GARY MORSON
Marriage, Love, and Time in Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina
This article, by a specialist in Russian literature,
suggests ways in which researchers on marriage
and the family might learn from great realist nov-
els. It explores differences between the humani-
ties and social sciences, the need for a historical
perspective on marriage, the role of temporality
in love and family, the different kinds of sexual
love, the nature of ‘‘prosaics,’’ the importance
of the ordinary, and the Russian Writers’ con-
ception of evil. A detailed analysis of Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina illustrates how great literature
can shed light on love, marriage, and family.
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary
human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow
and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of
that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
—George Eliot, Middlemarch
The aspects of things that are most impor-
tant for us are hidden because of their simplicity
and familiarity. (One is unable to notice some-
thing—because it is always before one’s eyes.) . . .
And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once
seen, is most striking and most powerful.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations
As a scholar of Russian literature, I accepted
the invitation to contribute to a social sci-
ence journal with some hesitation. A decade
and a half ago, I spent a year as a token
humanist at the Center for Advanced Study in
Department of Slavic Languages, Northwestern University,
Evanston, IL 60208-2206 (gmorson@northwestern.edu).
Journal of Family Theory & Review 2 (December 2010): 353–369
DOI:10.1111/j.1756-2589.2010.00066.x
the Behavioral Sciences. I expected that social
scientists would differ with humanists regarding
key assumptions. But I soon learned that the dif-
ference was far greater than that. Not only does
each group reject the key beliefs of the other, but
also each finds it difficult to believe that the other
actually believes what it professes to believe.
I was looking for a first-order difference but
encountered a second-order difference, as well.
Given their self-image as scientists, their
training in statistical methods, and their demands
for hard evidence, the social scientists I met
found it hard to grasp that the governing ortho-
doxy in literary studies rejected the very exis-
tence of facts. Surely, I would hear, literary
scholars do not reject facts—they just mean that
we should be skeptical about what a fact is.
They could not possibly mean that truth is no
more than what power says it is; they must
just mean that power can cloud our percep-
tions. When I replied that, no, the alternatives
the social scientists offered were now consid-
ered outmoded, reactionary, pre-postmodernist
positions, economists and political scientists
remained dubious.
By the same token, I found it hard to accept
that social scientists really believed that people
always, or even usually, act as rational agents to
maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Do they
not see all the irrationalities of human behavior,
and have they never engaged in introspection?
Could they really mean that each apparently
irrational action is really a rational one aiming
for a goal we have not yet identified? Have they
never read Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from
Underground?
It is not beliefs, but beliefs regarding each
other’s beliefs, that make different disciplines
353
354
into radically different cultures (I allude,
of course, to C. P. Snow’s The Two Cul-
tures, 1993).
It must be apparent that I doubt the core
assumptions of both fields. If I had to choose,
I would prefer the social sciences, which, for
all their naı̈veté, do not render the very concept
of knowledge meaningless. But I do think that
social scientists who deal with how people actu-
ally think, feel, and behave could learn a lot, if
not from literary critics, then at least from great
literature.
Let me put the point this way: If social scien-
tists understood individual psychology as well as
the great novelists did, they could offer descrip-
tions of human beings as believable as those
of Jane Austen, George Eliot, or Tolstoy. But
no such descriptions exist. None is even close.
Preparing to write this essay, I have gained
insight from some research on marriages, and
I am sure there is a great deal more I can learn,
but I do not expect to see anything rivaling
George Eliot’s description of Dorothea Brooke’s
marriage to Casaubon in Middlemarch or the
marriages of Anna and Karenin or Levin and
Kitty in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. To describe
marriages so plausibly, surely these novelists
must know something.
ROAD MAP
For what it is worth, this article offers a sam-
ple of what the humanities, and especially great
novels, can contribute to an understanding of
marriage. I begin with some reflections on the
importance of a historical perspective on present
institutions. Because its history is complex, mar-
riage cannot be assumed to mean the same thing
to everybody. At any given moment, people’s
expectations reflect numerous divergent histor-
ical traditions of which they are only dimly
aware. For that matter, self-deception applies to
cultures as well as to individuals.
