To think that Anna Karenina would have been less unhappy if she hadn't fallen in love with Vronsky?

[SwedesInACape]

I think everyone who has embarked upon/is thinking of embarking upon/is a bit bored with their husband or partner should read the book or at the very least watch the film. All that pain.

I loathed Charles Bovary as well though.

What a sap.

I don't mean I like her exactly, I mean I like the book. I didn't find her nearly so irritating last time I read it.

My fave adultery novel was Effi Briest. At least in that one, he shows how the demand that male honour be satisfied, is utterly disproportionate to the havoc that wreaks on all their lives. While not actually ever criticising the code they live by.

It's ages since I've read AK, is Anna stupid? Effi and Emma are, aren't they, am wondering if male novelists just thought all adulterous women were naturally a bit thick?

I like the book too, though when I tried to reread it recently I couldn't get into it. Tolstoy writes brilliantly but I don't like his perception of women.

I suppose it's experience of life that makes you change your attitude to a charcter in a book. First time I read AK (I was about 20) I thought life threw things at you and you had to deal with what was thrown at you as best you could. Now I feel you chart your own course most of the time.

Dittany - Happy new year to you and thank you for really making me stop and think about things that I would not normally think about at all.

My 'ha ha ha' didn't mean that I disliked the book. It just seemed that the OP was such a draconian warning against adultery. "It will end in tears. And suicide. And delays to commuters."

Threadie - LOL at delays to commuters.

Dittany - I caught the end of an Anna Karenina the other night..... not sure if it was the same version you saw. And they had changed the book hugely - in the book Vronsky and Anna have a daughter and Karenin gains custody.

Threadie I think I might make a placard and walk up and down Harpenden High Street.

Do not commit adultery
It will lead to pain and suffering for all concerned including your children
There will be delays to commuters

I think that would play very well with the Harpenden demographic.

LOL at Swedes. My guess is that the delays to commuters would be the bigger deterrent.

Oh, it's definitely the commuter angle that would grab attention round here.

But yes, when I first read these books as a teenager, I did realise AK and EB et al were trapped by the oppression of wimmin and all that. It was just very hard to sympathise with them as they were so bloody irritating. Unlike Austen's heroines (apart from Catherine in Northanger Abbey who I would quite like to slap).

agree about the choice of Vronsky - he's flagged up from the start as being not completely "sound".

Interested that the likeness to Mdame B. has come up so soon.

Ages since I read AK but isn't there the scene on the train really early on where she goes into that v. deep, fugue state and it sort of indicates that the affair is so v. much about redressing something in her that isn't being answered in her life?

If so, it suggests that the affair between the two of them has a strong element of, very nearly, fantasy and the creation of an imaginary space - like MB.

And also what so many agony columns have to say about affairs in general.

And suggests that any affair she might have embarked upon, with any other person, would have been similarly doomed.

So, while the choice of Vronsky wasn't so great, it was a choice that fulfilled her deepest needs in embarking on an affair (he would play the game). she wouldn't have chosen a more "sensible" choice.

Agree she would have been better taking an OU course.

Fwiw - I think that in both these books there is a strong connection between adultery and writing. The affair takes place in a similar imaginary/real space to writing. Also, these nineteenth century writers had a bit of a thing about writing being a bit of a vocation, which could take you away from your family (being locked away in a room, wrestling with the opus,) and could similarly end up sacrificing the present in the hope of a utopia/future that might never happen (social approbation as a genius/elysium of love). Also similar opposition to bourgeois mores that might just be the mark of delusion/madness (insanity of love/thinking your a genius).

they are similar books
as an aside ...anyone know why Anna karenin is sometimes referred o as Anna Karenina?

Edam I do so agree that Catherine in NA is eminently slappable but NA is a piss-take of the gothic novels then in vogue, no?

I confess to a weakness for a good gothic novel...

i read both AK and MB in a couple of days - utterly unputdownable

the pain and the heartache could wrench even he hardest heart -

swedes i agree with your op

Although, Zen, the fantasies of Emma and Anna are very different in at least one sense. Emma is profoundly stupid and her fantasies are based on facile romantic fiction. She is too shallow to find the genuine romance of a real marriage.
(Adultery and writing are linked then in the further sense that bad writing and bad sentiment unfaithfulness are united.)

But Anna is intelligent and capable. I can't remember her book very well but she is perhaps like Hedda Gabler. A creative woman whose life is trammelled by the requirement to live vicariously through an unimaginative husband. I don't recall the fugue state, but her life is so profoundly not her that presumably the 'involuntary fantasy' of the fugue becomes inevitable.

And perhaps her fugue only took the form of adultery because her identity was (so unfairly) defined by marriage. There should have been more to her life. There never could have been anythig to Emma's.

NotanOtter - the A at the end of the surname indicates that it is a female in Russian. Surnames are actually altered to indicate whether it is a male or a female (All nounds are either masculine, feminine or neuter). So the males are Karenin, but females are Karenina.

Yup, NA is a satire on the gothic novel but Catherine is still irritating. So is the awful vicar's wife in Emma - you know she's there as a figure of fun and to point up all sorts of things about other characters but she's still horrible!

I know lots of creative, imaginative, intelligent, women with dull husbands.

A truly intelligent and creative woman would be able to chart a worthwhile and fulfilling course through life in spite of marrying a dull man.

Oh yes I completely agree swedes. I am quite puritanical about adultery actually.

But a woman in Anna's position? In nineteenth century Russia? Different for her.