Like The Old Curiosity Shop, this epic by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was chosen as a long read for Henry Eliot's book group. A very long read, in fact... We started back in January last year, exactly 150 years after the first instalment of Anna Karenina was published in January 1875. And we finished on 27 February 2026, just a couple of weeks ago.

We didn't actually follow the original publication schedule, because at times Tolstoy left huge gaps between episodes. Rosamund Bartlett (one of the many who has translated Anna Karenina) explains how this went: "Parts One and Two and the first twelve chapters of Part Three of Anna Karenina were published in the first four issues of the Russian Messenger in 1875, between January and April. After an eight-month gap, the rest of Part Three was published in the January 1876 issue of the journal, followed by Part Four and the first twenty chapters of Part Five in the February, March, and April issues. Another long hiatus followed. Chapters 20 to 33 of Part Five appeared in December 1876, Part Six was published in the January and February 1877 issues of the journal, and Part Seven appeared in the March and April issues. [Editor and publisher] Katkov refused to print the novel’s eighth and final part for political reasons, and it was eventually published separately by Tolstoy. In early 1878 Anna Karenina was published for the first time as a complete novel."

Again, the extended read has been an amazing experience.

Some nitty-gritty, though, before I go further. I used a variety of media/translations. Primarily, I listened to the audio-book (the Constance Garnett translation), narrated by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who is ABSOLUTELY SUPERB... So brilliant, in fact, that I'm hearing her voice in my head as I now read War and Peace...



However, I took a break from my audio-books subscription for a while last year, and temporarily lost access to this. In the interim, I used the Gutenberg version (the same translation), and occasionally the German version (translated by Hans Moser).

I had all sorts of plans for language comparison on this one, and duly downloaded the Indonesian and Russian versions. I used them for a few months -- and then the year just completely got away on me, and it was all I could do to keep up with the instalments and the discussions, let alone use the chapters for language study.

For the record, though, the Indonesian version was translated by Koesalah Soebagyo Toer, the brother of renowned Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer.


Koesalah studied Russian first in Jakarta and later in the USSR


Volume 1 of the Indonesian translation. That cover...

There are all manner of translations of Anna Karenina into English. Not being a Russian expert, I didn't particularly notice any problems or infelicities with the Garnett version, but according to this discussion, lots of people have beefs with it. Vladimir Nabokov is one...: "Joseph Conrad, a British novelist of Polish descent, writing to Edward Garnett, a writer of sorts, in a letter dated the 10th of June, 1902, said: 'Remember me affectionately to your wife whose translation of Karenina is splendid. Of the thing itself I think but little, so that her merit shines with the greater lustre.' I shall never forgive Conrad this crack. Actually the Garnett translation is very poor."

When I read Anna Karenina again (and I feel I want to), I would pick the translation by Rosamund Bartlett or by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

This reading of Anna Karenina was only my second. The first was almost 50 years ago. There was a BBC television adaptation in 1977, but I had no TV back then; I saw the 2012 film adaptation at some point, but didn't care for it much. So, although I remembered the basic plot, I'd completely forgotten a lot of the detail.


The edition that gave me my first experience

***

For the intricacies of the story, see here. But the plot, as pretty much everyone in the world knows, concerns a doomed pair of lovers: On the one hand, Anna Arkadyevna, wife of the worthy but dull Alexey Alexandrovich Karenin; on the other, Alexey Kirillovich Vronsky, a dashing military officer. After much angst, they opt to set up an extra-marital menage, but there's no peace to be found. They're outcasts from polite society, and as Anna's husband refuses to grant a divorce, that's the way they're going to stay. From radiating a persona that's gloriously beautiful, life-loving, and truth-desiring, Anna spirals down into a slough of depression and jealousy, and an almost child-like desire to make everyone sorry. At the end, she commits suicide, and Vronsky heads off to the Serbian wars, clearly with the intention of dying there.

Contrasting with this sad pair is the lovely relationship between Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin, a deep-thinking, generous-spirited landowner, and Kitty Shcherbatskaya, a sensitive soul who has had her own sad experiences with Vronsky (it was on the brink of proposing to her that he turned his attentions to Anna).

There's a host of other characters, who all throw light on the central relationships. The pairing of Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky, aka Stiva (Anna's brother), and his wife Darya Alexandrovna, aka Dolly (Kitty's sister), is the most illuminating.

In the course of the four and a half years we're charting (February 1872 to July 1876), we frequently move from city (Moscow and St Petersburg) to countryside and back again, a transition that offers plenty more informative contrasts.

It's absolutely not all about relationships, though. True, the relationships absorb our attention like sponges. But characters also muse about religion, and agriculture, and politics.



