Tolstoy Counts the Cost

Anna Karenina opens by asserting that happy families are all alike and that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and then spends nine hundred pages complicating it.

The plot everybody remembers is Anna's. She is married to Karenin, a senior official who is cold, correct and not cruel. She meets Vronsky, falls in love with a completeness that the novel takes entirely seriously, and leaves. She loses her son, her position in society, and eventually her life.

The plot most readers forget occupies roughly half the book. Konstantin Levin proposes to Kitty, is refused, works his estate, proposes again, marries her, and builds something slowly. It is unglamorous, it involves a great deal of arguing about agriculture, and it is the novel's other answer to the same question.

The two plots are the argument. Tolstoy sets a love chosen against everything beside a love assembled patiently, and refuses to make either one look easy or obviously right.

What destroys Anna is the part to be precise about, because it is usually misread.

It is not the affair, and it is not passion as such. Vronsky commits the identical act and faces almost no consequence. He remains in society, keeps his position, and continues to be received. The punishment is applied to one of the two participants, and Tolstoy puts that asymmetry in the foreground rather than leaving it as background.

So the novel's claim is not that Anna wanted too much. It is that the cost of a love is not set by the love. It is set by the arrangements surrounding it, and those arrangements are not natural facts; they are a set of decisions a society has made and could make differently.

That is why the book is more useful than its reputation as a cautionary tale. Tolstoy declines both available morals. He will not say that passion is worth any price, because he shows what the price was. He will not say Anna was wrong to want more than she had, because he shows her perception of her own marriage to be accurate.

The first sentence does not survive the novel either. Levin's happiness, when it arrives, is specific, effortful and unlike anybody else's, full of doubt and unresolved argument with himself about God and farming and whether he deserves any of it. If that is happiness, then happy families differ from each other as much as unhappy ones do, and the famous opening is a hypothesis the book is about to test rather than a truth it is announcing.

Read this beside Austen and the pairing is exact. Austen writes about the arithmetic before marriage and Tolstoy writes about the arithmetic afterwards. Both of them are describing a structure that decides in advance what a feeling is going to cost, and both of them are more interested in the structure than in the feeling.

The difference is that Austen's characters can, with luck and accuracy, find a place to stand inside the structure. Anna cannot, and the novel knows it from the first page.