For the rest of this article, I focus on
Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, which is usually
considered one of the handful of best novels ever
written. The novel focuses on marriage and the
family. It considers the role of children, which
suggests that time pertains to the very nature
of marriage. We need to think of marriages
as participating in a long tradition of which
any given marriage is but a moment. Thinking
only in terms of present satisfaction leads to an
oversimplification of what marriage entails, both
for the couple and for society in general.
Journal of Family Theory & Review
I then consider a key aspect of Tolstoy’s phi-
losophy of life, the idea I call prosaics. Prosaics
stresses the importance of ordinary, undramatic
events. A good marriage is one about which
there is no story to tell. Tolstoy also wanted
to show that, although we typically identify all
sexual love with romantic love, romantic love is
but one among several distinct types of love. It is
more suited to adultery than to marriage. We will
explore the romantic view of life in some detail.
Other types of love include the hedonistic; the
idyllic; and the one that Tolstoy most favored,
the prosaic. Once we recognize the diversity of
loves, we may more intelligently choose among
them and understand the choices of others.
HISTORY
Social scientists also differ from historians. Hav-
ing served on several committees to award
fellowships, I have seen anthropologists express
enthusiasm for proposals that distress historians,
and vice versa. When anthropologists admire
perceptive description of how the elements of a
culture interact, historians object that an explana-
tion must include how the culture changed over
time into what it is. For historians, synchronic
explanations omit origins, and for anthropol-
ogists, diachronic ones miss how the culture
actually works.
When I was invited to contribute to the present
issue, I looked through some surveys of work on
marriages. As a Bakhtin scholar, for instance, I
discovered in Leslie A. Baxter’s (2004) descrip-
tion of relationships as dialogues a fine applica-
tion of Bakhtin’s ideas. Once one thinks along
these lines, one ceases to see marriage as a con-
tract into which two people enter. Once it exists,
a marriage becomes a unit of its own, larger than
the individuals comprising it, and the individu-
als themselves become shaped by its surprising
dynamics. They get their identity partly from
the dialogue. The marriage makes the spouses
as much as the spouses make the marriage.
If Baxter wanted to take Bakhtin’s insights
a step further, she would add a historical
dimension. Bakhtin was quite clear that every
element of culture, personality, and language
comes to us shaped by dialogues of the past,
extending over ‘‘great time’’ to remote antiq-
uity. We come to a world in which values,
concepts, and words are, as Bakhtin liked to say,
‘‘already spoken about,’’ already shaped by the
arguments, contests, and contingencies of the
Love and Anna Karenina
past. We make our selves by incorporating and
reaccentuating our culture’s ongoing dialogues,
and it is those selves that, having imbibed a
series of expectations about marriage, enter into
it with another person, shaped in a similar way
but with somewhat different sets of expectations.
To understand what happens as if marriage con-
sisted of an interaction of monads is to miss
a great deal of what is going on. Anyone who
reads novels from another culture, for instance,
will be struck by the changing nature not just
of gender roles, legal rights, and power relations
but also of the very goals of marriage itself.
My own thoughts about marriage had been
shaped not only by the great realist novels
but also by such historical classics as Georges
Duby’s (1991) Medieval Marriage and Denis
de Rougement’s (1956) Love in the Western
World (along with Philippe Ariès, Duby was
an editor of the important set of volumes
A History of Private Life). I was therefore
struck by the difference between those works
and the extensive research summarized in the
survey article by Thomas N. Bradbury, Frank
D. Fincham, and Steven R. H. Beach (2000),
‘‘Research on the Nature and Determinants of
Marital Satisfaction: A Decade in Review.’’
If this survey is accurate, it would seem that
researchers on marriage do not take much
interest in the history of marriage. They describe
work conducted as if that history had either not
left a mark on present feelings, assumptions, and
behavior or had left one visible without direct
examination of historical questions. The point
seems to be that, however marriage became
what it is, it should be possible to assess marital
satisfaction and what contributes to it.
