Abstract
This article examines Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina through an existential lens, exploring Anna’s psychological journey as a woman who embodies “inward truthfulness” and whose tragic fate arises from the clash between her authentic self and the oppressive moral and social codes of her society. The paper traces Anna’s existential struggle for identity, individuality, and selfhood, arguing that her suffering and ultimate destruction stem from an essential angst that cannot be resolved within the constraints imposed upon her as a woman in nineteenth-century Russian society.
Anna as the Spirit of Inward Truthfulness
Tolstoy believed that the aim of the artist is “not to resolve a question irrefutably but to compel one to love life in all its manifestations.” Anna Karenina stands as testimonial to this belief. Anna is the spirit of “inward truthfulness,” a truly great figure who could not be cast in the lying mould invented by society. The moment she represses or tries to repress her inner truth, reality erupts into catastrophe — accuses, judges and annihilates her through self-punitive fantasy of death.
Tolstoy sees the unconscious urges of human beings as the strongest agent of continuity of life. It is the effect of the event on the individual and the latter’s contribution to the event that interests Tolstoy. Anna is the most important character not because she is the heroine or central protagonist but because of her level of self-awareness and her sense of perspective.
The Existential Struggle
The existential struggle to have one’s own identity, to assert one’s individuality, and the desperate fight to exist as a separate entity appears in all its intensity in Anna. She is the woman who, after a sudden awakening and acute introspection, realizes the falsity and hollowness of her position as a wife. She rebels against existent moral codes and social norms which deny her the oxygen of freedom that nourishes her individual self.
Anna married Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin — a man twenty years her elder — without love, arranged by her aunt. After eight years of married life, Anna becomes painfully conscious of the deprivation her woman-self has suffered, because Karenin never considered her as a warm human being yearning for love.
Anna and Vronsky
Anna’s marriage with Vronsky is a misfortune but an unaccomplished fact. Anna and Vronsky are drawn to each other by the sheer force of their emotion. The bond that binds them has all the colors of love, anguish and pathos. Yet their world proved to be nothing but a half-lit world of silhouettes and dreams, with the leitmotif of pain, unreason and all-consuming love running through in unmitigated terms. All along Anna is plagued by a crisis of identity, an existential angst that defies easy solutions and answers.
The Question of Self
When faced with the question of her “self,” the anguished Anna has precisely no certainty of anything, either love or religion. Tolstoy says: “Faith is the force of life. If a man lives then he must believe in something… Without faith it is impossible to live.”
Anna lives intensely and watches herself, and the person who is now the pivot of her conscious and unconscious self intensely. The corollary is that she is forced to see everything in uncanny close-up. Suddenly, for her, the world appears as without meaning or coherence. She suffers jealousy, hatred, passion and love all in its extremity because she is so uncertain about herself, and there is no getting away from her “self.”
The Final Crisis
Tolstoy unfolds the story of the restless heart of Anna Karenina, whom neither Karenin could save nor Vronsky could make happy, and she sped “like a lawless comet” through a world sinking ever deeper into chaos. Anna ceased loving or had never loved Karenin, but Vronsky too ceased loving or had never appreciated Anna and her truthful, freedom-loving and fair-minded nature.
At one place Tolstoy writes that “the only fundamental obligation of a human being is to be in tune with life.” Before her meeting with Vronsky, Anna was not happy, was incomplete but was in harmony with herself. The love of Vronsky brings happiness and fulfillment but she experiences the greater and greater lack of harmony with her “self.” The result is the final crisis.
Out of the continuity of life, out of the grey materials of life, Tolstoy has created a splendid beauty called Anna that lingers on in our mind like the sweetest song that tells of saddest thought.
References
- Introduction, War and Peace (vol. 1) quoted by Rosemary Edmund (Penguin Books).
- Tolstoy’s Letters, V.L.I, edit by R.F. Christian, Letter to N.N. Strakhov, Jan. 1877.
- Tolstoy’s “A Confession and Other Religious Writing” Ch. 7, P.No- 46, 47.
- Quoted by Edward Babayev in the introduction of Anna Karenina, “Anna Karenina and Her Times” P. No. 14.
- Anna Karenina Vol.1, partII, Ch.6, P.No.195.
- Ibid, part I, Ch.6, P.No. 119.
- Ibid, part III, Ch.16, P.No. 400.
- Ibid, part I, Ch.30, P.No. 152.
- Ibid, part I, Ch.29, P.No. 147.
- Tolstoy’s “Confession”, Ch.9 P.No.54.
- Tolstoy’s Letters Vol.1, Letter to N.N.Strakhov.
- Anna Karenina Vol. II, part VII, Ch.31, P.No 428.
- Tolstoy’s Letters Vol.I Letter to N.N.Strakhov 8 April 1878.
- “Nausea or This is Death Coming on?” by Henri Michauxc, French Poet.
- Tolstoy’s Letters, Vol.I, Letter to N.N.Strakhov, 11 May 1873.