Reading the first hundred pages of Anna Karenina, for the first time

Classic, literary fiction

Past the most famous starting lines in history, Anna Karenina begins with a dream. Oblonskij is dreaming, he wakes up, he tries to grasp at the remnants of the dream before they fade away. A city in the dream is displaced, things are not as they seem, nothing obeys to the laws of the waking world. Everything, in Oblonskij’s dream, according to his character, is made for pleasure. A few pages later, Oblonskij finds himself stuck in “the dream of life”.

Life, for these characters, isn’t dreamlike. What draws me in again and again to these pages is the sincere depiction of a hundred small details making up the human condition. Thoughts, reflections, reactions—the way these characters act and react to each other is fascinating. There’s Levin, wanting to ask his brother for advice on proposing marriage to a young lady he’s in love with, but having witnessed a completely unrelated conversation, decides not to speak, because it suddenly doesn’t feel like the right thing to do; there’s Dolly, swayed by Anna’s heartfelt compassion, wrapping her hand around her sister-in-law’s; Vronskij, impulsively giving money to the widow of a man who fell on the train tracks because of a single whispered utterance from Anna’s lips. A gesture, a single word can cause a change of heart.

There’s unexpected depths in characters that I suspect other writers would’ve treated quite differently; happy Oblonskij, for instance, gives a particularly accurate assessment of Levin’s character, revealing himself to be a keen observer—the scene goes,

‘So you see,’ said Stepan Arkadyich, ‘you’re a very wholesome man. That is your virtue and your defect. You have a wholesome character, and you want all of life to be made up of wholesome phenomena, but that doesn’t happen. So you despise the activity of public service because you want things always to correspond to their aim, and that doesn’t happen. You also want the activity of the individual man always to have an aim, that love and family life always be one. And that doesn’t happen. All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.’
Levin sighed and gave no answer. He was thinking of his own things and not listening to Oblonsky.

I love that quote, and I especially love it because I see parts of myself in Levin. When I was younger, I tended to see the world as he did; I was uncompromising; I wanted “all life to be made up of wholesome phenomena”—but, as Oblonskij cleverly observes, “that doesn’t happen.” Growing up, I’ve learnt to compromise, to distinguish between what I can make space for without letting go of my values and what I cannot allow for myself. I’m fond of Levin, because I feel his struggles in my heart. I don’t know what will happen to him, how and how much he will grow and change during the course of the novel, but I know that I adore the way Tolstoj writes characters. The little things, which really are not so small. Kitty, sleepless, praying in bed. Her mother, too, sleepless, praying in bed. Levin, seeing his brother Nikolaj after three years, noticing how he’d failed to remember all the worst parts of his character, that now came rushing back. Kitty, at the dance, shooting Vronskij a loving look the recollection of which will make her painfully ashamed for years to come.

Lastly—another small detail. Anna is away from her son for the first time, and misses him; she thinks of him constantly, and at the time she usually puts him to bed at night, goes to fetch her photo album to show him to her family. Tolstoj writes, “She wanted to look at his picture and talk about him. Taking advantage of the first pretext, she got up and, with her light, resolute step, went to fetch the album.” I could just see her on the edge of her seat, waiting for an opportunity to get up; and then another image came to me, of a woman at a house party, taking her phone out and showing pictures of her son to her friends from her camera roll. Isn’t it the very same action we still perform, just slightly different in manner? The very same impulse, the very same feelings, unchanged. Surely, customs and mores change, society changes, and even our way of looking at things does; but some things—some things stay the same.

ETA: The corresponding post on my instagram account, for more quotes (both in Italian and English) in the slides.