***

As with The Old Curiosity Shop, I really appreciated the different perspective we gained by reading this in monthly instalments. As Henry Eliot comments, it's a procedure that throws a different light on the structure, and allows us to identify the contrasts, the various subordinate narrative arcs, and the cliff-hangers. We get a sense of how this book was originally appreciated.

Again, though, it leaves me in something of a quandary when it comes to a post... Every week there were interesting insights. To try to capture them all would produce something almost as big as the book itself.

So, again, I'm focusing on things that have stuck with me, looking back down that tunnel of months since we started.

A. The characters

Reading in my late teens/early twenties, I was all for Anna. Everyone else was either bad or boring. Reading in my sixties, I find myself just feeling sorry for all of them.

Anna was clearly desperately depressed by the end, and none of us, by definition, can think straight in that situation. And clearly she pays a higher price for this illicit relationship than Vronsky does. There are plenty of affairs in their social echelon. But what is demanded of the participants is discretion. Anna can't do discreet. So, as Nabokov points out (in a wonderfully insightful and detailed critique that I'm going to quote lots), the result is that "Anna gives Vronski her whole life". (These transliterations of Russian names, by the way, are all over the place. Different people just follow different systems.)

She ends up separated from her adored little boy, snubbed as an immoral woman, and almost totally isolated (always great fodder for depression). It is blatantly unfair. Stiva is a great womanizer (it's one of his affairs that the book opens with). But he always gets away with it, and seems to suffer no social censure. And Vronsky isn't driven out of society. Nabokov again: "Vronski is spared by scandal: he is invited, he goes places, meets his former friends, is introduced to seemingly decent women who would not remain a second in the same room with disgraced Anna." He's therefore not cut off in the way she is. And he has no inclination to give that up, and endure the isolation on the terms she does.

So it's a profoundly unequal partnership. He holds all the cards. There's a verse in one of Paul's epistles that advises believers not to be "unequally yoked". It's generally interpreted to mean that Christians shouldn't marry non-Christians. But does it not make more sense to take it at face value? One-sided partnerships are problematic. If the power is all on one side, the resulting ties of obligation cause stresses and strains that are hard to live with.

In a rapidly accelerating vicious circle, Vronsky's readiness to enjoy a world that is denied to Anna makes her feel that she is losing him. She berates him; he resents it. This makes her more suspicious. Which makes him more angry. The quarrels are so realistic... We just want to step in, counsellor hat on head, and say: Now stop! Listen to what he/she is REALLY saying. But they're on their own. And things ratchet up.


That famous first sentence...

I felt for Anna, but this time round I was more ready to question her. Is she too cruel to her husband? "I hear you, but I am thinking of him," she tells Alexey Alexandrovich at one key juncture. "I love him, I am his mistress; I can’t bear you; I’m afraid of you, and I hate you... You can do what you like to me." He's a pain, true, but does he deserve that? And when he's kind, she hates him even more. I know we do that sometimes, but...

I also know people don't automatically love their children, but her attitude to her daughter (Vronsky's child) is unsettling: "However hard she tried, she could not love this little child, and to feign love was beyond her powers."

And when she meets Levin, she does seem to go all out to attract him. Levin is attracted; he admires her. But it's just a self-punishing game with Anna: "After taking leave of her guests, Anna did not sit down, but began walking up and down the room. She had unconsciously the whole evening done her utmost to arouse in Levin a feeling of love -- as of late she had fallen into doing with all young men -- and she knew she had attained her aim, as far as was possible in one evening, with a married and conscientious man. She liked him indeed extremely... Yet as soon as he was out of the room, she ceased to think of him. One thought, and one only, pursued her in different forms, and refused to be shaken off. 'If I have so much effect on others, on this man, who loves his home and his wife, why is it HE is so cold to me?'" And off she goes again, in a self-destructive and unstoppable sequence of hatred and frustration, regret, and hatred again. Her lack of restraint is what we love about her. But it's also her downfall.

And Vronsky... Again, I felt much sorrier for him than I remember feeling on my first read. Initially, he seems deliberately cruel. A classic Don Juan. But Anna really touches him. He does try... At least a bit...

His fundamental problem, I think, is not that he's heartless, but that he's careless. He just doesn't realize the weight that the patriarchy lays on women in general and Anna in particular. There's that awful episode where he makes a careless mistake while riding his horse, and ends up breaking her back... There could hardly be a more portentous scene, and he does not come across at all well. He's angry with the mare because of his mistake; he curses her, kicks her, tugs at her: "She did not stir, but thrusting her nose into the ground, she simply gazed at her master with her speaking eyes." And then he realizes what's going on: "Ah! what have I done! The race lost! And my fault! shameful, unpardonable! And this poor, lovely creature killed by me!" And when Anna dies, he's a broken man.

