Taking Anna and Karenin to Counseling: Tolstoy, Marriage, and Making it Work

My previous blog got me thinking again about Anna’s affair in Anna Karenina. To what extent does Tolstoy blame Anna, and to what extent does Tolstoy blame Karenin? Where and how do they go wrong? It seems to me that, despite what she says, Anna was completely happy in her marriage before she left for Moscow (to reconcile Stiva and Dolly). It’s only when she comes back that she suddenly sees all these flaws in her husband. She says things like, “There was an old, familiar feeling, similar to that state of pretence she had experience in her relations with her husband; but previously she had not noticed it, while now she was clearly and painfully aware of it” (104). I don’t think Tolstoy wants us to trust Anna here, when she says that this pretence existed before, but her meeting of Vronsky has somehow opened up her eyes to this falseness. I think her expectations of her marriage changed in Moscow, and now she’s struck by the lack of “real” passion (see post below!). She suddenly disappointed with everything she once loved (she seems to have once loved). There’s something about Anna’s “seeker” nature (her quest for happiness, meaning), and her foray outside the home that has changed Anna, thrilled her that Tolstoy sees as the corrupting to what was once a happy marriage.

Granted, we see how unappealing Karenin is as a husband. He is proud, duty-obsessed, ambitious, and society-focused, and fits Anna into his schedule like he would schedule a bath. Yet, he seems to love Anna, but can’t express it. Karenin keeps trying to talk about how much he missed Anna, but it’s almost like he’s embarrassed to reveal too much emotion. Instead of saying he missed her, he makes jokes, mocking his “burning desire” to see Anna (104) and makes it sound like her absence inconvenienced him rather than grieved him: “my solitude is ended. You wouldn’t believe how awkward (he emphasizes the word awkward) it is to dine alone” (110). Later, when Karenin confronts her about Vronsky, he acknowledges that he has been too self-focused in the marriage, but he is afraid to feeling, afraid that Anna will hurt him,: “For the first time he vividly pictured to himself her personal life, her thoughts, her wishes, and the thought that she could and should have her own particular life seemed so frightening to him that he hastened to drive it away” (143-44). When also see Karenin through Anna’s eyes after she’s already fallen for Vronsky and “closed the depths of her soul to him” (paraphrased from 146), which really upsets him and is probably why he become so cold to her later.

I think when I was reading Anna Karenina, I kept being tempted to declare Anna’s marriage to Karenin empty and dead, but I don't think it was dead on arrival. I think Tolstoy wants to show that Anna and Karenina slowly kill it by closing their souls to each other and refusing to salvage their marriage. I don’t think Tolstoy intends us to see Anna and Karenin as mismatched people, but rather people who are both not trying hard enough to make their marriage work.

Passion vs. Love ?!

This is an idea I’ve sort of been mulling over for awhile, partly set off by my classmates’ discussions of marriage and love in Tolstoy (see their blog links on the right hand side of my blog!). For Tolstoy, it seems like a happy marriage stands in opposition to a passionate marriage. Tolstoy might even see the term “passionate marriage’ as an oxymoron. All-consuming passion for Tolstoy does not have any place in marriage –its almost something that has to be sublimated into everyday marriage. Kimberly has a good discussion of this in one of her posts about Family Happiness. Masha, once happily married to her husband, becomes thrilled by her society “shadows” until she realizes this passion is only fleeting and comes back to apologize to her husband, Sergey. Kimberly quotes Sergey talking to Masha: “'all of us and especially you young women must have personal experienced of all the nonsense of life, in order to get back to life itself; the evidence of other people is no good." (79). But Kim points out that even though Masha got society and thrill out of her system, “Yet she has returned with not more understanding about why she no longer has the same relationship with Sergey. She just decides to pour out her love on someone else and Sergey offers their baby as a person or a thing for that release.”

There’s a parallel idea to this in Anna Karenina, which comes up when Vronsky is arguing with the ambassador’s wife at Princess Betsy’s party early on in the book. The ambassador’s wife argues that arranged marriages are “those in which both have already had their wild times. It’s like scarlet fever, one has to go through it” to which Vronksy responds sarcastically, “Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox” (138). The ambassador’s wife is talking about lust, sexual passion, but Vronsky combines lust with love, either saying they are the same thing or at least somewhat dependant on one another. I think it’s just this slippage of terms, from love to “passionate love” that Tolstoy is discouraging. He wants to separate out passion and love as almost oppositional—I don’t think it hurts for couples to originally feel passion for one another, as long as they move past quickly! (In tolstoy’s opinion, not my own...) Its also interesting to think about Tolstoy’s “ideal couple,” Kitty and Levin, and how they have so little “passion” that Kitty refuses Levin’s proposal initially! There’s nothing passionate about it! Well, Tolstoy might say, there’s a “spiritual passion”...whatever in the world that is supposed to mean...

