Study Guide to Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781645423072
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, which he claimed as his first true novel despite having written several before it. As an 1877 realist novel, Anna Karenina follows a Russian wife in the midst of a love affair, who risks all she has for a lover. Moreover, Tolstoy discusses the betrayal by weaving in themes such as forgiveness, social class, and jealousy. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Tolstoy’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO LEO TOLSTOY

THE LIFE AND CAREER OF LEO TOLSTOY

Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born on August 28, 1828, on his father’s estate of estate of Yasnaya Polyana, in the Province of Tula, Russia. The Tolstoys were a family of the old Russian nobility who served the Czars and ruled the Empire. He was a count who was raised in a large family in the best tradition of the nobility. He was orphaned by the time he was nine, and his education was taken over by an aunt. Tolstoy entered the University of Kazan in 1844, where he studied oriental languages and later law, but he left in 1847 without receiving a degree.

In his youth Tolstoy led the usual easy-going life of young men of his class - lighthearted and full of pleasure seeking. However, as his diary reveals, he was incapable of completely indulging himself in this kind of existence. He began at an early age to try to find a rational and moral justification of life - this quest remained the dominant force of his mind throughout his life and career.

In 1851, Tolstoy enlisted in the army as a volunteer and served until 1854, fighting guerrilla tribesmen in the Caucasus. Later, he served as an officer during the Crimean campaign, and was involved in the siege of Sevastopol. His Sevastopol Stories appeared while the siege was still on.

He began his literary career with stories of reminiscence: Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854), and Youth (1856). These stories gained him his first fame and he was welcomed by the literary circles of Petersburg and Moscow. But Tolstoy was too much of an aristocrat to like these semi-Bohemian intelligentsia, whom he considered self-consciously plebian. In turn, they disliked his superior attitude. They could not appreciate the experimental value of his later works, so his association with the literary world was quite short-lived.

The years 1856-61 were divided between Petersburg, Moscow, Yasnaya, and foreign countries. His travels to Europe left him disgusted with the materialistic values of the bourgeois civilization. In 1859 he started a school for peasant children at Yasnaya and wrote a primer, graded reader, and arithmetic book, which had an enormous circulation. In 1860 he was profoundly affected by the death of his brother Nicholas (who appears as Nikolai in Anna Karenina). This was Tolstoy’s first encounter with the inevitability of death.

In 1862, he married Sophie Andreyevna Behrs. Tolstoy married her when she was eighteen and he was thirty-four. He had known her as a child and at one point had been practically engaged to one of her sisters. She was the loveliest of the daughters of Dr. Behrs, a prominent and highly successful physician. Tolstoy had made a point of not marrying into his own social class, because he had lost respect for it after a dashing and dissolute youth as a wealthy Barine (baron). By the time of his marriage, Tolstoy was no longer living in the big mansion at Yasnaya Polyana, because a series of high escapades and various army posts had left him in debt. He had been forced to sell it for the value of the bricks and other building materials.

The “little” white house at Yasnaya Polyana where Tolstoy brought his wife the day after the wedding was soon too small for the growing family. (The Tolstoys had a total of thirteen children.) Tolstoy kept adding wings and extensions. Tolstoy had to send for an English governess eventually. This situation was difficult for the young mother, who did not know English. However, her fluency in other languages proved a boon. Yasnaya Polyana was a multilingual center. The senior Tolstoys, like many of the Russian nobility, spoke a great deal of French together, and they knew Russian and German as well. Besides the footmen, the coppersmith who made and repaired samovars, the cook and the cook’s son, the stablemen, the grooms, the shepherds, the agents, and the laundress, there was the favorite Alexei, the writer’s personal servant who had been with Tolstoy ever since he and his brother were orphaned.

In addition to the permanent residents, there was always a conglomeration of relatives on long visits. (We are reminded of Dolly’s visits to Levin in Anna Karenina.) Visitors came frequently for special entertainments and amateur theatricals.

In the winter there were fancy dress balls which were less sophisticated than similar parties in St. Petersburg or Moscow. Regardless of the demands of his writing, there were periods when Tolstoy would sit down for three hours a day and play the piano. Other times he would steal time, and rescue the children from their studies to teach them to ride bareback. Summers, the family would take short trips on foot or in carts to bathing spots. At harvest time, Tolstoy would spend the whole day in the fields where he would take his place in the line of reapers. The other nobles of the area criticized him strongly for this. In Anna Karenina there are several scenes where Levin (Tolstoy) participates in the work of the farm. There are also hunting scenes. Tolstoy could not forego a chance to go bird hunting when an old friend, brother, or guest came down for a shoot.

