Leo Tolstoy was deeply unhappy with the complacency and hypocrisy of upper-class Russian society in the late 19th century.
The plot of the eight hundred page novel is obviously a little more complex than that, but that’s the point of the book. We’re treated to the contrast between Anna, whose affair breaks the conventions of society, and all the rest of the adulterers who carry on more discreetly and so lose no real status. Tolstoy is more inclined to blame social conventions for producing unhappiness than he is to introduce any serious moral reflections on individuals’ behavior. He has a distinct sympathy with individual desires.
We also have, running through the book, a distinct preference for the country over the city. The country is more honest, more necessary, less artificial. At the same time, many of the superfluous city nobility are quite sympathetically drawn: Tolstoy does not seem to want to blame anybody for being caught up in – born into – any condition whatever.
Through the character of Levin, Tolstoy seems to suggest the best life is simply to carry on life, to try to do the right thing, and to accept what comes of your choices. In some sense this is echoed by the rest of the plot: the eventual tragedy falls out through a process in which virtually every character, in one way or another and extending even to Anna herself, refuses to deal with the consequences of her affair sensibily or morally or both.
Tolstoy has a remarkable ability to turn a phrase, capture a scene or a feeling, and describe entirely plausible characters. The wit dries up somewhat in the last quarter of the book, and I can’t help feeling that the book sort of wanders to an end – although in a way the sheer lack of impact Anna’s eventual death has – quite plausibly! – on the rest of the cast is emotionally a little terrifying.
Still, it is for the most part a magnificently constructed novel: but not, on the whole, pleasant reading.
Romance of Victory 