“Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

This is the first book in a long time that I have given a reread. On a second read, it did not disappoint. I was tempted to give another translation a whirl, but who are we kidding? Pevear and Volokhonsky might not be as unanimously praised for their Tolstoy as their Dostoyevsky, but they are still the gold standard. At heart, this is a story of a society bound by conservatism, tradition, and honor. The plot also relates how the Russian aristocracy acts and reacts to those who do not know their place and push the bounds of polite company’s limits. “Vronsky’s life was especially fortunate in that he had a code of rules which unquestionably defined everything that ought and ought not to be done. The code embraced a very small circle of conditions, but the rules were unquestionable and, never going outside that circle, Vronsky never hesitated a moment in doing what ought to be done…. These rules might not all be very reasonable or very nice, but they were unquestionable.”

Tolstoy is also telling a love story, or, in fact, two love stories, two very different stories, though intimately intertwined. “As a bachelor, seeing the married life of others, their trifling cares, quarrels, jealousy, he used only to smile scornfully to himself. In his own future married life, he was convinced, there not only could be nothing like that, but even all its external forms, it seemed to him, were bound to be in every way completely unlike other people’s lives. And suddenly, instead of that, his life with his wife did not form itself in any special way, but was, on the contrary, formed entirely of those insignificant trifles he had scorned so much before, but which now, against his will, acquired an extraordinary and irrefutable significance. And Levin saw that to arrange all those trifles was by no means as easy as it had seemed to him before.”

Living up to society’s moral codes and hypocrisies was even harder for a noblewoman. “Abstractly, theoretically, she not only justified but even approved of what Anna had done. Weary of the monotony of a moral life, as irreproachably moral women in general often are, she not only excused criminal love from a distance but even envied it. Besides, she loved Anna from the heart. But in reality, seeing her among these people she found so alien, with their good tone that was so new to her, she felt awkward…. In general, abstractly, Dolly approved of what Anna had done, but to see the man for whose sake she had done it was unpleasant for her. Besides, she had never liked Vronsky.” Anna, speaking to Levin, shall get the last word herself, “Tell your wife that I love her as before, and if she cannot forgive me my situation, I wish her never to forgive me. In order to forgive, one must have lived through what I have lived through, and may God spare her that.”