Reflective Wanderer

   Anna Karenina is the greatest novel. In it, the reader will find illustrated the two great questions of existence: what is man like? and what is man for? The first question is mapped out in the lives of a complex cast of characters, most notably in the two protagonists, Anna and Levin, who begin, like Dante in The Divine Comedy, lost midway on life’s journey. One will find the way to Paradise, while the other journeys toward Inferno. The other question is metaphysical. What is man’s telos or aim? It is found in the keyword of Anna Karenina, happiness – all the characters are searching for happiness. But in what does true happiness consist? Trying to find this provides the underlying tension of the book.

What is man like in Anna Karenina?

   In his Poetics, Aristotle tells of three types of stories: stories where the characters are larger than life (think of King Arthur’s legends), stories where the characters reflect our own experience of people (Wendell Berry is a good contemporary example), and stories where the characters are worse than they are in real life (Flannery O’Connor uses this technique to advantage in many of her short stories). Tolstoy is in the middle category. He was the best of the realists. Anna Karenina is real, and that’s where its greatness lies. Levin is within every man with his dreams, fears, and petty annoyances. The tragedy of Anna is reenacted each time happiness is pursued apart from virtue. The free-spirited Oblonsky is lovable and deplorable like many people we all know. The story of Alexis, Anna’s husband, rings with simple heroism and faulty character. While morals may be black and white, characters are varying shades of grey. The story is interesting, monotonous, and inspiring — just like life.

   Levin is a simple man. He wants to find the best way to live and live it like no one else. He thinks his love story, wedding, and marriage will be unique. He dreams of updating the agricultural system in post-serf Russia (a major theme in the book). And yet, he is faced with two haunting dilemmas: death and the meaning of life. The inability to understand life’s purpose almost drives him into the arms of death. We all can relate. What is the use of living well if it all ends in dying? Levin also has mood swings. For example, one moment he is bursting with an almost boyish pleasure in the company of Dolly, his sister-in-law, and his nieces and nephews, the next, everything has turned black because he gets the news that Kitty, who turned him down, is not to be married to his rival after all. In Levin, we see a good man. He is not the Christ figure of Dostovesky’s Alyosha, nor is he, in Milton’s expressive phrase, “stupidly good.” In his actions he, “Lives,” in the words of the simple peasant Mityukha, “for the soul. He remembers God.” (pg. 794). We feel his flaws, the sins of his youth, even his materialistic creed that he picked up in his university days, and yet Levin borrows a sense of Christian morality caught at his mother’s knee (Part 8, Chapter 13), from this all the blessings of his life follow. He does so straightforwardly, not in trying to work for the “common good,” like Sergei (Levin’s famous step-brother), but by caring for his responsibilities.  

   The connection between Levin and Anna is the keystone of the entire novel. Both become unsatisfied with life and seek a greater meaning. When they cannot find life’s meaning, they look to suicide. They meet once (Part 7, Chapter 10). In their meeting, Levin can see Anna, not just as the fallen woman he has always judged her as, but also as, “An amazing, dear, and pitiful woman.” (pg. 701). She seeks fulfillment in an illicit love and finds that to do so she must give up her soul. Just as Lucifer was an angel of light, fallen by sin, Anna was a shining example of a faithful wife and a good mother. She chooses a lesser good, her desire for the admiration of a man above her commitment to God, as a result, she falls, however, like Milton’s Lucifer She retains much that made her once a splendid woman. Like all of us, Anna had a secret longing for something greater (which proves, Lewis would say, that we were made for another world). Seeing the ardent worship of Vronsky, she covets it. As Raskolnikov learns in Crime and Punishment, you cannot act contrary to God and the moral law and not pay the piper. So what does Levin see in Anna during their brief meeting? Anna’s good side. It was still there even after she became an adulterer; she still was a woman of grace, truth, and even kindness, as a later Russian writer would express it, “The line separating good and evil passes…right through every human heart…This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.” (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago). We see this in Anna. She desires a good, love, but by desiring it beyond its proper place, she becomes twisted by jealousy, remorse, and shame.

   Oblonsky, Anna’s brother and Levin’s best friend, is the carbon copy of many people. He is a scumbag. Cheating on his wife, and buying jewelry to give to dance girls while his wife is trying to save enough to clothe their children for a Russian winter. He is also a lovable fellow. Those below him at his office find him an easy and kind man, those in need find him generous, and his friends find him loyal and unselfish. To read about how he set up and kept a dinner party going (Part 4, Chapter 9) is a delight. Oblonsky is simple, and caring (as long as it does not require too much sacrifice) – a hail fellow well met. He too demonstrates the “line” that passes through every human heart, but unlike Anna and Levin, both of whom seek to push that line to its logical ends, Oblonsky is content to stay a respectable mix (to nineteenth-century Moscow society’s eyes, at least).