“The people live as nature lives”: Tolstoy and his “Natural” Peasants

This post is, in a way, a response to my very first post that accused Olenin of only seeing the Cossacks through a romantic lens. Olénin thinks of the Cossacks as simple and uncivilized, and sees their culture as a “slideshow” but having read so much more of Tolstoy’s work, I’m realizing that this romanticization of peasants/Cossacks is more of Tolstoy’s hang-up, rather than that of his characters. Tolstoy reveres the peasants--he only talks about them in a positive light. For him, the peasants are like Rousseau’s “Natural Man,” sincere, merry, hardworking, coarse, wild, and healthy, always in opposition to the false, insincere, whining, bored, lazy, refined upper class members of society. Now, I will start by giving Tolstoy major credit in looking to an underappreciated socioeconomic group that, as he is said, is largely undervalued and looked down upon. He writes about them because he thinks that the upper-class really has something to learn from them. That said, I have deep-seated misgivings about Tolstoy’s representations of the peasants like a “Natural Man.”

The narrator here describes Olenin’s thoughts: “The people live as nature lives: they die, are born, unite, and more are born—they fight, eat and drink, rejoice and die, without any restrictions but those that nature imposes on sun and grass, on animal and tree. They have no other laws” (The Cossacks 190). Here we see the peasants described positively, as without the artifice of the upper-class, but they are depicted almost as animals, even plants! I understand that he wants to show them as living in harmony with the landscape, but he seems to make the PART of the landscape, as objects rather than people. As far as the reader knows, the Cossacks are completely without intellect or culture. But it’s tricky to hold Tolstoy responsible here because he is using Olenin as an intermediary.

I will provide another representation, to be fair, one of Tolstoy’s more forgiving depictions of the peasants, and this time coming from his own mouth, not through a character. The following citation is drawn from What is Art and it gives a taste of what the “peasant” is for Tolstoy. Here he is defending peasants and the lower class against those who say that that their lives are poor in artistic content:

“The life of the laboring man, with its infinitely diverse forms of labour and the dangers connected with it on the sea or under the ground, with his travels, dealings with proprietors, superiors, comrades, with people of other confessions and nationalities, his struggle with nature, wild animals, his relations with domestic animals, his labours in the forest, the steppe, the fields, the orchard, the kitchen garden, his relations with his wife and children, not only as close and dear people but as co-workers, helpers, replacements in his work, his relation to all economic questions, not as subjects of discussion or vanity, but as questions vital for himself and his family, with his pride in self-sufficiency and service to others....”

This is an example of one of Tolstoy’s more nuanced and rich representations of “the peasant,” giving them credit for having more meaningful lives than those of the upper class. And yet, this definition of “the laboring man” is still really troubling. He defines this “laborer” as such, as someone defined only by their work and as something apart from and opposed to the “landowner” or “noble.” He still does not accord them a life that exists in any sphere but emotion and work, and does not seem to imagine the possibility of a complex life, with any strife, struggle, or sin. The laborer lives in an Edenic state, unburdened by things like knowledge of sin. In his attempt to hold the “the laborer” up to this ideal man, Tolstoy completely deprives this “laborer” of being an individual subject. This laborer” (a metonym standing for an entire economic class) is reduced to a body, with emotional instincts, that exists only to be the nobleman’s fantasy “natural man,” part of a schematic. It just seems like Tolstoy looks at the peasants as just as much of slide show as Olenin does. While I admire the value and attention Tolstoy is giving to workers, his understanding of them seems to be oversimplified and fantastic, in such a way that deprives them of being real human beings.

“What is Art?” First Impressions

I’ve just started “What is Art”, and though I’m really only a few chapters in, I’ve already got a lot to say about this book.

In general, I agree with Tolstoy that art is, “ a means of communion among people” (37). I totally agree that if there is (or has to be) a defining quality about art, this is it. I do think there has to be an author with an intention, who tries to communicate something to an audience (I still think this is art even if what is communicated is not the intention, although I’ll get into that later…). At first I thought that using the term “infection” was really poor word choice on Tolstoy’s part, because It makes art seem like a disease, like a corrupting influence. But I actually the term is appropriate for the feeling that Tolstoy is probably describing: what Tolstoy is really getting at here is the physical effect art should have. Art’s effect shouldn’t have anything to do with intellectualization; it should be an almost unconscious transmission of feelings from one person to another, and I see where he’s coming from here.

