If Life Could Write

A woman sits on a train trying to read a book.  Her mind wanders dangerously to thoughts of a man she shouldn't be thinking about.  The train gets hot and hotter until her surroundings blur from reality into a frightening dreamlike nightmare.  A fur cloak becomes a beast and returns to a cloak as she slides a paper knife slowly down her neck. A peasant is gnawing on a wall... or is he merely checking the temperature in the train?  Shapes and sounds swirl around her as she hears fearful shrieking and banging “as though someone were being torn to pieces.”  She feels as “though she is sinking down.  But it was not terrible, but delightful.”

The latest in late night television?  Some dark horror movie with an erotic bent?  Nope. Leo Tolstoy, my friends, drawing his readers into the mind and imagination of Anna as she begins her descent into her own desires and cravings.  Will they destroy her?  You’ll have to read the novel.  I can’t spoil it for you.  It is just too good.

Gary Morson, professor of Slavic languages at Northwestern and teacher of the class I’m auditing on Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, says that readers the world over have expressed that “if life could write directly, it would write like Tolstoy” (Morson, Anna Karenina in our Time).  He argues that Tolstoy’s way of understanding the world and the inner workings of people’s minds are “worth reconsidering so that , as Tolstoy intended, we learn to see the world, and our own lives, more wisely." 


Have you ever sat in a class with a teacher that is enthusiastic about a topic that you absolutely love?  It’s fun, isn’t it?  This is how I feel watching Morson pace back and forth in his blue sport coat and listening to him bring the characters off the page in his enthusiasm.

If you are interested in reading Anna Karenina  on your own or with a book club, consider buying Morson’s book Anna Karenina in our Time: Seeing More Wisely. I know this is crazy!  Read a 900 page novel and then another book about the novel?? Yes! Gary Morson’s course on Anna Karenina regularly enrolls 500-600 students and is the largest Slavic Lit class offered in America.  He is the only professor at Northwestern to hold both an endowed chair for research AND teaching.  He’s got some good stuff to say, folks.

Maybe you can get one copy and pass it around your book club.  Or maybe you could divide up the chapters and share with your group what you learned from specific chapters.  If you are on your own, skip his heady philosophical introduction and just read the SECOND chapter entitled “Dolly and Stiva: Prosaic Good and Evil” and the THIRD chapter “Anna and the Kinds of Love.”  These chapters will help you get more out of the novel and understand in a deeper way what Tolstoy is doing in crafting the character of Anna Karenina.  Then, skip to the end of Morson's book where he sums up his years of study in “163 Tolstoyan Conclusions.”  You won’t agree with everything he concludes, but I think it will enrich your reading.  Here are a few:

33.One can lie by looking and practice falsehood in silence.

44.We often describe actions as passions so as to avoid responsibility for them.

45.We sometimes choose to create situations in which something we wish for but know is wrong can happen “against our will.”

57.Marriage is not an idyll in which one simply “enjoys love.” It demands the constant work of knowing oneself and another as changing people in changing circumstances.

74.It is often when nothing special is happening that lives are being smashed.

84.We always know more than we know.

92.If life were essentially predictable, our hands would not have an inbuilt tremor and our minds would not wander.  Antelopes would have wheels and communism would work.

120.Real thinking, like real art, derives from serious reflection on finely observed experience.

142.When one senses the meaning of things, one cannot formulate it so that others will sense it...but one can tell a story...that story can help others to recognize when a similar process is taking place in themselves.

163.To understand life more deeply we must learn to see more wisely.

To close these thoughts on Anna Karenina I want to leave you with what I think is one of the most powerful passages in the book.  Tolstoy’s insight into what sin and shame feel like is profound.  What happens when sinful desire is fulfilled?  Read how Tolstoy describes two lovers whose elicit love becomes clouded with guilt as desire is fulfilled.

“Looking at him, she had a physical sense of her humiliation, and she could say nothing more. He felt what a murderer must feel when he sees the body he has robbed of life.  That body, robbed by him of life, was their love, the first stage of their love.  There was something awful and revolting in the memory of what had been bought at this fearful price of shame.  Shame at their spiritual nakedness crushed her and infected him.  But in spite of all the murderer’s horror before the body of his victim, he must hack it to pieces, hide the body, must use what he has gained by his murder.  And with fury, as it were with passion, the murderer falls on the body and drags it and hacks at it; so he covered her face and shoulders with kisses.  She held his hand, and did not stir.  ‘Yes, and one hand, which will always be mine-the hand of my accomplice.’ She lifted up that hand and kissed it.  He sank on his knees and tried to see her face; but she hid it, and said nothing” (Book 2, Chapter 11 Anna Karenina).

Yikes. If you weren't scared of sin before, maybe Tolstoy will change your mind.