And now for the first time Anna turned the bright light in which she saw everything upon her relations with him, about which she had always avoided thinking.
"What did he look for in me? Not so much love as the satisfaction of his vanity. Of course, there was love too, but the greater part was pride in his success.”
Anna Karenina is the story of women, and men, who mistakenly view the pursuit of love as an antidote to their descent into dissipation. Many women find it difficult to truly look beyond on themselves, as much of their time is spent in conscious and unconscious consideration of their own position relative to those around them. This natural interpersonal perceptiveness and self-prioritising acumen allows them to deftly navigate social politics, but when society gives importance to all that is superficial and material, these natural talents are left undirected without a guiding principle. Tolstoy depicts such women as falling prey to their base inclinations; a vain, selfish and destructive love affair with themselves. Tolstoy’s intense psychological dissection remains insightful because his cultural microcosm is so profoundly relatable to our own, to the extent that it is arguable that his time and our time are part of the same modern microcosm.
Through Anna, Tolstoy asks us to consider the casualty of love in a decadent society. Today, it is difficult to speak of love sincerely, so intertwined is it with pop cultural impressions and lower sentiments. Among the first signs of love’s conceptual decline is the development of an ars amatoria where the idea undergoes a gradual and progressive trivialisation until it reaches a terminal reductive state, where love exists purely for the gratification of the individual1. Here, it is only the individual that is granted the ultimate right of the rugged individualist; to love selfishly. As testament to our collective reluctance to acknowledge a possible higher form, modern Platonic love bears little semblance to Diotima’s description2, but instead tepidly refers to non-sensual relations. With time the metaphors of love and lovers cease to approximate descriptions of the sacred, thus giving no higher sacrality to the lower human experience. It is with these considerations that Tolstoy explores the erotic and emotional impulses of modern love in the correspondingly modern psychology of Anna and Levin.
Anna and Levin cross paths thematically in the former’s descent and the latter’s ascent. At first, both are observed to be self-centred in their own peculiar way. However, the reader is quick to recognise that Levin’s nature is fundamentally expansive, in that he is sincere and wishes to grow beyond the discontent that he feels within. Anna’s nature, on the other hand, is contractive, as she uses her gifts of psychological perception to create and maintain a vortex of vain gratification around herself for as long as possible. Under the pretext of love, she remains wilfully blind to the pain of others that occurs as a consequence to her actions. To achieve this, she must necessarily remain blind to her inner self. Were Tolstoy less gifted, Anna would be nothing more than a Weiningerian3 caricature, but instead Anna’s descent provides an opportunity to consider whether our own unexamined weaknesses are so different from hers.
In this introspective spirit, some thoughts on the novel are presented here. Part I explores the unravelling of Anna. Part II, the analytical crux, speculates on psychological processes in women. Part III aims to balance the possible insinuation of chauvinism4 arising from Part II and explores the journey of Levin. Part IV is the conclusion.
I: Unravelling
For much of the novel, Anna sees nothing beyond herself and her whims. It is only in her descent that she turns her sharp faculties of perception towards Vronsky, the man she loves, to understand the unpleasant reality of her affair. By this point, they have already grown distant on account of her neurotic jealousy, her neediness, and the daily acerbic skirmishes she compulsively instigates. Her epiphany5 is simple, sterile and unpleasant; with a dispassionate clarity she concludes that the love that she cherishes is based on egoism and vanity, nothing more.
My love grows more passionate and egoistic, and his dwindles and dwindles.
Vronsky loves Anna because to be loved by Anna, in his small world, is an unparalleled prestige beyond rank and title. A man’s world, when he searches for his identity and place in society, is indeed a small one to begin with. When its horizons inevitably expand, what was thought to be passionately sincere in the smaller world becomes embarrassingly juvenile in the larger. So, in Vronsky’s small world, winning the affection of a woman who society considers to be of superlative quality, accentuates the public perception of his own manhood. Being at the centre of a simmering public scandal appeals to his vainglory, which he justifies to himself as being in the throes of a love that others cannot understand. Most likely, Vronsky truly does love Anna as far as his immature understanding of love permits. But he loves her selfishly. The ever-perceptive Anna is sensitive to this subtlety.
