Anna Karenina, my friend told me, is one of the few books that have influenced how I live my life from day to day.This statement touches on a question I often wonder about: Can reading great fiction make you a better person? I dont mean to ask whether it can improve your mental agility or your knowledge of the world, for it undoubtedly does. But can these books make you kinder, wiser, more moral, more content? The answer to this question is far from self-evident. And maybe we should be doubtful, when we consider how many disagreeable Shakespeare fans have probably existed. Nevertheless, I suspect that most of us are inclined to say yes, these books do improve us. But how?Here are my answers. First, many great works of fiction tackle the moral question directly: What does it mean to be good? How do you live a good life? What is the point of it all? Dostoyevsky is the exemplary author in this respect, who was intensely, almost morbidly, preoccupied with these questions. Second, great fiction often involves a social critique; many well-known authors have been penetrating guides into the hypocrisies, immoralities, and stupidities of their societies. Dickens, for example, is famous for spreading awareness of the plights of the poor; and Jane Austen performed a similar task in her novels, though much more quietly, by satirizing the narrow, pinched social rules the landed gentry had to abide by. Finally, we come to great literatures ability to help us empathize. By imagining the actions, thoughts, feelings, desires, and hopes of another persona person perhaps from a different time, with different valueswe learn to see the world from multiple points of view. This not only helps us to understand others, but also helps us to understand ourselves. And this is important, since a big part of wise living (in my experience at least) involves the ability to see ourselves from a distance, as only one person among many, and to treat ourselves with the same good-natured respect as we treat our good friends. And the master of empathy is undoubtedly Leo Tolstoy.Leo Tolstoy was a contradictory man. He idolized the peasants and their simple life, and he preached a renunciation of worldly riches; and yet he maintained his aristocratic privileges till the end of his life. He considered marriage to be of enormous importance in living a moral life, and yet his relationship with his wife was bitterly unhappy and he ended up fleeing his house to escape. And as Isaiah Berlin pointed out in his essay on Tolstoys view of history, he yearned for unity and yet saw only multiplicity in the world. I cant help attributing this contradictoriness to his nearly supernatural ability to sympathize with other points of view, which caused him to constantly be pulled in different directions.This is on full display in Anna Karenina, but I cant discuss this or anything else about the book without copious spoilers. So if you are among the handful of people who dont know the plot already, here is your warning.Like so many authors, Tolstoy here writes about a fallen woman who ends up in a bad situation. But unlike anyone else, Tolstoy presents this story without taking any clear moral stance on Anna, her society, her betrayed husband, or her lover. It is, for example, close to impossible to read this simply as a parable of the immoral woman getting her just desserts. What was Anna supposed to do? She would have condemned herself to a life of unhappiness had she stayed with Karenin. And it can hardly be said that she was responsible for her unhappy marriage, since marriages in those days were contracted when women were very young, for reasons of power and wealth, not love. Tolstoy makes this very clear, and as a result this book can be read, in part, as a feminist critique of a society that severely limits the freedom of women and condemns them to live at the mercy of their fathers and husbands.But this is not the whole story. If it is impossible to read this book as a parable of an immoral wife, it is equally impossible to read it as the heroic struggle of a wronged women against an immoral society. Anna is neither wholly right nor wrong in her decision. For in choosing to abandon her husband, she also chooses to abandon her son. Admittedly, it was only the social rules that forced her to make this choice, but the fact remains that she knowingly chose it. Whats more, unlike in Madame Bovary, where the deceived husband is not a sympathetic character, Tolstoy brings Karenin to life, showing us an imperfect and limited man, but a real man nonetheless, a man who was deeply hurt by Annas actions.A similar ambiguity can be seen in the relationship between Anna and Vronsky. Tolstoy never makes us doubt that they do truly love one another. This is not the story of vanity or lust, but of tender, affectionate lovea love that was denied Anna for her whole life before her affair. For his part, Vronsky is also neither wholly bad nor good. He wrongs Karenin without any moral scruples; but his love for Anna is so deepat least at firstthat he gives up his respectability, his position in the military, and even his good relationship with his family to be with her. I cannot admire Vronsky, but it is impossible for me to condemn him, just like it is impossible for me to condemn Anna or Karenin, for they were all making the choices that seemed best to them.The final effect of these conflicts is not a critique of society nor a parable of vice, but a portrayal of the tragedy of life, of the unhappiness that inevitably arises when desires are not in harmony with values and when personalities are not in harmony with societies.The other thread of this bookthat of Levin and Kittyis where Tolstoy tells us how to be happy. For Tolstoy, this involves a return to tradition; specifically, this means a return to rural Russian tradition and a concomitant shunning of urban European influence. Levin and Kittys happy life in the countryside is repeatedly contrasted with Vronsky and Annas unhappy life in the city. Levin is connected with the earth; he knows the peasants and he works with them, while Vronsky only associates with aristocrats. Levin is earnest, provincial, and clumsy, while Vronsky is urbane, cosmopolitan, and suave. Kitty is simple, unreflecting, and pure-hearted, while Anna is well-read, sophisticated, and passionate.The most obvious symbol of Europeanization is the fateful railway. Anna and Vronsky meet in a train station; Vronsky confesses his love to Anna in another train station; and it is of course a train that ends Annas life. Levin, by contrast, catches sight of Kitty as he sits in the grass in his farm, while Kitty goes by in a horse-drawn carriage. Anna and Vronsky travel to Italy to see the sights, while for Levin even Moscow is painfully confusing and shallow. This contrast of urban Europe with rural Russia is mirrored in the contrast of atheism with belief. Like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy attributed the growing disbelief in Christianity to the nefarious influence of the freethinking West. In Tolstoys viewand in this respect hes remarkably close to DostoyevskyRussians were mistaken to gleefully import European technologies and modes of thought without paying attention to how appropriate these new arrivals were to Russia. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky wanted Russia to develop its own path into the future, a path that relied on an embrace of the Christian ethic, not an attempt to fill the vacuum left by religion with socialism and science. The final scene of this novelwhere Levin renounces his old free-thinking ways and embraces Christianityis the ultimate triumph of Russia over Europe in Levins soul. But this is where the book rings the most hollow for me. For here Tolstoy is attempting to put up one mode of life as ideal, while his prodigious ability to see the world from so many points of view makes us doubt whether there is such a thing as an ideal life or one right way of viewing the world. At least for me, Tolstoy's magnificent empathy is the real moral lesson I have taken away from this book. His insights into the minds and personalities of different people is staggering, and I can only hope to emulate this, in my own small way, as I fight the lifelong battle with my own ego.

