Anna Karenina

"Part of the genius of Tolstoy is his remarkable insight into so many very different people, so that he can portray a whole society and at the same time seem to get inside most of the people he depicts – for example, the description of Kozynyshev and Varenka and the way things went wrong for the proposal of marriage. Although he set out to write a moralising novel showing the evils of Anna’s adultery, his human empathy pushed him in a very different direction, and the reader sees every step towards the final tragedy from Anna’s point of view and sees how difficult – perhaps impossible – any of the alternatives would have been. There is the feeling that if God wrote novels they might be like this. Tolstoy’s own values come across in the way he treats many different people in the novel. He dislikes careerists and people who say or do things to impress or because they are fashionable, and the people he admires are often inarticulate but deep. Inarticulate: there is a contrast with the values of Socrates here. What the people he admires have in common is a certain kind of seriousness. Anna and Levin are both serious in a way that Vronsky is not. Part of this is giving thought to what your life is about and how you should live. Part of it is pushing through small talk to express things that really matter to you. This can make Levin, for instance, quite clumsy and gauche on social occasions, but reading Tolstoy makes you see how utterly unimportant this is."

"A really really good book. I like it because it deals with the complexities of human interaction and the double standards of society. People who are considered moral do immoral things and people who are supposed to be immoral display great kindness. Tolstoy is very good at bringing that stuff into focus. All Anna tries to do is be her authentic self, and the people who are actually rather horrible, Vronsky and her husband, survive and prosper. And even the women in the book who do survive and prosper have to frustrate, deny and suppress their authenticity, so it’s a very feminist book. It’s an allegory for human rights in general and the right that every human individual has to be themselves. She’s trying to be her authentic self, a sexual and loving woman and she gets whopped for it and that’s not fair. Basically what he’s saying is that it’s unfair and it shouldn’t be like this. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter No, because he makes the point very early that Vronksy can’t possibly handle her because he is a sub-standard human being and that she casts herself before swine because that’s all that’s available and the men in this culture are moral dwarves. Go back and read the bits about how it’s necessary and expected to fuck other men’s wives. At the end of the day he fails her completely because he hasn’t got the guts. She’s the only one with the guts. He’s saying it’s tragic that a solid gold human being gets killed for expressing herself but all the wankers do OK because they play by the rules. Even Kitty is a bit of a shadow. Yes, but I think it could happen anywhere. I think you teach people survival skills. You have to teach someone not to take their trousers off and shit in the street and things like that but you don’t have to change who they are. Just because you’ve learned how to swim you don’t have to stop being who you are. I think most of us had the experience of not being able to be authentic and feeling that our parents didn’t get us, that we and the system we were in was wrong and discouraged us from being authentic. But I found that the only real success and fulfilment in life comes when you are being authentic. But the fear is so drummed into us that it can be hard to break the pattern. The interesting thing about an autistic kid, though, is that you can try to change them but it doesn’t work. That’s the great gift that they have. Their ego is in the background so they can’t be controlled by moral manipulation – what people think is irrelevant to them. There is a lot to be learned about authenticity from hanging out with an autistic person. They are almost born enlightened – it is healing to be with them. They show us it is possible to be another way. Now it’s one in 100 kids so it’s touching everybody. It’s a little bit like having shamans in our midst."

"Well, this is an astonishing novel about the history of marriage and love, the high society woman falling from grace because of her deep passion for Vronsky, even though she has a respect for Karenin and he for her, within the confines of the time. She gives up her position, her child for this powerful passion. Tolstoy describes the sexual repression and her need for passion but never passes judgment. But that’s because there was no other way out for her. Tolstoy actually witnessed the death of an adulteress at a train station. I mean, he was a cruel, ruthless and difficult man in many ways, serially unfaithful, but devoted to his wife and children at the same time. The important thing about Anna Karenina as a novel though is how powerful it is about the constraints of marriage and her need for passion, sacrificing everything for the sake of passion and love. There is not a single woman who doesn’t identify with her. That’s an interesting question about how love has changed. Love and dedication used to be directed at your husband, not your children. Now you can openly love your children more than your husband – that passion is now reserved for children, maybe because it’s permanent. We can no longer trust our relationships to provide that sense of endless love."