But what if the very concept of marital satis-
faction is wanting, precisely because it ignores
questions that historical study would make vis-
ible? The very concept of marital satisfaction,
for instance, implicitly presumes that marriage
is essentially a relationship between two peo-
ple seeking to be satisfied. I imagine that this
hedonistic view is now widespread, and perhaps
predominant, in American culture, but surely it
is not the only possible view. Are we so sure,
for instance, that people in China, India, and the
Middle East think that the primary goal of mar-
riage is satisfaction? And how many Americans
today were born in those countries or are the
children of people born in those countries?
For that matter, even in Western culture, many
other views of marriage have existed. Almost
355
at random, I quote a sentence I underlined in
Duby’s (1991) book: ‘‘The entire history of
marriage in Western Christendom amounts to a
gradual process of acculturation, in which the
ecclesiastical model slowly gained the upper
hand, not over disorder—as is too often claimed
by those who blindly espouse the point of view
of Churchmen whose testimony is almost all that
has come down to us—but over a different order,
one that was solidly entrenched and not easily
dislodged’’ (p. 17). That other order was secu-
lar and concerned the interests of family above
all. The two views constantly came into conflict
over questions of incest, bigamy, divorce, con-
sent, sexuality, the role of betrothal as opposed
to wedding, inheritance, and countless other
matters. Nor were these the only contending
theories: Various heresies saw marriage in their
own way, at times rejecting it altogether. In none
of these arguments was the issue the satisfaction
of the partners.
One late-medieval view that is much with us
today is that of romantic love. I shall have a lot
more to say about romance below, but let me just
say here that, if anything, romance in our culture
probably wins the competition with hedonism.
Although we often do not recognize as much, the
two views are fundamentally opposed. It is, in
fact, the difference between the two that gener-
ates the plot of so many great novels; the adultery
plot typically depends on the search for romance
even at the expense of pleasure and satisfaction.
Anna Karenina craved not satisfaction but grand
passion, even at the expense of life itself.1
Many conflicting views of marriage compete
to shape our feelings, behaviors, and attitudes.
That, indeed, may be why we become so
confused or surprised by it. Given the age and
extensiveness of the institution, matters could
hardly be otherwise. We do not know what
we expect of it, whether our expectations are
compatible, or why we expect them.
One does not have to be a psychoanalyst to
recognize that what we say we want and what
we actually want may not be the same. What
we say depends on what we have been taught to
say, on the language available to us, and on our
capacity to overcome self-deception and vanity.
1 The romantic view exalts transcendence over the
everyday. Derived, as de Rougement contends, from
religious heresies, it sees love in an essentially mystical
way, as lifting us out of the world. Pleasure belongs very
much to this world, and so the two may easily conflict.
356
‘‘Self-love,’’ as La Rochefoucauld observed, ‘‘is
cleverer than the cleverest man in the world’’
(Maxims, 1959, p. 33).2 Cultures, as well as
individuals, deceive themselves. They simplify
the many different sets of values that persist
from earlier times; serve no longer recognized
purposes; and, perhaps, guard us from dangers
no longer present. History and great novels help
us see what we otherwise might overlook.
CHILDREN
What is the role of children in marriage? In the
hedonistic view, they must be incidental. One
has them if one expects they will provide sat-
isfaction. They are like pets, except that they
cannot be so easily gotten rid of. As do houses,
they represent a long-term commitment, except
that they cannot be remodeled. Rational choice
economists would go along with this view. Chil-
dren are expensive, in terms of time, effort, and
money. And in advanced countries, as those
countries like to style themselves, children are
no longer needed to provide for one’s old age.
One would therefore expect that societies in
which hedonistic views of marriage play a large
role would experience a declining birth rate, as
seems to be the case.
The survey article on marital satisfaction
refers to ‘‘the milieus in which marriages oper-
ate, including microcontexts (e.g. the presence of
children. . . . )’’ (Bradbury, Fincham, & Beach,
2000, p. 964). From the perspective of the
Middle Ages or traditionalists today, this for-
mulation seems decidedly odd. Traditionalists
might ask, ‘‘What if children are not a context
for marriage but essential to its very nature?