Amid the flurry of activity with the estate and his growing family, Tolstoy created two gigantic literary masterpieces. The peculiarities of his art are most spectacularly revealed in War and Peace, the creation of which took seven years (1862-8). It is a historical novel on a grandiose scale, unfolding the panorama of European events between 1805 and 1814, giving a detailed picture of Napoleon’s campaign in Russia in 1812.

Anna Karenina, a novel of family life and contemporary manners, began in 1873. The first installments appeared in 1875, and the publication of the novel was completed in 1877. Anna Karenina leads up to the moral and religious crisis that was to revolutionize Tolstoy’s entire life. Before he began to write it, he had already been thinking about new artistic methods - abandoning the psychological and analytical manner of superfluous detail and discovering a simpler narrative style that could be applied not only to the sophisticated and corrupt educated classes, but to the undeveloped mind of the people. Tolstoy’s writings after 1880 are divided by a deep cleft from all his earlier work. By 1880 his so-called “conversion” was complete. He was no longer interested in producing literature, but in conveying a moral and religious message. He now preached a primitive Christianity purged of ritual, church organization, and priesthood. The important thing was that men should love one another. In My Confession (1879), he described his personal “transformation,” a kind of mystic fervor combined with a glorifying of work. In What Is to Be Done? (1884), he attacked the evils of money and the life of the leisured and professional classes. In What is Art? (1897), he denounced art for art’s sake, attacked many of the world’s greatest writers, and insisted on religion and social purpose as the test of all art. He rejected his own greatest works. But he continued to write fiction, The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), a study of jealousy and a diatribe against sexual education of young men and women, and Resurrection (1899), a long novel which reflected his negative attitude toward society.

After his conversion, Tolstoy became increasingly identified with religious populism - union and communion with working people as the moral and religious solution to all problems. He became alienated from his wife and children, who considered him an eccentric mystic. He renounced his own class, turned vegetarian, reduced his material needs to a minimum, and even renounced his copyrights. This religious populism ran parallel to the revolutionary social populism of the radical intelligentsia in Russia, which led to the downfall of Czarism just seven years after his death. Tolstoy caught pneumonia and died at Ostapovo, an obscure railroad station, on November 20, 1910. He was buried at Yasnaya Polyana.

THE WRITING OF ANNA KARENINA

The novel was slow in its conception and even slower in being written. Tolstoy, not long after the publication of War and Peace, which put him in the limelight of world literature, had an idea to write a novel about a woman in high society who deceives her husband. But he soon discovered that being a well-known figure was time-consuming. His correspondence was great. He was still a wealthy count with an estate to manage. His old interest in education did not flag. Accordingly, it was three years later, in 1873, when he really started on Anna Karenina. Another three years passed, and in December, 1876, Tolstoy’s wife wrote to her sister, “We are at last writing Anna Karenina as it should be written; that is without interruption. Full of energy, concentrated, Lyovochka (the endearing diminutive name for Leon, Leo, or Lev) adds a whole chapter each day while I recopy as fast as my fingers can write; at this present, while I am writing to you, the pages of my letter cover the pages of the chapter he wrote yesterday. . . .”

One must smile at her writing “without interruption.” This amazing couple had thirteen children by 1888. Sophie, who copied War and Peace several times and went through all the drafts of Anna Karenina, once wrote that she was either pregnant or nursing the entire time. Sergei, Tolstoy’s oldest son, has given us a clear picture of life at Yasnaya Polyana during the time when his father was writing Anna Karenina. His book, Tolstoy Remembered, was not translated into English and published (London) until 1961, more than fifty years after the great writer had died. Sergei’s record of their life at this time is an expansive kaleidoscope of people, making one appreciate the skill with which Tolstoy wove so many of them into his writing, particularly in Anna Karenina.

The hint of bitterness that was to dominate much of Tolstoy’s later writing is beginning to be evident in Anna Karenina. In the same sense there are indications of Tolstoy’s religious “conversion,” which possibly brought him more fame than War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The last chapters of Anna Karenina, we must remember, were written much later than the first. Tolstoy, who was famous for his many corrections and revisions, always regretted that he had started to put the opening books of Anna Karenina into print before the end was written. To be sure, he had outlined it in full detail nearly a year in advance of his agreement with the Russian Herald for serial rights.

