When comparing Anna Karenina with War and Peace, we know that in the latter several storylines are spliced together, with characters interacting in wartime and peacetime, whereas Anna Karenina offers two separate stories connected by one brief meeting between Karenina and Levin. This has never stopped anyone, casual or erudite, from enjoying the later novel. Despite its drawbacks, many people prefer this shorter work. So, Anna Karenina works in practice, but does it work in theory?
Much ink has been spent in saying yes. Hidden correspondences linking the two narratives of Anna Karenina, announced by the author himself (post factum) as a “labyrinth of linkages,” have been followed up by teachers as vindication of the literary quality they instinctively know to be there. It was never easy to work out whether the linking omens, contrasts, hints, and symbols had been deliberately hidden by the author, placing responsibility for recognition on readers, or whether they were unconscious alluvia uncovered by acute commentators. But they were there.
This volume achieves further amplification of this helpful school of criticism. Its purpose is to “explore the dynamics of Tolstoi's multi-plot novel …” (9) by calling up similar or contrasting devices and methods in the previous Russian literary tradition, in the English novel, and in Pascal's Pensées, all of which contribute to “a comprehensive understanding of human life,” with much emphasis on vengeance, brotherly love, and religious experience.
Liza Knapp displays her own irrepressible love of the written word, which has turned her style into a quiet flow of eloquence. She has also developed an eye for forensic detail dating back to her graduate days at Columbia. She is now adept at spotting minutiae, and you will read her revelations with a thrill of shared serendipity.
Two examples will suffice. Introducing Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter in her second chapter, she suddenly produces this remarkable assertion: “Tolstoy … signals the kinship with Hester Prynne … when the narrator announces that Anna ‘was experiencing the feelings of a person on display at the pillory’” (58). This is just the right image for Anna's plight at the opera, and it does seem to have come from America. In her last chapter she leaps into the twentieth century with a suggestion that Levin's indifference to the fate of the Serbs (Slavic bothers) finds a response in Virginia Woolf's denial of feeling for the Armenians.
These are specific examples, but most of the book is more generalized, considering correspondences in broader terms of morality (Who is my brother?), love, vengeance, conscience, religious exploration (plenty of dispiriting Pascalian philosophy), and, returning to formal properties, the question of indeterminacy. This can be seen as a fault (not linking things that should be connected) or a particularly Russian virtue (reflecting the open-endedness of experience).
This study confirms my opinion of the two great novels. War and Peace is a sunny experience born in the only period of the author's life when he was, briefly, a happy man. Anna Karenina is a vindictive work created after the disastrous summer of 1869, when the author, misguided by Afanasii Fet, soaked himself in Schopenhauer. No one can do that and ever smile again; you can easily distinguish between a person who has been reading Schopenhauer and a sunbeam. For the rest of his life Tolstoi would require us to suffer for his sins.
I have been puzzled by the arbitrariness with which Liza Knapp's texts and subjects were chosen and accorded, or not accorded, detailed treatment. Why these writers in particular? Why not Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Richardson, William Faulkner, Theodor Fontane (think of all the potential in Effi Briest), or a dozen others? This magpie visitation, incorporating material from four centuries, different forms of writing, different themes for discussion, minutely formalist and broadly hermeneutic examination, is itself an exemplar of open-ended indeterminacy. It is not clear whether this is good or bad, deliberate or incidental, but I have certainly taken pleasure in reading it all.
Within these pages Liza Knapp has confirmed some truths of intertextuality—no book is an island, no story unique, no scrutiny unrewarded, no issue exhausted. Above all, she reasserts the joy of reading, comparing impressions, thinking and building attitudes and arguments on an expanding awareness of the world through what has been written about it.
