Anna Karenina: two small character studies
classics, literary fiction
This post contains quotes from Anna Karenina, book 5, but it’s spoiler-free: I’ve avoided any discussion of plot points to present a couple character studies that I enjoyed very much.
Reading Anna Karenina is a surprise after another. The latest, sweet and bitter, was Serëža and his inner thoughts. He is a nine-year-old boy who takes after his mother Anna rather than his father. Up until this point, he had only been peripheral to the narrative, but Tolstoj makes him suddenly come alive in just a few pages: we learn that he doesn’t believe in the concept of death, not really (“He did not believe that people he loved could die, and especially that he himself would die1”), and that he spends much of his time daydreaming; and though it is never explicitly said, we can infer from fragments of information, glimpses into his daily life, that it is living with his father that drives him to draw inward.
“Seryozha’s eyes, shining with tenderness and gaiety, went dull and lowered under his father’s gaze. This was the same long-familiar tone in which his father always addressed him and which he had learned to fall in with. His father always talked to him—so he felt—as if he were addressing some imaginary boy, one of those that exist in books, but quite unlike him. And he always tried, when with his father, to pretend he was that book boy.” (V.27)
What most interested me was his deep longing for love, to be loved and to love, that makes him so much like his mother. Much of Anna’s own complexity, most of her thoughts centre around this all-consuming desire to be loved, to be loved completely; and her son has the same disposition to value love above all else. The narrator says,
“He was nine years old, he was a child; but he knew his own soul, it was dear to him, and he protected it as the eyelid protects the eye, and did not let anyone into his soul without the key of love. His educators complained that he did not want to learn, yet his soul was overflowing with a thirst for knowledge. And he learned from Kapitonych, from his nurse, from Nadenka, from Vassily Lukich2, but not from his teachers.” (V.27)
Something else I particularly appreciated in Book V is the presence of an artist named Mikhailov whom we meet during certain characters’ stay in Italy. He is a painter, innovative, a solitary creator; the narrator spends a few chapters with him, his art and creative process. I could not help but think—though I try not to make the assumption automatically—that in some ways, Tolstoj must’ve drawn from his own creative process as a writer, that he was talking about himself. Of course, in practice the writers’s craft and the painter’s are drastically different; but in metaphor, they have been historically assimilated, and it’s easy to see how this passage, for instance, could describe a writer’s vision:
“About his picture, which now stood on his easel, he had one judgement in the depths of his soul—that no one had ever painted such a picture. He did not think that his painting was better than any of Raphael’s, but he knew that what he wanted to convey and did convey in this picture no one had ever conveyed before. He knew that firmly and had known it for a long time, from the very moment he had begun painting it; nevertheless people’s opinions, whatever they might be, were of great importance for him and stirred him to the bottom of his soul. Every observation, however insignificant, which showed that the judges saw at least a small part of what he saw in this picture, stirred him to the bottom of his soul. He always ascribed to his judges a greater depth of understanding than he himself had, and expected something from them that he himself did not see in his picture.” (10)
The last sentence feels particularly poignant to me; then, after the anxiety of others’ judgement is past, the artist’s attitude changes:
“When the visitors had gone, Mikhailov sat down facing the picture of Pilate and Christ and went over in his mind what had been said, or not said but implied, by these visitors. And, strangely, what had carried such weight for him when they were there and when he put himself mentally into their point of view, suddenly lost all meaning for him. He began to look at his picture with his full artistic vision and arrived at that state of confidence in the perfection and hence the significance of his picture which he needed for that tension, exclusive of all other interests, which alone made it possible for him to work.” (12)
Once he is alone with his work, it’s as if the preoccupation and anxiety slips away, as if the others’ presence has been an interference in the relation between him and his creation, once more vibrating at the same frequency, like two synchronised instruments playing in harmony.
English translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, from the 2000 Penguin edition of Anna Karenina.
All people who show him love, unlike his teachers.