If I believed in reincarnation, I told my former shrink at one of our last sessions, I’d say I was probably Russian in a former life. She laughed and said, I can see that (she had always tolerated this kind of quasi-serious flippancy from me, but then grilled me when I was glib).
I told her I was finally reading Anna Karenina, and she said she promised herself she never would, because Tolstoy was a misogynist asshole (my shrink is Russian-American, but was raised in a former USSR nation; her grandfather was in the Russian army. All this to say, she has some cred in this area). I told her I didn’t see that; that about a quarter of the way through the novel I could see what Tolstoy was trying to get at: that life is lived as individuals in the context of the multitude; that I thought he was actually sympathetic to women by plainly describing the circumstances in which they operated in “high society” (ie, no one could miss the double standards he wrote about vis a vis acceptable behaviour of men and women). There was also something about his writing, which wasn’t full of metaphors or analogies as much as the literal descriptions of events and intents (Anna “screwing up her eyes”, pretending to put away her rings to appear distracted; we know she is pretending because the narrator explicitly says so). It was nice to not have to guess all the time, or try to read between the lines. In its own simplistic way, it was floral enough. Also, it is through Kitty’s perspective that the ball, where Vronsky and Anna fall in love, is described. That was an interesting stylistic choice. I love that section.
But, I mean, the novel is still eight parts and almost a thousand pages long (I have the Vintage Classics version with the 1918 translation from the Maudes). So it still took me about two months to finish the thing (in my naivete I thought I would finish it and War and Peace over the holiday period – HAHA). And towards the end, knowing how it would go, I found myself wishing for her to just get it over with – do the thing that AK is known for, which is for Anna to jump in front of the train and end the misery she found herself in. Not that I didn’t feel any sympathy for her – I understood her descent into depression and madness. It was more like, in a way I acknowledge how suicide must have seemed the most attractive option for her to deal with things (don’t kill yourself kids, it’s not 19th century Russia anymore). Vronsky, who towards the latter half of the novel, is the subject of chapters less and less, becomes more and more of a mystery, a manix pixie dream bro. Who the hells knows, towards the end when Anna slowly becomes unhinged, what the fuck that guy was thinking. Was he really cheating on Anna? Did he still care? I found myself in the same miasma of uncertainty as Anna: was she being gaslit, or was it more evidence of Anna’s disintegrating mental health? It wasn’t an abusive 1:1 relationship the way that, say, Andrew and Kelly’s is on Bling Empire. But in the way that Karenin refused to grant her a divorce on the advice of some dodgy “clairvoyant”, in how she couldn’t even attend a concert in peace, even the way that Princess Betsy, who encouraged the scandal, disavowed her friendship with Anna. It was kind of an abusive relationship between Russian high society and women of a certain standing. I could feel that weight, and I think most women would have been able to relate, or at least extrapolate their own personal experiences, to grasp how that could have felt like. The number of times I have also felt that things were beyond my control given the hand I was dealt; and the temptation of wrestling some of that control back? Countless.
If it’s your (mis)fortune to be married to a pedantic, righteous civil servant older than you, then maybe it’s your fate to fall in love with a younger, impressionable officer. But there is always a price to pay. If it’s your sister’s fortune to be married to the kind of guy whose sole mode is “life of the party, come hell or high water”, then maybe it’s your fate to instead find love and solace in the quiet, questioning determination of a country gentleman. That doesn’t come free either. AK the novel is about a lot of things to a lot of people, but to me it was about looking at your fortunes and trying to figure out, or eke out, what your fate is. It’s like everyone got their palms read for a fee, and did what they could with the information that they had.
Speaking of fate versus fortune, this weekend I was told by a high school classmate that he had a crush on me, all those years ago. It was like a virtual mini homecoming with a few other former classmates. It was early morning PH time, and alcohol was definitely involved. I wasn’t even in the call, but one of my best friends messaged me to say the thing was going on and there was what she called “a phone in question” for me. Who wouldn’t be intrigued by that shit? When I logged in, TX asked me if I would ever had gone out with him, if he had ever fessed up. I was somewhat surprised, but mostly amused – how do you answer a moot hypothetical from 25 years ago? How much serious thought is required? It lay somewhere between the life-or-death dramaturgy with which 15 year olds take their lovelives, and the alternating mundanity and ennui of married adults entering their 40s. Somewhere in the back of my mind, sliding doors opened and closed. It might have been nice to have gone out with this guy, instead of the Napoleon complex that constantly pawed at me. But then here I am now, 11 thousand miles away or whatever, to a small extent because of the trauma of the pawer (middling to terrible boyfriends, along with an almost pathological family history of repressing your feelings, made it easier to distance myself from everything I’d ever known).
And that’s the thing about AK. Your story is yours but also not just your own. Everyone’s fortunes and fates are ensconced in each other’s. The only way to avoid is to run away – Anna is in the train station in the end for this reason – or to die. Or you can dive in head first and call it love, as Levin and Kitty do, and deal with it like most humans. This dude from my class, his inaction was action in itself that set my trajectory to a certain path. I’m sure you can think up of a million other examples yourself, of something you said or didn’t say, or do or didn’t do. To me, we’re all characters in some extremely long and long-winded, sometimes infuriatingly tedious, occassionally couldn’t-make-this-shit-up, trudgy-ass novel of our lives. Only, we write it ourselves, together.
doloresappreciationsociety 