We publish the review by Pierpaolo Valfre for the detailed analysis of the profiles of the characters of the Russian writer’s work
If Anna Karenina were only the story of an adultery that ended badly, it would not have required more than eight hundred pages to be told, not even in the nineteenth century. And, despite the title, it is simplistic to consider it the novel full of human understanding on the torments of a woman oppressed by a hypocritical and respectable society.
On the one hand Anna Karenina appears to us as a butterfly imprisoned behind glass: Tolstoy describes in detail, and from the inside, her painful struggling and struggling to try a way out, until she runs out and slips into the abyss of self-destruction. At the same time he paints a grandiose fresco of the human types that appear beyond the glass, figures and characters certainly present in the Russian society of his time, but somehow paradigmatic of human types that have always existed and always will exist. In addition, through the character of Konstantin Levin, he anticipates part of his personal torments, he makes us glimpse that inner crisis that will break out in him only a few years later, leading him to important life choices and full of consequences for himself and for his family members.
The fascinating thing is that all the main characters of the novel can be seen as “opposites” to Anna, each for different reasons. The first character we find on stage is Stepan Arkadevic Oblonskij, Anna’s brother, the butterfly able to live lightly and be forgiven for his numerous betrayals, the astute and idle official who has been part of the soft underbelly of the bureaucracy of every time and of every country, the jovial, generous and sincere friend, the carefree and spendthrift viveur, the father always ready to play with his children, to whom he concedes everything. He is a true artist in avoiding every effort, every problem, every annoyance. He willingly leaves the hardest and most tiring part of the family menage to his wife.
Stepan Arkadevic glides lightly into life and its contradictions, unlike Anna, who sinks into it. We have all known at least one Stepan Arkadevic in our life, and even more than one. Stefan Arkadevic’s wife and Darya Aleksandrovna (Dolly). Her way of being opposite to Anna and everything about her in her being with her feet firmly on the ground. A practical, down-to-earth, hard-working woman, with no crickets in her head, Dolly carries on her shoulders all the weight of a family and a distracted husband and cheater. He is the angel of the hearth, who listens to everyone, who understands everyone, has a word for everyone. A fragile and energetic angel, sanguine and occasionally bleeding, who cries, gets angry, thinks he can’t make it but always succeeds. Everything separates her from Anna, two opposite ways of being a woman.
Dolly is at the same time fascinated and annoyed, a little pitying her and a little envy. Dolly sees in Anna what she might have been if she hadn’t been Dolly. Dolly is one of Katerina Scerbackaja’s (Kitty) sisters. We find Kitty at the beginning of the novel, little girl. All the little girls of every age and every latitude of the globe have been Kitty at least once in their life. They were when they fell in love with the Beatles, Duran Duran and One Direction. In nineteenth-century Russia there were instead the waltz, the polka and young officers who let their imagination fly. Little women grow up and even Kitty goes through bitter disappointments, bad choices, experiences that forge her character. And when she falls in love with a difficult, shady man,
She will manage to be wonderful and immense when she finds herself, apparently so fragile, to lend the last care to her brother-in-law Nikolaj Dmitrievic, a reitect rejected by all. Kitty and the story of a training. We know her as a young girl, dazzled by Anna’s brilliance, who appears to her as a woman full of life, charming, mature, exceptionally gifted with savoir faire. Page after page we follow the two opposite parables and in the end, when the calm returns after the storm, it will be Kitty’s star that shines strongly in the sky.
Even that of Konstantin Dmitirevic Levin is the beautiful story of a painful and successful evolution, which acts as a counterpoint to the involution and bewilderment of oneself personified by Anna. Konstantin is the positive hero of the novel (his will also be the concluding words, the look ahead after the tragedy). The man who, starting from the dark ravines where he had hidden his soul, manages to find himself, because he begins his own personal and tiring search, but above all because he finds the right woman. A love that saves, as opposed to a love that overwhelms and destroys.
Alexei Karenin, intelligent, cultured, skilled, honest, powerful, respected and respected by all. However, he is a man that life has made completely anaffective. Anna’s betrayal is like a gust of wind that opens the windows and disrupts the perfect order of her life without real life. It is an annoying accident that he would like to drive away, to remove as soon as possible because it is too impregnated with matter, and Karenin, on the other hand, is at ease only in his ordered mental universe. Obviously his first concern goes to decorum, etiquette, good name. Yet he is not a hypocrite: he is a man sincerely attached to good principles, who tries to be just and even generous. His predisposition to seek the good will lead him, in a shocking night, to overcome the constraints imposed by respectability and right-thinking moralism and to turn the other cheek evangelically, to give such proof of altruism and magnanimity as to completely overwhelm Anna and her lover. One will be suffocated, confused and annihilated, the other will be pushed to attempt suicide.
But Karenin does not understand the one thing that instead it would be necessary to understand: to win back Anna he is not required to become a champion of magnanimity, but simply to love her. Instead he is a man completely unable to love, this is his way of being opposed to Anna, this is her personal tragedy, from which all the others derive. Finally Aleksej Vronskij: the other half of Anna’s apple, the seductive and fascinating tambeur de femme, the cynical and rapacious officer.
But Anna is serious and he gets entangled in spite of himself. The two are made on purpose to find and ruin each other. Eros and thanatos, love and death at work, but with a difference. Just an iota, an infinitesimal of more or less conviction is enough and we find ourselves on two opposite sides. Both, at different times, obey the urge to take their own lives. Vronsky does it first, he really believes in it but fails and that episode definitively tears Anna from the remains of her previous life. As he sinks, Vronskji grabs his woman’s hand and drags her with him.
Anna, on the other hand, does not fail and does not drag her lover with her. Rather, she returns him to her life, shipwrecked by the sea after the storm, and to her sense of guilt. This is to limit ourselves to the figures in the foreground, but there is much more in the fresco. Anna is also a mother and some of the most touching scenes in the novel concern her relationship with her son Sereza. There are the princesses of the worldly circles, the bigoted noblewomen, the landowners, the peasants, the university professors, the politicians, the officers and all that is needed to make history flow with the majestic and peaceful beauty of the Volga. January 6, 2014
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