Review of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
By Elizavetta Schrijver
05-21-2005
When I finished Anna Karenina I had one thought stronger than the rest, Tolstoy is a genius. Real people live in his text. History comes alive through his vivid accounts of life in 1880’s of the upper class Russian people. I came to love Russian writers and my love grows more and more. After I read some short fiction by Tolstoy Master and Man, and The Death of Ivan Ilych, I decided I liked his view of life. He talked about the root of matters, cutting out all the middle trash for what it is. His style made me crave more, so I went for what all the biographies claimed as his best work: Anna Karenina. Anna, comes into the story a bit late, and isn’t the always the star either. But her name is rightly on the cover. First though we get to know her brother, Stefan Oblonsky, and his family. Anna’s brother isn’t the central figure either, even though he plays a leading role, instead he introduces us to the real star, the one we grow to love deeply, Konstantin Levin. I love Konsta so much, I’d like to name my son after him. He is so down to earth and as the story goes on he is the counter balance to Anna. Together they show the extremes of life. We go with these people to their parties, horse races, elections, bird hunts. We live with them in the through their triumphs, their miseries, their falls from grace, their torments, their obsessions. The story is about obsession. The story is about the differences between the people in Petersburg and the people in Moscow. The story is about marriage and love and children. This might sound like a normal epic, but it is more. Tolstoy is able to capture the nuances of life and write them so clearly without making them menial. We get to see Russia and we get to see so many different aspects of life which a normal history book would have skipped. Read Anna Karenina if you have a deep passion for living; read it if you lost your deep passion for living. Tolstoy has written one of the best books about life we have. Read it!