Read-along – Anna Karenina (1 of 14)

Part One, Chapters 1-23 – and Nabokov on Time

Dear Anna Karenina readers,

We’ve read the first instalment! How are you finding it? Petya K. Grady mentioned our read-along in her newsletter yesterday: Petya is reading Anna Karenina and finding it weirder, hornier and funnier than she was expecting. How about you? Please do share your thoughts and reactions as comments below. Here are mine:

And then I’m looking forward to discussing the second instalment next month!

On Friday 28th February we will discuss Part One, Chapters 24-34 and Part Two, Chapters 1-11. (For reference, the full schedule is here.)

These chapters comprised Tolstoy’s second instalment of Anna Karenina, which was published 150 years ago in the February 1875 edition of the Russian Messenger.

---

This month I’ve also been reading – at John Leman Riley’s suggestion – Vladimir Nabokov’s Lecture on Anna Karenina, delivered at Wellesley College in the 1940s and later published by Harcourt Brace in Lectures on Russian Literature (1980).

It’s a great appreciation of the novel by a great twentieth-century Russian novelist. It covers all of Anna Karenina – so hold off reading the whole thing if you want to avoid spoilers – but I did want to share a few excerpts with you.

Below are Nabokov’s descriptions of some of the key characters – as well as three portraits, all of which have come to be associated with the character of Anna Karenina.

‘Portrait of an Unknown Woman’ (1883) by Ivan Kramskoi

Anna

One of the most attractive heroines in international fiction, Anna is a young, handsome, and fundamentally good woman, and a fundamentally doomed woman. Married off as a very young girl by a well-meaning aunt to a promising official with a splendid bureaucratic career, Anna leads a contented life within the most sparkling circle of St. Petersburg society. She adores her little son, respects her husband who is twenty years her senior, and her vivid, optimistic nature enjoys all the superficial pleasures offered her by life. When she meets Vronsky on a trip to Moscow, she falls deeply in love with him. This love transforms everything around her; everything she looks at she sees in a different light. [. . .] Anna is not just a woman, not just a splendid specimen of womanhood, she is a woman with a full, compact, important moral nature: everything about her character is significant and striking, and this applie[s] as well to her love.

‘Portrait of a Young Woman’ (1885) by Aleksey Kolesov

Levin & Vronsky

Levin, in whom more than in any other of his male characters Tolstoy has portrayed himself, is a man of moral ideals, of Conscience with a capital C. Conscience gives him no respite. Levin is very different from Vronsky. Vronsky lives only to satisfy his impulses. Vronsky, before he meets Anna, has lived a conventional life: even in love, Vronsky is content to substitute for moral ideals the conventions of his circle. But Levin is a man who feels it his duty to understand intelligently the surrounding world and to work out for himself his place within it. Therefore Levin’s nature moves on in constant evolution, spiritually growing throughout the novel, growing toward those religious ideals which at the time Tolstoy was evolving for himself.

‘Anna Karenina’ (1904) by Heinrich Matvejevich Maniser

The Oblonskys

Around these main characters a number of others move. Stepan Oblonsky, Anna’s lighthearted good-for-nothing brother; his wife Dolly, born Shcherbatskaya, a kindly, serious, long-suffering woman, in a way one of Tolstoy’s ideal women, for her life is selflessly devoted to her children and to her shiftless husband; there is the rest of the Shcherbatsky family, one of Moscow’s old aristocratic families; Vronsky’s mother; and a whole gallery of people of St. Petersburg high society. Petersburg society was very different from the Moscow kind, Moscow being the kindly, homey, flaccid, patriarchal old town, and Petersburg the sophisticated, cold, formal, fashionable, and relatively young capital where some thirty years later I was born.

---

I also love what Nabokov has to say about the passing of time in Anna Karenina:

He is the only writer I know of whose watch keeps time with the numberless watches of his readers. All the great writers have good eyes, and the “realism,” as it is called, of Tolstoy’s descriptions, has been deepened by others; and though the average Russian reader will tell you that what seduces him in Tolstoy is the absolute reality of his novels, the sensation of meeting old friends and seeing familiar places, this is neither here nor there. Others were equally good at vivid description. What really seduces the average reader is the gift Tolstoy had of endowing his fiction with such time-values as correspond exactly to our sense of time. It is a mysterious accomplishment which is not so much a laudable feature of genius as something pertaining to the physical nature of that genius. This time balance, absolutely peculiar to Tolstoy alone, is what gives the gentle reader that sense of average reality which he is apt to ascribe to Tolstoy’s keen vision. Tolstoy’s prose keeps pace with our pulses, his characters seem to move with the same swing as the people passing under our window while we sit reading his book.

---

I hope you enjoy the next instalment! I look forward to discussing it with you on Friday 28th February.

---

For reference, here are links to our previous Anna Karenina posts:

• The Schedule (18 December 2024)

• Leo Tolstoy (3 January 2025)

• 0. Introductions (10 January 2025)

---

And if you’re not planning to read Anna Karenina with us, remember you can choose to opt out of our conversation. Just follow this link to your settings and, under Notifications, slide the toggle next to ‘Anna Karenina’. A grey toggle means you will not receive emails relating to this title.