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Anna Karenina: The Dialectic of Prophecy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
One of the most impressive features of Anna Karenina is the way in which Tolstoy draws the reader's imagination beyond the literal level of the narrative into generalizations that seem mythical in a manner difficult to articulate. With Dostoevsky or Melville, one sees immediately a propensity for exploiting the symbolic value of things. With Tolstoy, things try, as it were, to resist conversion: they strive to maintain their “thingness” as empirical entities. A character in Dostoevsky is usually only half man; the other half is Christ or Satan. Moby Dick is obviously only half whale; the other half is Evil or some principle of Nature. But Anna Karenina is emphatically Anna Karenina. Like almost all of Tolstoy's characters, she has a proficiency in the husbandry of identity; she jealously hoards her own unique reality, so that it becomes difficult to say of her that she is a “type” of nineteenth-century Russian lady or a “symbol” of modern woman or an “archetypical” Eve or Lilith.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1964
References
1 In Russian, there are only eight because of prepositional prefixes, as in the verb “bowed down:” ona vsya sgibalas—literally “she altogether was bowed down.” It is interesting that only the Garnett translation, among five that I compared, properly exhibits Tolstoy's rhetorical device. Except for certain changes in the transliteration of names, I have used this translation not only because of its general reliability but also its nineteenth-century flavor. Recent translators have probably erred by converting Tolstoy's language into the racier idiom of the twentieth century. Anna Karenina, tr. Constance Garnett (New York: Modern Library, n.d.). The definitive Russian text with variants and commentary is in volumes xviii–xx, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete Works] (Moscow, 1934–39).
2 Berlin: Aufbauverlag, 1955, pp. 104, 107–108.
3 Modern Science and the Nature of Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957), pp. 246–247. For the term “homeostasis,” biologists have recently substituted the more exact “homeokinesis.”
4 In What Then Must We Do (1886) Tolstoy made savage fun of Comte for contriving the analogy between “organism” and humanity. Comte “was struck by the old idea expressed long ago by Menenius Agrippa, that human societies and even all humanity may be regarded as one whole, as an organism, and men may be regarded as the living cells of separate organs each having its definite function in the service of the whole organism. This thought so pleased Comte that he began to construct a philosophic theory on it, and he was so carried away by this theory that he quite forgot that his starting-point was merely a nice little analogy, suitable in a fable but quite unsuitable for the foundation of a science.” Tr. A. Maude (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1935), pp. 240–241.
5 New York: Harper, 1947, p. 120.
6 “Anna Karenina: The Dialectic of Incarnation,” Kenyon Review, xii (Summer 1950), 433–456.
7 The origin of the epigraph is curious, as Professor N. K. Gudzii has shown. Tolstoy began using epigraphs in the fifth draft, and this one first appears in the abbreviated form (“Otmshchenie moyo”) evidently as he found it while reading the German text of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea. Later he converted the phrase into Church Slavonic and completed it “Mne otmshchenie, a Az vozdam.” “Istoriya pianiya i pechataniya Anny Karenenoi,” [History of the Writing and Printing of Anna Karenina], in Tolstoy's Complete Works, xx, 586–587.
8 Vie de Tolstoi (Paris: Librarie Hachette, 1928), p. 75.
9 Letopis zhizni i tvorchestvo L. N. Tolstovo, 1828–1890 (Moscow, 1958).
10 Counter-Statement (Los Altos: Hermes, 1953), pp. 45–46.
11 The Meaning of Beauty (London: Richards & Toulmin, 1929) pp. 5–6, 162, 164.
12 Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Critical Study (London: Martin Secker, 1916), p. 36.