Anna Karenina Essay Example For Students

Anna Karenina Essay The world of Tolstoyquot;s Anna Karenina is a world ruled by chance. From the very opening chapters, where a watchman is accidentally run over by a train at Moscowquot;s Petersburg station, to the final, climactic scenes of arbitrary destruction when Levin searches for Kitty in a forest beset by lightning, characters are brought together and forced into action against their will by coincidence and, sometimes, misfortune. That Anna and Vronsky ever meet and begin the fateful affair that becomes the centerpiece of the novel is itself a consequence of a long chain of unrelated events: culminating Annaquot;s sharing a berth with Vronskyquot;s mother on her way to reconcile Dolly and Stiva in Moscow. And yet, as an epigraph to this seemingly chaotic world of chance event, a seemingly amoral world that would seem to neither punish sin nor reward good, Tolstoy chooses a quotation that comes originally from the book of Deuteronomyquot;s song of Moses: Vengeance is mine; I will repay. Originally and somewhat narrowly thought to refer to Annaquot;s final ostracism from the upper echelons of society that punish her for her misdeeds, the epigraph is the key to Tolstoyquot;s subtle and philosophically complex conception of morality that denies the existence of a universal and unavoidable justice and derives responsibility from the individualquot;s freedom to create and then bind himself to laws. Three of the novelquot;s characters, Stephen Oblonsky, Constatine Levin, and Anna Karenina, all in some way connected to the Shcherbatsky family, serve to illustrate the various ways that Tolstoyquot;s individual can be, or fail to be, good, the various ways in which a character can be moral, immoral or amoral through the use of thought, or reason, to create necessity outside of the confused demands of a chaotic reality. Tolstoyquot;s world is indeed a servant to chance, and the plot depends so heavily on coincidence that Anna Karenina, taking into account the many elements of Menippian satire and Socratic dialogue that are integrated into its structure, may well be considered in part a carnival novel. The steeplechase scene during which Vronsky breaks Frou-Frouquot;s back is a perfect example of carnivalism the tragic yet somehow slapstick and cartoon-like injuries that befall the riders is a parody of the grand battlefield that the steeplechase is supposed to symbolize and the crowds of observers present provide the necessary public square that Bakhtin outlines as necessary for the second key property of carnivalism, free and familiar contact among people, at the racecourse occasioned by the terrible accidents that generate a swarm of rumors that pass between the spectators regardless, for once, of class and gender in the excitement of the event, Tolstoy writes, Annaquot;s shriek of fear at the precise moment of Vronskyquot;s upset passes the notice of those surrounding her usually so keen to find something inappropriate in Annaquot;s relation to Vronsky. Bakhtinquot;s theory of carnivalism, however, only goes so far in characterizing Tolstoyquot;s prose, and even though the reliance on chance as generator of events continues, the solipsistic mode of self-analysis and interpersonal distance returns almost immediately after the race is over and as the novel continues, becomes the dominant mode of ideological presentation so key to the essence of Annaquot;s relationship to Vronsky and to her reasons for suicide. Stephen Oblonsky, the first character we encounter in the novel, is at home in the turbulent and unstructured world that Tolstoy depicts, and lives at ease with the often meaningless turns of fate that occur to him and others. You wish all the facts of life to be consistent, but they never are, he says to Levin in Part I. You want the activity of each separate man to have an aim, and love and family life always to coincide and that doesnquot;t happen either. All the variety, charm and beauty of life are made up of light and sha de. Oblonsky is a materialist, although not in a formally philosophical way. He might better be said to be a pragmatist, or hedonist, although those labels, too, have their problems, since, as Anna remarks to Dolly, family life for him is sacred. He is not particularly religious but neither is he an intellectual such as Koznyshev or an nihilist such as Nicholas. Perhaps the best way to characterize Oblonsky is as a man who never held a coherent system of behavior, a man to whom the idea of thinking rationally about the way he lives his life would never occur. All the variety, charm and beauty of life are made up of light and shade. Oblonskyquot;s aesthetic consciousness is devoid of the traditional ethical, religious and literary structures that man has created to understand and appreciate beauty. The poetry Oblonsky quotes when he remarks upon and, importantly, empathizes with Levinquot;s love for Kitty is more often than not misquoted, and in recalling his various adulterous escapades, he takes great pleasure in referring to the women he has loved outside of marriage using Levinquot;s metaphor of stealing rolls of bread. Oblonsky is far from Kareninquot;s dry inability to see clearly the beautiful and pleasurable in life, but yet how far also he is from Socrates and the ethical imperative of love in the Symposium, the religious eroticism of the Song of Solomon, the tortured analysis and reanalysis of Goethequot;s Werther. The two words Oblonsky yokes together with beauty are variety and charm, and beauty in life for him is just that a rather incoherent series of inconsequential yet pleasurable encounters with a world that, through its own apparent random nature, never suggests any greater ethical obligation than to perceive and appreciate. That Oblonsky survives so intact a storyline that leaves the lives of others shattered implies that Tolstoy does not derive moral responsibility and the power to judge from nature, that he shares with Immanuel Kant the belief that the phenomenal world is separate from man and does not enter a manquot;s life to pass judgement upon his actions. Oblonsky then, in the final analysis, is unconcerned with the human ability to create structures to filter and interpret experience. He is exempt from the tortures of doubt and guilt that descend upon the other characters whose experiences are intertwined with an inner moral sense. No where is this clearer than in his interactions with Levin, where his continual lack of caution and respect for language causes the love struck Levin such pain. How does Austen present the two sides of Mr Darcy in the two extracts EssayTolstoy in his novel, has revealed to us the effect that death can have on a person and advocates us to not succumb to the daily life of the world which we live in, because it is all a delusion. Yet if we live as naturally as possible, we can get a better grasp on the true essence of life as Levin does in the novel. He finds joy out of working and enjoying the fruits of his labor, instead of indulging himself in the materialism of the hypocritical aristocrats. Modern culture has lost this aspect of life and we need to check ourselves before we lead our lives into a downfall.