Anna Karenina part.4

Anna Karenina set

Author

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy written by

Publisher

Minumsa | 2012-11-01 published

Category

Novel

Book description

A masterpiece in which the great writer Tolstoy's thought and agonizing are gathered! Russia's great writer Tol...

Author's rating

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Human life is composed as if it were a musical score. Guided by an aesthetic sense, a human transforms a chance event into a single theme to be engraved on the score of life. And, just as a composer handles the theme of a sonata, one will repeat it, vary it, and develop it. Anna could have ended her life in a completely different way. But Anna meets her death symmetrically with an 'event' that occurred at that very station where she first met Vronsky.

On the day Anna met Vronsky, a railway worker died at the train station. Before going to meet Vronsky, Anna delivers about three monologues, and in this third monologue she very incidentally recalls the fact that the worker died that day. This could be called a narrative flow with no plausibility or connection whatsoever, but considering that most of the world's affairs generally proceed without plausibility like this, I think there's no need to find this particularly strange. Anna's death can indeed be called a result full of a certain inevitability, but it's not only that. What truly influenced her in making the decision was, indeed, her situation. Because had her situation not been so, the succession of monologues would not have occurred. I don't think it was 100 percent her successive monologues that led her to suicide. As she dwelt on the death that had incidentally come to mind, she must have thought this death was a very beautiful and clean ending for her situation.

"A feeling similar to what she had felt before, when about to dip her body into the water while swimming, seized her......"

It's a truly strange intersection where extreme seriousness and the lightness of life meet. Dostoevsky—er, this emotion, far from tragedy yet whose actual situation is very tragic, the author tried to realize through Anna. And he actually realized it at the end through a structure of symmetry. By making Anna's death and the worker's death symmetrical as if by coincidence, he achieved a 'novel'-like conclusion.

Part 8 is Levin's story. Nikolai Levin—er, Levin is a theme in this novel that stands on equal footing with Anna, and when I thought about why on earth the book is titled Anna Karenina, the conclusion was that Anna's death has to become a 'story' for Levin to shine. Since Anna's death let me see and hear, to the very end, the thoughts of Levin, who did not die, Levin was a figure very easy for me to empathize with. I found his rational side especially easy to relate to. In whatever matter, his principles stand firm, he searches for reasons, and rather than managing the peasants he works directly alongside them and makes efforts to understand their experience—these much resembled my own behavior.

Levin's attitude of doing everything by tackling it one by one himself was probably a very groundbreaking behavior for the 'landlords' of the time. Later, in the work 'Resurrection,' the method of lending this farmed land to the peasants is chosen, but in this work it doesn't go that far. Still, even so, the point that Levin participates in farming and, through direct experience, builds up his own scholarship and thought about farming can be said to be the difference from other people.

This book is definitely worth reading at least once. Because I don't think there's a book that portrays the Russian high society of that time as well as this one. Thanks to this book's quite detailed portrayal, I was able to understand, even a little, the 'aristocratic' culture of Russia at the time. The unavoidably compulsory high-society gatherings and the roles of women that accompanied them were a 'culture' that I could say is hard to glimpse offhand in the East. The second reason is that, through Levin, I found a 'model' of a person who 'devotes' himself to some endeavor. It seems like all I have to do is be just like this character. I believe that Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina'—which wasn't first noticed in Russia, but became known to everyone through world literature—will be ceaselessly rediscovered. Of course there's already a sufficient amount of research papers, but because this novel is still attractive, beautiful, and gives me stimulation.