We're All Reading Anna Karenina in New York City
mind the gap
I don’t know why, but this autumn we’re all reading Anna Karenina. Sometimes we all just end up reading the same old books — two years ago, we were all reading Goethe. Six years ago, everybody read Play it As It Lays. This autumn, everybody’s reading Anna Karenina.
I’ll admit that such a broad characterization of America’s reading habits sounds like an oversimplification, like the sort of premise a bad writer might invent. But in the month of October alone, Ken Burns talked about Anna K in the New York Times. Kelly Weill read it on her iPhone. The Paris Review’s web editor tweeted, “everyone I know is reading Anna Karenina and taking a long walk.”
And so, because I am never one to pass up a good trend, I too began reading Anna Karenina — I happened to be in New York City and the book felt right for NYC in the early winter (and, again, they’re all reading it there). It’s my eccentric belief that some books are meant to be read in certain places, at certain times of the year. For example, I prefer to read Under the Volcano on a California beach in the dead heat of August and Swann’s Way is perfect for Connecticut in springtime.1
Tolstoy’s novel opens in medias res — in the opening pages, we are told there has been a disastrous bout of adultery. But what perfection for New York, where the whole concrete jungle is a drama in media res. There’s no beginning-or-end to the city with its unending towers scratching the sky. Anna Karenina — like the best works of realism — swallows you entirely. As you read (provided you’re reading a good translation2), you become like a carriage horse with blinders on.
You read Tolstoy for half an hour and you cannot imagine anything else. And if you stand anywhere in New York City and walk for half an hour, you cannot imagine anything else. New York becomes the world. Camus said New York City is a place where you lose yourself forever. He said he was out of his depth when he thought of New York. As Tolstoy’s co-protagonist Konstantin Levin is out of his depth, overtaken by an all-consuming emotion — he says he is not in love; it’s bigger, some “external force taking ahold of me.”
I too am out of my depth when I think of New York. And when I’m there, I feel the city as an external force which takes ahold of me. I have never lived in the city-that-never-sleeps and I know I never will — I’m terrified of losing myself there, I get claustrophobic around the towers and annoyed with Manhattan’s ravaging of the senses. After four days in New York, my knuckles go white, my hair stands on edge and I begin looking for fights in the streets.
I wish I was the sort of person who could move to New York and love it — they seem so exciting, those people. It seems they lead such interesting lives. They go to operas and they have a favorite dive bar nearby and a favorite hotel bar too and they always know the tone of the ongoing cosmopolitan conversation. Even when they live cheaply, it’s somehow chic. Because it also seems that all people who move to New York live cheaply at some point in their tenure there.
In New York City, as in Anna Karenina, the strata of society are both easily recognizable and occasionally intermixed. Tolstoy’s male characters move between social circles3. In Anna Karenina, there is Konstantin Levin the landowner and Agafya Mikhailovna the housekeeper and because this is a Russian novel, there is of course, a tender-hearted prostitute. In New York City, there are the blue-blooded wealthy who live in the regal buildings along Fifth Avenue and the doormen who stand in the lobbies of those buildings and the homeless who aren’t allowed inside. They see each other on the streets, have brief interactions and go about their day. But they are all New Yorkers, aren’t they?
Camus said New York “lays bare your soul”, and that’s just how Anna Karenina affects you. It leaves you feeling raw, as if Tolstoy has put your emotional stability on trial and poked a few holes in your armor.
I suppose I should make more of an effort to give succinct explanations as to why we’re all reading Anna Karenina in New York City this fall. That was the title of this post and I’d like to be able to give some simple examples. I’d like to be satisfied in saying: it’s cold in New York right now and it’s cold in Anna Karenina right now too. Or maybe to say: New York is full of beautiful people and so is Anna Karenina. Maybe I could even go deeper, I could suggest that Anna Karenina is ripe for the present end-of-the-world moment in which we are searching not for more dead-eyed prose but for some real-life writing that leaves us feeling raw.
But I’m not a good enough structuralist to give such a simple answer. Or maybe I’m not educated enough to give an answer sufficiently complex to pass the bullshit test. I can’t even say what you feel as you read Anna Karenina. I can say what I feel; but maybe you feel different than me — maybe you read Catcher in the Rye and you admire Holden Caulfield. I hate Holden Caulfield, I wish he died at the end of that book. What I’m saying is that New York City in the early-winter leaves me feeling raw and hollow and contemplative and so does Anna Karenina. And yet, I like engaging in the melancholy of New York in the early-winter. And I like the sadness of Anna Karenina. Like New York City, I will go back to it again.
I would also like to add that, contrary to a common misconception, not all the Russian novels are winter books. Crime & Punishment, for example, is a summer book — Dostoyevsky uses the blistering Petersburg heat to boil his plot in the same way that Fitzgerald uses the blistering NYC heat to boil the plot in Gatsby.
The first time I read Anna Karenina, was the summer after my junior year of college. I read it in a lounge chair overlooking the river where I grew up. It wasn’t the right place for it and the translation I read (Magarshack’s) was dry without an ounce of emotion. I’ve since climbed aboard the Pevear and Volokhonsky bandwagon. I've read their Dostoyevskys and their Chekhovs (their translation of The Lady With the Dog is an excellent companion to Anna Karenina) and their Gogols — they’re great. Or some people (me) think they’re great. Anyway, there’s a really good New Yorker piece on it.
One of the few worthwhile criticisms of Tolstoy is that he, an aristocrat, was horrible at writing Russian peasants. But what are you going to do? Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway can’t write women, we still read their books. Also, I’d like to point out that it’s a funny little twist that we’re reading a Russian aristocrat at the same time our government has levied sanctions on the Russian aristocrats. But again, what are you going to do? Not read Tolstoy? fuck-all-the-way-off with that remedy.