The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Leo Tolstoy · a novel in eight parts · two hundred and thirty-nine chapters · 1875–78 · scored on Tolstoy’s Russian, with Constance Garnett’s translation (1901), the only one in hand, for sense and for every English quotation
Mode
Novel of adultery and family chronicle in a double plot; society novel, country novel and conversion narrative in one work
Mythos
The railway as fate; the peasant at the iron; the woman who will not lie and the world that punishes her honesty; earth, labour and birth against it; vengeance reserved to God
Phase
From a winter morning in the Oblonskys’ house to a summer night on Levin’s estate, some years on, with the Serbian war of 1876 at the close
Presentation
Fiction; eight parts, 239 chapters, under an epigraph from Romans; two strands alternating in blocks, meeting in one scene, the last part given to the second
Register
From Stiva’s ease, Karenin’s officialese and society’s French to the peasants’ speech, a dog’s senses and a dying woman’s associations
Scale
Three marriages and their households; Moscow and Petersburg society, the estate, the ministry and the provincial elections
Governing Proposition
A woman leaves her husband and son for an officer, and a landowner marries the girl who once refused him; the two lives touch once, and are told side by side until one ends under a train and the other in a prayer under the stars. The wager of the novel is that a passion which cannot live honestly inside the shared life of family and society consumes those who live it, that goodness has no causes and is lived before it is understood, and that only two stories told against each other can show both.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.”
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Above the sentence Tolstoy set an epigraph from Romans 12:19, “Мне отмщение, и аз воздам”: vengeance is mine, and I will repay. The book never says whose vengeance it will see. Its second sentence comes down at once from the law to a house: “Всё смешалось в доме Облонских.”
“Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house.” The novel named for Anna begins without her. Stiva has been found out with the French governess, Dolly will not leave her room, and Stiva wakes on the sofa in his study, feels with his feet for the slippers of gold-coloured morocco his wife made him, and only then remembers why he is not sleeping in her room. His sister is coming by train from Petersburg to make the peace.
Around that house the novel builds eight parts and 239 chapters, which ran in The Russian Messenger from 1875 and came out whole in 1878. Measured in the English, five of the eight parts are within a point of one seventh of the book each. The three shorter parts are the hinges: the fourth, with the deathbed and the forgiveness and the proposal in chalk; the seventh, with Anna’s end; and the eighth, a coda of nineteen chapters. Two strands run through them, alternating in blocks of four to thirteen chapters. The Oblonskys join them, since Stiva is Anna’s brother and Kitty’s brother-in-law, and the opening chapters are theirs. Levin’s chapters hold more of the book than Anna’s, and the last part is all but wholly his. The two people whose stories these are meet once, in a single evening of the seventh part (VII.9–11).
What binds the strands is not plot but return. The death at the station falls about seven per cent of the way into the book, and Anna’s own death beneath the wheels about ninety-four. The little red bag she opens on the night train in the first part is the bag she drops between the wheels in the seventh. In the carriage on the way to her death she sees, “in the piercing light”, what she takes for “the meaning of life and human relations” (VII.30), and she recalls Yashvin’s saying that “the struggle for existence and hatred is the one thing that holds men together.” In the twelfth chapter of the last part Levin, lying in the grass, finds he could not discover “the meaning of life” by reason, and that “Reason discovered the struggle for existence” and nothing else (VIII.12). The words she dies by are the words he argues his way past. The book does not point this out.
Movement II
Vronsky goes to the Moscow station to meet his mother, and at the door of her compartment makes way for a lady he has never seen. As they leave, the train moves back along the platform. “A guard, either drunk or too much muffled up in the bitter frost, had not heard the train moving back, and had been crushed.” In the carriage afterwards Anna’s lips are quivering, and when her brother asks what is the matter she says: “It’s an omen of evil” (I.18). Days later, at the ball, Kitty sees in Anna what she has come to dread: “there was something terrible and cruel in her fascination” (I.23). The book’s fate arrives on time, by timetable, and it is announced by a woman who does not yet know what she is announcing.
