Anna Karenina

Podia haber sido 5 estrellas, como todo el mundo dice, Tolstoy es un maestro de entrar en la cabeza de cada una de las personas y explicar todos sus pensamientos de forma realista.

Lo mejor para mi es el pendulo emocional de Anna hacia el final de la novela.

Tambien o como consecuencia de lo anterior, cada uno de los personajes tiene una motivacion compleja y logica. No hay nadie simplemente malvado, quiza hay gente que se equivoca pero incluso eso es muy comprensible. Una vez que estas en la cabeza de la gente todo es mucho mas comprensible!

No le doy 5 estrellas porque no me podia importar menos sus comentarios sobre la vida en el campo y otros aspectos de la sociedad rusa de la epoca. Me interesaba saber que pasaba en los conflictos principales de la novela, lo que unos personajes secundarios se dijeran entre ellos en una fiesta me importaba bastante poco.

Review here.

Some favorite passages:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

There seemed to be nothing very special in her dress, nor in her pose; but for Levin she was as easy to recognize in that crowd as a rose among nettles.

‘Understand,’ he said, ‘that it isn’t love. I’ve been in love, but this is not the same. This is not my feeling, but some external force taking possession of me. I left because I decided it could not be, you understand, like a happiness that doesn’t exist on earth; but I have struggled with myself and I see that without it there is no life.

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.’

‘I told you I didn’t know whether I had come for long… that it depended on you…’ She hung her head lower and lower, not knowing how she would reply to what was coming. ‘That it depended on you,’ he repeated. ‘I wanted to say… I wanted to say… I came for this… that… to be my wife!’ he said, hardly aware of what he was saying; but, feeling that the most dreadful part had been said, he stopped and looked at her.

Anyhow, the train’s come.’ Indeed, the engine was already whistling in the distance. A few minutes later the platform began to tremble, and, puffing steam that was beaten down by the frost, the engine rolled past, with the coupling rod of the middle wheel slowly and rhythmically turning and straightening, and a muffled-up, frost-grizzled engineer bowing; and, after the tender, slowing down and shaking the platform still more, the luggage van began to pass, with a squealing dog in it; finally came the passenger carriages, shuddering to a stop. A dashing conductor jumped off, blowing his whistle, and after him the impatient passengers began to step down one by one:

Evidently something extraordinary had happened. People who had left the train were running back. ‘What?… What?… Where?… Threw himself!… run over!…’ could be heard among those passing by. […] ‘What a terrible death!’ said some gentleman passing by. ‘Cut in two pieces, they say.’ ‘On the contrary, I think it’s the easiest, it’s instantaneous,’ observed another. ‘How is it they don’t take measures?’ said a third.

Dolly was crushed by her grief and totally consumed by it.

Yes, I would forgive. I wouldn’t be the same, no, but I would forgive, and forgive in such a way as if it hadn’t happened, hadn’t happened at all.’ ‘Well, naturally,’ Dolly quickly interrupted, as if she were saying something she had thought more than once, ‘otherwise it wouldn’t be forgiveness. If you forgive, it’s completely, completely.

Anna obviously admired her beauty and youth, and before Kitty could recover she felt that she was not only under her influence but in love with her, as young girls are capable of being in love with older married ladies.

Anna, looking down, at once recognized Vronsky, and a strange feeling of pleasure suddenly stirred in her heart, together with a fear of something. He stood without removing his coat, and was taking something from his pocket. Just as she reached the centre of the landing, he raised his eyes, saw her, and something ashamed and frightened appeared in his expression.

but he had only just put his arm around her slender waist and taken the first step when the music suddenly stopped. Kitty looked into his face, which was such a short distance from hers, and long afterwards, for several years, that look, so full of love, which she gave him then, and to which he did not respond, cut her heart with tormenting shame.

She felt destroyed. She went to the far corner of a small drawing room and sank into an armchair. Her airy skirt rose like a cloud around her slender body; one bared, thin, delicate girlish hand sank strengthlessly into the folds of her pink tunic; in the other she held her fan and waved it before her flushed face with quick, short movements. But though she had the look of a butterfly that clings momentarily to a blade of grass and is about to flutter up, unfolding its iridescent wings, a terrible despair pained her heart.

