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Updated: June 29, 2025
Now in the cultivation of the mind one of the most important factors is precisely the feeling of strain, of difficulty, of a task which one part of you is anxious to achieve and another part of you is anxious to shirk; and that feeling cannot be got in facing a novel. You do not set your teeth in order to read "Anna Karenina."
In the number of May 1877, Katkov printed a footnote to the instalment of the novel, which shows how little he understood its significance, although the majority of contemporary Russian critics understood the book no better than he. "In our last number, at the foot of the novel "Anna Karenina," we printed, 'Conclusion in the next issue. But with the death of the heroine the real story ends.
Behind walked Madame Karenina with her brother. Just as they were going out of the station the station-master overtook Vronsky. "You gave my assistant two hundred roubles. Would you kindly explain for whose benefit you intend them?" "For the widow," said Vronsky, shrugging his shoulders. "I should have thought there was no need to ask."
Society in St. Petersburg is very united, and Anna Karenina had very friendly relations with the gay world of fashion, with its dinner parties and balls. She met Vronsky at several of these brilliant reunions. He, deeply impressed with her, notwithstanding his connection with Kitty, went everywhere that he was likely to meet her, and her joy at meeting him easily betrayed itself in her eyes and her smile. And he did not refrain from actually making love to Anna on the occasions when they were able to engage in tête-
She took from her table a thick paper-backed volume, one of the "line" of paper novels the druggist kept to sell to traveling men. She had bought it, only yesterday, because the first sentence interested her very much, and because she saw, as she glanced over the pages, the magical names of two Russian cities. The book was a poor translation of "Anna Karenina."
Now, everything that she really wanted was impossible; a CANTABILE like Harsanyi's, for instance, instead of her own cloudy tone. No use telling her she might have it in ten years. She wanted it now. She wondered how she had ever found other things interesting: books, "Anna Karenina" all that seemed so unreal and on the outside of things.
I REMEMBER my father writing his alphabet and reading-book in 1871 and 1872, but I cannot at all remember his beginning "Anna Karenina." I probably knew nothing about it at the time. What did it matter to a boy of seven what his father was writing?
And, under the unsuspecting blouse of the humanitarian is the fine and perfumed linen of the dandy. Leo Tolstoy, the Beau Brummel of his corps in my father's day the dandy in domino to-day." Tolstoy the artist! When his vagaries are forgotten, when all his books are rags, when his very name shall be a vague memory, there will live the portrait of Anna Karenina.
So he can, at least, in general; for in Anna Karenina, as I said, his method seems to break down very conspicuously at a certain juncture. But before I come to that, I would dwell further upon this peculiar skill of Tolstoy's, this facility which explains, I think, the curious flaw in his beautiful novel.
Already, in "War and Peace" and in "Anna Karenina," his descriptions of female charms resembled catalogues of weapons against which a man must arm himself or perish.
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