Here we have a unique case of a writer and a work of literature becoming truly global and surviving decades, transgressing borders and civilizations boundaries.
That’s a rare achievement, indeed. Writers, if you didn’t know, write books for today and for a very narrow circle of friends, those able to get all the meaning of author’s literary game with vaguely familiar names and situations. But then it somehow happens that every literate being, from India, Africa, Europe etc., knows at least the name of William Shakespeare or Leo Tolstoy, and possibly have read their books or at least seen the plays and movies. While other writers, wildly popular in their time and selling millions of copies, fade away in years.
“Anna Karenina” is a good case of a politico-philosophical pamphlet that, somehow, hopped into eternity. Let’s see what makes it universal, and relevant for today.
Ambiguity is one answer. Here we have a good similar case of Shakespeare and his most known play, that’s a story of Prince Hamlet. Some directors stage the play about a hero of Enlightenment crushed by the cruel society. Others portray the prince as a brooding intellectual incapable of achieving a victory, still others see him as a powerful warrior, purely incidentally defeated by bad folks. Finally, today that same Hamlet is rather viewed as an ugly neurotic and mass murderer, bringing his family and nation to ruination.
And, what’s more, all these verdicts and definitions are correct. It’s just that societies’ current circumstance helps us see the same complicated personality in the new light, again and again, sometimes – like with Shakespeare - for more than four hundred years. Tolstoy’s novel, now: that’s almost the same case. To remind, here we have a story of a young high society lady falling in love, leaving her husband and child and joining her beloved. Next she is being ostracized by the very Victorian imperial elite of Russia of the 1870-s, up to her dramatic suicide.
So what, and why should that long and complicated novel with dozens of colorful personalities from a lost empire be noticed even when published 150 years ago? Today’s celebrations in Russia give you a lot of answers to that.
Let’s have a look at a new play “Anna Karenina” staged in the old and hugely prestigious Maly Theater in the very center of Moscow. It’s a ballet and a musical, with almost no decorations, but with plenty of theatrical snow engulfing the dancing actors. The reviews range from horror to delight, but at least one thing is clear: the play was meant for people who know the novel almost by heart, and that’s millions of Russians and a great lot of folks from all over the world. Such people are supposed to make new discoveries from short conversations of actors, highlighting some ideas and situations that have not been noticed before.
What it was not being noticed? Here I’d give a gold medal to Mr. Boris Akimov, a political figure and an ideologue, who gives us, today, a good answer to the question of what’s so special to that novel, that makes it live through decades and transgress borders.
Indeed, what’s so unusual about people falling in love and ruining their families in the process? Happens everywhere and is almost a norm in some societies of today.
Look at other people in the novel, says Mr. Akimov. And look at the special age of Russian and the Western culture, that’s the age of change of norms and principles, just the same age that we are seeing today. The name of the game is Progress, bringing in new ideas and trends. That Progress of 1870-s, incidentally, has brought a huge industrial and social leap to the Russian Empire, which has suddenly ended in a catastrophe of extremist ideas, then in a civil war and Communist revolution. Leo Tolstoy has not seen that catastrophe, but his book has, in a way, shown the roots of the coming disaster. Here, to repeat, we have to look at other people in the novel, including the one Mr. Levin who is almost Leo himself, invading the book and getting busy reforming the countryside, while trying to save lady Anna from big trouble.
What we have here is a conflict and a constant interaction of Progress and Tradition not just in the novel, not just in every human society, but in every human heart at all ages, says Akimov. That’s an absolutely modern conflict, that will stay modern forever, since there’ll be always a strive for progress and resistance to that, the good people doing bad things in that struggle and bad people suddenly finding themselves on the side of the angels.
To add, isn’t that the ambiguous story of Prince Hamlet again and again, as well as millions of other stories of real people in real lives? Writing such stories is, probably, what makes writers immortal.
Writing skills and other personal characteristics are important, too. But, at least with Leo Tolstoy, what we have here is an extremely complicated and not always a pleasant character. Vladimir Nabokov, a great Russian classic of the 20thcentury, was lecturing students in the US about the amazing architecture of “Karenina”. So many different personalities, not always interacting directly, are forming in fact a most complicated chess game, says Nabokov, himself a chess player. That inner discipline of a writer, making a veritable well-rehearsed ballet of a novel, is a miracle that drives you on to turn pages.
Tolstoy’s style, though, is not a miracle at all. It often is been compared with a pile of heavy boulders. There are dozens of great Russian writers whose style is light, elegant and pure music, and that’s the mentioned Nabokov, and Mikhail Bulgakov, also from the 20th century, the century that brought us many more literary masterpieces than in the previous age. There are dozens more of good writers, besides the ones named. None of these have been as imposing and insistent, as their great predecessor.
Tolstoy not only thought of himself as of a philosopher first, and the writer only second. He, as a thinker, have often been too hard in pushing his ideas on people, and not all the people liked it. That mental aggression was still tolerable in his “War And Peace”, where authors’ ideas about mass murder and political greatness made him a very Asian thinker and a guru, popular from Japan to India to other places. Teaching people author’s values is almost invisible in “Anna Karenina”, but that was Tolstoy’s last great novel. Later on his writing became too hard on readers.
Getting older and obstinate, he was always pushing his ideas about state, and religion, and vegetarian rations on his disciples, and they adored him, while others scorned him. In the end, the writer has committed a weird kind of suicide in 1910, leaving home and walking on foot in the midst of terrible winter colds.
But who said it that great writers have to be ideal in everything? Rather, the reverse is true. In any case, Tolstoy made Russian literature respected the world over, and you cannot beat that fact.
Dmitry Kosyrev is a Russian writer, author of spy novels and short stories. He also did columns for the Pioneer and Firstpost.com