If anything, “Anna Karenina” is a warning against the myth and cult of love.
A few weeks ago, on an appropriately snowy Wednesday, my wife and I went to see the new film version of “Anna Karenina.” It was the movie’s New York première, and, before it started, Joe Wright, the director, a dark-haired Englishman in a gray suit, stood up to say a few words. He introduced Keira Knightley, who plays Anna, along with the actors who play Kitty and Levin, Alicia Vikander and Domhnall Gleeson.
Those thoughts aren’t very romantic, but they are Tolstoyan. When he turned to “Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy didn’t simply leave behind the themes of “War and Peace.” Instead, he found a way of thinking about many of same issues that had always interested him—fate, chance, our powerlessness against circumstances and our determination to change them—in a different context. In 1873, when Tolstoy began writing “Anna Karenina,” he was in the midst of planning a historical novel about Peter the Great.
This view of love sounds fine, in theory, but in practice it can be hard to accept, because it runs against the mythology of love, which sees star-crossed lovers as more romantic, more in love, than the rest of us. That mythology urges us to see Anna’s death as a noble sacrifice: She gave up everything, we want to say, for a chance at love. It’s a seductive, but crazy, way to think.
Tolstoy, I think, doesn’t know exactly how to think about Anna’s role in her own downfall, just as he doesn’t know exactly how to think about the free will of the soldiers and generals in “War and Peace.” He believes that we make choices, and that our sense of free will is based on something real. But he also has a deep respect for the complexity and power of our circumstances, and he considers our personalities and psychologies to be “circumstances,” too.
I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray—but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but...
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