The Name Count
This novel is named after Anna, but Tolstoy writes the name Levin almost twice as often, and in the last part he never writes the name Anna at all.
Here is the count, from Project Gutenberg ebook number one thousand three hundred ninety-nine, in Constance Garnett’s translation. The plain name Anna appears eight hundred twenty-two times. Levin appears sixteen hundred sixteen times. Even Vronsky beats Anna, with eight hundred sixty-two.
Levin’s name is the bigger number in all eight parts of the book. In a chapter-by-chapter race, Anna leads in one hundred chapters, Levin leads in one hundred fourteen, and twenty-five are a tie.
That is my own tally of plain names, so treat it as a rough gauge. But follow it through the story and it shows what the book is really about: one marriage coming apart, one marriage being built, and one man trying to work out how to live. Fair warning, this summary spoils everything, ending included. It also covers a death by suicide, in the section called The Last Day, so skip that one if it is hard to hear.
Part One: A Station and a Refusal
Tolstoy opens with a sentence about families: happy ones are all alike, and every unhappy one is unhappy in its own way. Then he shows us one. In the Oblonsky house, the wife, Dolly, has found out that her husband, Stiva, had an affair with the children’s former French governess. Stiva is charming, healthy and well fed, and he cannot honestly make himself repent. He asks his sister Anna to come from Petersburg and calm his wife.
Meanwhile Levin, a country landowner, arrives in Moscow to propose to Kitty, Dolly’s younger sister. She refuses him, because she is waiting for Count Vronsky to propose.
Anna arrives at the same station where Vronsky is meeting his mother. While they stand there, a railway guard is crushed by a train. Anna calls it an omen of evil. Remember that, because the book returns to a station.
At the ball, Kitty is sure that Vronsky will ask her for the mazurka. Instead, she watches him dance with Anna, and she sees what is happening. Anna leaves Moscow early, on a night train in a snowstorm. At a stop, Vronsky is standing on the platform. He tells her he has come to be where she is. She goes home to her husband, Karenin, and her young son, Seryozha.
Parts Two and Three: A Fall and a Field
Back in Petersburg, Vronsky follows Anna into every drawing room. Her husband warns her that people are talking. Then the book tells us that what he feared has happened. Anna and Vronsky are lovers, and she says she has nothing now but him.
Then comes the horse race. Vronsky falls, and his mare breaks her back and is put down. In the pavilion, Anna cries out and hides her face, in front of everyone. On the drive home she tells her husband the truth in one line: she loves Vronsky, she is his mistress, and she hates him. Karenin’s answer is to demand that appearances be kept up.
Meanwhile, Kitty falls ill and is taken to a German spa. There she makes friends and slowly recovers, and by the end of Part Two she is serene.
Part Three almost leaves Anna out. Her name appears seventy-nine times, and Levin’s three hundred ten. Levin spends the part on his farm. He picks up a scythe and mows with his peasants, and the book fills with the idea. Words starting with m-o-w appear seventy-two times in this part, and four times at most in any other. He also watches a young peasant couple on a hay cart, and thinks of Kitty. However good that simple life may be, he tells himself, he loves her.
Part Four: Forgiveness
Part Four puts both stories in one evening. At Stiva’s dinner party in Moscow, Levin and Kitty meet again, and by the end of the night she has said she loves him and that he should come the next morning.
At the same dinner, Dolly urges Karenin to forgive his wife. He refuses. He has long decided that the Christian rule of forgiveness does not apply to his case. Forgive I cannot, he says, because he hates her too much.
That night he gets a telegram from Anna. She is dying, and begs him to come. He takes it for a trick, then decides to go.
In Petersburg he finds her delirious after giving birth to a daughter, and Vronsky weeping in the next room. At her bed, Karenin forgives them both. The text says it gives him a spiritual peace he never knew. He grows fond of the baby, who is not his child.
