Mental Purgatory

Anna Karenina comes from the land of Russian literature, and what’s more, from Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy, known for War and Peace, has a habit of saying a lot, and Anna Karenina is no exception, weighing in at 864 pages long.

With that in mind, we might as well get through the negatives of this book. First, the obvious, Russian names can be hard to tell apart. This book is no different as every character has their common name, as well as their name of endearment, and there are almost always two or three characters with dangerously similar names that you will mix up on countless occasions. Second, the book is long, there’s no getting around that. However, length isn’t really a flaw, and it wouldn’t be in this case, were it not for Tolstoy’s desire to end the book wherever he feels like it. You will find at least four or five spots during Anna Karenina where you will say, “Wow! What a conclusion! Tolstoy did a great job pulling everything together and bringing this book to a close.” However, you will be wrong, because Tolstoy DOESN’T stop and instead, extends the book needlessly until it ends with what I can only guess is excessive political commentary.

Despite those flaws, and my eagerness to dive into them, Anna Karenina is a great book. Of the Russian three (Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, and Tolstoy), Tolstoy’s writing is the easiest to digest. It’s light, entertaining, and great at creating enjoyable scenes. Tolstoy is able to bring the characters to life and make you empathize with their struggles. A social/political commentator, he’s able to subtly weave in criticisms of the government and to discuss the different social classes without making the reader feel like he’s sitting through a lecture.

How is he able to achieve all this? By recognizing that everyone has a struggle in life, no matter their social class. The book takes you through rejection, infidelity, and passion, and makes every character’s motives and actions understandable. You’ve got Levin, the hard working farmer who’s love is scorned early in the story, Kitty, who first rejects and then finds herself rejected in love, Count Vronsky, the aristocrat who follows his heart even as it forces him to cross paths with family and friends, and of course, Anna Karenina, who’s forced to choose between marriage and love, honesty and deception.

Anna Karenina is a tremendous story about love, and the choices we make in falling in love. The story expertly deals with every issue surrounding love and raises the question of whether it’s better for calm, content love, or for passionate, dramatic love. And of course, in doing that, it’s filled with great quotes.

Anna Karenina Quotes

“He knew so well this feeling of Levin’s, knew that for him all the girls in the world were divided into two sorts: one sort was all the girls in the world except her, and these girls had all the human weaknesses and were very ordinary girls; the other sort was her alone, with no weaknesses and higher than everything human.”

A – “I think that in order to know love, one must make a mistake and then correct it.”
B – “Even after marriage?”
A – “It’s never too late to repent.”

“If there are as many minds as there are men, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”

“The peasants are poor and uneducated, we see that as surely as the woman sees the shriek-hag because the baby shrieks. But why schools will help in this trouble – poverty and uneducation – is as incomprehensible as why chickens on a roost help against the shriek-hag. What must be helped is the cause of the poverty.”

“Then he had considered himself unhappy, but happiness was ahead of him; while now he felt that the best happiness was already behind him. She was not at all as he had seen her in the beginning. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. She had broadened out, and her face, when she spoke of the actress, was distorted by a spiteful expression. He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has plucked, in which he can barely recognize the beauty that had made him pluck and destroy it.”

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”

“To live not for one’s own needs but for God. For what God? For God. And could anything more meaningless be said than what he said? He said one should not live for one’s needs – that is, one should not live for what we understand, for what we’re drawn to, for what we want – but for something incomprehensible, for God, whom no one can either comprehend or define. And what then?”

“If the good has a cause, it is no longer the good; if it has a consequence – a reward – it is also not the good. Therefore the good is outside the chain of cause and effect. “