Leo Tolstoy. We all know who Leo Tolstoy is, right? He wrote War and Peace, and he is regarded alongside Dostoevsky as one of the two giants of Russian literature. He became a Christian anarcho-pacifist later in life, and his thinking influenced both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
I read War and Peace some time ago, so I can't say much about it. I remember allusions to Napoleon, and characters reflecting on Tolstoy's theory of historical determinism. I remember liking the novel, if not loving it. It is of course famously long, but my objection to it wasn't its length but rather my difficulty in engaging with the story.
I'm happy to say that I enjoyed Anna Karenina a lot more. This is perhaps because Anna Karenina makes a moral point rather than a philosophical one. It also does so without preaching to the reader, instead illustrating a set of perfectly commonplace circumstances and then observing how various characters react to these circumstances. Where War and Peace felt bogged down in historical details, Anna Karenina felt very immediate, in that one wouldn't have to change its characters or their settings too much to make the story feel modern.
I feel obligated to say that Anna Karenina is the novel that finally decided me in favor of Tolstoy. Up until finishing this book, I wasn't sure whether I preferred Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. But having read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov not long ago, I can now assert that Tolstoy is better. With Anna Karenina Tolstoy took the novel into the age of modernism, and its characters feel very fresh, and very much alive in 2021. Dostoevsky, by contrast, never quite feels comfortable with his female characters, and characters such as Grushenka, to be found in the pages of The Brothers Karamazov, resemble nothing so much as stand-ins for women the male characters should be interacting with.
But to return to Anna Karenina, in it a married member of the Russian aristocracy falls in love with a cavalry officer. Around her the other members of the aristocracy attempt to interpret and to orient themselves in respect to her scandal, with the author using them as a way of gazing into the society of his time. Communism waits in the wings of this society, as the upper class scrambles for power and the lower class begins to assert its rights.
I enjoyed this book almost all the way through. I loved the subtle way it shifted from one character's point of view to another's, and also the way it points out its characters' moral inconsistencies. I felt like every character in this novel was a living, breathing person, and their actions always made sense - even when I didn't agree with their choices.
What I didn't like about this book was the very, very end, which occurs after Anna and her lover's fates are decided. Instead of ending the book there, Tolstoy adds an extended reflection on both the essential goodness of God and the limits of rational thinking. This section of the novel seemed out of tune to me, and it wasn't in keeping with Anna as its central character. I suppose you could link the ideas of God's goodness, the failure of rationality in encountering this goodness, and Anna's desire to be loved together, but that seems like a stretch. Linking these three ideas together also feels like rationalizing, and moreover the very kind of rationalizing that Tolstoy seems to be arguing against.
Even so, I think Anna Karenina is by far the best of the classic Russian novels. I didn't enjoy it (if "enjoy" is the right word) nearly as much as more recent Russian novels like Master and Margerita or The Gulag Archipeligo, but it remains undeniably great, and rewards the effort required to get through it.
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