Hossain Al Mamun :
Leo Tolstoy’s two great creations are “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” in the history of English literature. Both have special significance in literary fields. But the first has a socio-political and historic appeal and the second one has a tragic appeal. “Anna Karenina” is to be called as the best novel of love affairs of the world.
Anna, the heroine of the novel ‘Anna Karenina,’ seeks a personal resolution between spontaneous, unreflecting life and the claims of reason and moral law. Being a woman, whose human destiny is to raise children and be mistress of her household, Anna is more victimised by culture and society than her male counterpart and is more sensitive to the social restrictions on her quest for personal meaning. Anna’s quest concludes at the dead end to hate, and death is her only recourse. Tolstoy shows how Anna, seeking self-gratification in love, drives herself from salvation, away from God, toward Satanism and self-destruction.
Tolstoy makes it obvious that Anna’s marriage will never satisfy her passionate nature. Karenin, Anna’s husband, a gentleman, too cold, formal and official to love and be loved is the first one Anna rejects. Anna’s life of passion and romance starts at the time of her meeting with Vronsky at the rail-road station. Contrasting with the cold and formal Karenin, Vronsky appears to Anna to be brilliant and elegant. Anna says, “My God! Forgive me! Sobbing and pressing Vronsky’s hand to her breast… It is all over. I have nothing but you left. Remember that”. We see Karenin one after another uses cold, tempered and authoritative words like, “I love you, but I am not important, what matters here is our son and yourself,” but no words turn Anna back from Vronsky to Karenin.
We know Anna, an invited guest to Dolly’s house as a peace-maker, looses her own peace. She forgets her husband; she forgets the social oblique; even she forgets her own son. Before leaving Karenin, she had not the least idea what would settle the situation, but she firmly believed that something would turn up. In fact, Anna thought positive, it latter on results in negative. Neither her intelligence, nor her clarity of vision, personal charm and beauty, is enough to save Anna. Despite her gentleness and goodness, she falls prey to the vitriol of the materialist thoughts of the 1870s. As she embarks on her last rail journey to her destruction, the last good thought she can recall is what Yashmin had maintained: “The struggle for existence and hatred are the only things that unite people.” In the piercing light which now revealed to her the meaning of life and of human relations? She experienced the death of Vronsky’s love, and the inevitability of her own death. Anna, as an unfulfilled woman, finally pays the penalty for her ill-doings through her life. Neither she led a happy family life, nor did she happen to have the goal.
It has been argued, with some justification that it is Anna’s growing sense of bleak isolation that is the essence of her tragedy. Mathew Arnold thinks Tolstoy’s own initial intention of tracing the inestimable result for a woman of committing adultery and thus breaking a moral law. Of her own volition she chose to break with her husband and abandon her son for the sake of the sensual pleasure of a selfish liaison. Torn between the natural love for her son, Serezha, and her illicit love for Vronsky, she is unable to bear the strain and her only escape is through her suicide.
Others have argued that Anna’s tragedy was not that she was destroyed by the external pressures of social convention, but by her own full-blooded sensual nature, an irresistible inner force described by Romain Rolland as ‘the fatality which broods over the romance-the madness of love’. Another way of seeing her tragedy would be to suggest, as Raymond Williams did, that men, first Karenin and then Vronsky, were to blame for their incapacity to fulfil Anna’s passionate nature.
All these ways of seeking to understand Anna’s tragedy may be justified. However, they take for granted that a tragic tale has a parabolic shape: a hero seeks to affirm his identify by challenging superhuman forces and manages to achieve his quest for self-affirmation before those contending forces bring him inevitable destruction. Anna’s fate is not traced in that way. It is true that her passion gives unique meaning to her existence and results in an awakening to life which she expresses on receipt of Karenin’s letter after her confession to him. In Italy, feeling truly liberated, she tries to persuade herself that she has at last found true happiness in her relationship with Vronsky. Anna’s love for Vronsky cannot, indeed, bring her pardon; her happiness is embittered by a sense of ultimate judgement and punishment.
Anna can often be compared with Emma Bovery, and both figure in novels that examine a passion leading to catastrophe. If Emma’s snallowness and clinging to illusions explain how she was blinded by her passion, Anna, despite her growing habit of screwing up her eyes, is intent on seeing her fate with clarity. It is part of the tragic pattern that Anna should, from her first encounter with Vronsky, recognise the doomed end to which her love would bring her.
