I Miss Anna

Last night, after about six months, I finished reading "Anna Karenina." During my senior year of college I said one thing I wanted to do was read some of the classics, and Tolstoy was my first choice. (Yes, I know that Opera also had this as part of her Book Club last year, and no, that's not the reason I selected this book.)

Now, this book is 817 pages long. I started it around Christmas last year. Throughout this entire time, I have been with Anna and Vronksy, Levin and Kitty, Stiva and Dolly, almost every day, at least every week. The pages have been read in Boston and Eagle-Vail, but mostly in my home in Shelby, Ohio, far away from eighteenth-century Russia. So as I saw the end approach, realized there were only about fifty pages left, I think I began to get a little sad. Of course, there were feelings of joy and accomplishment as well, a time of both celebration and sorrow. I opened a bottle of wine, got into my favorite pajamas, grabbed some pillows and a comforter, and stayed awake late into the night, and when I turned the last page, there might have been a tear or two. I felt like I was losing some close friends. I had a first-hand view into their lives for so many days and weeks and months that I almost forgot they weren't actually real. As with most novels, at the end, the characters aren't all dead, so now I am left not really knowing what happened to them after they stopped inviting me into their lives and thoughts. I don't know what happened on page 818.

One of the things I really loved about this novel, and about all the great novels, is that I find I love each character. They all have virtues and they all have flaws, but this is what makes them believable. I especially loved Levin. Rather awkward, socially inept, he was intelligent and compassionate and questioned the society that he saw around him. Towards the end of the novel, he comes to accept "faith" that he before had not taken a part in, and his journey there is quite beautiful. I discovered after reading the novel that this "coming to faith" represents Tolstoy's own conversion while writing the novel. The last sentence is a great one, and one that I think I can share without really giving anything away. Levin says:

"[M]y life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!"

I love it. Indeed, those last fifty pages were breaktaking, and I wish I could share more without giving away the climax of the story which Tolstoy brilliantly leads up to. I suppose you'll have to read it yourself.