“The Shcherbatskys consult doctors over Kitty’s health which has been failing since she realizes that Vronsky did not love her and that he did not intend to propose marriage to her, and that she refused and hurt Levin, whom she cares for, in vain. A specialist doctor advises that Kitty should go abroad to a health spa to recover. ” From the Wikipedia synopsis of “Anna Karenin” by Leo Tolstoy.
“Anna Karenin” is allegedly the greatest novel of all time. Well, on some lists. “The Brother’s Karamazov” is often at the top of the list, and so is “Ulysses” by Joyce, and Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”, and “In Search of Lost Time” by Proust.
So Kitty needs to go to a spa to recover. That, in essence, is the problem I have with Anna Karenin. The whole book is about extremely privileged people committing stupid acts and then having nervous breakdowns and scooting themselves off to a spa or an estate somewhere to “recover” from their awful, horrible, traumatic experiences. It’s sounds like a Russian “Gone With the Wind”. We all want to be rich and privileged just so we can have such beautiful crises.
In the film “The Last Station”, Sophia, Tolstoy’s wife, is informed that Tolstoy has run away from home. Yes, he did, at 80, fed up with his wife’s nagging him about giving her the copyrights to his books. There are a lot of terrible flaws to this scene that are emblematic of the entire film.
Firstly, Sophia immediately becomes hysterical and tries to throw herself into the pond. But you thought, he just left on a train, right? And she’s been married to him for 30 years, right? It’s simply hard to believe in that reaction. Dramatically, that moment cries out for a few moments of “what do you mean he left on a train? Where to? Why didn’t he tell me?” You would expect some annoyance on her part, rather than this immediate, overwhelming despair.
She really does throw herself into the pond and sort of drowns. It’s a silly scene. It’s not like she picked some lonely time and place where no one was likely to rescue her. Her family and friends haul her out and turn her on her side, but she hasn’t swallowed any water and doesn’t vomit, and then, later, she reacts comically when she is told that Tolstoy was merely concerned about her. You do wish that someone would grab her and shout, “don’t be pathetic!” Send her to a spa.
I started reading Tolstoy again because of a reference by Philip Yancey, and because of the recent movie “The Last Station”, which, by the way, is as melodramatic and overwrought as “Anna Karenin”.
“Vronsky, embarrassed by Karenin’s magnanimity, attempts suicide by shooting himself. He fails in his attempt but wounds himself badly.” Wikipedia Synopsis.
Is this tragic or comic? When I first read this novel back in the 1970’s, I thought it was gloriously, beautifully, astonishingly tragic.
Now, I find it a bit ridiculous.
My personal list of the best novels ever written?
1. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
2. Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
3. Beautiful Losers (Leonard Cohen)
4. The Stranger (Albert Camus)
5. The Pearl (John Steinbeck)
6. The Castle (Franz Kafka)
7. Animal Farm (George Orwell)
8. Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
9. Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut Jr.)
10. Anna Karenin (Leo Tolstoy)
But don’t put too much weight on my list: literature is not American Idol. There is no point to this competition, except perhaps to draw peoples’ attention to great books.
“Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel is also a great book. So is “Life of Pi”.
More uptodate: Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” and David Foster Wallace “Infinite Jest” and “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”.