Quote:
Originally Posted by Hamlet53
I thought that at times Tolstoy's character development was brilliant. As an example the entire Chapter 8 of Part II which is devoted to who Alexey Alexandrovitch Karenin was as a person and his relationship to Anna.
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I decided to quote just this part of your post, because I mostly agree with everything else that was said on here, but as far as character development goes, this one left me wanting. I guess you could argue that Tolstoy tries to give an insight into his characters' psychological motivations, but in the case of Anna Karenina, this didn't come across for me. It felt like every chapter served to intensify her neurosis. And while that can be justified given her situation, the last few chapters concerning her and Vronsky just came off as unbearable. Alright, she had an opium problem, that much was obvious. But still, when every exchange serves as a setup for a meaningless conflict which always has the same structure with slightly different wording, it became almost senseless to me. Her inner monologues became so annoying by the end that I couldn't believe her thoughts had any progression. Always the same thoughts, over and over and over. I know, she was ill, but it still felt oh so contrived to me. I don't know..
Concerning the narrative descriptions of characters' mental lives, I still haven't read a better novel than Virginia Woolf's
To the Lighthouse
Anyway, what I really wanted to bring up was that it seemed to me that Tolstoy threw in quite a few comments into the story that appear totally offhand, as though they were meaningless but sound really important at the time. Let me give you an example of what I mean: Levin and Kitty's wedding. In that chapter, there's a passage where the narrator says (of Kitty): All her life, all her desires and hopes were concentrated on this one man, still uncomprehended by her, to whom she was bound by a feeling of alternate attraction and repulsion, even less comprehended than the man himself, and all the while she was going on living in the outward conditions of her old life."
Now, when I read that she was repulsed by him, it sticks in my mind, and all the time I wait for some sort of working through of this repulsion, but it's never resolved in the book. It's just left dangling there, glossed over as it seems and never mentioned again. It just felt... overlooked. And I think I found a couple more instances of this, but can't find the highlights now.