If our pity at her downfall is increased by the presentation of her as a beautiful, charming, and intelligent creature, it is also intensified by the way in which her tragedy is recounted. Unlike conventional tragic tales, where the main actor is allowed to thrive and flourish before withering and being cut down, we are given hardly any details of Anna’s early life. Our first acquaintance with Anna coincides with the fateful moment when she falls in love, begetting a passion that is accompanied by the fatal accident of a peasant crushed under the iron wheels of a train that foretells her own death; beginning and end are squeezed together into a tense and explosive moment. Anna recognises the omen that foretells her doom.
For Anna, fatalism also serves to relieve her guilt. When Dolly comes to visit her, Anna repeats a speech she has evidently often made to herself. “Yes, yes”, said Anna, turning out of the open window. “But 1 was not to blame. And who is to blame? What’s the meaning of being to blame? Could it have been otherwise?
What do you think? Could it possibly have happened that you didn’t become the wife of Stiva?
“Really, I don’t know…”
If everything is fated no one is responsible, she reasons.
But this way of thinking exacts a price. Focusing on fate, she neglects causes; she foregoes decisions and trusts in inevitability. As the story develops, we see, Anna’s refusal to examine causes and make appropriate decisions – to take responsibility-grows. As she express deliberately-
“It is only these two beings (Vronsky and Seryozha) that I love, and one excludes the other. I can’t have them together, and that’s the only thing I want. And since I can’t have that, I don’t care about the rest. I don’t care about anything, anything. And it will end one way or another, and so I can’t. I don’t like to talk of it. So don’t blame me, don’t judge me for anything.”
In fact, Anna talks mad avoiding all moral and social norms and forms. Whatever does she speak, I think, if Anna could not involve herself in Vronsky’s world; if Anna could finally set her eyes to Karenin’s reguest of leaving illicit relationship with Vronksy; if Anna could abide by God’s and society’s conviction; there would have been no tragedy in her life. So blame goes to Anna for her tragedy.
Leo Tolstoy’s two great creations are “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” in the history of English literature. Both have special significance in literary fields. But the first has a socio-political and historic appeal and the second one has a tragic appeal. “Anna Karenina” is to be called as the best novel of love affairs of the world.
Anna, the heroine of the novel ‘Anna Karenina,’ seeks a personal resolution between spontaneous, unreflecting life and the claims of reason and moral law. Being a woman, whose human destiny is to raise children and be mistress of her household, Anna is more victimised by culture and society than her male counterpart and is more sensitive to the social restrictions on her quest for personal meaning. Anna’s quest concludes at the dead end to hate, and death is her only recourse. Tolstoy shows how Anna, seeking self-gratification in love, drives herself from salvation, away from God, toward Satanism and self-destruction.
Tolstoy makes it obvious that Anna’s marriage will never satisfy her passionate nature. Karenin, Anna’s husband, a gentleman, too cold, formal and official to love and be loved is the first one Anna rejects. Anna’s life of passion and romance starts at the time of her meeting with Vronsky at the rail-road station. Contrasting with the cold and formal Karenin, Vronsky appears to Anna to be brilliant and elegant. Anna says, “My God! Forgive me! Sobbing and pressing Vronsky’s hand to her breast… It is all over. I have nothing but you left. Remember that”. We see Karenin one after another uses cold, tempered and authoritative words like, “I love you, but I am not important, what matters here is our son and yourself,” but no words turn Anna back from Vronsky to Karenin.
We know Anna, an invited guest to Dolly’s house as a peace-maker, looses her own peace. She forgets her husband; she forgets the social oblique; even she forgets her own son. Before leaving Karenin, she had not the least idea what would settle the situation, but she firmly believed that something would turn up. In fact, Anna thought positive, it latter on results in negative. Neither her intelligence, nor her clarity of vision, personal charm and beauty, is enough to save Anna. Despite her gentleness and goodness, she falls prey to the vitriol of the materialist thoughts of the 1870s. As she embarks on her last rail journey to her destruction, the last good thought she can recall is what Yashmin had maintained: “The struggle for existence and hatred are the only things that unite people.” In the piercing light which now revealed to her the meaning of life and of human relations? She experienced the death of Vronsky’s love, and the inevitability of her own death. Anna, as an unfulfilled woman, finally pays the penalty for her ill-doings through her life. Neither she led a happy family life, nor did she happen to have the goal.