On the night train back to Petersburg Anna opens her little red bag, takes out a paper-knife and an English novel, and cannot read it: “She had too great a desire to live herself.” (I.29). At a station in the snowstorm she steps down to the platform, and Vronsky is there. “You know that I have come to be where you are,” he says, “I can’t help it.” The wind tears a sheet of iron from a carriage roof, the engine whistles, and the storm seems to her “more splendid now” (I.30). In the morning, at Petersburg, the first person she sees is her husband: “Oh, mercy! why do his ears look like that?” (I.30). Nothing has happened, and her marriage has already changed shape in her eyes.
The novel enters Karenin as fully as it enters her. Waiting for her to come home from Betsy’s, he feels like a man crossing a precipice by a bridge who finds it broken: “That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived.” (II.8). When the lovers are first together, the book gives no bed and no embrace, only the aftermath: “He felt what a murderer must feel, when he sees the body he has robbed of life.” (II.11). At the officers’ steeplechase Vronsky shifts in the saddle at a jump, and his mare, Frou-Frou, “fluttered on the ground at his feet like a shot bird. The clumsy movement made by Vronsky had broken her back.” (II.25). Driving home from the race, Anna tells her husband the truth (II.29).
Movement III
The other strand begins in a refusal. Levin comes to Moscow to propose, and Kitty, thinking of Vronsky, answers: “That cannot be ... forgive me.” (I.13). He goes back to the country, to his estate and his farming, and the novel gives him the work it gives no one else. In the third part he mows with his peasants from morning to night, and finds the moments when “it seemed not his hands that swung the scythe, but the scythe mowing of itself, a body full of life and consciousness of its own”. “These were the most blissful moments.” (III.5). Dolly, in the country with her children, finds their joys “so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand” (III.7).
In the fourth part the two meet again at the Oblonskys’, and Levin proposes in chalk on a card-table, writing only the first letters of the words: “When you told me it could never be, did that mean never, or then?” She reads it, and answers in letters of her own (IV.13). On the morning after, waiting for the hour when he may call, he walks the streets: “And what he saw then, he never saw again after.” Children going to school, doves flying down from the roofs, little loaves put out by an unseen hand: “Those loaves, those doves, and those two boys were not earthly creatures.” (IV.15). Then marriage, which is like getting into the “little boat on a lake” one has admired from the shore and finding one must row (V.14).
Levin’s brother Nikolay is dying in a provincial hotel. Levin cannot bear the room; Kitty, whom he had not wanted to bring, knows at once what to do, and the dying man kisses his brother’s hand. Levin thinks of the text: “Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.” (V.19). The birth of his son, in the seventh part, is joined to that death in his mind: grief and joy alike were “loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime” (VII.14). Shown the child, he feels no gladness, only a fear: “It was the consciousness of a new sphere of liability to pain.” (VII.16). The strand that ends in faith is built of these long before it is argued.
Movement IV
Vronsky wakes from a dream of a little dirty man with a dishevelled beard, stooping and saying strange words in French (IV.2). That evening Anna tells him her own dream, of a peasant fumbling in a sack and talking quickly in French, “Il faut le battre, le fer, le broyer, le pétrir”, and of being told she will die in childbirth; he feels “the same terror filling his soul” (IV.3). She does not die. Called by a telegram, Karenin comes home and, at the door, “He felt distinctly now how intensely he had longed for her death.” (IV.17). Then he sees her. In her fever she says: “But there is another woman in me, I’m afraid of her: she loved that man, and I tried to hate you, and could not forget about her that used to be.” And “a glad feeling of love and forgiveness for his enemies filled his heart” (IV.17). Vronsky goes home and shoots himself, and lives (IV.18).
The forgiveness does not hold, and the lovers go abroad. When Anna comes back she visits her son, without leave, on the morning of his birthday, and has a few minutes with him before his father comes. “Seryozha, my darling,” she says, “love him; he’s better and kinder than I am, and I have done him wrong. When you grow up you will judge.” (V.30). At Vronsky’s estate, where Dolly comes to visit, there is a new hospital and every comfort, and Anna, asked how many teeth her baby has, answers wrong and knows nothing about “the two last teeth” (VI.19). Vronsky puts the case to Dolly in the garden: “My daughter is by law not my daughter, but Karenin’s. I cannot bear this falsity!” (VI.21). The law gives Karenin both children.