What if a marriage without children is somehow
not quite a full marriage?’’
Instead of imagining monads who decide to
achieve satisfaction through a contract of mar-
riage, and then, on the same grounds, make a
quite separate decision to have or not to have
2 The 17th-century French author of maxims, François de
la Rochefoucauld, is one of the great psychologists in world
literature. Among his famous maxims are the following:
‘‘There are successful marriages, but no blissful ones’’
(p. 53); ‘‘There are people who would never have fallen in
love but for hearing love discussed’’ (p. 57); ‘‘Hypocrisy is
the homage that vice pays to virtue’’ (p. 73); ‘‘We all have
sufficient fortitude to endure the misfortunes of others’’
(p. 36, modified to accord with the usual version). Tolstoy
loved La Rochefoucauld, and his novels contain aphorisms
on this model.
Journal of Family Theory & Review
children, what if marriage is about family? What
if, instead of seeing a family as a couple to
which children have been added, we see a cou-
ple without children as an incomplete family or
as a family still lacking children? Is the absence
of children a significant one, like Conan Doyle’s
dog that didn’t bark, or is it a mere absence, no
different from countless other absences? Perhaps
many people who profess more up-to-date views
of marriage still feel the sense of childlessness
as an incompleteness.
TOLSTOY, MARRIAGE, AND TIME
Tolstoy stressed that children give marriage a
temporal dimension it might otherwise lack.
Understood hedonistically, a marriage lasts as
long as it lasts, but in a family-centered view,
it represents a link between generations. It is a
chapter in a longer story.
In Anna Karenina, Stiva views life, and there-
fore marriage, entirely hedonistically. He has
long ceased to derive much pleasure from his
wife, and so he indulges in an endless series of
affairs. For Stiva, children are simply an encum-
brance and expense he leaves to his wife, while
he pursues a life of pleasure. He takes much the
same view of the property he and his wife have
inherited: it is there to be enjoyed. He makes the
most of his status as an aristocrat but, as a good
liberal, regards class identity as an outmoded
prejudice.
Stiva’s friend Levin, the novel’s hero, differs
with Stiva on every point. When he sees Stiva
selling his wife’s forest to a merchant who will
cut it down for timber, Levin objects that such a
sale violates Stiva’s duty to the land, a concept
that Stiva finds laughably vague.3 As Levin sees
the matter, an aristocrat does not own the land
he has inherited, in the sense that he is free to do
with it as he likes, but simply serves as its steward
for the present generation. As he inherited it from
his ancestors, he must pass it on to his children in
no worse a condition. The forests must not be cut
down, however profitable the sale. In this way,
the environment as a whole is preserved, which
for Levin is one reason an aristocracy is needed, a
position that liberals regard as retrograde. Levin
3 The actual phrase does not occur until later in the novel,
when Levin agrees with a conservative landowner. Levin
works hard for profit, but as he explains, he will not seek
profit by cutting down trees: ‘‘It’s a sort of duty one feels to
the land’’ (AK, 686).
Love and Anna Karenina
is a conservationist for the same reasons he
is a conservative. Unlike merchants, aristocrats
exist to take the long view and preserve cultural
and material heritage over generations. Levin
angrily dismisses people who, while supposedly
aristocrats, live only in the present, as Stiva and
Vronsky do.
Levin points out as well that, by squandering
his money, Stiva is condemning his children to
poverty. They will have been raised to live the
life of their class but without the means to do
so. For Stiva, that kind of thinking makes it
impossible to derive satisfaction from life.
