Progress Report Number 1
October 15, 1998
Although the Encyclopedia Britannica omits Anna Karenina from its list of Great Books of the Western World, I chose this book to read because I enjoyed Tolstoy’s story-telling charm in War and Peace. Tolstoy himself considered Anna Karenina to be more of a novel than War and Peace. Like its predecessor, however, Anna Karenina chronicles the events in the lives of families. It is more like a novel in that there is more unity of purpose in its focus on Anna and her troubles.
The novel starts out with the troubles of Anna’s brother, Prince Stephen Arkadyevich Oblonsky (Stiva). It seems Stiva has been indiscrete in his affair with his family’s live-in French maid. His wife, Dolly, is on the verge of leaving him this time. Oblonsky enlists his sister, Anna’s, aid in convincing Dolly to stay.
Dolly’s sister, Princess Kitty Shcherbatsky, is spotlighted early in the novel. She lives in Moscow, and she is trying to choose which of two suitors she would accept if marriage is proposed: Constantine Dmitrich Levin, who is a landowner and farmer in love with Kitty; or Count Alexis Kirilovich Vronsky, the dashing cavalry Captain from Petersburg. Levin does propose, and he gets turned down. When Vronsky realizes (through Oblonsky’s hinting) that he is expected to propose, he immediately flees this trap and sets his sights on Anna, ignoring the fact that that lady is already married.
How convenient for Vronsky that Anna and her husband, Alexis Alexandrovich Karenin, live in Petersburg with their son, Seryozha. He starts appearing at the same soirees, etc. as Anna, and this is quickly noticed by everyone, including Mr. Karenin, a prominent civil servant and statesman. Things finally come to a head when Anna becomes pregnant. Vronsky impulsively asks her to run away with him, but she says it is impossible. While watching Vronsky race his horse at a race where the horse is injured and Vronsky is thrown, Anna cannot conceal from her husband her unseemly concern for Vronsky.
In their carriage on the way home, when Karenin confronts his wife with her behavior, she blurts out that she hates him and loves Vronsky, and she wants to be with him. The cold Mr. Karenin is immensely relieved, and he tells Anna only that he will inform her later of what steps he will take to preserve his honor. That turns out to be keeping her as his wife, instructing her to break off her relations with Vronsky. The other two choices, a duel with Vronsky, or an ugly divorce in court, would do more harm to him and/or his career than being magnanimous and forgiving in appearance. These other choices also make things too easy on Anna, who Karenin believes should suffer from having dishonored him this way.
This is the dilemma at approximately one third of the book. Anna is in tears. She can’t run away; she has no money. Vronsky can’t marry her if she did run away with him. He has no money. Stay tuned for part two.
Copyright 1998, Herman Fontenot
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