It has been argued, with some justification that it is Anna’s growing sense of bleak isolation that is the essence of her tragedy. Mathew Arnold thinks Tolstoy’s own initial intention of tracing the inestimable result for a woman of committing adultery and thus breaking a moral law. Of her own volition she chose to break with her husband and abandon her son for the sake of the sensual pleasure of a selfish liaison. Torn between the natural love for her son, Serezha, and her illicit love for Vronsky, she is unable to bear the strain and her only escape is through her suicide.
Others have argued that Anna’s tragedy was not that she was destroyed by the external pressures of social convention, but by her own full-blooded sensual nature, an irresistible inner force described by Romain Rolland as ‘the fatality which broods over the romance-the madness of love’. Another way of seeing her tragedy would be to suggest, as Raymond Williams did, that men, first Karenin and then Vronsky, were to blame for their incapacity to fulfil Anna’s passionate nature.
All these ways of seeking to understand Anna’s tragedy may be justified. However, they take for granted that a tragic tale has a parabolic shape: a hero seeks to affirm his identify by challenging superhuman forces and manages to achieve his quest for self-affirmation before those contending forces bring him inevitable destruction. Anna’s fate is not traced in that way. It is true that her passion gives unique meaning to her existence and results in an awakening to life which she expresses on receipt of Karenin’s letter after her confession to him. In Italy, feeling truly liberated, she tries to persuade herself that she has at last found true happiness in her relationship with Vronsky. Anna’s love for Vronsky cannot, indeed, bring her pardon; her happiness is embittered by a sense of ultimate judgement and punishment.
Anna can often be compared with Emma Bovery, and both figure in novels that examine a passion leading to catastrophe. If Emma’s snallowness and clinging to illusions explain how she was blinded by her passion, Anna, despite her growing habit of screwing up her eyes, is intent on seeing her fate with clarity. It is part of the tragic pattern that Anna should, from her first encounter with Vronsky, recognise the doomed end to which her love would bring her.
If our pity at her downfall is increased by the presentation of her as a beautiful, charming, and intelligent creature, it is also intensified by the way in which her tragedy is recounted. Unlike conventional tragic tales, where the main actor is allowed to thrive and flourish before withering and being cut down, we are given hardly any details of Anna’s early life. Our first acquaintance with Anna coincides with the fateful moment when she falls in love, begetting a passion that is accompanied by the fatal accident of a peasant crushed under the iron wheels of a train that foretells her own death; beginning and end are squeezed together into a tense and explosive moment. Anna recognises the omen that foretells her doom.
For Anna, fatalism also serves to relieve her guilt. When Dolly comes to visit her, Anna repeats a speech she has evidently often made to herself. “Yes, yes”, said Anna, turning out of the open window. “But 1 was not to blame. And who is to blame? What’s the meaning of being to blame? Could it have been otherwise?
What do you think? Could it possibly have happened that you didn’t become the wife of Stiva?
“Really, I don’t know…”
If everything is fated no one is responsible, she reasons.
But this way of thinking exacts a price. Focusing on fate, she neglects causes; she foregoes decisions and trusts in inevitability. As the story develops, we see, Anna’s refusal to examine causes and make appropriate decisions – to take responsibility-grows. As she express deliberately-
“It is only these two beings (Vronsky and Seryozha) that I love, and one excludes the other. I can’t have them together, and that’s the only thing I want. And since I can’t have that, I don’t care about the rest. I don’t care about anything, anything. And it will end one way or another, and so I can’t. I don’t like to talk of it. So don’t blame me, don’t judge me for anything.”
In fact, Anna talks mad avoiding all moral and social norms and forms. Whatever does she speak, I think, if Anna could not involve herself in Vronsky’s world; if Anna could finally set her eyes to Karenin’s reguest of leaving illicit relationship with Vronksy; if Anna could abide by God’s and society’s conviction; there would have been no tragedy in her life. So blame goes to Anna for her tragedy.