Anna’s egoism, on the other hand, is firmly rooted in the cosmopolitan superfluity of St Petersburg society. Anna, who feels unappreciated and constricted by her marriage, finds that an intrigue with a handsome charismatic young officer validates her desirability to herself. This need for validation is the foundation of her intense love for Vronsky and soon takes priority over the lesser forms of validation she receives from St Petersburg society. Women like her are sensitive to the quality of validation they receive; for Anna to enrapture and mesmerise any member of an audience through the smallest exertion of her charm and beauty is a somewhat mundane routine for her. She has taken part in this routine since she was old enough to be aware of the effects of her words, glances and movements on influencing and winning over whomever she pleased. For Anna, the most potent validation is an affair that spites everything -her husband, her marriage, her children, her future, social propriety, her lover’s future, his career, his prospects- for the sake of herself and herself alone. Her personality has a destructive and vicious quality that spreads through her like a sickness, eventually affecting Vronsky and straining the vitality of their relationship. Her rising jealousy is a self-awareness of her losing grip on the egoistic reality she has constructed around herself.
The immature Vronsky may have willingly given himself away to Anna’s charms, but he cannot ignore the resulting discord that emerges. When the relationship is removed from St Petersburg society, the social prestige of courting Anna no longer appeals to his vanity. Love alone cannot satisfy his broadening horizons, and the void within him grows larger. His attempt to fill the void is familiar to the modern reader; escapism through travel, the excesses of consumerism, intellectual and artistic pretences and distracting oneself with public affairs. He finds these pursuits unsatisfactory, and why shouldn’t he, for the remedy to the rising undercurrents of discontent are not to be found in frivolity or relationships, but within. Tolstoy delicately portrays this shift in circumstances; the youthful passion and romanticism of their relationship fades into the mundane. The intensity of feeling they have for each other dissipates into pointless dilettantism and endless distraction in art and culture6. Even their bodies pay a physical toll as Anna’s appearance becomes more haggard and Vronsky’s youthful virility recedes alongside his hairline. Both Anna and Vronsky pay dearly for their self-centredness in the sacred matter of love; at the end of the novel, though one of them lives and the other one dies, they are both left equally lifeless.
II: Unconscious Processes
Anna’s profane love leaves her othered in the mind of the reader, but Tolstoy simply asks us whether all romantic love is not just vain pleasure at another person holding our qualities in as high regard as we hold ourselves? Are we not, like Anna, intoxicated on our opinion of ourselves, only content to see our own reflection through the colluding mirror of the other? Though a self-critical proposition, it is worth deeper consideration; in our pop-culture, media portrays love as an individualistic realisation that is only requited when it is reciprocated by the other. Though we think of ourselves as too intelligently cynical to believe that romantic fiction bears any reflection on reality, decades of passive media consumption erode deep channels beneath the surface of our purported beliefs, resulting in a perception of reality as a series of sentimental vacuums fuelled by individual will. Individualism does indeed govern a large part of our unconscious processes under which the pursuit and experience of love falls. The ars amatoria of our age could be said to be a mostly selfish process, subordinate to our sense of individuality and autonomy. It is a game of vanity, validation and values and the perpetual interplay between them within the unconscious.
Tolstoy chose a woman, not a man, to explore the interplay between validation and love precisely because women have exceptional social intuition and have a more intimate need for congruity with the norms around them. When woman’s natural conformist inclination is overwhelmed by society’s emphasis of individualism, the dissonance in extremis resulting from a lack of validation desperately searches for either compromise or resolution. The resulting tension, though terrible, is nonetheless aesthetically pleasing and beautiful in its melancholic contortions. When in love, women’s unconscious appraisal of their prospective partner is arguably more psychosocially complex and sensitive to validation than the simple, visual and often crude appraisal of women by men. When the pneumatic pressure within this woman torn between conformism and individualism reaches its limits, either the woman conforms completely to male norms by adopting a masculine intellect or hyper-sexuality and validating herself through that, or she reactively sets herself as the only object worthy of her love and chooses only those partners who extend and accentuate her own self-absorbed image7. Like Anna, she places herself on an unassailable pedestal and her unconscious mind concocts an array of defence mechanisms to sanitise and make palatable the resulting narcissism. These defence mechanisms manifest externally in a rich, complex and coded second language of validation, values and implicit social norms. Purported values become the subterfuge behind which the desire for self-validation operates.