She was enchanting in her simple black dress, enchanting were her full arms with the bracelets on them, enchanting her firm neck with its string of pearls, enchanting her curly hair in disarray, enchanting the graceful, light movements of her small feet and hands, enchanting that beautiful face in its animation; but there was something terrible and cruel in her enchantment.

He felt he was himself and did not want to be otherwise. He only wanted to be better than he had been before.

Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was unpleasant for her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She wanted too much to live herself.

‘Why am I going?’ he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. ‘You know I am going in order to be where you are,’ he said, ‘I cannot do otherwise.’ And just then, as if overcoming an obstacle, the wind dumped snow from the roof of the carriage, blew some torn-off sheet of iron about, and from ahead a low train whistle howled mournfully and drearily. All the terror of the blizzard seemed still more beautiful to her now. He had said the very thing that her soul desired but that her reason feared.

Her whole illness and treatment seemed to her such a stupid, even ridiculous thing! Her treatment seemed to her as ridiculous as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. And what did they want to do, treat her with pills and powders?

The only happy marriages I know are arranged ones.’ ‘Yes, but how often the happiness of an arranged marriage scatters like dust, precisely because of the appearance of that very passion which was not acknowledged,’ said Vronsky. ‘But by arranged marriages we mean those in which both have already had their wild times. It’s like scarlet fever, one has to go through it.’ ‘Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox.’

‘I think,’ said Anna, toying with the glove she had taken off, ‘I think… if there are as many minds as there are men, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.’

‘Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

Spring was a long time unfolding.

To his dismay, he felt that he was whole and unhurt. The horse had broken her back and they decided to shoot her.

and went into the enormous grey-green sea of the meadow, unstirred by the wind. The silky grass with its ripening seeds reached his waist in the places flooded in spring.

The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own. These were the most blissful moments.

Sliced down with a succulent sound and smelling of spice, the grass lay in high swaths.

She knew beforehand that the help of religion was possible only on condition of renouncing all that made up the whole meaning of life for her. Not only was it painful for her, but she was beginning to feel fear before the new, never experienced state of her soul. She felt that everything was beginning to go double in her soul, as an object sometimes goes double in tired eyes. Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.

Every man, knowing to the smallest detail all the complexity of the conditions surrounding him, involuntarily assumes that the complexity of these conditions and the difficulty of comprehending them are only his personal, accidental peculiarity, and never thinks that others are surrounded by the same complexity as he is.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said, understanding her.

‘Wait,’ he said, sitting down at the table. ‘There’s one thing I’ve long wanted to ask you.’ He looked straight into her tender though frightened eyes. ‘Please do.’ ‘Here,’ he said, and wrote the initial letters: w, y, a, m: t, c, b, d, i, m, n, o, t? These letters meant: ‘When you answered me: “that cannot be”, did it mean never or then?’

‘This is how people lose their minds,’ he repeated, ‘and shoot themselves… so as not to be ashamed,’ he added slowly.

‘I’m lost, lost! Worse than lost. I’m not lost yet, I can’t say it’s all ended, on the contrary, I feel that it hasn’t ended. I’m like a tightened string that’s about to snap. It hasn’t ended… and it will end horribly.’

‘How happy I’ll be when I find out you’ve fallen in love!’ said Levin. ‘Kindly invite me to your wedding.’ ‘I’m already in love.’ ‘Yes, with the cuttlefish. You know,’ Levin turned to his brother, ‘Mikhail Semyonych is writing a work on the feeding and…’ ‘Well, don’t go muddling things! It makes no difference what it’s about. The point is that I really do love the cuttlefish.’ ‘But that won’t prevent you loving a wife!’ ‘That won’t prevent me, but the wife will.’

The church became so still that the dripping of wax could be heard.

Vronsky meanwhile, despite the full realization of what he had desired for so long, was not fully happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires.

Generally, that honeymoon – that is, the month following the wedding, from which, by tradition, Levin had expected so much – not only had no honey in it, but remained in both their memories as the most difficult and humiliating time of their life.

He was nine years old, he was a child; but he knew his own soul, it was dear to him, he protected it as the eyelid protects the eye, and did not let anyone into his soul without the key of love.

‘And what is the difference between a white boletus and a birch boletus?’ Varenka’s lips trembled as she answered: ‘There’s hardly any difference in the caps, but in the feet.’ And as soon as these words were spoken, both he and she understood that the matter was ended, and that what was to have been said would not be said, and their excitement, which had reached its highest point just before then, began to subside.