In Moscow Levin, taken by Stiva after dinner at the club, calls on Anna, the only time the two strands meet. Her portrait, painted in Italy, hangs on the wall in the light of a lamp. Levin looks at it and at her, and as she takes her brother’s arm “he felt for her a tenderness and pity at which he wondered himself” (VII.10). He goes home to Kitty, who reads it in his face, and confesses that pity and the wine had been too much for him (VII.11). He will never see Anna again. Her own days have narrowed to the house, the morphine and the waiting for Vronsky, and each quarrel leaves less to be said in the next.
Movement V
On her last night she lies “by the light of a single burned-down candle”, imagining how sorry he will be when she is dead. The candle goes out, the shadows of the screen swoop over the ceiling, and she thinks: “Death!” Her hands cannot find the matches; when another candle is lit she weeps for joy at the return to life: “Why, I love him! Why, he loves me!” (VII.26). Towards morning the old nightmare comes again: “A little old man with unkempt beard was doing something bent down over some iron, muttering meaningless French words” (VII.26). The next day she cannot remember doing her own hair, and does not know the face in the glass: “Why, it’s I!” (VII.27).
Her last ride is given from inside a mind that takes in shop signs and passers-by as it goes, “Tiutkin, coiffeur” (VII.29) among them, and turns everything it sees to hatred: “And where love ends, hate begins.” (VII.30). At the station she watches the wheels of the second carriage, drops the red bag, and falls under the train. At once she is terrified and tries to rise, too late: “Lord, forgive me all!” Then the last two sentences of her story: “A peasant muttering something was working at the iron above her. And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.” (VII.31).
The last part does not mourn her. Vronsky’s mother says “Even the death she chose was low and vulgar.” (VIII.4). Vronsky, leaving for the Serbian war with toothache, remembers her body “shamelessly sprawling out among strangers” (VIII.5). Levin, “a happy father and husband, in perfect health”, hides the cord and is afraid to go out with his gun, for the self seems to him a “bubble-organism” (VIII.9), until a peasant tells him of a neighbour who “lives for his soul” (VIII.11), and he sees that “Reason discovered the struggle for existence” and could never have discovered love (VIII.12). That night, after a storm, he looks at the stars and knows he will not change: he will still lose his temper and quarrel, and he will still pray without knowing why, “but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.” (VIII.19). The novel ends there. The epigraph is never explained.
Act III · The Twelve
Length is not a cost; the question is whether the parts are required, and the spine passes the test. Remove Levin and Anna’s story loses its measure: the two marriages are read against each other, and the phrases of her last ride, “the meaning of life” and “the struggle for existence” (VII.30), are the phrases he argues his way out of in VIII.12. Remove the Oblonskys and the strands do not touch. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is about a twentieth of the whole that says at length what could be said briefly: Sviazhsky’s farming argument (III.26–28), the provincial elections (VI.27–31) and the war argument at the bee-house (VIII.15–16), which is the author’s polemic more than Levin’s.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a passion that cannot live inside the shared life of family, work and society consumes those who live it, and the society that forbids it forbids not the act but its honesty. Betsy’s world forgives the hidden affair and closes on the open one, and the law keeps the children: “My daughter is by law not my daughter, but Karenin’s” (VI.21). Beside it the novel shows goodness lived without reasons, “If goodness has causes, it is not goodness” (VIII.12), and jealousy turning the world to hatred: “And where love ends, hate begins.” (VII.30). It holds without the author’s faith. Held off the top because Levin’s answer is asserted more than shown, and the scales are weighted, a little, against the woman.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Height is reached often, in a plain register. The ceiling: Anna’s childbed and Karenin’s forgiveness (IV.17); Nikolay’s death and Kitty’s nursing (V.18–20); the birth, “a new sphere of liability to pain” (VII.16); and the death, in the light that “flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever” (VII.31). The warm heights: the scythe “mowing of itself” (III.5); the morning after the proposal, which “he never saw again after” (IV.15); Levin under the stars. The dreadful: Frou-Frou “like a shot bird” (II.25), and Seryozha’s birthday (V.30). Held below the top because the elevation thins in the sixth part and in the argued chapters of the eighth.