Entry 4:

Dear Tony,

Let's take a crack at this business of Anna and religion. However timeless this book's theme, it could only have been couched in these particular religious terms during the brief window of time--the threshold between an age of faith and an age of science--in which Tolstoy wrote. (Before, adultery couldn't be mentioned; later, God couldn't be understood.) That window came late to Russia.

It's hard to separate Tolstoy from (folk) Russia. Take his description of Karenin, on the verge of confronting Anna: "He dressed hurriedly and, as if carrying a full cup of wrath and fearing to spill it, fearing to lose along with it the energy needed for a talk with his wife, went into her room as soon as he knew that she was up." What are we appreciating here? Is Tolstoy the most extraordinary observer of resentment who ever lived? Or is "carrying a full cup of wrath and fearing to spill it" merely some Russian folk saying? One wonders the same thing when Tolstoy describes social disorientation: "Levin felt like a deaf man watching people dance."

Whether it's a Russian thing or a personal idiosyncrasy I don't know. But what will most throw off the modern reader is this novel's concept of the soul. We no longer know what one is; those who even use the word today use it to mean something like "essence," but that essence is always laid out in terms that borrow from self-actualization (and hence from hedonism and ambition). The difference is not just that for Tolstoy the soul is such a holy thing; it's that it's such a real thing. Take the scene where Levin shares with Kitty the two guilts that are haunting him on the eve of marriage: his unbelief and his "sins." The pious Kitty is grossed out by the (presumably sexual) sins, but wholly unbothered by the agnosticism. Why? Because "she knew his whole soul through love, and in his soul she saw what she wanted, and if such a state of soul was called unbelief, it made no difference to her." Kitty knows by looking into Levin's soul that he's one of God's--no matter what Levin says to the contrary. His soul is such a visible, accurately describable thing for her that it trumps Levin's own honest confession. As surely as DNA testing or fingerprints are for us, it's evidence. You have to go back to the 17^th century in our own literature to find people discoursing on the soul with such certitude.

We can understand better what this soul is by understanding the idea of love that arises from it. This is an idea of love that modern readers will find not just unfamiliar but threatening. "Feelings," which Tolstoy distrusts, are not an issue. Nor is "compatibility." Kitty takes no interest in Levin's farming. Levin and Kitty have "nothing to talk about" during the first months of their marriage. In fact, Levin hardly knows her when they get engaged. Such "meetings of souls" are hard for us to distinguish from carnal coups de foudre. In Tolstoy's spiritual view, Anna's passion for Vronsky is closer than it looks to Levin's for Kitty.

Tolstoy's idea of spirituality is not the idiotic, ideologized one we hold today, under which the only meaningful differences are the degree of certitude one has that God does or doesn't exist. Spirituality for Tolstoy is a matter of quality, not quantity. Pagans can be holy: Levin admires the ribald Turovtsyn's laughter the way Italian mothers admire gluttony in their sons. And believers can be unco' guid: The horrible Lydia Ivanovna, who talks about Jesus (or "Him" ... or "this Friend") in every sentence, is a desiccated, embittered old hypocritical bitch. In a book obsessed with lying, there is no lie more evil than the one she tells to Seryozha: that his mother is dead. Then she uses that lie as a pretext for not letting Anna see Seryozha. All she does thereby is fire Karenin to hatred. When Anna says of Lydia and Karenin: "All they want is to offend me and torment the child, and I should submit to them!" She's right. And then: "She's worse than I am. At least I don't lie." Again, she's right.

She's also voicing Tolstoy's feelings. Tolstoy hates nothing more than lying. For him, "soul" is almost a synonym for "truth." And the striking paradox about Anna's character is that she's made an outcast for "deceiving" her husband, and that she's "deceived" her husband at least in part because she's the least "deceptive" character in the whole book. Anna is, in fact, a volcano of spirituality. That is what people "see" in her. And all the wisest characters realize this. That charming blurter of home truths Princess Miagky says, "She didn't want to deceive and did splendidly." Levin thinks, "Besides intelligence, grace, beauty, there was truthfulness in her."

That's why Levin is so absolutely electrified by Anna when they meet, aroused intellectually and spiritually, not to mention simply aroused. They talk about art, passion, and philanthropy, and Levin begins to think that Vronsky doesn't really understand her. (He's right--but that would take a whole day's posting to go into.) Levin is drunk at the time (a wise narrative move on Tolstoy's part), and there is clearly a thought bubbling in the deepest depths of Levin to which he can't give voice: that Anna would have been the perfect wife for him. In fact, the two of them have a real affinity: Levin, with his reactionary skepticism, is no less modern than she.

This affinity is strengthened on Anna's ride to her death. Anna thinks on the train "that we're all created in order to suffer, and that we all know it, and keep thinking up ways of deceiving ourselves. But if you see the truth, what can you do?" Her moments of absolute clarity while sitting on the train are the reflection of Levin's when he marries Kitty. The Demonic reflection, in fact. She reads a note from Vronsky, and then ... "'No, I won't let you torment me,' she thought, addressing her threat not to him, not to herself, but to the one who made her suffer, and she walked along the platform past the station house." Anna's is a big soul, a real conquest for the devil, just as Levin's is for God.

Could I talk about Anna's suicide for a sec before signing off? This episode powers the book while standing at an implausible distance from it, like a spinnaker. On its own, it's a brilliant exposition of self-destructive insanity, the best writing in the book, but it doesn't follow from anything in her relations with Vronsky--and certainly not from their final argument, which is over grievances manufactured in her own head. But thus detaching the episode makes a lot of sense. The source of Anna's tragedy is not in her love affair but in herself. Her defining attribute is not her "passion," her beauty, her overpowering intellect (which is, curiously, mentioned almost as an afterthought by Tolstoy), or any of the things Levin mentions. It's her honesty.

No question she makes a mistake. Tolstoy is not saying that adultery is a proper calling for a decent Russian woman. But lying is not an option, either. The soul, Tolstoy tells us, needs nourishment, too.

Best,
Chris