I must confess my total and utter failure to enjoy Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel Anna Karenina (serialized 1875-1877 and printed in a single volume in 1878). I started with the customary patience I use when reading very long texts (1096 pages in my edition, the excellent 2000 translation by husband-and-wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky), but I totally lost it after part six, of eight. I still had then about 175 pages to go, which I mostly skipped, stopping only in the chapters narrating Anna’s tragic fate and her lover Vronsky’s desperate reaction.
What is the problem with Anna Karenina? Well, I have avoided all its TV and film adaptations and so I had no idea that this novel, excuse my ignorance, is a composite of two stories. It may be called Anna Karenina, but apart from narrating the adulterous affair between this sexually frustrated lady and charming Count Alexei Vronsky, Tolstoy uses about half of the novel to describe in tedious detail the life of his delegate in the text, the noble landowner and farmer Konstantin Levin, and his relationship with Princess Kitty Shcherbatsky, before and after their marriage. I was reminded a little bit of the two-tier narrative of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), with the stories of Amelia and Becky, and initially thought the novel should have been called something like Anna and Kitty or Two Women. Eventually, I concluded that Tolstoy is only truly interested in Levin and his paterno-religious crisis, which was the very boring part I mostly skipped (it also narrated something I half understood about elections within the nobility or something). I even believe now that the fated romance between Anna and Vronsky was just a decoy for Tolstoy to sell to readers Levin’s dull story, which is mostly autobiographical.
Famously, Anna Karenina begins with “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” the kind of sweeping statement that pleases readers and has them nod their heads in agreement, though it is actually nonsense. I found the novel a demonstration of the opposite: the European 19th century upper classes seem, the more I read novels in different languages, amazingly homogenous despite national differences. The families of that class are all made unhappy exactly for the same reason: their dependence on the acceptance of their social circle is so strong that any deviance leads to disaster. This dependence is, on its turn, conditioned by three main elements: social respectability, religious beliefs and, the great forgotten, legislation.
I wrote a while ago “An Overlooked Adulteress: Annabella’s Irresistible Passion In Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” (https://ojs.ual.es/ojs/index.php/RAUDEM/article/view/4092), an article in which I read this novel in the context of adultery fiction, a sort of subgenre extremely dependent on legislation for its verisimilitude. I’m quoting a chunk here, the next two paragraphs.
The new Matrimonial Causes Act, passed in 1857, nine years after the publication of Brontë’s novel, came to replace previous legislation which, basically, always privileged the husband. As Lawrence Stone explains (in Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987), from the 1760s onward, married couples who no longer loved each other could sign a private separation deal, with the husband ensuring out of pure good will the economic welfare, choice of residence, and personal freedom of the wife. Essentially, this is what Helen demands from Arthur in Tenant but these are the rights he denies her, not wishing to become an object of gossipy mockery in his neighbourhood and social circle. Stone adds that private deals still prevented both husband and wife from remarrying legally (this would constitute bigamy) and left the separated wife wholly in the hands of her husband. He could always sue her for “criminal conversation” (1990: 153) with another man, divorce her and turn her into a social pariah.
The 1857 legal reform enhanced the grounds for divorce and, most importantly, it took divorce away from the hands of the ecclesiastical Anglican courts of England, which were connected with civil legislation through the Doctors’ Commons or College of Civilians, where a young Dickens was employed as a reporter, to place it squarely within the domain of the civil courts. Divorce was, nonetheless, a hard to attain dispensation which could only be obtained in very limited circumstances; it was, besides, an extremely expensive procedure that required a Private Act of Parliament. In any case, most of the 314 divorces granted between 1700 and 1857 were instigated by husbands for, although both members of the couple could apply on the grounds of adultery, the wife’s plea had to be accompanied by proof of life-threatening cruelty, a stipulation which did not include psychological abuse of the kind Helen suffers in Brontë’s novel. Logically, whereas being caught in flagrant adultery had hardly any consequences for men (a wife could not even deny her husband his “conjugal rights” as Helen does), upper-class wives committing the same breach of matrimonial contract “were often tormented with guilt and shame” (Stone 1990: 339) and ruined by scandal. They could easily lose both lover and husband to “face total separation from all their children, severe financial hardship, loneliness, and social ostracism” (339).
Tolstoy’s 1860s-1870s Imperial Russia follows, essentially, the same legislation. Anna, who marries around age 18 a boring man twice her age (her aunt acts as matchmaker), finds herself passionately in love, around age 27, with Vronsky, a noble military officer a few years her junior. As a result of their affair, Anna, who already has an eight-year-old boy, Seryozha, gets pregnant, which precipitates the dramatic confession of her adulterous relationship to her husband, Count Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, a high-ranking government official in St. Petersburg who is not a particularly loving husband or father.