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Myth built, not evoked, and built from a railway timetable. A guard is crushed at the station on the day the lovers meet, and Anna calls it “an omen of evil” (I.18). The two of them dream one dream, of a peasant muttering French over iron, “Il faut le battre, le fer, le broyer, le pétrir” (IV.3); it returns on her last morning (VII.26) and over her body: “A peasant muttering something was working at the iron above her.” (VII.31). The epigraph’s vengeance stands over it unexplained. Anna has become an archetype and stays a woman who cannot say how many teeth her daughter has (VI.19). Held a step down because the realist surface keeps the archetype implicit, and Levin’s counter-myth of earth and birth is partly stated rather than built.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The inheritance is the European novel of adultery, with Madame Bovary the nearest precedent, and the Russian family chronicle. The swerve: two plots that meet in a single evening (VII.9–11), joined by an inner linkage rather than by plot; a heroine dead with one of the eight parts still to run; a last part given to a man’s search for faith; chapters seen through a dog; and in Anna’s last ride a mind given as a run of associations, “Tiutkin, coiffeur” (VII.29), with nothing between it and the reader. The stake was real: Katkov refused the last part for The Russian Messenger, and Tolstoy issued it himself. Held below the top because the greater break had been made in War and Peace, which Tolstoy refused to call a novel; this book returns in part to the form it bends.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The double plot is the argument: told singly, Anna’s story is a tragedy of passion and Levin’s a conversion, and neither knows what the pairing knows, that the two lives answer the same questions (death, the body, honesty, what to live for) and that the answers are not freely chosen. The free indirect style, passing from Karenin to Seryozha to the dog within pages, is the instrument of the novel’s justice: each is seen from within for as long as it takes to understand them, Karenin included, whose chasm the reader enters (II.8). The chapters shorten as Anna’s mind narrows; the seventh part’s are the shortest of the first seven. Held off the top by the argued chapters, where the form becomes a container.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: a century and a half of reading that has not exhausted it, from Dostoevsky’s long notice in A Writer’s Diary (1877) and Matthew Arnold’s essay (1887), through Nabokov’s Cornell lectures and Eikhenbaum’s studies, to Gary Saul Morson’s Anna Karenina in Our Time (2007), which reads its ethics through Dolly. The text holds its questions open: whether the epigraph’s vengeance is God’s, society’s or Anna’s own; whether Levin’s revelation is the answer or a last illusion, since he will “still go on praying” without knowing why (VIII.19); whether Karenin is a machine or the most wronged man in the book. Formal depth yields too: the echoes across the strands are left for the reader to find. Held a step down because its open questions are fewer, and lie nearer the surface.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The field is the Russian novel and, as Russia’s novel entered it, the European. The force is in the measure it set for the psychological novel: a whole society shown through consciousness without the author’s comment, and in Anna’s last ride an interior monologue that later novelists would make a method. Its reach is as the form’s perfection more than its reorganisation, and the larger rupture in Tolstoy’s own field was War and Peace; that holds it below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Dostoevsky wrote on it at length in A Writer’s Diary (1877), Matthew Arnold in 1887 and Thomas Mann in 1939; Nabokov taught it at Cornell; and beside Madame Bovary it became the type of the novel of adultery for the literatures that followed.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Survival is demonstrated: in print since the serial of 1875–77 and the book of 1878, translated into English many times and into most of the world’s written languages, read in schools in Russia and far beyond it, filmed in nearly every decade of cinema, with Greta Garbo (1935), Vivien Leigh (1948), Tatiana Samoilova (1967) and by Joe Wright (2012), and made a ballet by Rodion Shchedrin for Maya Plisetskaya (1972). It has outlived its conditions: divorce law, the zemstvo and the aftermath of emancipation are history, and the novel is read for what they pressed upon. Charged: the surfaces that have dated, the elections, the farming debate and the volunteers of the last part, which modern readers skip; and the Levin close, whose reception has cooled more than Anna’s.