This was to throw too much upon it, and it is critically
of high interest to see where it failed, and why. The miscalculations
of a great genius are enlightening; here, in Anna Karenina, is one
that calls attention to Tolstoy's characteristic fashion of telling a
story, and declares its remarkable qualities.
The story of Anna, I suggested, is not essentially dramatic. Like the
story of Emma Bovary or of Eugenie Grandet, it is a picture outspread,
an impression of life, rather than an action. Anna at first has a life
that rests on many supports, with her husband and her child and her
social possessions; it is broadly based and its stability is assured,
if she chooses to rely on it. But her husband is a dull and pedantic
soul, and before long she chooses to exchange her assured life for
another that rests on one support only, a romantic passion. Her life
with Vronsky has no other security, and in process of time it fails.
Its gradual failure is her story--the losing battle of a woman who has
thrown away more resources than she could afford. But the point and
reason of the book is not in the dramatic question--what will happen,
will Anna lose or win? It is in the picture of her gathering and
deepening difficulties, difficulties that arise out of her position
and her mood, difficulties of which the only solution is at last her
death. And this story, with the contrasted picture of Levin's
domesticity that completes it, is laid out exactly as Balzac did _not_
lay out his story of Eugenie; it is all presented as action, because
Tolstoy's eye was infallibly drawn, whenever he wrote, to the instant
aspect of his matter, the play itself.
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