I will admit that before I read it, I had no idea that Anna Karenina was more than a story of tragic, scandalous romance. I went in expecting glamorous Moscow ballrooms; tearful shouting matches between lovers; elegant dresses worn with luxurious furs. Anna Karenina does contain all those things. Yet its most surprising turn — aside, of course, from its granular questions about how best to run an 18th-century Russian farm — is perhaps its final and surprisingly sacramental revelation that what makes for a good life is often hidden within the most everyday things around us.
Anna Karenina’s narrative is split between two protagonists: glamorous society woman Anna and idealistic farmer Konstantin Levin. If A Tale of Two Cities is just that, then Anna Karenina, with its famous opening line (“Happy families are all alike; unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way”) is a tale of two families: the ones made, or unmade, by Anna and Levin respectively. The novel compares their attempts to find happiness by way of their mutual pursuit of romantic passion and familial joy.
At the beginning of the story, the unhappily married Anna and the idealistic young Levin are equally full of yearning for the romantic prospects they have both idealised: Anna has fallen in love with the dashing, ambitious Count Vronsky, and Levin has his sights set on Anna’s niece, Kitty. Both Anna and Levin are consumed by their longing for those they pine after.
Yet once they attain their partners, both struggle with ennui and dissatisfaction. Anna leaves her marriage, her child, and her good social standing behind in favor of the passion she feels for Vronsky, but once he’s hers, Anna doubts his love and becomes paranoid that he’ll leave her. Vronsky, suffocated by their illicit union, falls into despair and boredom, and finds that “the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness that he expected.” Levin, meanwhile, is shocked to discover that his marriage to Kitty doesn’t solve all his problems, but instead adds new ones to his life. He and Kitty fight and disagree; her independence and the power of her personality vexes him, and he finds himself unable to even fully love his newborn child, and is confused as to why he feels this way.
It is here that Anna Karenina turns into a cautionary tale of what happens when you get what you want. Rather than finding that getting what they desired has liberated them from desire, Anna and Levin both find themselves more full of longing than ever. Reason fails Levin in his quest to determine why he feels so unhappy; the more he thinks about it, the more he falls into despair . Yet when he isn’t thinking about it, his life seems, of itself, to make its own meaning, and he senses the presence of “an impartial judge” by whose right judgement he wants to live.
This place of darkness becomes a place of discovery for Levin. While out in the fields of his farm, he experiences a revelation, arising spontaneously from his surroundings:
But I looked for miracles, I was sorry that I’d never seen a miracle that would convince me. And here it is, the only possible miracle, ever existing, surrounding me on all sides, and I never noticed it!.. Is it possible that I’ve found the solution to everything? Is it possible that my sufferings are now over?
Levin finds the answer to his searching not in any philosophy, but all around him: in the beauty of nature, in the home and child he shares with Kitty, in the unearned blessings that make no sense. Rather than happiness finally coming to him through some philosophy, Levin realises that goodness sometimes defies reason, and that the miracle and the answer he’s been looking for is his own life itself.
Anna’s revelation comes, too, but not soon enough to save her from the existential darkness that is crushing her. Because it has led her nowhere but into more and more suffering, she decides that she must take action to “put out the candle” (p. 766) of her own reason. Just as she is kneeling on the train tracks to take her own life, Anna makes the sign of the cross:
The habitual gesture of making the sign of the cross called up in her soul a whole series of memories from childhood and girlhood, and suddenly the darkness that covered everything for her broke, and life rose up before her momentarily with all its bright past joys. Yet she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the approaching second carriage.
In the physical litany of her faith, Anna is reminded of the things that have made her life worth living, just when it is too late to keep hold of them. At her last moment, her faith illuminates her life: its light revealing “all for her that had once been in darkness,” up to the moment when that same light “goes out for ever”.
Tolstoy’s direct linking of the sign of the cross with Anna’s recognition of the beauty of her life highlights his belief that faith holds the ultimate answer to Levin’s searching as well as her own. Though brought to very different ends, Tolstoy allows both of his protagonists, through their similar suffering, to come to the same recognition: that the only thing that can truly drive back their existential pain is the light of faith. While Anna is ultimately crushed by such darkness, Levin has the chance to get out from under its thumb: “My whole life,” he realizes in the book’s final line, “is not only not meaningless … but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it.”
It is both tragic and wonderful that Anna and Levin find the answer to their longing directly under their own noses, and in such a simple form: in the “bright past joys” of Anna’s life and in the miraculous present of Levin’s. Tolstoy’s masterpiece makes the daring claim that, despite 800 pages of philosophical striving to find joy, finding it could really be as simple as recognition of God’s generosity in the most simple and beautiful things.
Levin had stopped thinking … “Can this be faith”? He wondered, afraid to believe his own happiness. “My God, thank you.”
