Levin similarly is a complex character, whose path to personal fulfilment and happiness is far from smooth. But it is as if he and Kitty inhabit a different novel. Anna seems to want to live like a romantic heroine, inspired by all the English fiction she reads, and the story of her love affair with Vronsky is full not just of drama, but melodrama. Ultimately, Anna’s fate bears witness to her inability to gravitate from romance, which by its nature is not reality, to love, which is a far more prosaic and demanding proposition, as Levin and Kitty discover in the first months of their marriage. As Gary Saul Morson observes, the novel explicitly ‘tries to redirect our attention to aspects of everyday living: love and the family, moral decisions, the process of self-improvement, and, ultimately, all that makes a life feel meaningful or leads us to contemplate suicide’.6 Can we really see Anna’s fate, then, in tragic terms? Tolstoy seems to invite us to subscribe to conventional views of romance because his Olympian narrator remains impersonal. It is easy, for example, to succumb to the idea that the horse race is an allegory of Vronsky’s relationship with Anna, and that he is to blame for its failure, just as he is to blame for breaking his horse’s back. But to some scholars this interpretation now seems a little too pat.
Tolstoy was naturally well aware of works such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1867), but he wanted to write more than just another novel of adultery. He was also very fond of what his son Sergey called ‘English family novels’, whose faint shadow can be discerned behind the plot-lines and characterization of Anna Karenina. The stiff, aristocratic statesman Plantagenet Palliser, from Anthony Trollope’s six ‘Parliamentary Novels’ (1864–79), seems in certain respects like a benign Karenin (with elements of Lady Glencora and Burgo Fitzgerald in Anna and Vronsky), while Anna shares certain physical traits with Hetty Sorel in George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), to name just a few examples. Tolstoy had little interest, however, in emulating what he saw as a favoured plot-line of English novels, in which the hero ‘puts his arm around her waist, then they get married, and he inherits an estate and a baronetcy’.7 He was much more interested in what happens after his characters get married. The high incidence of marital discord Tolstoy depicts in Anna Karenina conveys a rather bleak vision of family life, but there were compelling artistic and moral reasons for why he ended his novel not with the melodramatic death of his adulterous heroine, but with a mundane conversation his hero Levin has with his wife on the veranda on a summer night after contemplating the stars. They have everything to do with the literary tradition in which Tolstoy was nurtured.
If Russian novelists trod a different path with regard to the content of their works, they also saw no reason to capitulate to the Western model in terms of form. As Tolstoy put it himself in one of the draft prefaces to War and Peace, ‘in the modern period of Russian literature there is not one work of art in prose even slightly better than average that could fully fit into the form of a novel, epic, or story’.8 Tolstoy was doing more than making a statement of fact by pointedly calling Anna Karenina a ‘novel’, for he had never previously used the term to describe anything he had written. There is also a possible degree of hidden provocation contained in this appellation, because deeper familiarity with the text of Anna Karenina encourages the interpretation of the Anna and Vronsky plot-line, partnered as it is by far less romantic stories, as almost a parody of the European novelistic tradition and the expectations engendered by it in the reader. Certainly it is important to resist the temptation to view Anna Karenina as exemplary of the European nineteenth-century realist novel, with which it is often identified, despite the many valid areas of correspondence. Its scope is far wider, and its richly symbolic structure, replete with recurring dreams and careful juxtaposition of contrasting stories and themes (such as Levin and Kitty’s lawful wedding, followed by Vronsky and Anna’s cohabitation abroad; and Nikolay Levin’s death, followed by discovery of Kitty’s pregnancy), is too much at odds with any perceived objectivity of depiction.
Even before Tolstoy self-consciously became a religious crusader, he was a religious artist who claimed that his real hero was the truth. With the Russian Orthodox Church in an increasingly moribund state after Peter the Great subordinated it to the state by abolishing the Patriarchate in 1721, it is possible to argue, as Richard Gustafson has done, that in the nineteenth century literature became a kind of substitute for the icon, which had traditionally fulfilled the role of theology and was now in decline. Seen in this perspective, Tolstoy’s fictional works function as ‘verbal icons’ of his religious world-view, which is why his realism is inherently ‘emblematic’.9 This certainly offers us a way of understanding Tolstoy’s characteristic use of repetition, a cornerstone of his literary style, as well as the proliferation of important symbols embedded in the structure of Anna Karenina, which are both fundamental attributes of Russian religious art.
Tolstoy was not interested in preaching Russian Orthodox dogma, as he was a non-believer like Levin while he was writing Anna Karenina, and Levin’s painfully articulated spiritual journey mirrors the trajectory of his own thought (and was one of the reasons he did not keep a diary at this time). Having been raised in the Orthodox Church, however, Tolstoy could not help emulating its artistic methods while conducting his quest in Anna Karenina for a divine love which might provide solace when even love within an essentially happy marriage fails to be enough. He felt compelled to propose a positive alternative to the ultimately one-dimensional, self-centred love which Anna and Vronsky’s story represents. This is why Tolstoy follows Levin and Kitty past their marriage (at the exact halfway point of the novel), past their first painful months together as man and wife, and even past the birth of their first child (an event seen unusually through the eyes of the father). It is also why he was so meticulous with the novel’s construction, as his meditations on love and marriage, the nature of artistic creation, and the meaning of life itself are communicated as much obliquely through the myriad connections he forges between characters, themes, and situations as they are openly articulated by means of dialogue and description.
The text of Anna Karenina is like a Persian carpet of intricate symmetrical design, whose workmanship can only be appreciated by seeing the reverse side. Tolstoy found this novel immensely difficult to write, but he was nevertheless proud of his skill as an architect, seeing his novel as a building whose arches had been joined in such a way that it was impossible to see the keystone. Naturally, identification of this ‘keystone’ has dominated much of the research into the novel. Some regard Oblonsky’s dinner party as the key to the whole, or Mikhailov’s portrait of Anna as the essential link, while others see as the crux Anna’s meeting with Levin, when the two storylines of the novel finally converge through the agency of the ever-emollient Oblonsky. Certainly Tolstoy takes pains to align these two central characters who, as Donna Tussing Orwin has commented, are ‘in touch both physically and spiritually with the illogical forces that govern life from minute to minute’.10 By contrast, both Vronsky and Karenin, who share the same first name, have a carapace of rules to buffer themselves against the storms of life.