Review: Anna Karenina

I had this book on my shelf for several years now. But for some reason or another I couldn’t get myself to read it. It was not just the intimidating number of pages—roughly a thousand—but also the fact that I always had something seemingly more interesting to read at the time.

Last year, however, a friend picked it up and couldn’t stop raving about it. This book was one of the best he had read until then. I was mildly intrigued but seriously doubted his bold claim. Besides, one shouldn’t make such a statement to a fellow reader; the amount of pressure for the other person to read said book is enormous—it’s simply not decent.

Crushed by the peer pressure and my own guilt, I retreated home for the holidays. Lo and behold, what did I see on my dad’s nightstand? A copy of Anna Karenina. And of course, he was also shamelessly singing its praise.

This was too much for my little ego, and so I joined the Anna Karenina club. Surprisingly, I finished the whole thing in three weeks—the damn thing turned out to be a page-turner. It was like reading a splendid mystery novel that I just couldn’t put down. It hooked me from the outset.

This is probably one of the most complete novels ever written about life. The moral compass is so distorted and fractured throughout the book that by the end, you are left with that which is simply human. Was Anna a monster or just a victim? Was Alexei an impotent weakling, or truly the personification of Christian love? Were Levin and Vronsky merely representations of destruction and creation within the same existence? Perhaps, or perhaps not, but the novel reaches into the depths of life and lays bare all that is grey.

We live for the other

We judge people all the time, knowingly or not. But in doing so, we constantly judge ourselves. One cannot judge without first positing their own position, and this self-judgment always happens through the gaze of the other. The novel captures this theme beautifully—the very human condition of living for the “other.”

Every man, knowing to the smallest detail all the complexity of the conditions surrounding him, involuntarily assumes that the complexity of these conditions and the difficulty of comprehending them are only his personal, accidental peculiarity, and never thinks that others are surrounded by the same complexity as he is.

Anna lived for Vronsky, Vronsky for Anna, Alexei for society, and their son for just a glimpse of his mother. This was the cruel irony, as it is not the actual person for whom they live, but always the idea of the other—the idea that perpetuates a feeling of love, home, comfort, or acceptance in oneself.

But the novel is not reprimanding this nature. Though one might think that living for others, as Anna did, ruins one’s life, or that judging others and ourselves ruins our own happiness, this is too naive a view. Ultimately, it is precisely this living for the other that makes things worthwhile.

As Levin eventually finds out for himself, by taking the chance of acknowledging the impact of his family, while still restless, he learns to accommodate himself in his own body. But acceptance does not mean that the outcome will be favourable. Anna took the same chance, but she paid it with her life.

Brittleness of knowledge

A large part of life’s unfulfilled desires falls heavy on our soul. We try and argue with ourself, sometimes blaming others, sometimes ourselves, but it is needlessly depressing. We often feel like we are missing something, some knowledge, some secret that everyone else is purview to except us. We give ourself completely to this knowledge, have faith in it like a zealot ready to die on its cross, again and again. But in the end we find no comfort in knowledge.

It is the suspension of all analysis that actually has any solace, like the Muzhik who was cutting grass, which inspired Levin to be completely absorbed in it as well. He forgot all about his troubles, the moments of “unconsciousness”, when the scythe moved by itself. The immediate result of cutting, the moment of respite while coming back, the heat, the toiling work, did nothing except made his moments of oblivion even more frequent as in the so called uneducated. It was the most blissful moment for him.

Today we know this is as the flow-state, vulgarised for the sake of productivity and more capital accumulation. There is no play anymore, only a directed action where ever we look. Knowledge is only used to formalise the super structures in our society.

What did knowledge do for Sergei (Levin’s brother)? It destroyed him. Though alone with the girl he desired, even in that fleeting moment when he thought he might approach her, he left without saying anything, too much of a martyr to his own intellectual cause. What Levin came to understand about life through his journey with Kitty was something that Sergei never experienced, nor ever could experience.

Knowledge is a poor substitute for the life that could be. The worship of knowledge, as is done throughout our society, is making us increasingly brittle. We have become far more intolerable than ignorant.

I have nothing but you, remember that!

One of the most defining moments in the novel occurs when Anna tells Vronsky, “I have nothing but you, remember that!” This is total surrender— a complete acknowledgment of her shame that serves as the inevitable price for the exuberant joy. Yet this was not truly joy, but rather the complete annihilation of the anxiety that had consumed her throughout her past life. This moment marked the overwhelming arrival of a new paradigm, a fundamental shift in her very existence.

