Anna Karenina

Author: (Russian) Tolstoy
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2004-10-09
Features: Anna Karenina, a noblewoman from St. Petersburg, is the wife of the high-ranking official Karenin. Her brother Oblonsky lives in Moscow, leading a dissolute life. He has an affair with his former family governess, which his wife Dolly discovers, causing her great distress. Anna comes to Moscow to mediate the conflict between her brother and sister-in-law and meets Count Vronsky at the train station. Vronsky is captivated by Anna's elegant demeanor and the suppressed vitality in her smile. Meanwhile, the aristocratic Levin also arrives in Moscow. Over thirty, he feels the need to establish a family and decides to propose to Kitty, whom he has loved since his youth. However, Kitty is infatuated with Vronsky and rejects Levin. But after meeting Anna, Vronsky no longer associates with Kitty. Anna's arrival brings Dolly and her husband back together, but it leads Kitty into misfortune. Levin returns to the countryside and dedicates himself to agricultural reforms, hoping to forget his personal disappointments. He tries to raise high-quality livestock and introduce agricultural machinery, but always fails to achieve the desired results. On her way back, Anna discovers that Vronsky is on the same train, and she feels both uneasy and excited. Upon returning to St. Petersburg, Anna and Vronsky frequently meet in social circles. At a banquet, Vronsky confesses his love to Anna. Their prolonged time spent together alone attracts public attention. Upon returning home, Karenin warns Anna to pay attention to social etiquette and adhere to womanly propriety. However, this hypocrisy and preaching only lead Anna to shut her heart off, and she falls deeply in love with Vronsky. Their relationship is finally exposed at a horse race: when Vronsky's horse falls, Anna completely loses her composure. On the way home, Anna admits to Karenin that she is Vronsky's lover, but Karenin insists on maintaining the status quo, merely forbidding Vronsky from visiting their home. Levin works alongside the peasants in the countryside, yearning for a new, simple life like them, but when he learns that Kitty has recovered from a serious illness abroad and is about to return, his love for her rekindles, and he proposes again. They finally marry and live a happy life on the estate, but Levin does not find true happiness. His various agricultural experiments fail, and the peasants do not trust the landowners. He fantasizes about establishing a shareholder partnership that benefits both peasants and landowners, replacing mutual hostility with harmony of interests, but all his new methods and measures prove ineffective. He does not know how to live and is so troubled that he nearly commits suicide. Eventually, he receives an epiphany from an old farmer: "People live not just to fill their bellies, but for their souls, for God." Anna's situation worsens as she becomes pregnant and contracts puerperal fever during childbirth, nearly dying. On her deathbed, she asks her husband for forgiveness and hopes he will make peace with Vronsky. Karenin, moved by Christian compassion, agrees. But once Anna recovers, she cannot continue living with her husband and, without waiting for his consent, flees with Vronsky to abroad. After traveling in Europe for three months, Anna misses her son and, on his birthday, house. Seeing her son, she is overcome with emotion and they cling tightly, unable to part. Only when Karenin enters the children's room does Anna have to leave hastily. From then on, Anna loses her beloved son forever. Without a divorce, her union with Vronsky remains illegal, and high society shuts its doors on her, treating her with coldness everywhere. She lives alone in Vronsky's estate, trying to pass the time in any way she can. When Vronsky is away, she suspects he has taken a new lover, leading to frequent arguments. One day, after an argument, Anna is driven to despair. She writes a letter and sends a telegraph while following Vronsky to the train station. In a daze, she recalls their first meeting and the scene of a worker being crushed by the train. It seems to foreshadow her fate. Anna throws herself under the train as it approaches, extinguishing the flame of her life and her suffering forever.