In Part 7 of the novel, we find Stiva leaving
traditionalist Moscow and traveling to progres-
sive St. Petersburg so that, among other reasons,
he can recover a healthy view of life centered on
his own satisfaction.4 Tolstoy describes Stiva’s
thinking in a passage narrated in what Bakhtin
called double-voiced discourse. Although the
description is grammatically in the third person,
the tone, choice of words, and order of thoughts
belong to Stiva as if he were speaking to him-
self. The author’s perspective is sensed in an
overall sense of irony that provides an implicit
commentary:
In spite of its cafés charmants and its omnibuses,
Moscow was still a stagnant swamp. . . . After
living for some time in Moscow, especially in
close relations with his family, he was conscious
of a depression of spirits. And after being there
so long without a change, he reached a point
where he positively began to be worrying himself
over his wife’s ill-humor and reproaches, over his
children’s health and education. . . . His children?
In Petersburg children did not prevent their parents
from enjoying life. . . . [T]here was no trace of the
wild notions that prevailed in Moscow . . . that all
the luxuries of life were for the children, where
the parents were to have nothing but work and
anxiety. Here people understood that a man is in
duty bound to live for himself as every person of
culture should live. (Tolstoy, 1965, pp. 757–758)5
In that ‘‘stagnant swamp’’ of Moscow, Stiva—
can you believe it?—‘‘positively’’ began to
worry about his family! In Petersburg, people
4 As every educated Russian then and since would have
known, Moscow symbolizes traditionalism and rootedness,
whereas Petersburg—a planned city built according to the
ideas of French utopian architects—symbolized rationality
and progressivism.
5 Further references are to AK. Translations from Russian
works have been occasionally modified for accuracy.
357
are sensible. They understand that children must
not prevent their parents from enjoying life. In
the exaggerated way in which Stiva’s thought is
phrased—all luxuries for the children; nothing
but work and anxieties for the parents—and in
its implicit sense of a zero-sum game between
parents and children, we get the core values of
the Petersburg view. The possibility of mean-
ingfulness from family life itself, of family life
as something more important than the sum of
pleasures it provides its members, is not enter-
tained. The partisans of the Moscow view would
obviously phrase the relation of parents to chil-
dren differently, and the author implicitly invites
readers to reconstruct that way of speaking.
Such implicit invitations to provide the speech
of those whose views are dismissed constitute
the lifeblood of the realist novel. They derive
from the genre’s goal of encouraging empathy
with other points of view.
Interesting enough, Stiva defends the Peters-
burg view not just as permissible but even
as a moral duty. By this reasoning, it would
be immoral not to choose one’s own amuse-
ments over one’s children’s needs. The obvious
absurdity of a moral duty to place one’s own
amusements first creates the humor of the final
line, which reflects the ironizing voice of the
author answering Stiva’s speech.
It appears that more than morals dictate
Petersburg selfishness, which represents the
demand of high culture itself. One should choose
Petersburg values so as to live ‘‘as every person
of culture should.’’ Earlier, Stiva has explained
to Levin that ‘‘the aim of civilization’’ is
‘‘to make everything a source of enjoyment’’
(AK, 40). ‘‘Well, if that’s its aim,’’ Levin replies,
‘‘I’d rather be a savage’’ (AK, 40).
From the Moscow point of view, children
are not just contexts of marriage, much as
land is not just so many economic resources
to exploit. They, and we, belong to something
larger, which extends over time. Many different
views of life and marriage depend on that sense
of a time longer than our own and therefore of
a meaning beyond our own satisfaction. When
Levin returns to his estate after Kitty has turned
down his proposal, he takes comfort in the sense
of family and time extending over generations
provided by his house:
The house was big and old-fashioned, and Levin,
though he lived alone, had the whole house heated
and used all of it. He knew that this was stupid,
he knew that it was positively wrong and contrary
358
to his present new plans, but this house was a
whole world to Levin. It was the world in which
his father and mother had lived and died. They had
lived just the life that to Levin seemed the ideal of
perfection, and that he had dreamed of renewing
with his wife, with his own family. (AK, 101)
He wants a new family for the sake of a way of
life that derives meaning from extending across
generations. Although he does not have children,
that same sense of longer time is important to
him, and so he heats the whole house.
