“… Anna read and understood, but it was unpleasant to read, that is to say, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She was too eager to live herself.” Such was my predicament too while reading this novel. Like Anna, when she’s sitting on the train back to her home, reading a novel and finding herself too eager to live whatever she’s reading about, I, sometimes near the heater, and at other under my blanket late till after midnight, also found myself too involved and moved that the mere reading of this excellent novel was becoming unpleasant. I wanted to enter Tolstoy’s fictional world and move about there, stop the characters from making the choices they did, and share both in their joys and sorrows.
But that is not to say I did not cherish reading this novel: Tolstoy’s novel, even after years of reading, sensitized me to how engrossingly profound the act of reading a novel can be. In other words, how reading is one of the most of worthiest of activities one can do.
Considered by many to be, not one of many, but the best novel of all time, Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’ is, as I’ve come to read and comprehend it, a perfectly proper novel. The word proper could also be applied to many other great novels, both classics and contemporary, given its criterion of great plot, characters, insights, themes, morals, and of course, endings. But should one read ‘Anna Karenina’, one would then come to know what a ‘proper’ novel is crafted like: this is how a novel should be written!
And like all memorable novels, ‘Anna Karenina’ starts with an insightful and persistently-true statement: that all happy marriages are alike, while every unhappy marriage has its own distinct reason for it. We meet an angry and dejected Dolly who has recently found out that Oblonsky, her husband, has cheated on her. Himself unsuccessful, Oblonsky writes to his sister, Anna Karenina, to come help them reunite. Meanwhile, Levin, Oblonsky’s old friend, is in town and plans to propose to Kitty, Dolly’s younger sister; but Vronsky, a charming military-man is also interested in Kitty and has better chances than Levin.
To gave away more than this elementary section of plot would be unfair to, like myself, anticipated and eager readers, knowing that the joy of a novel is best reserved in its surprises and in individual reading of them. From here on begins a myriad of love affairs, betrayals, broken hearts, patch-ups, marriages, divorce, and a whole ‘theatre of hurt feelings’ (to quote Jenny Offill) and other equivalent and intense emotions.
But to call it a tragic love story, or stories, would be to shy away from the ‘proper-ness’ of this deservedly thick, and thereby, brilliant novel. Tolstoy, through his ‘art of the novel’ (as Milan Kundera puts it), transcends himself and his intelligence into intelligence and genius of the novel itself – whereby we witness the political, economic, social, global, and religio-philosophical aspects of the late nineteenth-century Russia come unfold through different plot events and character-driven motives. Being a coherent, accessible, involving, and moving story on one hand, and a reflective, inclusive, meditative, socio-philosophical, and representative book on the other, this novel achieves, almost imaginatively impossibly, a whole essence of the life, as well as the essence of the time and place where the life is taking place – and that is why this novel deserves its crown of ‘being the best novel of all time’.
Its climax utterly heartbreaking to which I, even intentionally, couldn’t stop crying; its build-up to the climax full of anxiety; its story consistently absorbing; its joys heart-warming, its sorrows tendering; and, its ending a most proper and needed resolve - this novel had me completely absolved in itself, and for that reason, ‘Anna Karenina’ is, also, my most favorite novel of all time. Period.
Ratings: 5/5 January 15, 2022_