Author Bio: Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a Russian writer. Born on September 9, 1828, in Yasnaia Polyana, Krapivino, Tula Province (now part of Shokshino District, Tula Province), Tolstoy belonged to a noble family whose lineage traced back to the 16th century, with ancestors receiving noble titles from Peter the Great. His father, Count Nikolai Ivanovich Tolstoy, participated in the 1812 Patriotic War and retired as a lieutenant colonel. His mother, Maria Nikolaevna Tolstoy, was the daughter of Prince Nikolai Sheremetev. Tolstoy lost his mother at the age of one and his father at the age of nine. After his guardian aunt, Aunt A. I. Osten-Sakon, died in 1841, he was placed under the care of his aunt, Aunt P. I. Yushkova, in Kazan, prompting the family to move there. Tolstoy received a typical noble education. In 1844, he entered the Oriental Department of Kazan University to study Turkish and Arabic, preparing to become a diplomat. He failed his final exams and transferred to the Law Department the following year. Unfocused on his studies, he was drawn to social life but developed an interest in philosophy, particularly moral philosophy, admiring Rousseau's teachings and personality, and read widely in literature. During his university years, he noticed the superiority of his peers from humble backgrounds. He dropped out in April 1847 and returned to Yasnaia Polyana, which was his mother's dowry and later inherited by him. He spent most of his life there. Upon returning to the estate, he attempted to improve the lives of the peasants but gave up when he lost their trust. In April 1849, he went to St. Petersburg to take the exams for a legal degree but returned home after passing only two subjects. That autumn, he founded schools for peasant children. Starting in November, he held a nominal position in the Tula Provincial Administration, promoted to the rank of 14th-class civil servant the following December, though he spent most of his time socializing with relatives and the Moscow elite. However, he grew to dislike this lifestyle and environment. In April 1851, he joined the Caucasus military service as a volunteer, participating in campaigns against mountain tribes, serving as a second lieutenant in the artillery for two and a half years. Despite his excellent performance, his promotion to lieutenant was also due to the support of relatives. In March 1854, he joined the Danube troops. During the Crimean War, he volunteered for Sevastopol and served as a battery commander in the most dangerous Fourth Redoubt, participating in the city's final defense. His experiences with the bravery and qualities of common soldiers and officers strengthened his sympathy for the people and his criticism of serfdom. While in the Caucasus, Tolstoy began writing, publishing novels like "Childhood," "Boyhood," and "Sevastopol Stories" in the magazine "The Contemporary." In November 1855, he moved to St. Petersburg as a rising new writer, welcomed by authors like Turgenev and, and gradually met writers and critics such as Goncharov, Fet, Ostrovsky, Druzhinin, Annenkov, and Botkin. He was seen as eccentric due to his lack of worldly experience and unrestrained behavior, and his disdain for Homer and Shakespeare also caused astonishment. Soon after, he met Chernyshevsky but disagreed with his literary views. At the time, Druzhinin and others promoted "art for art's sake," opposing "didactic art," which was essentially the expose literature advocated by the revolutionary democrats. Tolstoy inclined toward Druzhinin's views but believed that art could not be detached from social life. By 1859, he had broken with "The Contemporary." He retired as a lieutenant in late 1856 and traveled to France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany early the next year. The "social freedom" of France impressed him, but the sight of an execution in Paris deeply repulsed him. In Switzerland, he witnessed the selfishness and cruelty of English bourgeois gentlemen, which filled him with indignation. However, the trip broadened his perspective on literature and art and deepened his awareness of Russia's backwardness. Regarding the abolition of serfdom and the revolutionary situation in the 1850s–60s, Tolstoy's thoughts were deeply contradictory. As early as 1856, he drafted plans to free the peasants through redemption payments and tried it on his estate, but it failed due to peasant resistance. He sympathized with the peasants and abhorred serfdom but believed, based on "historical justice," that land should belong to the landowners, while also being deeply troubled by the dilemma facing landowners: whether to save their lives or their land. He disagreed with the views of liberals, Slavophiles, and conservative serfowners, and saw the tsar's top-down "reforms" as hypocritical, yet he opposed abolishing serfdom through revolution, instead seeking his own path. Unable to resolve these contradictions, he tried to escape reality through philosophy and art but soon grew disillusioned. The death of his older brother, Nikolai, in 1860 deepened his pessimism. From 1859 to 1862, he nearly stopped writing, founding over 20 schools for peasant children in Yasnaia Polyana and nearby villages, studying Russian and Western educational systems, and traveling to Germany, France, Italy, England, and Belgium to