Vronsky is overwhelmed by the man’s generosity and shoots himself. He survives, and asks that it be called an accident. When Anna recovers, Vronsky comes to her. She tells him he has conquered her, and the two go abroad, with no divorce, and no wish for one.
Parts Five and Six: Two Households
Part Five is the wedding. Levin and Kitty marry in Moscow, and then he learns that married life is not what he pictured. When his brother Nikolay is dying in a provincial hotel, Kitty is the one who steadies Levin, and after the death he finds out she is expecting.
Anna and Vronsky travel through Italy and settle in a small town near a painter named Mihailov, who paints Anna’s portrait. Back in Petersburg, she slips in to see her son on his birthday. When Karenin walks in, she leaves with the toys she bought still in her hands. At the theater, a lady says it is a disgrace to sit beside her. It is the first time Vronsky feels real anger at Anna, and they make up and leave for the country.
In Part Six, Dolly stays with Kitty and Levin for the summer. She then drives to see Anna and Vronsky at their country house, finds a rich and comfortable home, and asks the question that matters. Surely a divorce is possible? Anna says she does not want to talk about it, and that asking would mean humbling herself.
The summer and part of the winter pass with no step toward one. Vronsky goes to the provincial elections and Anna cannot bear his absence. By the end of Part Six, they have moved to Moscow, waiting for her husband’s answer.
Part Seven: The Last Day
Part Seven opens with Kitty’s long labour. The date the learned calculators gave came and went, and nothing happened. Levin is terrified, and the baby, a son named Mitya, is born healthy. Levin feels fear first, and then a thrill of senseless joy when the baby sneezes.
While in Moscow, Levin also meets Anna, who charms him within an hour. Afterwards she knows she did it on purpose, and she is not proud of it.
In Petersburg, Karenin listens to a Frenchman, Landau, who falls into a trance. Karenin sends his final answer. No divorce.
After one quarrel too many, Vronsky leaves to see his mother. Anna writes him a note: I was wrong, come back, I’m afraid. It does not reach him. She sends a telegram, and his answer says he cannot come before ten o’clock. She decides to go to him, and goes to a railway station.
Her last day is made of notes that cross. His note, which finds her at the station, says only that he is sorry hers did not reach him, and he will be home at ten. In the crowd, she thinks of the guard crushed on the day they met. Her last words are, Lord, forgive me all.
Part Eight: The Part with No Anna
The name Anna never appears in Part Eight. It is the shortest part, nineteen chapters, and Levin’s name appears ninety times.
She comes back only in a conversation on a train platform. Vronsky’s mother says her son did not speak for six weeks, and that Karenin has taken Anna’s daughter. She calls Anna a bad woman. Vronsky himself, going to fight as a volunteer in Serbia, says his life is worth nothing to him.
Then the book goes back to Levin, who is tormented by questions of death and meaning. A peasant named Fyodor tells him that a neighbor lives for his soul. That one phrase sets off a change in Levin. At his table, his brother Sergey argues that the whole nation longs to help the Slavs, and Levin answers that the people sacrifice for their soul, not for murder. A storm breaks, Kitty and the baby are safe under a tree, and Levin ends the novel on a terrace under the stars.
He tells nobody what he has found. He expects to go on losing his temper and praying without knowing why. But his life now has a positive meaning of goodness, which he has the power to put into every minute.
What the Count Says
So whose book is it? In my reading, Anna is the fire, and Levin is the question. Her story ends in Part Seven. Anna gets the station at the start and the station at the end, but Levin gets the last page, and his is the question the final pages are left to answer.
If you want to read it yourself, the Garnett translation is free on Project Gutenberg, ebook one thousand three hundred ninety-nine. It is long, about three hundred fifty thousand words, so pick a part at a time.
My question for you: whose book is it, Anna’s or Levin’s? Tell me in the comments. Subscribe for more big novels, one clear angle at a time, and tap like if the count helped.