Even for those without children, the sense of
a community including children creates a sense
of purpose beyond present needs. Perhaps that
is why even the childless pay school taxes. Chil-
dren link us to the past and future, and we would
not exist if others had not viewed matters this
way.
Tolstoy does not mean that satisfaction is
not important. He is trying to say that to see
only satisfaction is to impoverish, and perhaps
endanger, human life.
THE IDEA OF A FAMILY
While working on Anna Karenina, Tolstoy
remarked to his wife: ‘‘Now my idea is clear
to me. In order for a work to be good, one must
love its main idea, as in Anna Karenina, I love
the idea of a family’’ (Tolstoy, 1995, p. 751
[from the diary of Tolstoy’s wife]).
The first sentence of Anna Karenina—one of
the best known lines in world literature—reads:
‘‘All happy families resemble each other; each
unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’’
From this sentence on, Anna Karenina examines
characters in terms of their appreciation of
family life. The best, like Kitty and Dolly,
understand and appreciate family, whereas the
worst, like Stiva and the various professional
intellectuals, look down on it. What the narrator
calls ‘‘woman’s work’’—the work of sustaining
a family—defines what is most important in
life (AK, 131). Men live meaningful lives when
they do either women’s work, such as raising a
family, or other work in a similar spirit.6
Although at one point Tolstoy considered
calling his novel Two Families, the book he
wrote actually interweaves narratives about three
6 Lvov, the husband of the third (middle by birth order)
Shcherbatsky sister, is deeply concerned about his children’s
education, and Levin says what most pleases him when he
praises his children’s upbringing.
Journal of Family Theory & Review
families: Anna, Karenin, and Vronsky (about
40%); Levin and Kitty (about 40%); and Stiva
and Dolly (about 20%). It begins with Stiva and
Dolly, at the moment of crisis when Dolly has
just discovered Stiva’s infidelity. Later, she will
learn that this affair is one of an endless series
and that her husband’s fundamental values are
incompatible with family life.
In Chapter 1, Stiva wakes from his enticing
dreams of feasts and women. He does not at
first remember the previous day’s quarrel or his
wife’s distress at his discovering his infidelity.
He has not so much as considered the effect of his
actions on his children. It is only when he reaches
for his robe, which is not in its usual place and
realizes that he is not sleeping in his wife’s
bedroom and why, that he even remembers the
revelations that have kept Dolly up all night.
As Tolstoy paraphrases Stiva’s morning
thoughts, once again the tone, choice of words,
and sequence of ideas belong to Stiva, and
an overall irony reflects the perspective of the
author:
Stepan Arkadyevich [Stiva] was a truthful man
with himself. . . . [H]e could not at this date feel
repentant that he, a handsome, susceptible man
of thirty-four, was not in love with his wife, the
mother of five living and two dead children and
only a year younger than himself. . . . He had never
clearly thought out the subject, but he . . . had even
supposed that she, a worn-out woman no longer
young or good-looking, and in no way remarkable
or interesting, merely a good mother, ought from
a sense of fairness to take an indulgent view [of
his affairs]. It had turned out quite the other way.
(AK, 5–6)
We must read the line as: ‘‘Stiva thought, ‘I am
a truthful man . . . I cannot feel repentant.’’’
The irony of defending infidelity in terms of
truthfulness belongs entirely to the author. The
description of Dolly as ‘‘merely a good mother’’
marks the radical difference between Stiva and
the author. Stiva thinks of five living and two
dead children in terms of their effect on Dolly’s
looks; we are left to imagine what those two
dead children mean to her. Constant care for
the children and anxiety over their health and
welfare—clearly, a matter of life and death for
them—occupy all her time, but for Stiva, family
life has been going smoothly precisely because
it makes so few demands of him. ‘‘She was
contented and happy in her children; I never
interfered with her in anything’’ (AK, 6). The
humor of the final sentence—his surprise that ‘‘it
Love and Anna Karenina
had turned out quite the other way’’—derives
from the difference between his hedonism and
the author’s psychological realism.
