Read "The Bright Book of Life" by Harold Bloom online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
I CANNOT REREAD Anna Karenina, particularly in the eloquent translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, without becoming unnerved. It is upsetting because Tolstoy's vitalism drives me to ask questions I cannot answer. Anna Karenina can be called the novel of the drives, since no other narrative centers so fully upon its protagonist's being so swept away by her will to live that almost nothing else matters to her. Anna's love for Vronsky has its rivals in Western literature, but I can recall no similar representation of erotic passion quite so intense. Tolstoy explains nothing about Anna's object-choice to us, whether in idealizing or in reductive terms. What he does show us, with overwhelming persuasiveness, is that there is no choice involved. Anna, vital and attractive in every way, is someone with whom most male readers of the novel fall in love, and Tolstoy clearly loves her almost obsessively. He would not have said that he was Anna, but she resembles something in him, a pulsation more intimate than Levin, his ostensible surrogate, can share.
Why does Anna kill herself? Would we find it as plausible if a contemporary Anna emulated her? Could there be a contemporary Anna? The questions may reduce to: Why did Tolstoy kill her? Did he mean to punish her? I think not. Anna's suicide saddens us, but it also relieves us from shared suffering. Doubtless it relieved Tolstoy also, who was suffering with her. Other legitimate questions would be: How would Schopenhauer have received Anna's death? Is it a heroic release, or a failure in endurance?