Is it fair to call any novel the
“Greatest Novel Ever Written” - it does not seem to be so, but I
can't help it. Anna Karenina is quite simply the greatest novel ever
written and not just the best novel I've read. I cannot imagine any
other novel matching this one as it possesses everything one wants
from a novel – it is gripping, philosophical, enthralling, long,
and utterly timeless. Long seems to be strange praise but I use it to
say that I would have stayed with Tolstoy for as many pages as he
needed to tell his story.
What struck me most about this 100+
year old novel was how timeless it is. When an author like Tolstoy
sets out to tell a human story the setting is almost irrelevant
because what makes us human is universal. The love, betrayal, and
fear described are all never changing, it is our emotions that make
us human, so that was not surprising but even on the philosophical
level things are the same. We are having the same debates about
social order, education, gender, and relationships that we were
having all those years ago. However, to say that setting is
irrelevant is maybe a bit flip because another element of the novel
that amazed me was how clearly defined the social conventions were.
Tolstoy made me feel late 19th century Russia. I felt that
I could really see into this hidden world; it was so fully realized
that I was immersed within it.
To get into a discussion about the
characters makes me feel as though this is more of a book report than
a review of my impressions because there are so many characters and
they are all so connected no matter how tenuously. I guess this is
because I feel that the novel is bigger than the sum of its parts. No
amount of discussion of the romance between Anna and Vronsky or the
moralizing of Karenin to Anna or even the subtle awesomeness of Levin
will lead you to read this book and it will only serve to spoil you
of the virgin delights I experienced upon first encountering the
novel. With a novel as “Important” as Anna Karenina I find it
best to go in blind, work my way out of the material, wrestle with
themes, and then surrender to academia. Upon the completion of a
great novel I like to do a little research, discovering all the
things I missed within the novel and praising myself over all that I
did observe.
The characters within Anna Karenina are
both real and not. They are real in that they are full of
selfishness, beauty, and contradiction just like the rest of us, yet
they stand apart in that they are the vehicles of Tolstoy's ideas.
They are there to represent both what is and what is not possible,
and the ultimate goal of the tragedy is to expose an unyielding
society whose fear of change and difference, seen as depravity, may
sink not only one person but a nation. The novel definitely speaks to
the changing society in Russia that came to fruition in the years
after the novel was published.
No comments:
Post a Comment