Anna’s intellect clearly saw the oncoming hellish nightmare. She understood the trajectory of her choice with complete lucidity, yet choice itself had become an illusion. Her soul demanded its own destruction, craved the very ravaging that would consume her, and she had surrendered everything—leaving only him. But Vronsky was finite, mortal and insufficient to bear the weight of being someone’s entire universe. Anna knew this with the same terrible clarity with which she saw her approaching doom, and so her tragedy was sealed even before their love had truly begun.

Anna’s surrender is both her liberation and her doom, the moment she becomes most alive and begins to die.

Levin’s revelation on duality

For much of the novel, Levin is kinda dumb, yet he possesses a certain tenacity—an intuitive understanding of something fundamental that he stumbles upon early on but lacks the words to articulate clearly.

This becomes evident in the conversation about whether he truly loved the muzhiks. He had a certain spontaneity in his answer, an honesty that revealed his natural perspective: he saw no meaningful distinction between the peasants and any other group, recognising them as equally complex and nuanced human beings. Yet he could never quite explain how this instinctive egalitarianism connected to his broader understanding of life and meaning.

Or when he saw his dying brother. Death’s reality struck him as completely foreign, something for which his intellect had left him utterly unprepared. But Kitty’s divine ignorance—her natural, unthinking compassion— took control of circumstances that seemed so chaotic to him. Her grace illuminated what his reasoning could not: that sometimes “living” life is the only reasonable thing to do.

Being at the precipice of this clear subjective truth, but lost at finding any purpose to his life, he is drawn to the idea of God, either divine incarnate or the human calculus to instil meaning in the meaningless.

Fyodor says that Kirillov the innkeeper lives for his belly. That is clear and reasonable. None of us, as reasonable beings, can live otherwise than for our belly. And suddenly the same Fyodor says it’s bad to live for the belly and that one should live for the truth, for God, and I understand him from a hint! And I and millions of people who lived ages ago and are living now, muzhiks, the poor in spirit, and the wise men who have thought and written about it, saying the same thing in their vague language - we’re all agreed on this one thing; what we should live for and what is good. I and all people have only one firm, unquestionable and clear knowledge, and this knowledge cannot be explained by reason - it is outside it, and has no causes, and can have no consequences

The elusive truth that had been breeding in his consciousness, the hint he finally grasped in its fullness, is that understanding has very little to do with reason, and often the most profound truths transcend rational inquiry entirely.

This new feeling hasn’t changed me, hasn’t made me happy or suddenly enlightened me, as I dreamed - but this feeling has entered into me through suffering and has firmly lodged itself in my soul: I’ll get angry in the same way with people, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s deepest thoughts and other people, even those closest to me. I’ll accuse them in the same way of my own fear and then regret it - but my life now, my whole life, regardless of what may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!

Levin’s journey concludes not with answers that satisfy the mind, but with a peace that emerges from a simple feeling, the very peace he had been unconsciously seeking through all his intellectual struggles and existential anxieties.

Alexei Alexandrovitch, the model Christian

The man observed propriety, if nothing else. Oh but he had more depth than what appeared on the surface. What Anna did easily out of passion, Alexei achieved out of duty with great difficulty. In many ways, he is the true protagonist of the novel—his life underwent the most radical transformation.

From someone who had buried himself in books, proper etiquette, social norms, and all the red-tape in civilised societies, he performed the most absurd act imaginable: he genuinely forgave his wife and her lover from his heart.

It is one thing to pretend to do a thing, and entirely another, to actually do it. What Alexei did was nothing short of revolutionary—anyone can perform the motions of forgiveness, but he went beyond mere performance to reach authentic grace. And this move, more than anything, completely obliterated any dignity Anna or Vronsky had left. In fact, Anna never hated him as intensely as she did after this act of radical mercy. And through that hatred, she came to loathe herself with equal ferocity.

This is the point of all genuine philosophy, and religion understands it perfectly as well: only by embracing the absurd—any real transformation can occur, first within oneself, and through that inner revolution, in others. Alexei’s forgiveness was absurd precisely because it was unnecessary, undeserved, and socially inappropriate. Yet this very absurdity gave it a transformative power.

An end

Alexei is the one who really follows through with the ultimate, he alone becomes authentically true to his desire, while Anna is only devoured by passion. Alexei ascends from the depths of his monotony to forge a new identity in a complete authentic self. His belief, which begins as a convention evolves into true faith precisely through embracing the absurd.

The betrayal that destroys their marriage, becomes the very dialectic through which they misrecognise each other yet recognise their truest selves. Anna sees only weakness where Alexei demonstrates ultimate strength; Alexei perceives only corruption where Anna seeks desperate belonging. This mutual misrecognition paradoxically enables each to access their own deepest truths and motivations for continuing.

To know thyself, is to know thyself through the Other.