"Anna Karenina" WHY DOES ANNA HAVE TO DIE?

(20) Why Does Anna Have to Die?

Readers and critics have been debating this question ever since the novel was written, and will continue to debate it for as long as great literature lasts. Early on in their relationship Vronsky says to Anna, "There's a way out of every situation" (p. 200), but it seems there is no way out for Anna. The very artistic structure of the book has her doomed from the moment she first meets Vronsky.

Many readers and critics blame Tolstoy for Anna's relentless and inexorable path to perdition.The old man's fear and hatred of women (so they say), and, especially, of human sexuality is to blame. As one critic. Edward Wasiolek, has written, "Tolstoy sees sex as a massive intrusion on a person's being and a ruthless obliteration of the sanctity of personhood." Tolstoy's "views on sex were already extreme at the time he wrote "Anna Karenina;" they are bizarre today" (Wasiolek, Tolstoy, p. 154-55).

Among those shouting most vociferously in condemnation of Tolstoy's conservative morals was another Anna, the poet Anna Akhmatova: "Why should Anna have to be killed? As soon as she leaves Karenin. . . .  she suddenly becomes a fallen woman in Tolstoy's eyes, a traviata, a prostitute. Of course, there are pages of genius, but the basic morality is disgusting. . . .  Tolstoy is lying: he knew better than that. The morality of "Anna Karenina" is the morality of Tolstoy's wife, of his Moscow aunts" (cited in Isaiah Berlin, Personal Impressions, Viking Press, 1980).

I guess the big question here is whether the author's sense of aesthetics is hijacked in the writing of this novel by his moralistic impulses. In other words, is the novel ruined artistically by Tolstoy's insistence that Anna must die? Does Tolstoy prod her on to her death, or is her death motivated by the artistic logic of the composition. I think the latter.

It is made clear, time and again, that Anna's spirit is broken when she is ostracized by the corrupt society to which she belongs. She is stuck in a kind of limbo; her situation is undefined, and she is forced to live in this in-between for years. She is guilty over leaving her son Seryozha, she judges herself harshly, as "an immoral worthless woman."

Furthermore, in contrasting the Kitty-Lyovin relationship throughout the book to that of Anna-Vronsky, Tolstoy's main point seems to be that a marriage based almost solely on passionate physical attraction must inevitably self-destruct over time. World literature from time out of mind has dealt with the eros-thanatos business, the way that sexual ecstasy and death are boon companions. Suicide has been associated with romantic passionate love ever since passionate love has existed. So insisting that "Anna does not have to die" strikes me as somewhat ingenuous.

I believe that a good place to begin, for anyone setting out to read Tolstoy's greatest novel "Anna Karenina," is with a quotation from Rebecca West's masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.This passage could even serve as an epigraph to Tolstoy's novel:

"Only part of us is sane; only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us.The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations."

"Steal Like an Artist" TOLSTOY TO CHEKHOV TO BUNIN TO NABOKOV

In his Youtube video (see below for link)  Austin Kleon tells us something all artists have known since time out of mind: that art is not totally original, that it comes out of previous art.

"Nothing is original," says Kleon, and all artists are "creative kleptomaniacs."

If you want to become a creative writer, read creative literature. If you want to become a great creative writer read GREAT writers. Then write. Some twenty years later, if you are still reading great writers and still practicing your craft every day, you will become, maybe not a great, but probably at least a GOOD writer. This does not mean that you have plagiarized from the great artists. No, you have taken the creative coals from their fires and you have blown on those coals, and you have built your own fires upon those coals and your own breath.

Then again, if you are a feminist you may not want to read the great male writers, many of whom are, let's face it, quite often misogynists. So no problem: read Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Flannery O'Connor. But don't make the mistake of thinking that, e.g., To Kill a Mockingbird, is a great novel. As Flannery once said, "this is a children's book."


As for Russian literature, examples of creative artists as thieves are easy to find. Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina. Chekhov read and loved AK, and he wrote lots and lots of stories with heroines named Anna. Those stories were, while original, the creative offspring of Tolsoy's AK. One of them, "The Lady with the Dog," is one of Chekhov's most well-known stories. Bunin also loved AK, but he also read "The Lady with the Dog." His story "Sunstroke" comes, largely but not entirely, out of his reading of AK and "The Lady with the Dog." Nabokov read AK, loved it, but he also read Chekhov and Bunin. His story "Khvat," (in English translation, "A Dashing Fellow") is a brutal parody on Bunin's "Sunstroke." But this Nabokov story would also not have been written without the tacit participation of Tolstoy and Chekhov.

So it goes. At least so it goes in part. Given that any writer has read many many different things and has had a whole plethora of personal experiences to draw on, what finally comes out on the page cannot be ascribed totally to that writer's reading of only Tolstoy, or only Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Bunin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oww7oB9rjgw