criticisms of the upper middle class can still be just as fruitfully applied to our own beleaguered wealthy, if expanded significantly. The relative economic success of recent years, due largely to free market expansion and technological progress, means that your average middle-class person can live in a luxury that a tiny percentage of feudal Russia could only dream of. But with the expansion of wealth, come some hard questions about human nature and its proximity to comfort. As Dostoevsky posits, if all human beings were expected to do all day was lay about in warm pools and busy themselves with the continuations of the species, people would break things and cause trouble, on purpose, just to see what would happen. That is too say, the further people get from real authentic danger, there is an increasing drive to seek out trouble, danger, stakes. Most of the characters Tolstoy is interested in either don't work or work by moving papers around on some government desk. Uncle Teddy K. had a habit of calling these unfulfilling time-sinks of jobs 'surrogate activities,' or activities that replace the real, underlying work that humans actually receive meaning from. There is this inextricable link between meaning and risk. Yes, living in a state that rejects technology would mean that more people would live exponentially harder lives, but the shortness of their lives actually makes them more valuable, more full, more ontologically fulfilled. There's a reason that both the mega-rich and the deeply poor are interested in combat sports. Violence as a life-affirming practice, violence for its own sake in a world far too obsessed with comfort and convenience, can be a deeply moving experience. Of course, it doesn’t have to be violence, really. Any kind of danger will do. People with nothing better to do will seek out intense experiences, whether that be spiritual or material.
The love affairs of Levin and Anna are the most intense feelings that they have ever had. They are foundation rocking events, sending Lev spiraling into a kind of existential angst and to Anna's descent into depression, into madness and jealousy and eventually a dramatic suicide (spoiler for a book published in the 1800s, I guess). However, Lev develops a relatively healthy spirituality, a framework for the world (one that just so happens to coincide nearly exactly with the conclusion Tolstoy reaches in his own religious writings) while Karenina rejects spiritually and embraces locomotive. This doesn't come close to doing the 800-ish pages justice and glosses over most of the psychological complexity of the novel. Tolstoy practically invented realist fiction and has set the high water mark of what can be done in cataloging the minutiae of everyday life. But lots of the imitators of Tolstoy seem to think that realistic fiction means that the fiction cannot be dramatic and characters cannot be larger than life. Tolstoy shows us over and over that actually, being larger than life is much more realistic than being simple. There are no simple humans. The window we get into the internal lives of the characters show just how much is going on under the hood. Even Stepan becomes somewhat likable after he goes out of his way to be better to his wife, or helps Levin out of some hairy social situations. He is still motivated by social standing in these instances, but he is a kinder, gentler person by the end of the novel.
Tolstoy manages to be both deeply cynical of human nature and profoundly convinced of our ability to transcend our limitations. Karenina is frustratingly self-absorbed and intensely jealous of Vronsky, because his life barely changes when he runs off with another man's wife, while she overnight becomes a pariah. Totally unfair and totally foreseeable. Levin, for his part, embraces the simple joys of running his farm and working with the Russian peasantry. A group of people Tolstoy has a soft spot for a mile wide. The time Levin spends working on the farm are almost cartoonishly idyllic, and he breaks with tradition even more by actually participating in the workings of the farm, threshing his own alfalfa and negotiating for his own prices. At this time, the gentry usually hired people to actually manage the day to day of running their vast estates, and just accepted that they would get cheated out of some of the value of the land by their overseers and the peasant class. Levin actually being involved in the day to day running of his estate would already be considered strange, but actually deigning to work with his hands side by side with the peasants who lived on his land was unheard of. Levin, ever inarticulate, cannot explain to his contemporaries the intense joy, the quiet fulfillment, the sheer physicality and beauty of working with your own hands to create your own wealth. If you have any interest in shutting off from technology and living simply by the sweat of your brow somewhere, these sections of the novel will give you a shuddering, full body wet dream. It really is hard to overstate just how lovely it sounds to own one of these plantations. Just try not to think about how the serfs have zero rights and aren't allowed to leave and consistently do slapdash jobs on the farm because they see no personal benefit as all the economic output goes back to Levin. It really isn't hard to understand why Russia produced so many famous Marxists. It's a shame that they replaced the gentry with a far worse master, but oh well, it gave Solzhenitsyn something to write about, and for that, I am eternally grateful.
There is so much more to say about a novel like this. Like the first line implies, it is at its heart a family novel. Levin and Kitty patch things up eventually and get married, and when the two sides of the family merge, it is shockingly complex but eternally sweet. Tolstoy's compassion shines when Dolly gives Anna relationship advice, or Levin and Kitty work through their mutual jealousy. They all manage to be endlessly frustrating and endlessly loveable, like your favorite cousin who is his own worst enemy. Lev's development from an inarticulate man, who senses the falsity of the aristocratic class that surrounds him on a gut level, and his journey to rejecting it for a life filled with spiritual meaning (much to the consternation of his family, his friends, and even his wife) demonstrates better than any book I am familiar with what healthy male intellectual and spiritual development actually looks like. If you are a woman and want to understand the way men think, read this book. If you are a man and want to better understand yourself, read this book. More importantly, if you are someone who finds life to be meaningless, if like Tolstoy, for years you avoided taking guns or ropes into the woods out of fear you would end your own life, read this book. It is life-affirming in the best way. For a story with love at first sight as a central conceit, it miraculously manages not to be saccharine. In fact, it is a realistic, bleak, hopeful view on man's search for meaning in a world where we are increasingly disconnected from the things that actually create meaning. We find meaning, Tolstoy says, where we are most human, that is: where we work and play and love and build. Where we create it for ourselves. We find meaning where we go looking for it. Ask and ye shall receive. Where we reject meaning, where we cannot emotionally or intellectually disconnect from the cruel, superficial, obsessively materialistic world, we find ourselves drinking ourselves to death or leaping in front of locomotives. Find what gives meaning and stick to it like glue. Love your family, and if you can’t do that, make a better one. Shockingly modern advice in a novel over a century old.