When validation becomes her unconscious priority, the values looked for in a partner aren’t special in of themselves; they serve a purely aesthetic function and are worn for public display. The appraisal has little to do with the values themselves, even less to do with the person being considered, and gives more importance than is admitted, to what compliments the wider perception of the self. The notion of values, which are personal precepts that are assumed to be in concordance with a higher truth, find themselves devalued, relativised and mercenarily used as a means to an end, where the prospect is of secondary importance and must patiently wait as their suitability is assessed. At its most reductive, the values that the prospect explicitly or implicitly represents are weighed and correlated to those of the appraiser and compatibility depends on how well they will validate and accentuate her own qualities8. The higher the perceived compatibility of the individual, the greater the perceived congruence of values and the more validation the pairing provides. For many, this desire for validation provides the final impetus to either pursue or abandon a relationship. Even those sincere values that do exist internally and introspectively may be contaminated by individualist affectation as they make their journey to external expression. It is not to imply that love is nothing more than psychologically mechanistic process outlined above, but only that it finds itself reduced to this pitiful state by those who approach it without a modicum of self-knowledge.
Women, recognising a vague discord in the unconscious currents relating to matters of love, would sooner give away their body than they would their heart. This is because they find no higher object to their love, and so choose to love themselves before all else. Their partner must collude with them in their pathological self-love or risk introducing an expansive dysfunction into the relationship. A relationship built on such a self-regarding foundation is difficult to intellectualise one’s way out of. It is difficult enough to regulate the ego in solitude, but attempting to do so in the psychological company of another is a tall order. Separating internal precepts from outward facing affectations within oneself, whilst at the same time attempting to do the same in the appraisal of the other, often results in failure to do either. Where it is successful, we see a recognisably healthy relationship, but so delicate is the balance here that chance and good fortune play a greater part in this outcome than expertise and experience.
Ovid’s Echo and Narcissus provides a locus classicus for the symptoms and consequences of self-absorption under the popular epithet of “narcissism”. However, Tolstoy’s modern woman is both Echo and Narcissus. She is self-absorbed like Narcissus but, like Echo, finds her ability for expression defined by those around her. She must experience herself in all senses and modalities; not only must she behold herself longingly in her reflection, but she also demands that her partner’s being be defined in response and reaction to her own voice. Then, ironically, she also embodies Echo, for her “self” is a mere echo of the norms of society as a whole. Echo’s undoing was that she spoke too much and spent too little time in silent repose, and modern woman’s undoing is that she spends too much time thinking of her own petty affairs and not enough time in introverted contemplation of higher spiritual truths that she has a natural capacity for.
III: Levin
Despite the above, Anna Karenina is not a novel that is content to condemn all women when there is an opportunity to hold both sexes to account. Women are merely the quintessential measure of an effect that either sex is susceptible to, admittedly to varying degrees. One such susceptible individual is Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin. Notably, Levin does not share Anna’s fate, for his sincerity and uncompromising introspection tethered to a growing faith is what cuts through psychological and sociological complications, allowing him to experience a higher and spiritually fulfilling Love. It is through Levin’s example that Tolstoy wishes both men and women to aspire to something greater than the shallow, selfish and transient love of Anna. However, Levin is not perfect and one can only begin to relate to Levin if they share his reflective compulsion to identify discord within himself and investigate its cause9. We are candidly introduced to his flaws and are in turn asked to consider our own. The reader sees that Levin struggles with vain intellectual self-absorption as he desperately searches for meaning and is compelled to recursively reflect on and revaluate all that he does. Levin quickly vacillates between gormless imperceptiveness and perceptive introspection, punctuated by neuroticism and emotionality. He is beset by anger, shame, and frustration at his inadequacies, but only because these sensitive perceptions are pointed inward to the point of neurotic self-loathing. His external perceptions are blunted by this disposition, where his curbs his intuition about others with rationalisation and intellectualisation, but can just as easily succumb to passionate emotion. However, despite these shortcomings, he is undeniably sincere in his search for meaning and perseveres through setbacks. Levin’s turbulent inner world is tempered by his marriage to Kitty however this alone does not provide him with the meaning he seeks. Matrimonial love is not the antidote to his feeling of spiritual discontent. In both of Tolstoy’s larger novels, it is notable that his characters often experience a period of mundane domestic tension that follows marriage. The flaws, insecurities and anxieties of the characters are not resolved by union but instead find themselves transposed into a different mode of expression. For Levin, his marriage only affirms that his journey for self-knowledge is incomplete and that he still needs to conciliate his flawed base self with his aspirational higher self.