Life had done much to change the author’s viewpoint between February 1870, when he spoke of writing about “a woman who is married in high society, but who ruins herself,” and January 1875, when the first installment appeared. For one thing, a close neighbor, Anna Pirogova, committed suicide by throwing herself under a train in June, 1872. In mid-May, 1873 he put aside the draft to take time to visit Samara (the second estate he owned) where the suffering of the Bashkirs as a result of drought aroused his sympathy; he raised nearly two million rubles and provided over 750,000 pounds of wheat for their relief.

In that same year, in November, he lost the first of his infant children. (He was to lose two more in as many years after.) The death of the eighteen-month-old Peter had a very sobering effect on the course of his authorship. He wrote, “One may take consolation in the fact that if one had to choose one of us eight, this death is the easiest of all and for all to bear; but a heart, especially that of a mother, is a wonderful manifestation of the Divinity on earth, it does not reason, so my wife is much stricken.”

His sorrow was converted into a drive to work. He worked with extreme intensity. When he went back to Anna Karenina, he little realized how much work there was ahead of him. As a result of his laborious productive effort, he slumped off as soon as the opening pages were in print. The reviewers were enthusiastic but he claimed he was disgusted and bored. Instead of a further work cure, he took the summer off and went to Samara where he not only bought horses, but, to the delight of the Bashkirs, organized horse races. Sometimes a thousand tribesmen watched a single race.

Back home in the fall, his wife became gravely ill, giving birth prematurely to a little girl who lived only long enough to be christened. The next month, the old aunt who had brought him up died. Her death had the effect of regarding Tolstoy’s evolution towards faith. The old lady had gone to her death, fearing and fighting it. To the end she maintained a lack of humility and insubordination to the will of God. Undoubtedly this attitude of hers affected Tolstoy’s account of Nikolai’s death. In February 1876, after the beginning, but before the completion of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote; “I do not believe in anything that religion teaches us to believe in; yet at the same time I not only hate and scorn unbelief, I cannot see any possibility of living without faith, much less dying without one. So I am gradually building up my beliefs but they are all, even if firm, still very indefinite, lacking in distinctness and the capacity for consolation.”

A month before this, he had written to his brother: “Nothing is left in life but to die. I feel this constantly.” This reminds us of the scene where Levin speaks of “hiding the rope.”

Although My Confession was not published until 1879, it is unquestionable that Tolstoy was going through a religious evolution during the writing of Anna Karenina. Because Tolstoy asks, through the mouths of so many characters, the eternal questions of all ages, the popularity of Anna Karenina continues.

TOLSTOY THE EDUCATOR

In addition to his educational work with peasants mentioned earlier, Tolstoy also spent a great deal of time on his children’s education. He read to them regularly. He taught them mathematics, for which he devised a new method of multiplying. This system is similar to the contemporary “new math,” now popularly called the “base five” concept. Instruction in the languages became the mother’s province. Later, a German tutor was hired for the boys. Even so, Tolstoy took a hand especially when they participated in local exams. At one time he learned Greek to help his oldest son but became so interested in the Greek way of life that he altered many of his own viewpoints. These alterations are reflected in Anna Karenina.

While working on Anna Karenina, Tolstoy went ahead with the educational book, The Alphabet. He had tried setting up a school for the peasants at Yasnaya Polyana. He experimented with the Lancaster method. One winter his older children were entrusted with the education of the peasant children, who came to the house where they crowded the rooms and halls. Regardless of the shrieks and laughter the experiment was considered successful. In 1862, he published a pedagogical magazine, Yasnaya Polyana, in which he shocked his readers by contending that it was not intellectuals who should teach peasants, but vice versa.

TOLSTOY AND THE PEASANTS

From his childhood until his death, Tolstoy always saw agricultural work as man’s means of providing all his needs. The theme of work is dominant in Tolstoy, particularly in Anna Karenina. Because of the influence of German medicine in Russia, Tolstoy took up the name Arbeitskur (Labor Cure). He felt that physical exercise insured a healthy body and a healthy mind. Tolstoy himself enjoyed good health. Even when he was “sick” after a long winter of indoor study, writing, and waiting on ailing children and a tire-out wife, he took a K...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1) Introduction to Leo Tolstoy
• 2) Textual Analysis
• 3) Character Analyses
• 4) Critical Commentary
• 5) Essay Questions and Answers
• 6) Bibliography
• 7) Annotated Bibliography