examine schools. He also founded the educational magazine "Yasnaia Polyana." These activities drew the attention of the tsarist government. Additionally, as a peace mediator in the serfdom reforms, his frequent sympathy for peasants in mediating disputes between landowners and peasants earned him the enmity of conservative serfowners. In July 1862, while traveling, his estate was searched for two consecutive days by gendarmes. Soon after, he closed his schools. The shocks to his thinking during this period, combined with the perspectives he gained from his frequent interactions with peasants, marked the beginning of his worldview transformation. From summer 1856 to winter 1857, Tolstoy was briefly infatuated with his neighbor, Vera Fedorovna Arkashev, but his efforts to marry her failed. In September 1862, he married Sofia Andreevna Bers, the daughter of his physician and 8th-class civil servant, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. Throughout his life, his wife not only managed his household and estate but also typed his manuscripts, including multiple drafts of "War and Peace." However, she could not escape societal prejudices and prioritized family and children over his changing worldview, failing to understand his intellectual evolution. Their marital discord led to a family tragedy. After their marriage, the revolutionary situation gradually subsided, and Tolstoy gradually overcame his ideological crisis. He withdrew from social life, settled on his estate, acquired more land, and lived a simple, peaceful, harmonious, and happy life. From 1863 to 1869, he spent six years writing his masterpiece, "War and Peace." During this time, a significant event was his defense of a soldier, Shybin, before a military court. Shybin had slapped an officer in protest and, despite Tolstoy's efforts, was executed. This incident led him to develop views opposing courts and the death penalty. Tolstoy's inner peace and harmony did not last long. In September 1869, while passing through Arzamas on a trip, he suddenly felt an unprecedented sorrow and terror in a hotel at midnight—a phenomenon known as the "Arzamas Terror." Around this time, in letters to friends, he expressed his recent dark thoughts of waiting for death. From autumn 1868 to summer 1869, he became interested in Schopenhauer's philosophy and was influenced by it for a time. Starting in the early 1870s, the intensification of the "destruction of all 'old foundations' in rural Russia" and the rise of social movements like "Going to the People" led to a new ideological crisis and exploration period. He grew anxious, doubting the purpose and meaning of life and being troubled by his "terrible position" as a noble parasite, unsure of what to do. He studied various philosophical and religious books but found no answers. He even hid a rope and refused to carry a gun, fearing suicide as a means of escape. These thoughts and emotions were vividly reflected in his novel "Anna Karenina." Afterward, he visited priests, bishops, monks, and hermits, and met peasant Konstantin Shukhtayev, an independent believer. He ultimately rejected the state church and accepted the beliefs of the peasant commune. By the turn of the 1870s and 1880s, under the strong influence of the new revolutionary situation and a nationwide famine, he renounced his class and completed the worldview transformation he had beening since the 1860s, aligning himself with the peasant commune. In essays like "Confessions" (1879–1880) and "What Is My Faith?" (1882–1884), he elaborated on his intellectual transformation, strongly condemning the life and foundation of the wealthy and educated class—the private ownership of land—and fiercely criticizing the state and the church. Yet, he opposed violent revolution, advocating Christian love and self-cultivation, seeking solutions to social conflicts through religion and ethics. This was because he not only reflected the hatred and anger of the peasants toward the ruling class but also accepted their non-violent resistance due to their political immaturity. Lenin analyzed this astonishing contradiction: "As a prophet inventing a new salvation for humanity, Tolstoy was ridiculous. As the embodiment of the thoughts and emotions of millions of Russian peasants at the dawn of the bourgeois revolution in Russia, Tolstoy was great. Tolstoy was original because, in general, his views reflected the characteristics of the peasant-bourgeois revolution in Russia. From this perspective, the contradictions in Tolstoy's views were indeed a mirror reflecting the various contradictions in the historical role of the peasants in the Russian revolution." From then on, Tolstoy rejected his and his surroundings' noble life, engaging in manual labor—plowing, sewing shoes, and building houses for peasants—eschewing luxury, fasting, and vegetarianism. He also changed his views on art, condemning his past works, including "War and Peace," as "game for lords," shifting his focus to essays and political tracts to directly promote his social, philosophical, and religious views, exposing the evils of the landlord-bourgeois society. The plays, short stories, and folk tales he wrote during this time served the same purpose. He also engaged in extensive social activities. In 1881, the family moved to Moscow for his children's education, where he visited the poor.