Stiva’s friend Levin could not differ more pro-
foundly. For him, meaningful life is family life:
He was so far from conceiving of love for woman
apart from marriage that he actually pictured to
himself first the family, and only secondarily the
woman who would give him a family. His ideas of
marriage were, consequently, very unlike those of
the great majority of his acquaintances, for whom
getting married was one of the numerous facts of
social life. For Levin it was the chief affair of life,
on which his whole happiness turned. (AK, 101)
Critics have often remarked that, unlike other
writers, Tolstoy does not describe a family as
a collection of individuals who happen to be
related but as a cultural unit with its own,
often unarticulated ways of thinking, feeling, and
communicating, as well as its own set of values.
For the Shcherbatskys, the essential value is
family itself, and so Levin at first falls in love
not with any one of the Shcherbatsky sisters but
with the whole Shcherbatsky family:
Strange as it may appear, it was the entire
family with which Konstantin Levin was in love,
especially with the feminine half of it. Levin did
not remember his own mother, and his only sister
was older than he was, so that it was in the
Shcherbatskys’ house that he saw for the first time
that inner life of an old, noble, cultivated, and
honorable family of which he had been deprived
by the death of his father and mother. (AK, 25)
In this passage and in the sentences that follow,
the word family is repeated several times. Levin
was about to propose to Dolly when she married
Stiva and to Nathalie when she married Lvov.
Only then does he discover that the one he really
loves is Kitty. To marry her would be to marry
them all, to marry the family.
In Tolstoy’s novels, to know a person is to
understand him or her both as an individual and
as a member of a family. From a Tolstoyan
point of view, people do not enter the world
like the natural man or abstract person of the
philosophers. The theories of Locke, Rousseau,
and Rawls are all absurdities because they
conceive of a person as an original individual
who decides to enter society and form a family.
But people are social, and especially familial,
by nature. Adam and Eve excepted, no one
has entered the world without parents, whether
359
present or sensed as absent. Like Tolstoy
himself, whose parents died when he was quite
young, Levin—whose name presumably comes
from Tolstoy’s first name, Lev—keenly senses
the absence of parents and siblings.
PROSAIC EVIL
Unlike Levin, Vronsky lacks not only a
family but also any sense of family. As the
novel begins, he has been flirting with Kitty.
The Shcherbatskys assume that he is serious,
because, given the customs of the day, if he
were not, he would be compromising her as well
as driving away other potential suitors. In fact,
Vronsky has no idea of the harm he is causing for
the simple reason that he has not been brought
up by a family at all.
The chapter about his flirting begins: ‘‘Vron-
sky had never had a real family life’’ (AK,
62). He scarcely remembered his father, and his
mother, a society woman having endless affairs,
had him brought up in a military school. His
shallowness results from what he has not expe-
rienced and does not even know he has missed.
He means no harm: ‘‘He did not know that this
mode of behavior [with Kitty] . . . is one of the
evil actions common among young men such as
he was. . . . [I]f he could have put himself in the
position of the family and have heard that Kitty
would be unhappy if he did not marry her, he
would have been greatly astonished, and would
not have believed it’’ (AK, 62). He does evil
with no ill intent, and that is Tolstoy’s point.
Anna Karenina repeatedly conveys what
I like to call ‘‘the Russian idea of evil.’’ This
idea was most closely associated with Tolstoy,
but Dostoevsky and Chekhov extended it in their
own ways.7
7 I discuss Chekhov from this point of view in Morson
(1990–1991). To give just one example, Chekhov pioneered
a drama of inaction, that is, plays consisting largely of
ordinary events. As he once said, you hear only the sound
of eating and cutlery, but lives are being ruined. Drama had
been a matter of the dramatic, but Chekhov believed that a
focus on dramatic action misdirected our attention from the
ordinary events that really make a life what it is.
The first reader of this essay, when submitted to this
journal, reminds me of the critic and novelist Dmitri
Merezhkovsky’s comment on Russia’s earlier great writer,
Nikolai Gogol. Merezhkovsky commented, ‘‘Gogol did
for the moral dimension what Leibnitz had done for the
mathematical: he discovered, we might say, the infinitely
small magnitudes of good and evil’’ (Maguire, 1974, p. 58).
