«Anna Karenina», Leo TolstoyA book about Anna. Levin is named nearly twice as often

Two novels in one binding

In the Russian original Tolstoy writes the surname Levin 1,627 times and the name Anna 816. Fair enough, he calls Levin by his surname, and Anna is often just “she”. So I recounted by chapter, and it came out even: half the novel is about her, half about a man who is not in the title.

Under one cover there are two novels of about the same length, and Tolstoy runs them by turns, a few chapters at a time. One is about a woman who leaves her husband for the man she loves. The other is about a landowner who marries, mows hay alongside his peasants and looks for a reason to live.

The Oblonskys hold them together: Stiva is Anna’s brother and Levin’s friend, Dolly is Kitty’s sister. Anna and Levin themselves meet once, in Part Seven, and talk for one evening.

Confusion, and not in Anna’s house

The novel does not open with Anna but with her brother. Stiva Oblonsky has been carrying on with the French governess, his wife has been threatening to leave for three days, and “everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house”. Anna is sent for from Petersburg to make peace, and she does not step on stage until chapter eighteen.

Peace is made that same day. Three parts later Stiva gives a coral necklace to a pretty young dancer, and the novel needs one sentence for it. For the same thing Anna gets a theatre where she sits like someone in the pillory. Tolstoy opens the book with a man’s affair to show later what the same affair costs a woman.

Why do his ears look like that?

Anna goes home from Moscow a different woman: Vronsky has boarded the same train. On the platform at Petersburg her husband meets her, and her first thought is: “Oh, mercy! why do his ears look like that?”

Alexey Alexandrovitch’s ears are as they always were. She is the one who has changed. She will notice them three more times: at home that same evening, at the summer house and at the races. This is how Tolstoy shows a marriage that is over: nobody did anything, it is just the ears.

And yet Karenin is no villain. When Anna nearly dies after giving birth, he forgives her at her bedside, in tears. Tolstoy gives the reader no simple culprit, and that only makes the book heavier.

The half everyone skips

At school Levin’s chapters tend to get skipped: farming, peasants, shooting, arguments about local councils. A mistake: the best pages of the book are there. Levin spends a whole day mowing with his peasants, and the longer he mows, the oftener he feels “the moments of unconsciousness”, when it seems not his hands that swing the scythe but the scythe that mows of itself.

There, too, is the strangest declaration of love. Levin writes in chalk on the green cloth of a card table nothing but initial letters: “w, y, t, m, i, c, n, b, d, t, m, n, o, t”. They mean: “When you told me it could never be, did that mean never, or then?” Kitty understands, and answers the same way, in six letters.

The red bag

Now the train, since you know about it. On the day Anna arrives in Moscow, a train runs over a watchman at the station, and she tells her brother: “It’s an omen of evil.” She boards the train home with a little red bag: she opens and shuts it, and takes out a cushion.

In the Russian original the red bag is mentioned 5 times: twice in that carriage and three times on Anna’s last day. At the last station she means to fall under the first carriage, but the red bag which she tried to drop out of her hand delayed her. She has to wait for the second, and in those seconds “life rose up before her for an instant with all its bright past joys”.

Then comes Part Eight: 19 more chapters in which Anna’s name is not spoken once. People say “she”. And in the last chapter Levin stands on the terrace at night, looks at the stars and asks himself nearly what she asked: “What am I about?” Only he finds an answer.

Verdict

Read it. Not for the train, but because these are two lives running side by side. Anna looks for meaning in love, and under the carriage she asks herself: “What for?” Levin looks for it in work, family and faith, and the novel ends with him saying his life now has “the positive meaning of goodness”.

At school this is the book about the woman who threw herself under a train. An adult reads it as a book about how to live, and why some people manage it and others do not. One point off for the provincial elections: six chapters in Part Six. I read them. You may skim.