   Tolstoy is a realist writer but unlike Émile Zola’s natural realism, Tolstoy’s realism infuses the transcendently meaningful through the most mundane things. He transforms the family novel, which was a dying novel form in 1870s Russia, into a complex study of the nature of man. Each character’s struggle is mirrored in another character giving different angles on the same dilemma. A good example is Vronsky’s letdown after getting Anna to live with him (pg. 465) reflected in Levin and Kitty’s first few months of marriage (pg. 480). They both felt, “The eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires (pg. 465).” As a realist, this novel is slow, even mundane at times, nothing explodes, and nobody is kidnapped or shot, but in the daily actions of families, the eternal drama of passion and desire is on full display. Deaths, births, marriages, farming, local politics, hunting, and parties fill up the eight hundred pages of this novel, yet it is never dull for the real points upward to the ideal. When Levin is jealous of his friend’s shooting more snipe, I knew those feelings since my brothers always shot more doves than I could. When Alexis (Anna’s husband) learns the bitter truth that what we look down on in others might come to us, is a common experience. The fear of death, the longing for love, and the innate desire for happiness make the book live in the reader’s mind.

What is man for in Anna Karenina?

   Everything a person does is for happiness. This axiomatic principle in philosophy goes back to Aristotle (Ethics, Book 1). If you ask why about a human action, behind it, you will find a desire for a good, either something actually good or perceived as good. We seek this good for, to use Aristotle’s term, eudaimonia, which is something like being-in-the-state-of-happiness (not a feeling, but a condition where people can flourish). Humans aim towards this, providing a telos or purpose for human actions. Anna Karenina is a book about people seeking happiness. But what does happiness consist of? In a post-Darwinian age, answering the question of man’s purpose is pointless. Things that randomly emerged from a cosmic accident do not have a hierarchy of values, except the need for survival. Nietzsche thought we could create our own meaning. If we’ve learned anything from the bloodshed of the twentieth and the craziness of the twenty-first centuries, it is that human beings cannot create meaning for themselves (inventing meaning is at the heart of socialist dreams and woke agendas alike).  Finding what happiness consists of drives the characters to their actions. Levin uncovers the meaning of life, and it saves him from suicide, while Anna realizes that there is no life possible in which she can be happy under the conditions she created for herself (pg. 764), so she throws herself under a train.

   In the Constance Garnett translation of Anna Karenina, the word happy/unhappy/happiness/unhappiness appears 346 times. It is everywhere. Actions make sense when understood as weak mortals looking for eternal happiness. Why does Anna fall for Vronsky, Levin marry and live a rural life, Alexis try to stay blind to his wife’s infidelity, Kitty serve the sick in Germany, or the countless actions of the multitudes of characters across this eight-hundred-page novel? Happiness must be sought. This simplifies man’s anthropology by giving him a common purpose for action. Mankind is a species, and as such, he possesses a common essence. An essence is that which connects the one and the many. It is like the blueprint that everything in that group shares. Houses vary in construction, yet there is something house-ish about all houses, that is the essence of house-ness. This is what Plato meant in his doctrine of the Forms. As human beings, we have a human nature, and this nature was created to be united to its happiness. Anna Karinena is direct about man’s search for meaning or happiness, which gives it a timeless relevance in a world where everyone is inventing his purpose, and killing himself in the process.

  What is the nature of happiness? In the first line of the novel, Tolstoy provides a hint, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way (pg. 1).” In other words, there are many ways to hell, but there is only one path to heaven. What is this path to heaven? Philosophers and theologians have been arguing over this for centuries. The Stoics said it was virtue, and their archnemesis, the Epicureans, said it was pleasure. Plotinus thinks it is in contemplation, while Aristotle places it in virtue leading to the contemplation of the First Cause. St. Augustine says it is “To rejoice for you, in you, about you (Confessions, Book 10).” Aquinas would agree, writing that, “God alone constitutes man’s happiness (A Shorter Summa, pg. 149).” Like Aristotle and later Aquinas, the greatest good in Anna Karenina is to be found in virtuous living leading to a connection with God, giving happiness. Levin illustrates this. He later realizes he has lived by the Christian principles he learned as a child in Orthodox Russia (Part 8, Chapter 13). He rejects God in his university days but keeps the model of ethical living. This creates a dichotomy in his soul, he fears death, and cannot find a justification for living until he comes to believe that God is the cause of life’s meaning. The good life is found in union with God and is lived out in virtue. Anna contrasts this by living more and more for herself, taking her to the logical conclusion, death. The nature of happiness is not up for discussion. God has made mankind for Himself, and it is only by living in line with our nature (virtue) in union with God, that man finds happiness.

   It may be debated how conscious Tolstoy was of these eternal themes. Levin’s Christianity seems somewhat unorthodox (as was Tolstoy’s). However, the eternal truth, that living for God, and not for one’s desires (pg. 701) provides meaning, and that this meaning is justified in the knowledge of God, is a deeply Christian idea, which we also find echoed in the best of the pagans. Tolstoy’s thought (in the person of Levin) on the use of logic to aid in discovering this truth (pg. 797) is distinctively Eastern. Believing that it is only in divine revelation (or mystical inner knowledge) that this knowledge can be reached, is more reminiscent of Orthodox Christianity than a more robust optimism about the role of reason like in Thomism. Aristotle, and most Western thinkers until Kant, would have posited that the right use of reason can justify virtue and contemplation as the path to happiness. Either way, Anna Karenina asks the questions that need to be asked and answers them in a way consistent with a Christian view of mankind.

   

Anna Karenina captures men and women in the most common place, their families at home. Like Austen’s novels, the drama of family life provides the backdrop of a realistic portrait of what people are like. This is the primary role of art, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet puts it, “To hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature.” Anna Karenina shows mankind his face. Yet it does so without losing sight of the end of human self-discovery: the connection of man with transcendent meaning – happiness in God Himself.