Here Anna’s troubles begin, for Karenin decides not to apply for a divorce, convinced that this would ruin Anna and himself socially to no avail. According to Russian legislation, Anna herself cannot divorce Karenin, as only the victim of adultery can do so (the other valid reasons for divorce were desertion, physical cruelty, or, this being Tzarist Russia, one spouse being sentenced to loss of rights and exile). When Karenin considers how he could obtain a divorce if he wished to do so, he stops himself right away as soon as he realises that the unavoidable public exposure of the case before a court of law would create a major scandal. No-fault divorce, in which no reason needs to be invoked by either partner, was introduced by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Later in the novel, Karenin adds to his socio-legal scruples new religious scruples, although the Orthodox Church is not in Tolstoy’s novel the immense influence it was in real-life Russia. The main point is that Anna can only divorce Karenin if he agrees to present himself falsely as the perpetrator of adultery which, of course, he is hardly willing to do, being chagrined (rather than hurt) by her behaviour. Taking advantage of the power that the laws grant him as a deceived husband, Karenin keeps Seryozha with him when Anna and Vronsky move temporarily to Italy, even telling the little boy that his mother is dead.
Anna, universally considered a fallen woman by her Moscow and St. Petersburg hypocritical social circle, is trapped between a rock and a hard place, as the Americans say: Karenin will not divorce her and she grows desperately jealous seeing how Vronsky, legally a single man, is not shunned as she is. Vronsky himself, also a Count and a richer man than Karenin as a landowner, can do nothing to free Anna and suffers, besides, the humiliation of seeing his daughter with Anna, little Annie, carry as her last name Karenina, for she is legally Karenin’s child. Ironically, when Anna commits suicide unable to see an end to her situation and Vronsky leaves for war in Serbia, where he presumably also dies, Karenin keeps Annie, whom he needs not even adopt, as she is legally his.
Anna Karenina is, arguably, a great novel and possibly the greatest novel on adultery before no-fault divorce, but read in 2025, in the context of free divorce, Tolstoy’s endless descriptions of the mental states of the persons involved in the triangle is irksome. I grant that even today, when the word ‘adultery’ is not so commonly used and ‘infidelity’ is preferred, stories about sexual triangles and marriage breakups have a certain appeal, despite no longer being a cause for scandal or only very exceptionally. Yet, there is a triteness in the theme that makes the modest language of the 19th century fiction particularly unbearable. Note that there are no sex scenes between Anna and Vronsky, though it is obvious that his appeal is sexual and that she discovers with him pleasure her husband is unable to provide and elicit. Funnily, instead of stressing Vronsky’s attractive, Tolstoy mentions a few times that the guy is stocky and balding, making strangely a point of always mentioning his straight, white teeth.
What amazes me in that in my years as a student, none of my teachers bothered to mention legislation as one of the main factors in 19th century realist narrative, beginning with the very basic fact that when a woman married she lost her citizenship to become part of her husband’s legal persona under coverture. Indeed, in cases of adultery, most European husbands (I assume that American, too) could sue their wife’s lover for damaged goods. If legislation is considered, and not only religious belief, social uses, or plain morality, 19th century fiction takes on a very different cast. In, for instance, Great Expectations, Dickens uses legislation abundantly to justify why Magwitch, a convict transported to Australia, cannot freely return to England, or why Pip loses Magwitch’s legacy as his designated heir when the man is arrested. You need to do a little bit of digging, though, to understand that Estella’s status as Miss Havisham’s adoptive daughter is quite unstable, and that it could have been contested at a court of law by the Pockett family, the adoptive mother’s cousins. We generally find legislation a sort of extra background element when actually tragedies like that of Anna Karenina are caused by restrictive laws, and not, as we surmise, by passion out of control.
The most extreme legal reform is, of course, revolution. Reading Anna Karenina, particularly Levin’s snobbish remarks against the muzhiks (or peasants) freed by Tzar Alexander II from serfdom only in 1861 (in parallel to Lincoln’s liberation of blacks from enslavement) and the legal consequences of that liberation, I felt cruelly happy that his class were swept away by the Bolsheviks. I was surprised that communism is mentioned by Tolstoy, not having realised that it was already present in 1860s Russia. It’s in many ways scary to see revolution lurking in the shadows, ready to do away with Imperial Russia, a feeling no minimally informed reader can miss. I’m no communist, but I understood with Anna Karenina why the Russian nobility elicited so much hatred, and what a miracle it was that communism didn’t extend to many more countries in Europe, though I’m sure that in 1877, when he started writing this novel, Tolstoy had no idea this was a sort of Götterdämmerung, and good riddance to them all.
Now, I dare a contemporary novelist to write a great literary novel about the current upper classes, perhaps centred on Jeff Bezos’s wedding in Venice last weekend and his guests. What an immense distance in feeling there is between Tolstoy’s characters, even the most trivial, and the current vanity fair! And poor Anna Karenina and the bloody stupid legislation!