I also love Tolstoy’s broadening of the definition of art to include the work of the makeup artist, hairdresser, chef, and tailor, and includes such media as a “lullabies, jokes, mimicry, home decoration, clothing, utensils, to church services and solemn processions” (41). At the same time though, I really resist some of the stricter aspects of his definition of art, and his impulse to limit art and audience responses. For instance, I disagree with the whole idea of defining art. I guess I don’t even really like using the word--I don’t think “artists” should have to always consider what they are doing or making in relationship to some kind of type evoked by the word “art.” I also really disagree that “good art” can only be art that makes the audience experience the same feeling as the artist, art that communicates only the author’s intention. First of all, how could you ever verify that you are feeling the exact same thing that you were intended to feel? Secondly, why should (or how can) everyone to react the same way to a work of art? Not only does this seem rather boring, it seems impossibly restrictive. The more different reactions a work of art evokes (ESPECIALLY when it’s within one viewer) the better, for me. I guess Tolstoy, perhaps being an author/artist himself, puts a little too much emphasis on the artist’s intentions. I think intentions are certainly important, but they are not at the core of what makes good art, in my opinion. This probably comes from Tolstoy’s desire to make art more accessible to the people, by making intentions clearer, but I think people should also be allowed to disagree and even think contradictory things about a work of art.

Tolstoy seems to be speaking directly to me and my argument when he says: “Formerly, there was fear that among objects of art some corrupting objects might be found, and so all art was forbidden. Now, there is only fear lest they be deprived of some pleasure afforded by art, and so all art is patronized. And I think that the second error is much greater than the first and that its consequences are much more harmful” (42).

So I can see myself as one of these people wanting to enjoy all art for whatever it brings to the table, and I can totally understand his point. For Tolstoy, the spiritual risks of allowing all art were just too great—I guess I’m just not as concerned about the corruptive power of bad art, although I guess Tolstoy is making me think about it. Perhaps my biggest problem with Tolstoy who is going to do all this censoring? Who is going to decide what art is good and bad? I guess I’d rather just allow it all and restrict my own access to it if I decide it is “bad,” rather than have someone be in charge of limiting art by deciding what is spiritually elevating and what is not.

Well, I doubt that anyone would be shocked by my opinions about art (I realize they’re pretty typical…) and I realize they’re just as much a product the time and culture I live in as much as Tolstoy’s are, but I can’t help—this is just my honest reaction.

“It’s Complicated” with Ivan Illych: What’s his relationship to the reader?

We’ve just finished reading “The Death of Ivan Illych,” and we’ve been having a lot of discussion about the relationship between readers and Ivan Illych. Does Tolstoy want us to identify with him, as an “ordinary” man or does he want to set him apart?

I personally have trouble identifying with Ivan Illych. We meet so many other characters first: they are lively and having conversations , which is a big deal, since there are hardly any discussions in the story. When we do meet Ivan Illych, he’s dead, in a whole other world. Starting the book, I have the sensation that I’ve arrived in the story too late, and I missed the whole point, and I am denied access to this man who seems like I should have known him, looking handsome and dignified in death. No matter how little the living characters heed him, and how superficially they take his death, I can’t help but be far more invested in them than the dead man of title.

But of course, Tolstoy brings Ivan Illych “back to life” so to speak, and readers watch his whole life progress. But the telling of Ivan’s life feels like an obituary, almost deader than his funeral, full of facts about his career. Even his affairs are dull and feel long gone: we are far from Anna and Vronsky here! His marriage and children are hardly remarked, while Tolstoy forces the reader listen to trivialities: “He got up at nine, drank his coffee, read the paper, and then put on his undress uniform…” (267), and this goes on for over a full page. Tolstoy hardly gives us any quotations, and we are rarely granted access into Ivan Illych’s though process (until the accident). This is so different from “Anna Karenina” and “War and Peace” where we are allowed into almost everyone’s head to understand their perspective. Vassily, Karenin, and even Anatole are more flesh and blood than Ivan Illych. But of course, this all changes with Ivan Illych’s illness. He starts to feel human, especially in the doctor’s office, listening to mumbo—jumbo about his “floating kidney.” He starts to question his whole life, as if he’s sort of unfreezing and becoming a real, rounded-out character. I feel especially connected to Ivan Illych as he becomes distant with his family—I feel as if he’s becoming as distant from them as I am.

But that death scene is very distancing yet again. As we talked about in class, we, the living, cannot follow Ivan Illych where he is going, and that’s why it is hard to understand him, talking about the light and joy, and I find his mental state at the moment of death very alienating. The last line particularly pushes me away, even grosses me out: “He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.” This sudden external perspective, describing his death in physical terms, expels the reader from Ivan Illych’s mind.

I struggle to understand why Tolstoy puts a barrier between the reader and his main character, then lets them connect for such a brief point in the story, then wrenches them apart again. I understand why we can’t follow him into death—I mean, I don’t think even Tolstoy can do that. I certainly think that showing us “ordinary” human life from a distance makes us realize how trivial it can be, and certainly having Ivan’s death in our minds throughout the book has the same effect. Any thoughts and/or disagreement are welcome!