Anna's husband, meanwhile, takes us through a roller-coaster of emotions. We feel sorry for him; cheer on the outbreak of compassion he shows when Anna nearly dies giving birth to Vronsky's child; but then despair of him when -- brainwashed by the exploitative Lidia Ivanovna and some dodgy French clairvoyant -- he decides God has commanded him not to grant her a divorce. He's an example of the tragedy of the career-minded conservative. He just CAN'T change his mindset. He is the victim of "that brute force which would inevitably control him in the life he led in the eyes of the world, and hinder him from giving way to his feeling of love and forgiveness".


The new/old German version

***

B. The death

Anna dies... Anna died while I was laboriously cleaning the kitchen floor of our new house. She jumps; she instantly regrets it. How often does this happen? One of Sigrid Nunez's characters in The Friend has read that "among people who try to kill themselves and survive, almost all say they regretted it". Is that true? It's certainly of Tolstoy's Anna:

"She... fell on her hands under the carriage, and lightly, as though she would rise again at once, dropped on to her knees. And at the same instant she was terror-stricken at what she was doing. 'Where am I? What am I doing? What for?' She tried to get up, to drop backwards; but something huge and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back. 'Lord, forgive me all!' she said, feeling it impossible to struggle. A peasant muttering something was working at the iron above her. And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever."

How indescribably tragic... Even when you're crouched down, using mega-wipe after mega-wipe to ease the dirt off the kitchen floor, you can't NOT be affected by this description...


Anna Karenina (1904), by Heinrich Matvejevich Maniser

Three things about this death:

1.

There is lots of foreshadowing; there are lots of prophetic images and dreams. Someone falls under a train at the very beginning of Anna and Vronsky's relationship; and there's the "double nightmare", where Anna and Vronsky have a similar dream, featuring a muffled up and somehow frightening man, who is bending over something, talking in French about something to do with iron.

I didn't grasp the momentousness of all that on the way through. It's best savoured afterwards, again with Nabokov as guide: "I shall show," he says, "the connection between the nightmare and Anna's suicide, when she realizes that what the horrible little man in her dream was doing over the iron is what her sinful life has done to her soul -- battering and destroying it -- and that from the very beginning the idea of death was present in the background of her passion, in the wings of her love, and that now she will follow the direction of her dream and have a train, a thing of iron, destroy her body..."

2.

The lead-up to this awful death is offered to us through the thoughts and impressions of Anna. "The Stream of Consciousness or Interior Monologue," says Nabokov, "is a method of expression which was invented by Tolstoy, a Russian, long before James Joyce... In Tolstoy the device is still in its rudimentary form, with the author giving some assistance to the reader but in James Joyce the thing will be carried to an extreme stage of objective record."

3.

The death is not the end of the book. It could have been. Many people feel it should have been. And it was the last part to be published in The Russian Messenger (the final part went unpublished until Tolstoy published it himself, remember). But Tolstoy wanted to end on a different note.

Which brings us to...

***

C. The other themes

Part Eight, after quickly dealing with the aftermath of the suicide, brings us back to our other major pair of protagonists.

Levin (or Lyovin, as Nabokov spells him) is the book's thinker: "Lyovin, in whom more than in any other of his male characters Tolstoy has portrayed himself, is a man of moral ideals, of Conscience with a capital C. Conscience gives him no respite... Lyovin is a man who feels it his duty to understand intelligently the surrounding world and to work out for himself his place within it. Therefore Lyovin’s nature moves on in constant evolution, spiritually growing throughout the novel, growing toward those religious ideals which at the time Tolstoy was evolving for himself."

Kitty is a great foil for him. Initially naive, she gradually grows to inhabit a quiet little force of her own. She and Levin have discussions; they don't always agree. But they find a kind of resolution. They listen to each, and make mutual concessions, in a way that contrasts markedly with the book's other key relationship. Which is partly, of course, because they're not isolated... They have family and society batting for them at every turn.


Petya K. Grady observed at the beginning of last year: "Everyone seems to be reading the big classics..." This is Paul Frenzeny's Levin and Kitty Skating

By the end, Levin finds a kind of faith. It's not life-changing or transcendent, but it feels very grounded: "My life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it."

Nabokov: "Thus the book ends, on a mystic note which seems to me rather a part of Tolstoy’s own diary than that of the character he created. This is the background of the book, the [unchanging] Milky Way of the book, the Lyovin-Kitty family life line." It's against "this star-dusted sky" that the Vronsky-Anna pattern, "the pattern of iron and blood", stands out in such terrible relief.