Passing Through the Human Passions"...Let him first cast a stone at her"I read this Tolstoy masterpiece for the first time five years ago, coming to it with a cynicism formed by my mistaken impression that it was simply about Anna Karenina's terminal adulterous affair and her despicable selfishness toward her son. I thought the novel would, no doubt, effectively demonstrate the tragic consequences of self-centeredness and the absence of a moral compass. Beyond that, I was a cynic.My skepticism was misguided. While Anna K's affair with Count Vlonsky is the primary tale being told, this must be viewed within the context of the novel's three other relationships to appreciate the purified beauty of this masterwork.Both of the Russian Giants (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) sculpt consistently around themes of the relationship between a husband and a wife;a human's relationship to and with God;the mortal struggles --of faith versus doubt, and --of monogamy and morality versus free will and the pleasures of the flesh; and,below the firmament, the ongoing and infinite war between the forces of good and evil.These themes are arguably nowhere more breathtakingly composed for study, contemplation and interpretation for all time, by scholars, thinkers, students and lovers of literature, than in this transcendent tragedy.Anna Karenina's illicit romance with the younger, adonic Count Vronsky is mainscreen. I recall seeing an article shortly after reading this novel revealing that Tolstoy began with the idea of making a fallen married woman, condemned for her actions, sympathetic to readers for her human weaknesses and her lot in life (or something to this effect). He wanted to test Jesus' admonition in the Bible to those about to stone to death a woman caught having sexual relations outside her marriage: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." John 8:7, KJV. In addition to the eponymous affair, the novel also follows: ^ The verecund, thinking farmer Levin and his courtship of and marriage to the gorgeous, shallow and vestal Kitty (who was once infatuated with Vronsky);^ The mired uxorial partnership between Anna's brother, the unsteady, unfaithful social-hound Stiva Oblonsky and his loyal wife Dolly (Kitty's sister), who is the exemplary, unappreciated mother of his children, and who finds herself having muliebral daydreams of a scorching affair of body and soul with another man; as well as,^ Anna's relationships with her controlling, cuckolded husband Karenin and with her poor, innocent son.Tolstoy created this stunningly gorgeous mindtrip over a terrain he drew in a way that would emotionally drain the reader* and provoke her thoughts and feelings such that she might find an obscure piece of her soul revealed.In my opinion, this is the best novel ever written.*Given my harsh criticism of the novel, a little life by Hanya Yanagihara, as...let's just say...Emotionally Sadistic (by Author Admission), and lengthy discussions I've had about that novel, I should say here that there is a HUGE difference between writing a novel/story with the express intent of inflicting emotional pain on the reader (as the author of a little life has repeatedly admitted and as is evident in the way it's written) and composing a novel that is truthful to the human condition and shows a character in a fallen married woman who Tolstoy wanted to portray in a light sympathetic to readers, testing the Christian admonition about casting the first stone. Let me explain further. Anna Karenina is sad. A suicide seemed the most likely outcome under the circumstances, as it did in a little life. The difference is in the verisimilitude in the former and the lack thereof in the latter. For example, the events leading up to the suicide were not beaten into you over and over and over and over and over. In Anna Karenina, by comparison, the delineation of the terrible circumstances never became gratuitous, grating, annoying, patently manipulative as quickly happened in a little life. I don't believe one can overemphasize the author's statement that when she began writing a little life, she set out to write a novel that would inflict as much emotional pain as she could manage upon the book's readers.. I invite, with honorable intentions, Goodreads friends (and readers) to give me examples of acclaimed novels for which the author said something to the effect that when he/she began writing the novel with the idea and purpose of tormenting its readers.

In lieu of a proper review of my favorite book, and in addition to the remark that it would be more aptly named Konstantin Levin, I present to you the characters of Anna Karenina in a series of portraits painted by dead white men.Anna Karenina (Lady Agnew of Lochnaw by John Singer Sargent)Alexei Karenin (Portrait of Edouard Manet by Henri Fantin-Latour)Alexei Vronsky (Study of a Young Man by John Singer Sargent)Konstantin Levin (Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife by John Singer SargentKitty Scherbatsky (Portrait of Julie Manet by Pierre-Auguste Renoir)Stepan Arkadyick Oblonsky (Monsieur Charpentier by Pierre-Auguste Renoir)Dolly Oblonsky (The Marchioness of Downshire by John William Waterhouse)An old muzhik (Tolstoy Plowing by Ilya Yefimovich Repin; yes, that is really a painting of Tolstoy himself, and he looks like what I imagine an old muzhik to look like.)