He searched everywhere in the sedge, but Laska did not believe he had shot it, and when he sent her to search, she did not really search but only pretended.

Smoke from the shooting, like milk, spread white over the green grass.

Am I any better? I at least have a husband I love. Not as I’d have wanted to love, but I do love him, and Anna did not love hers. How is she to blame, then? She wants to live. God has put that into our souls. I might very well have done the same.

as she thought about Anna’s love affair, she imagined, parallel to it, an almost identical love affair of her own, with an imaginary collective man who was in love with her. She confessed everything to her husband, just as Anna had done. And Stepan Arkadyich’s astonishment and perplexity at the news made her smile.

‘but I’ve always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.’

To stir up those feelings was painful for her; but she knew all the same that that was the best part of her soul and that it was quickly being overgrown in the life she led.

‘But you yourself say that it’s an outdated institution.’ ‘Outdated it is, but still it ought to be treated more respectfully. Take Snetkov… Good or not, we’ve been a thousand years growing. You know, when you want to make a garden in front of your house, you have to lay it out, and there’s a hundred-year-old tree growing in that spot… Though it’s old and gnarled, you still won’t cut the old-timer down for the sake of your flower beds, you’ll lay them out so as to include the tree. It can’t be grown in a year,’

‘That look shows that the cooling off has begun.’ And though she was convinced that the cooling off had begun, still there was nothing she could do, she could not change anything in her relations with him. Just as before, she could only try to keep him by her love and her attractiveness. And as before, by being occupied during the day and taking morphine at night, she could stifle the terrible thoughts of what would happen if he stopped loving her. True, there was one other means, not to keep him – for that she wanted nothing but his love – but to get so close to him, to be in such a position, that he could not abandon her. That means was divorce and marriage.

Now, in that moment, he knew that neither all his doubts, nor the impossibility he knew in himself of believing by means of reason, hindered him in the least from addressing God. It all blew off his soul like dust.

But that grief and this joy were equally outside all ordinary circumstances of life, were like holes in this ordinary life, through which something higher showed. And just as painful, as tormenting in its coming, was what was now being accomplished; and just as inconceivably, in contemplating this higher thing, the soul rose to such heights as it had never known before, where reason was no longer able to overtake it.

What he felt for this small being was not at all what he had expected. There was nothing happy or joyful in this feeling; on the contrary, there was a new tormenting fear.

All the cruellest words a coarse man could say, he said to her in her imagination, and she could not forgive him for them, as if he had actually said them to her.

And death presented itself to her clearly and vividly as the only way to restore the love for her in his heart, to punish him and to be victorious in the struggle that the evil spirit lodged in her heart was waging with him.

and giving the order to tell him she had a headache, she thought, ‘If he comes in spite of what the maid says, it means he still loves me. If not, it means it’s all over, and then I’ll decide what to do!…’

‘Ah, incidentally,’ he said, when she was already in the doorway, ‘we’re definitely going tomorrow, aren’t we?’ ‘You are, but I’m not,’ she said, turning to him. ‘Anna, we can’t live like this…’ ‘You are, but I’m not,’ she repeated. ‘This is becoming unbearable!’ ‘You… you will regret that,’ she said and walked out.

The terrible thing is that it’s impossible to tear the past out by the roots.

‘Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?

And he knows me as little as anyone else in the world knows me. I don’t know myself.

Our lives are parting ways, and I have become his unhappiness and he mine, and it’s impossible to remake either him or me. All efforts have been made; the screw is stripped.

‘There!’ she said to herself, staring into the shadow of the carriage at the sand mixed with coal poured between the sleepers, ‘there, right in the middle, and I’ll punish him and be rid of everybody and of myself.’

And in that same instant she was horrified at what she was doing. ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Why?’ She wanted to rise, to throw herself back, but something huge and implacable pushed at her head and dragged over her. ‘Lord, forgive me for everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of any struggle. A little muzhik, muttering to himself, was working over some iron. And the candle by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been in darkness, sputtered, grew dim, and went out for ever.

‘Yes, she ended as such a woman should have ended. Even the death she chose was mean and low.’

Well, what are these desperate passions! It’s all to prove something special. So she proved it.