It's to Levin's storyline that all the social, agrarian, and political discussions belong. First time round, I was just bored by all this, and wanted to get back to the STORY. But this time, I found most of it quite engaging. Levin is constantly questing for better ways of doing things -- better ways of managing his land, for example. His attitude to the peasantry was interesting, and very credible. He acknowledges, with irritation, that his workers can be pretty obstinate, to the degree of sabotaging his efforts sometimes. But he also admires them, gets on with them, treats them as people.

Some of the countryside tableaux have an undeniable spirituality. The mowing scene, for example, as Anna Primrose Bendiksen brilliantly points out, gives us a mindful, meditative Levin, and a glimpse of something we might want for ourselves.




Mowers (1891), by George Clausen


For a large harvest, a Soviet propaganda poster. Lenin, 1908: "Tolstoy’s views are indeed a mirror of those contradictory conditions in which the peasantry had to play their historical part in our revolution..."

Much of the socioeconomic discussion felt terribly contemporary to me: How best to organize labour and cultivate land, when all sides have a different set of interests and a bad history to get over; how to balance authority and co-responsibility; how to get people on board with new ideas; how to figure out whether ideas that have been developed elsewhere are applicable in your situation -- all these questions feel like things we still haven't really learnt to do. "Instead of poverty, general prosperity and content; instead of hostility, harmony and unity of interests" -- it's what most people would want, and yet how hard it is to get there..."

***

See how quickly I've dealt with Levin and Kitty and their concerns, as opposed to Vronksy and Anna?

We're always more fascinated by hell than by heaven...

And yet it's the first pair that holds the secrets to happiness. OK, it's a conservative sort of happiness. Tolstoy could probably not have conceived of marital happiness without children, for example. The role of the woman was very much bound up with her household. But at least he dignifies that experience with admiration. How much more we are led to respect Dolly, for instance, dumped in the countryside without any provision, but managing masterfully, than Stiva, her flaky, improvident, social-butterfly husband.

It's as though Tolstoy offers us two possibilities: We can have this, or we can have that. We can have the road to happiness, or the road to tragedy. Yes, circumstances play a part. We can't help being born into a whole raft of constraints; and Fortuna is always ready to bowl us a googly. But, ultimately, what matters is our choices, our principles, the things that ground us.


Young Tolstoy

***

For all his wisdom, though, things didn't end that well for Tolstoy either.

In the late 1870s, he went through a kind of spiritual crisis. Nabokov describes a life-long conflict between his art and his conscience, but eventually conscience won:

"The ethical overcame both the esthetical and the personal and drove him to sacrifice his wife’s happiness, his peaceful family life, and his lofty literary career to what he considered a moral necessity: living according to the principles of rational Christian morality -- the simple and stern life of generalized humanity, instead of the colorful adventure of individual art. And when in 1910 he realized that by continuing to live on his country estate, in the bosom of his stormy family, he still was betraying his ideal of a simple, saintly existence, he, a man of eighty, left his home and wandered away, heading for a monastery he never reached, and died in the waiting room of a little railway station...

"Thus when he had just reached the uppermost peaks of creative perfection with Anna Karenin, he suddenly decided to stop writing altogether, except for essays on ethics. Fortunately he was not always able to maintain in chains that gigantic creative need of his and, succumbing once in a while, added to his output a few exquisite stories untainted by deliberate moralizing...

"Whether painting or preaching, Tolstoy was striving, in spite of all obstacles, to get at the truth. As the author of Anna Karenin, he used one method of discovering truth; in his sermons, he used another; but somehow, no matter how subtle his art was and no matter how dull some of his other attitudes were, truth which he was ponderously groping for or magically finding just around the corner, was always the same truth -- this truth was he and this he was an art."

Again I'm reminded of Sigrid Nunez's The Friend. One of the narrator's associates, a promising writer, gives up writing: "I started having doubts about becoming a writer. I didn’t see how I could reconcile a literary career with the goal of freedom from attachment... [To succeed] you had to believe that what you were doing was incredibly serious and important. And all this seemed to me in conflict with learning to sit still. To let go."

Maybe that was how Tolstoy felt too...

But whether he saw value in his literary legacy or not, he has lived on... In January I started re-reading War and Peace with another online book group, Simon Haisell's Footnotes and Tangents. I've skimped on the discussions a bit (I'm planning a catch-up day soon). But I've religiously read the chapter a day that will bring us to the finale by the end of the year. War and Peace is my breakfast read. Things are a bit calmer now, but at times in recent weeks that War and Peace morning moment was the only still spot in the day.

Few can match his capacity to evoke all the facets of human existence, and bring to ask that crucial question, the only one that really matters when we read a novel: What would we have done?