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Reading "Anna Karenina" (fwd)
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Subject: Reading "Anna Karenina"
Article about the reading of Anna Karenina quotes Nabokov:
You don't need to know a thing about Tolstoy's biography to
understand that he was a profoundly sensual man who at the same
time yearned to reject the material world and be spiritually pure;
this struggle is indelibly etched on every page of "Anna Karenina."
Perhaps no one understood this struggle better than Vladimir
Nabokov, not just because he was a great novelist himself, but
because he was also a Russian. "What one would like to do," Nabokov
writes in "Lectures on Russian Literature," "would be to kick the
glorified soapbox from under [Tolstoy's] sandalled feet and then
lock him up in a stone house on a desert island with gallons of ink
and reams of paper -- far away from the things, ethical and
pedagogical, that diverted his attention from observing the way the
dark hair curled above Anna's white neck." But in the same passage,
Nabokov allows that "the thing cannot be done: Tolstoy is
homogeneous, is one," and the "truth which he was ponderously
groping for or magically finding just around the corner, was always
the same truth -- the truth was he and this he was an art."
If I wanted to be criminally glib here, I could boil this down to
the workshop truism that it's all about the process, dude. But I
don't think that's what Nabokov meant, and it's certainly not what
Tolstoy's life and work meant. As this middle-aged novelist (and
I'm the same age as Tolstoy was when he published "Anna Karenina")
struggles up off the couch and takes off his aggravating reading
glasses and returns to work on his own novel, he's faced with the
fact that the author of the greatest novel on the greatest
conundrum in human experience -- flesh vs. spirit, profane vs.
sacred, whatever -- finally decided that writing novels was
downright sinful and immoral. For what it's worth, Jim the
philosopher manqué (and I have the useless B.A. to prove it) thinks
Tolstoy was wrong about that, and that what Nabokov is really
saying is, don't listen to what Tolstoy said about art, look at
what he did, at the magnificent art he created. For that matter, I
don't have to look any further than my agent, who, with the
towering example of "Anna Karenina" before him, turned around and
wrote a first-rate thriller ("The Icon," by Neil Olson. Check it
out).
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Reading "Anna Karenina"
By James Hynes
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2005/07/11/tolstoy/index_np.html
- - - - - - - - - - - - Tue Jul 12 10:10:34 2005
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Stringer-Hye, Suellen
Vanderbilt University
Email: suellen.stringer-hye@Vanderbilt.Edu
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