Marian Schwartz on Anna Karenina

Tolstoy's great novel is "within human error of being perfect."

Leo Tolstoy’s masterwork Anna Karenina commands a readership that defies boundaries imposed by time, space, and language. No wonder it's considered the best modern novel. Marian Schwartz, whose translation of the novel is itself a work of genius, explains below why she sees its power as lying in its author’s ability to evoke without effort the inner lives of wildly varying characters and to weave their diverging stories into a single whole. And if you haven’t subscribed already to WHY THE CLASSICS? you should click here — that way you’ll never miss our newsletter, hitting inboxes every Thursday.

A love story for the ages. A piercing study of the nuclear family. An examination of change, decay, and renewal in Russia’s soul. A meditation on religion and the secular world, the differences between erotic and spiritual love, and the loneliness we all must struggle to overcome. To call Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina one of the greatest novels ever written does it something of an injustice. It is the realistic novel par excellence. But it is also far more than that, as its enormous cultural and personal impact on generations of readers Russian and otherwise can attest.

Indeed, as its translator Marian Schwartz says, the book is “within human error of being perfect.”

Schwartz has translated Russian writers ranging from Ivan Goncharov and Mikhail Lermontov to Mikhail Bulgakov and Yuri Olesha to Yuri Mamleev and Venedikt Erofeev. She has worked on the contemporary novelist Mikhail Shishkin, whose Maidenhair she ranks almost with Tolstoy’s writing, and served as co-translator of Mikhail Gorbachev’s memoirs. She came to Russian as a linguist looking for a new challenge and as a reader fascinated by “extreme situations.” (“I was one of those teenagers who like novels about concentration camps,” as she puts it.) She discovered Tolstoy as a possible subject for translations primarily through an interest in the masterpiece of his early middle age. Anna Karenina “stunned” her. “It was so beautiful and it was so unlike what I had expected,” Schwartz says. This set her to wondering how Tolstoy “achieved something so muscular and so confident and different.”

The translator is, of course, only one of many to fall under the book’s spell. When its first chapters appeared in 1873 in The Russian Messenger (whose previous issues had serialized Dostoevsky’s Demons and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons), Tolstoy had been one of the most famous and admired novelists in Russia — a nation that, for whatever reason, seems capable of recognizing genius in its own time in a way almost no other is — for more than two decades. His early trilogy of strongly autobiographical novels Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth had catapulted him to fame while he was still in his twenties. His subsequent books Sebastopol Stories and the short novel The Cossacks, which the author famously sold to help pay off gambling debts, consolidated his reputation. War and Peace was published in 1869, when Tolstoy was forty-one. Anna Karenina showed that Tolstoy had not even come close to exhausting the prodigious talent he possessed. The book was written as its author entered the first phases of a spiritual crisis that would end years later with his articulation of a radical form of Christianity. Schwartz points out, as well, that Tolstoy had begun to develop an aversion to his native tongue and initially toyed with the idea of writing Anna Karenina in the now-endangered Paleosiberian language Chukchi. It would appear, of course, in Russian, and provoke an enormous critical and popular response. Its readership has only widened and deepened with the passing of more than a century since its debut in the Messenger. “I can’t tell you, says Schwartz, “how many Russians have told me this was the book by their bedside.”

This immense and enduring readership is not mysterious, in her view. Anna Karenina’s near-perfection as an instance of literary form is partly responsible. Schwartz cites as well its remarkable narrative economy, all the more astonishing given its considerable length, and the abundance of characters almost more memorable than one’s acquaintances outside the book (even those readers only meet for a few moments). These include Stiva Oblonsky, the bon vivant, whose gluttony echoes his sexual incontinence; his long-suffering wife Dolly, about whom Schwartz cites her fellow Tolstoy translator Gary Saul Morson’s argument that she — a mother who sacrifices everything, including her own dignity and peace of mind, for her children — was in her creator’s opinion the book’s most admirable figure; Nikolai Levin, the ne’er-do-well whose sordid life is redeemed by his deathbed suffering; Alexei Karenin, Anna’s cuckolded husband and a cold, stiff bureaucrat, who is revealed to be a man capable of ultimate, self-negating sympathy and enjoys a spiritual renascence as a result. And this is to say nothing of the book’s dual protagonists: the tormented (self-tormented, in Schwartz’s reading) Anna and the clumsy, erratic, and good-souled Konstantin Levin, whom Schwartz describes as “so much like Tolstoy” and “absolutely a stand-in for him.” Their mirrored struggles to find love and meaning, one doomed and one at least provisionally successful, form the narrative core of the novel, a dynamic that draws readers in again and again as they grow older and wiser. Schwartz points out that the book ages along with its readers, that the fascination Anna exerts over so many first encounters with it dissipates, that Levin’s halting progress towards his goal grows more and more fascinating with the passage of time. The scene she cites when asked to explain the book’s magnetism features Levin, out on his estate and cutting wheat with the peasants. “It’s like The Wizard of Oz,” she says. “All of a sudden the book’s in technicolor. Tolstoy only uses description when it’s absolutely necessary. But once Levin goes out into the fields and starts mowing, it’s like everybody turned on the lights. It’s something you don’t expect, this sudden, extremely cinematic portrayal of him in the fields trying to mow with the peasants.”

Levin’s difficult story ends with marriage and the birth of a child, while Anna’s ends with suicide beneath the wheels of a train. And while Levin’s happiness may in its structure echo that of Pierre Bezuhov, a Levin-like major character in War and Peace, Schwartz sees Anna Karenina as being fundamentally different from the earlier novel: “I think in War and Peace he got more carried away with abstract ideas about war and man’s experience with war rather than a human being’s struggle to live in a decent way and create happiness for themselves.” Which is not to suggest, of course, that Anna Karenina is in any way a lesser work. It achieves a similarly vast scope using much more precisely delimited means. Tolstoy recreates in it the whole world of human experience through two central characters with turbulent inner lives, both searching for love. Anna’s decision to submerge herself in her passion for the officer Vronsky and Levin’s eventual recognition of Kitty as his only possible mate cause earthquakes for both them and the friends and family who surround them.

Despite the book’s length, Schwartz recommends that even people leading succesful, high-pressure lives make the commitment to reading it. “They’ll be surprised,” she says, by how modern it sounds, by the manifold portrait of human nature it contains, and by the endless ways, as numerous as there are readers, in which this matchless novel can be understood.

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