Anna Karenina

Among the many thematic links between the two ‘sides’ of the novel, the most obvious is the contrast of the happy marriage of Levin and Kitty with the tragic relations of Anna and Vronsky. More hidden is the connection between Anna and Levin, who meet only once. Under the moral problem of adultery, which was Tolstoy’s starting point, lies the ‘problem’ that obsessed Tolstoy most of all - death. Death and Anna enter the novel together; death is present at her first meeting with Vronsky; death is also present in their first embrace and in their mysteriously shared dream; death haunts their entire brief life together. But for Levin, too, death comes to darken the happiest moments of his life. It gives a stark title to the only chapter with a title in the whole novel - chapter XX of Part Five, describing the last agony of Levin’s brother Nikolai. Anna surrenders to death; Levin struggles with it and wins, momentarily. But even in his victory, surrounded by his family, his estate, his peasants, he is as alone as Anna in her last moments. Metaphysical solitude is the hidden connection between them, and is what connects them both to their author.

Richard Pevear

TRANSLATORS’ NOTE

Tolstoy’s narrative voice poses a particular challenge to the translator. To apply general notions of natural, idiomatic English and good prose style to Tolstoy’s writing is to risk blunting the sharpness of its internal dialogization. The narrator’s personal attitudes often intrude on the objectivity of his discourse. Sometimes the intrusion is as slight as a single word, a sudden shift of tone, as, for instance, when he adds to the list of those enjoying themselves at the skating rink the ‘old people who skated for hygienic [gigienicheskiy] purposes’. It is the word ‘hygienic’ that Tolstoy scorns, as much as the practice - one of the ‘new’ terms made current by the popularization of medical science in the later nineteenth century. At other times the intrusion is not so slight. An example is the description of the merchant Ryabinin’s carriage standing in front of Levin’s house: ‘A little gig was already standing by the porch, tightly bound in iron and leather, with a sleek horse tightly harnessed in broad tugs. In the little gig, tightly filled with blood and tightly girdled, sat Ryabinin’s clerk, who was also his driver.’ Tolstoy clearly despises the merchant, and therefore his carriage and driver, as much as Levin does. There is also the narrator’s undercutting of Kitty’s admiration for the very spiritual Mme Stahl: “‘And here’s Mme Stahl,” said Kitty, pointing to a bath-chair in which something lay, dressed in something grey and blue, propped on pillows under an umbrella.’ Or the description of Karenin’s meeting with his new lady-friend: ‘Catching sight of the yellow shoulders rising from the corset of Countess Lydia Ivanovna ... Alexei Alexandrovich smiled, revealing his unfading white teeth, and went up to her.’ That ‘unfading’ (as in ‘unfading glory’), worthy of Gogol or Dostoevsky, comes unexpectedly from Count Tolstoy. There are other times when his artistic purpose is less clear: for instance, in the scene at the railway station early in the novel, when the watchman is killed: ’... several men with frightened faces suddenly ran past. The stationmaster, in a peaked cap of an extraordinary colour, also ran past. Evidently something extraordinary had happened.’ Vladimir Nabokov says of this passage: ‘There is of course no actual connection between the two [uses of ‘extraordinary’], but the repetition is characteristic of Tolstoy’s style with its rejection of false elegancies and its readiness to admit any robust awkwardness if that is the shortest way to sense.’ In previous English translations such passages have generally been toned down if not eliminated. We have preferred to keep them as evidence of the freedom Tolstoy allowed himself in Russian.

Further Reading

Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (University of Texas Press, Austin, 1981)

Bayley, John, Tolstoy and the Novel (Chatto and Windus, London, 1966)

Berlin, Isaiah, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1966; Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1967)

Eikhenbaum, Boris, Tolstoi in the Seventies, trans. Albert Kaspin (Ardis, Ann Arbor, 1982)

Evans, Mary, Anna Karenina (Routledge, London and New York, 1989)

Leavis, F. R., Anna Karenina and Other Essays (Chatto and Windus, London, 1967)

Mandelker, Amy, Framing ‘Anna Karenina’: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel (Ohio State University Press, Columbus, 1993)