People ask me, "How do you like it?" I think the truest answer is that I didn't really like it, but I certainly appreciated it.
In 2011, hardly anything is shocking anymore. A trashy rich family is a household name (Kardashian), a congressman send photos of his "junk" to his girlfriend, a candidate for the presidency has a long and sordid history of harassing women but seems to think this is irrelevant to his fitness for office. Female movie and music stars are, for the most part, anything but "ladylike." The governor of California has children with his wife and his live-in housekeeper in the same year.
Flash to the 1870s. Tolstoy wrote A.K. in the Victorian era. People of quality didn't even say "leg" because one's leg was too close to one's private parts, so instead they used euphemisms like "limb," and so forth. But Tolstoy, whew! Extra-marital affairs (by women!), and all the details of babies out of wedlock. Women birthing their babies, women breastfeeding their babies. And in Part Six, there's some mysterious (and particularly wicked) revelation from Anna to Dolly that because of her terribly difficult delivery of Vronsky's daughter, she should not have any more children, and the method by which she is preventing this is depicted like this (for real): .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................
What does that mean??? Tolstoy wants us to use our imagination. "This discovery, which suddenly explained for her all those formerly incomprehensible families with only one or two children, called up in her so many thoughts, reflections, and contradictory feelings that she was unable to say anything and only looke at Anna with wide-eyed astonishment." (p.637) IMHO, it was either birth control or oral sex. The horror!
Tolstoy gives us "real life" in an era when people didn't even admit to having bodies. Salacious reality.
The book is worth wading through to get to Part Seven. Anna's inner monologue is so genuine, worthy of 20th century writing of the inner mind. She's having a mental breakdown, possibly because of her personal guilt, her jealousy and paranoia, or maybe because of her opium addiction (I believe the latter is likely the biggest neurological problem). The episodes on trains (and, sadly, UNDER them) become the structural story arc. Trains must have been something of a fabulous novelty to 19th century Russians.
I had no idea that the Russian upper crust spoke so much French. Even more than Russian, it seems.
Part Eight is a bit of a let down (although anything would be after amazing Part Seven). Tolstoy is trying to make some sense of the tragedy of Anna & Vronsky. In this case, why bad things happen to bad people. Levin has a mystical revelation: that we must put our needs last and live "by the soul," for God. It's as though it's BECAUSE Anna & Vronsky didn't do this that their lives follow the path ending in tragedy. Now, maybe that's so. Maybe because they pursued a carpe diem attitude that everything unraveled. But I didn't like how Tolstoy boiled the whole epic down to a morality play. Life is a lot more complicated than that. And Tolstoy had done a darn good job at depicting life. Real life, warts and all. In Part Eight, he folds. Bleh.
Excellent translation. I had tried to read a different edition of A.K. a few years ago and stalled out. If you're going to read A.K., I recommend this (award-winning) translation.
If I never read another long Russian name (with "patronymic" and all: Darya Alexandrovna, Stepan Arkadyich, Agafya Mikhailovna) it'll be okay with me.
Too much sadness, these last two books.
At any rate, I'm quite hopeful there'll be less suicide.
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