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Judged on the original as far as a translation carries it; the Russian sentence, unheard here, is neither credited nor charged. The construction is Tolstoy’s most finished: 239 chapters of even length, alternated in blocks, the two strands timed so that births, deaths and seasons answer across them. The scene: Stiva waking on the study sofa and feeling for his morocco slippers, the race, the opera, the hospital at Vozdvizhenskoe, “This is not a lying-in home, but a hospital for the sick” (VI.20). The detail that carries a character: Karenin’s ears and cracking fingers, Vronsky’s even teeth, aching at the last “like rows of ivory in his mouth” (VIII.5), the red bag. The dialogue, near a third of the book, lets its subtext show. Charged: the argued chapters, and the essay voice of VIII.15–16.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Stiva’s oysters with Levin (I.10) and Anna under the wheels (VII.31); or Laska on the snipe marsh, thinking “They have chosen a time to talk” (II.15), and Levin’s “bubble-organism” (VIII.9). One law governs them: the body’s appetite and the soul’s truthfulness, and what follows when either lies to the other. Stiva is never punished and never saved; Anna, who will not lie, is destroyed; Levin, who cannot stop thinking, is saved when he stops. The range is wide and held: social comedy at Betsy’s and the Countess Lidia’s, a dog’s senses, the death chamber, the elections, the theology of the bee-house. Charged: the last part turns from shown to argued for several chapters, and Landau’s trance (VII.21–22) is satire cruder than the book elsewhere allows itself.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Held, not listed. Consciousness: Anna’s last day, Levin’s despair, Karenin’s chasm, Dolly’s reverie on the road to Vozdvizhenskoe. The family: three marriages, the children, Seryozha’s divided loyalty, a birth and a death nursed. Labour: the mowing, the farm accounts, the peasants’ distrust, the hay. The state: the ministry, the commission on the native tribes, the zemstvo, the elections, divorce law. History: the aftermath of emancipation, the railways, the Serbian war of 1876. The sacred: Karenin’s spiritualism, Kitty’s and Varenka’s piety, Levin’s faith. The natural order: the snipe, the storm, the stars, the bees. All of it passes through two lives and their few neighbours. Held a step down only because history here is a ground, not an agent.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment, The Made and The Encompassed at 9.5. A disclosure about passion and honesty, and a society that punishes the second and not the first, which holds without the author’s faith; Tolstoy’s most finished construction, its two strands timed against each other from the first part to the last; and every order from a dog’s senses to the Serbian war held in two lives.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.5, held by the stretches that say at length what could be said briefly: Sviazhsky’s farming argument, the provincial elections and the war argument at the bee-house, about a twentieth of the whole. Next above it, The Swerve at 8.9, because the greater break with the form had already been made in War and Peace, and this novel returns in part to the form it bends. The rhythm of the Russian sentence is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.5, The Living Form at 9.4, The Inner Law at 9.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.5, The Imperishable at 9.4, The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.2 and The Swerve at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, The Swerve by four tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.5, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.5. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, scored as one novel in eight parts and 239 chapters under its epigraph, the eighth part included. Parts One to Seven ran in The Russian Messenger from 1875 to 1877; its editor, Mikhail Katkov, refused the eighth over its treatment of the Russian volunteers for the Serbian war, and Tolstoy issued it as a separate book in 1877. The first complete edition, revised, came out in 1878, the year of record. Every score is judged on the novel in Tolstoy’s Russian, which is not in hand; Russian is quoted on this page only where it is certain, in the epigraph and the first two sentences. Translation · Constance Garnett’s (1901), Project Gutenberg e-text #1399, for sense and for every English quotation on this page. It was used because it is the only version in hand, and because it is complete and sound in structure: its eight parts and 239 chapters follow the Russian divisions. Its English is not charged to the novel. The e-text omits the epigraph, which is scored as part of the work and quoted here in Russian. The translations of Louise and Aylmer Maude (1918), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2000), Rosamund Bartlett (2014) and Marian Schwartz (2014) are not in hand, and none is quoted. The divisions, proportions and share of speech carry over from the Russian; the word counts do not, and the shares given on this page are measured in the English. The rhythm of Tolstoy’s sentence, its repetitions, the registers of its speakers and its play on words are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. Citations are by part and chapter: VII.31 is Part Seven, chapter 31.