As he looked at the tender and the rails, influenced by the conversation with an acquaintance he had not met since his misfortune, he suddenly remembered her – that is, what was left of her when he came running like a madman into the shed of the railway station: on a table in the shed, sprawled shamelessly among strangers, lay the blood-covered body, still filled with recent life; the intact head with its heavy plaits and hair curling at the temples was thrown back, and on the lovely face with its half-open red lips a strange expression was frozen, pitiful on the lips and terrible in the fixed, unclosed eyes, as if uttering the words of that terrible phrase – that he would regret it – which she had spoken to him when they had quarrelled.

‘If I do not accept the answers that Christianity gives to the questions of my life, then which answers do I accept?’ And nowhere in the whole arsenal of his convictions was he able to find, not only any answers, but anything resembling an answer.

‘Without knowing what I am and why I’m here, it is impossible for me to live. And I cannot know that, therefore I cannot live,’ Levin would say to himself. ‘In infinite time, in the infinity of matter, in infinite space, a bubble-organism separates itself, and that bubble holds out for a while and then bursts, and that bubble is – me.’

Reason could not discover love for the other, because it’s unreasonable.

Going into the shady front hall, he took down his net that hung from a peg in the wall, put it on, and, hands in pockets, went out to the fenced apiary where, in the middle of a mowed space, in even rows, tied to stakes with strips of bast, the old hives stood – all of them familiar to him, each with its own story – and, along the wattle fence, the young ones started that year. Bees and drones played, dizzying the eye, before the flight holes, circling and swarming inonespot, and among them the worker bees flew, all in the same direction, out to the blossoming lindens in the forest and back to the hives with their booty. His ears were ceaselessly filled with various sounds, now of a busy worker bee flying quickly by, now of a trumpeting, idle drone, now of alarmed, sting-ready sentry bees guarding their property against the enemy.

‘I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray – but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!’

He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has plucked, in which he can barely recognize the beauty that had made him pluck and destroy it.

Anna Karenina is a novel of subtext and nuance. Filled with deeply flawed and often unlikeable characters (Anna perhaps most of all), the story is one in which nothing especially extraordinary happens: it’s not that uncommon for people to fall in love, have affairs, be cheated on, get married, get divorced,

kill themselves

, and so on. Instead, the novel is extraordinary for the psychological depths that Tolstoy plumbs; the extent to which these characters feel like real people, people we know better than we can ever know our flesh-and-blood friends; and thus the degree to which we can understand, empathize with, and even

become them.

It’s also a novel about women’s pain: the pain of Dolly, faithful to an unfaithful husband; Kitty, tormented by a careless decision; and of course Anna, torn between her husband, her lover, and her firstborn. The rise of one, the fall of another, and the painful sameness of the third all play off one another in ways that throw each story into sharp relief. And their journeys are equally reflected in the characters of the men they love, who grow, fall apart, or remain unchanged by the events of the novel.

The scenes I found to be most vivid, emotional, and memorable were: Levin’s ice skating; the ball where Anna and Vronsky begin their obsession; Vronksy racing his horse; Levin mowing his fields; the chalk scene; the wedding of

Kitty and Levin

; the death of

Nikolai

; Seryozha missing his mother; the mushroom gathering party; Levin’s hunting trip (especially the section told from Laska’s perspective); Anna’s psychological unraveling; and the final chapter with Levin ruminating under the stars (or, really, the entirety of Levin’s arc).

Despite the length, the novel moves along fairly quickly. The chapters are short. Characters and plot are constantly evolving. Tolstoy doesn’t typically spend much time on setting (though there are several passages of really gorgeous, luxurious nature writing), but instead pauses just long enough for a quick, vibrant sketch before delving into what really interests him: the characters. Levin turns his thoughts to religion and philosophy fairly often, but Tolstoy never lectures, nor is there much political content (though I’m sure most of the political and social subtext that would have been understood by a contemporary Russian reader is completely lost on me). The result is a novel that is quite accessible, provided the reader has enough endurance and a good memory for names.

In fact, I have no criticisms of

Anna Karenina. The only reason I don’t think I’ll be considering this an all-time favorite is because my reading preferences differ from what Tolstoy has to offer: I like books short enough to be read in a week or two, with a bit of heightened drama, a slightly stronger flavor, a more enchanting atmosphere. I prefer Monet to Vermeer, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy and appreciate the beauty of

Girl with a Pearl Earring; while

Anna Karenina might not jump to the top of my reread pile, it’s still a novel I will treasure.

Favorite passages are here because I couldn’t cut them down enough to fit within the Goodreads character limit.