Also, I felt I sort of knew what happens in the book - unsuitable romance; she dies at the end by falling under a train - and didn’t want to go there. Why, after all, should I be put through the mill of getting to know and presumably like a character only to watch her come to a sticky end after a prolonged period of emotional torture so grim that you almost welcome her death?
But Tolstoy, you may be relieved to hear if you’re thinking of taking the plunge, has already anticipated this problem and successfully resolved it. Yes, there’s no escaping it, the trajectory of the relationship between captivating, beautiful but unfortunately married Anna Karenina and her dashing, aristocratic, cavalry officer lover Vronsky is not a comfortable one because Tolstoy is so good at capturing not only the ecstasies but also the agonies of doomed romance. That’s why Tolstoy takes care to sweeten the pill by interspersing the tragic main plot with a redemptive subplot about the much happier, more fulfilled life of a character called Levin.
If you are a Christian, as I am and Tolstoy was, you may find yourself especially drawn to the final chapters which largely concern themselves with Levin’s personal journey towards Christian faith. For most of the book he has remained resistant, trying and failing to find the true meaning of life by immersing himself in the works of the great philosophers. It brings him to the brink of suicide but then he has an insight: reason is not the solution but the problem.
“Would reason ever have proved to me that I must love my neighbour instead of strangling him? I was told that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and the law demanding that I should strangle all who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one’s neighbour reason could never discover, because it’s unreasonable.”
Levin achieves this new level of understanding much as I remember doing - not in one moment of blinding revelation but rather in a series of stages, prompted by all manner of apparently random incidences: a sudden squall, watching in impotent terror as his wife gives birth, a chance remark by one of the peasants on his estate, his experience of what works and what doesn’t work when trying to get on with living your life.
When things go wrong, Levin finally intuits, it’s a product of what we might now call ‘overthinking.’ And what Tolstoy more elegantly calls ‘deliberation.’
“Deliberation led to doubts and prevented him from seeing what he ought and ought not to do. But when he did not think, but just lived, he never ceased to be aware of the presence in his soul of an infallible judge which decided which of two possible course of action was the better and which one the worse, and instantly let him know if he did what he should not.”
This is the same in-built moral conscience which CS Lewis identifies in his lecture series Mere Christianity. It’s also the basis of the first psalm in the Psalter which lays out the ground rules of how to live a meaningful life. “Blessed is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly.” Achieve this, Psalm 1 counsels, and everything else will fall into place. “And he shall be like a tree planted by the waterside that will bring forth his fruit in due season/His leaf also shall not wither; and look, whatsoever he doeth, it shall prosper!”
Philosophy, Levin decides, is just a distracting, circumlocutionary, intellectual way of trying to tell us what even the humblest peasant instinctively knows already. “Is it not plainly evident in the development of every philosopher’s theory that he knows beforehand, just as positively as the peasant Fiodr and not a whit more clearly than he, the real meaning of life, and is simply trying by a dubious intellectual process to come back to what everyone knows.”
Levin is red-pilled avant la lettre. Unlike, say, his intellectual half-brother Koznyshev, Levin is deeply suspicious of The System which most of the other characters in the book take as read as necessary for a functioning society. For example, he can see no point in grand plans to better the serfs’ lot through means of formal education or organised healthcare (which he believes is a poor substitute for time-honoured folkish remedies). He is also deeply sceptical of what the newspapers insist is the popular will, especially with regards to the bout of alleged war fever which grips the nation towards the end of the book and which he recognises as the purest cant. Because he is fortunate enough to be possessed of landed estates, Levin can afford to do what most of us who are Awake would like to do now: retreat to the country and cultivate our gardens.
Probably if I’d read Anna Karenina earlier, a lot of these quintessentially Tolstoyan themes would have sailed right over my head. Not that there wouldn’t have been plenty else to tickle my fancy, for Tolstoy is such a master of his craft that it would require an act of perverse will not to become smitten with his genius. His characters, for example, are extraordinarily well-drawn, so that your perspective on them keeps changing to the point where they feel more real, better rounded, than even people you know in real life. His set pieces - the snipe shoot, Anna’s and Vronsky’s stint in Venice, the childbirth, and best of all the steeplechase - are gloriously realised, simply the most closely observed and exquisitely expressed of their kind anywhere in literature.
I’m sorry that I’ve given away a few spoilers. Except not too much because it really doesn’t matter. Knowing some of what happens isn’t going to make the blindest bit of difference to your enjoyment. Anna Karenina really is the greatest novel ever written.
Article by James Delingpole
James Delingpole is a writer, broadcaster and truth seeker. He hosts the Delingpod - the world’s most entertainingly shambolic ‘conspiracy’ podcast.
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