Levin is indeed Tolstoy’s representative of himself, or a part of himself, inserted within the novel. However, he need not be thought of purely as an aggrandised masculine archetype to contrast against the femininity of Anna. Levin’s balance of masculine and feminine qualities aim for a higher understanding of themselves, and provide an example that is applicable to all. In fact, it is only through Levin’s sincerity that we can begin to see the wretched figure of Anna in a sympathetic light. If the reader is able to find common ground with Levin, they can see that despite his aloof cynicism, he is an idealist who wishes to presume that all have a share in the sincerity which he harbours within himself. Though this presumption goes against his judgement and experience, he never truly lets it go and his final epiphany only affirms it. Thus, it is through Levin’s sincerity that Tolstoy encourages us, without condoning or condemning, to understand the flaws that exist in Anna, our society and ourselves.
Some10 found themselves disappointed that Levin’s journey culminated with his discovery of the transcendental and highest form of love in his faith. For Tolstoy, faith could provide a remedy to the excesses of a self-absorbed culture, or at the very least allow the seeker to identify the insidious influences that colour their view of themselves and others. Self-knowledge and introspection alone is presented as futile without the framework of faith and religious-feeling. Through Levin, Tolstoy urges us to consider love in its transcendental and earthly forms. His descriptions of the latter brim with sensuality that makes no aesthetic concessions to its undeniable beauty. However, the passionately sensual finds contrast with the placid waters of a transcendental love that is both subtle and elusive. Yes, there is a Christian sentimentality in Levin, but equally, there is a revolt against it, and Tolstoy spent much of his later years searching for its form beyond the contingencies of organised religion. The pursuit of this higher love amidst the distraction of its lower form is presented as difficult to differentiate, as they mask themselves in each other with delicate elusion.
To the relief of the cynical aesthete, Tolstoy acknowledges that there are no easy answers in religion alone; religious sentimentalism just as easily leads to illusory epiphanies, regurgitated platitudes and utter inaction. Such is the cautionary example of Count Karenin, a cold, intellectual and practical man who seeks comfort in faith and mysticism, but without sincere intentions, is led to a deluded conclusion11. Sincerity of intent is a prominent theme in Tolstoy’s introspective exercises and perhaps to him, it is antithetical to the sycophancy that comes with public life. Personally, I doubt that Levin finds his truth after his epiphany in the final chapter. The epiphany itself seemed slightly forced, tepid and naively idealistic12. One could imagine new agitations springing up shortly after the conclusion of the novel that disturbed the tranquil waters Levin found himself in. It is nonetheless profound as the final chapter is Tolstoy’s acknowledgement, and must be ours too, at that all stories must end somewhere; the search for Truth and Love is something that continues beyond words and pages.
IV: Conclusion
Anna Karenina, perhaps like this essay, at first glance appears to be unkind to women, but on further reading reveals itself as an elegy to a nostalgic ideal of love, but nostalgic due to a recession of sincerity that both sexes can be held accountable for. Men and women are naturally preoccupied with self-interested affairs but is not to a pathological degree until this attitude is encouraged, rather than restrained, by the wider world influencing their inner world. Tolstoy urges his reader to be particularly sensitive to the subtleties of this inner world, of ourselves and others, so that we do not fall victims to our own weaknesses. There is inevitable divergence on the question of faith, but Levin could not find his peace without it. He had absorbed himself into the fashionable philosophies of his day, which remain as fashionable today, and found them wanting. Those that admire Tolstoy and place their trust in him to beautifully describe the intricacies of the human experience, may consider trusting him on this matter too and explore the question of faith with a renewed sincerity.
