Anna

“The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow or when you go looking for your joy.” Eudora Welty, “The Wide Net”.

“And though he was a happy and healthy family man, Levin was several times so near to suicide that he hid a cord he had lest he should hang himself, and he feared to carry a gun lest he should shoot himself.” …

Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin, one of two protagonists in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, is a broad-shouldered country gentleman working on his rural estate. Like several young men in his position, he is living through that peculiar period where the most consequential decisions about one’s life are all expected to be taken in short succession – what career to pursue, what to believe, and, most importantly, who to marry. While some of Tolstoy’s characters, such as Stephen Arkadyevich Oblonsky, exemplify impulsivity and a lack of moral concern, Levin represents a contrary archetype: one primarily driven by a sense of honesty and moral righteousness, tormented by an unquenchable hunger for meaning. “Of Levins in Russia there are multitudes, almost as many as there are Oblonskys,” wrote F. M. Dostoevsky in his 1877 Writer’s Diary, recognising in Levin something representative of a whole generation of Russian men for whom joy was not a given but a pursuit. As the novel demonstrates, however, Levin’s excursion in search of joy will prove to be his most elusive quarry.

As she stands on the platform at Obiralovka, the ground trembles beneath her, and the mechanical clank of the train grows overwhelmingly ever louder.

Anna Arkadyevna Karenina is a woman of extraordinary beauty, whose entrance into any room changes its atmosphere. It is in these very final moments of hers that the essence of her character is revealed: “with a light movement, as if preparing to rise again, immediately drops on her knees. And at the same moment she is horror-struck at what she is doing.”…

For it is only at this point that Tolstoy grants her the interior voice he had otherwise withheld. Throughout her novel-spanning excursion for sorrow, Anna Arkadyevna moves through the world as others see her – luminous, magnetic, ultimately opaque – her inner deliberations left unrendered. It is precisely in this absence that her masterful tragedy resides: her soul is inexorably drawn into the abyss as if by gravity, without possibility of rational escape.

It is in their first considerations of death that we can identify, for both Levin and Anna, the pivotal turning points of their excursions through the novel.

Levin is visiting his sickly brother Nikolas in a dirty, run-down lodging house. The refusal of Kitty Scherbatskaya, Oblonsky’s sister-in-law and object of Levin’s early desire, has left him longing for something he himself cannot define: a strike of inspiration, a development, or perhaps a direction for his life. In this atmosphere of decay and disappointed hope, and reflecting on his brother’s miserable condition, he deliberates about his mortal condition: “his thoughts are various, but they all lead up to death. Death, the inevitable end of everything, confronts him for the first time with irresistible force.”

In parallel, Anna steps off the train at Moscow station, and for the first time her and Vronsky’s eyes intersect. The moment is cut short: a commotion is heard, a crowd gathers: “ ‘thrown himself under…run over…’ shout the passers-by.” Anna is struck by something she cannot immediately account for: a feeling that is not quite grief, not quite dread, but something closer to recognition. “It’s a bad omen,” she says to Oblonsky. She does not yet know what she means. As with Levin, a seed has been sown in her mind.

And throughout the two characters’ respective journeys in the novel, these seeds grow at an ever-accelerating pace.

Levin succeeds at what seemed the hardest of his quests, and eventually marries Kitty. But his success proves not to be the final destination that he was so desperately seeking: his marriage does not put an end to his longing for meaning, and he finds himself dissatisfied with the mundane, with the management of his farm, with the distant rumblings of the Russo-Turkish war… leaving him precisely where he began, back to the starting point:

… “But he did not hang or shoot himself and went on living.”

And in living, Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin discovers something that had eluded him throughout his excursion: not joy, but something beneath it: “if goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness; if it has a consequence – a reward, it is also not goodness. Therefore, goodness is beyond the chain of cause and effect.” This is what saves him. This is Tolstoy’s God.

Eudora Welty was right. The excursion is the same. Two roads, two travellers, one precipice: what differs is only what each finds waiting there. Levin finds his salvation, and steps back. Anna Arkadyevna Karenina is not so fortunate, and does not. Set out on a wicked path of adultery and self-centred desire, her excursion for sorrow was never truly destined for any other end:

… “The candle, by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief, and evil, flared up with a brighter light than before, lit up for her all that had before been dark, flickered, began to grow dim, and went out … for ever.”