The Godfather: Peter Corris on Anna Karenina

Tags: Anna Karenina/ Anthony Trollope/ Leo Tolstoy/ Thomas Hardy/ Wilkie Collins

I first read Anna Karenina in 1960. It was a set text in English I at the University of Melbourne. Like the swot I was, I read as many of the set texts as I could before embarking on the course, so I must have been a few months short of 18 at the time. I found the book wonderful – dramatic, romantic, historically interesting, emotionally moving. I wrote an essay on it for the tutor Philippa Moody, an alluring, finely drawn chain-smoker (Hallmark filters) with whom I was in love from afar. I got a good mark for it and answered a question on it at the examination, which must also have been received favourably because my result in the subject was stellar.

Cut to 2018 and I decided to revisit the novel via an audio book. The reading was to take 35 hours plus and I settled down to be entranced once again. As I listened, my disappointment mounted to dismay. Rather than finding Anna beguiling and tragic as I had before, I now thought her vapid and uninteresting, with no concern for anything beyond the social niceties and her appearance. No apparent awareness of literature or practical matters, apart from a brief flurry of interest in the management of her lover, Vronsky’s, estate. I could not see her as anything but a pampered clothes-horse; her relationship with her son sentimental and with her daughter marked by indifference.

Similarly with Vronsky. Apart from a dilettantish flirtation with painting, quickly abandoned when he discovers his mediocrity, he displays no interest in anything, other than, like Anna, a brief preoccupation with his estate, and horses. He manages to kill one through his poor horsemanship. The supposedly passionate relationship between these two is tissue-thin, based on nothing but physical attraction and mutual vanity.

The secondary story between Levin and Kitty I found equally unsatisfactory. I remembered Levin as the embodiment of good sense and usefulness (I remembered his day of hay cutting with the peasants), and as an agnostic but I now found him emotionally immature and unstable, given to fits of unwarranted jealousy and with a shaky sense of his social and political position. His wife, Kitty, displays one spark of energy and spunk when she provides comfort to Levin’s brother, but is otherwise a cipher, indifferent to everything but domestic and family matters.

All in all I found the characters poseurs, acting out undeveloped roles against a social and political background scarcely sketched in, with no sense of the issues, if any, involved. The writing is frequently limp, with people blushing on every second page. In my experience people seldom blush and not over social trivialities.

My interest perked up with the brilliant account of Anna, before her suicide, as a clinically depressive, drug-addicted paranoiac. These chapters are the strongest in the book but are followed by a kind of epilogue mostly devoted to Levin’s tedious musing on the meaning of life and his wholly unconvincing return to religious faith.

If I were to mount a defence of the book I might suggest that it is a satire on the manners and mores of the Russian upper classes at the time. But as I’ve never heard anything like this from professional critics it’s probably not so.

Oh, well, back to the earthy honesty of Hardy, the pace and plotting skills of Wilkie Collins and the wit of Trollope for my 19th-century literary fix.