It is fitting to end this essay by briefly speaking of the most tragic, yet heroic, character in Anna Karenina; Stiva Oblonsky. Stiva ends the novel more or less as he begins it; debonair, merry and carefree. He is unperturbed by questions of meaning or the vicissitudes of passion. He has an easy-going life in the self-assured pursuit of pleasure, and this very nature somehow renders him immune to all consequence and accountability. In fact, his fortunes are on rise at the end of the novel, and his marriage secured. He is heroically unmoved by all setbacks; “…he was a truthful man in his relations with himself. He was incapable of deceiving himself and persuading himself that he repented of his conduct.”. It is he, not Levin, that embodies the masculine unperturbed indifference that contrasts with Anna’s feminine neuroticism. It is in fact he, not Anna, who is the most tragic character; his world is devoid of any impetus for self-knowledge and he experiences a pleasurably intense, but nonetheless narrow spectrum of the human experience. He is intellectually and spiritually restricted and can learn nothing about himself from the joys and suffering of his loved ones. He represents the emotionally and intellectually vacuous everyman, disinclined to all strenuous thought and celebrating the plentiful fruit of this disinclination. However, Tolstoy does not traduce the everyman for their disposition, they simply are as they are and can aspire no further. For them, their stagnancy and distance from spiritual realisation is consequence enough. Like Levin, one wonders how Stiva’s story ends beyond the pages of the novel, in old age when his capacity for pleasure is diminished, and the course of Nature curtails his many appetites in preparation for his end. Perhaps there too, his end is as carefree as his beginning, or perhaps like Levin, what he experiences is unsettlingly beyond words.
Indeed, the scope of Tolstoy’s themes extend beyond words, and beyond the petty flaws of women and men, with his prose providing what is immediate and sensuous whilst also alluding to inner themes existing beyond pure technique. The character of Levin and Anna are imbued with a certain instructive resonance that a reader can identify with. Regardless of whether the reader identifies with the illusory ideas of love preponderant in today’s culture, or perceives vanity within their own self, for Tolstoy inquiry into the self and spirit must be contingent upon an uncompromising inner sincerity. It is possible that Tolstoy’s writing had a cathartic function, as he chiselled aways at his own illusions to obtain the Truth underlying all things, with the remnant fragments of his efforts sublimated into timeless prose. If we consider his convictions in later life, it seems that his conclusion was that his prose contained only falsity, with the Truth found beyond it. Perhaps he felt that he could no longer spiritually benefit from his art, but thankfully we are not excluded from the privilege of doing so.
As Ovid tellingly surmises; Iuppiter ex alto periuria ridet amantum, et iubet Aeolios inrita ferre notos
211A-212b, Symposium, Plato
Were I more gifted, this sentence could have avoided this derivational suffix.
This essay is not intended to be pejorative; women are usually synonymous with an introverted outlook, whereas men are usually extroverted in nature. If this reductive but useful dichotomy is maintained, then men necessarily have their own particular challenges, one of which is arguably a theoretically greater difficulty in introspection. For women, a self-absorbed disposition is ideally balanced by a greater capacity for introspection, but unfortunately this ideal (like most) is often left unmet.
In Chapter 31, Part 7 of the Aylmer and Louise Maude translation.
In some ways, I wonder if the quietly scathing descriptions of Vronsky’s dilettantism in art and culture was a prelude to Tolstoy’s later work What is Art?.
These are not mutually exclusive, for many women express hyper sexuality whilst they simultaneously idolise the self. The weighting is probably determined by disposition.
The often heard phrase “they bring out the best in me” is actually quite a passive and helpless self-indictment.
To merely relate to Levin, though easy to do, is not enough; the reader must grow beyond him.
“What one would like to do, would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under his sandalled feet and then lock him up in a stone house on a desert island with gallons of ink and reams of paper—far away from the things, ethical and pedagogical, that diverted his attention from observing the way the dark hair curled above Anna's white neck.” - Nabokov, Lectures in Russian Literature
Spiritist fads were popular around this time; Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society was founded in 1875, for example.
It seems that Tolstoy would agree with this; he had formed ideological objections to his serialised novel and rushed to conclude it any way he could.