360
Contrary to what we usually imagine, and
what most literature suggests, most evil results
not from villainy but from small actions or
even the omission of actions. That is so for
three reasons. First, the total effect of small
events is much greater than the rare great ones.
Second, even the great actions derive mainly
from countless small ones; that is the central
argument about historical causation in War and
Peace. Third, small actions form habits, and
the habits of many people form cultural pat-
terns, which, taken together, exert an ‘‘elemental
force’’ almost impossible to resist (AK, 165).
Anna Karenina develops Tolstoyan prosaics, as
I like to call this way of thinking, with respect to
love and the family (I coined the term prosaics
in Morson 1987, 1988a, 1988b).
Tolstoy’s most cogent statement on prosaics
occurs in one of his essays. He retells the story of
the painter Bryullov, who corrected a student’s
sketch. ‘‘‘Why, you only touched it a tiny bit,
but it is quite another thing,’ the pupil observed.
Bryullov replied: ‘Art begins where the ‘tiny bit’
begins.’’’ Tolstoy comments:
That saying is strikingly true not only of art but of
all life. One may say that true life begins where
the tiny bit begins—where what seem to us minute
and infinitely small alterations take place. True life
is not lived where the great external changes take
place—where people move about, clash, fight, and
slay one another—it is lived only where these tiny,
tiny, infinitesimally small changes occur. . . . Tiny,
tiny alterations—but on them depend the most
immense and terrible consequences. (Tolstoy,
1961, pp. 81–82)
For Dostoevsky, the small actions that matter
most are our momentary evil wishes, even if we
never act on them, because they shape the field of
possibility for ourselves and others. To think of
evil as alien and other is to excuse oneself from
it. If the devil exists, then, as the incarnation of
evil, he must rather be just like us. In fact the
devil who haunts Ivan Karamazov turns out to
be a quite ordinary person. Anything but grand
and Satanic, he is banal and companionable, a
good conversationalist with a sense of pleasure
and all the most the most fashionable opinions.
To be sure, he neglects his children.8 This
8 See the chapter ‘‘The Devil: Ivan’s Nightmare,’’ in
Dostoevsky (1950). The devil is described as a man who
‘‘once had good connections,’’ a man ‘‘received . . . for
Journal of Family Theory & Review
‘‘petty demon,’’ as Russians like to call him,
bears a striking resemblance to Stiva, about
whom Dostoevsky had just written an article
(see Dostoevsky, 1994).
Tolstoy goes one step beyond Dostoevsky.
In Anna Karenina, evil does not even require
ungenerous wishes. It can result entirely from
a lack, the actions we do not take. It is a form
of criminal negligence and therefore requires no
malice at all! Stiva is one of Tolstoy’s most
brilliant and profound creations, because this
figure of evil never intends any harm to anyone,
yet causes it by his neglect. I know of no earlier
literary work that represents evil in this way.
Vronsky causes harm to Kitty without any ill
will or awareness he is causing it. In his circle,
people are divided into two ‘‘utterly opposed
classes. One, the lower class, vulgar, stupid,
and, above all, ridiculous people, who believe
that one husband ought to live with the one wife
to whom he is lawfully married . . . that one ought
to bring up one’s children, earn one’s bread, and
pay one’s debts; and various similar absurdities’’
(AK, 121). But for ‘‘the real people . . . the
great thing was to be elegant, generous, plucky,
gay, to abandon oneself without a blush to
every passion, and to laugh at everything else’’
(AK, 121).
One might imagine it is obvious that children
will suffer if no one takes the time and effort
to bring them up, but nothing is obvious unless
one attends to it. One has to have seen and
experienced good upbringing to realize what the
lack of it entails. Among other things, it entails
unawareness of that very lack.
YOU MUST NOT REMEMBER THIS
We may now better appreciate the significance
of a line I quoted above: Stiva ‘‘never clearly
thought out the matter’’ of his wife’s reaction
to his infidelities. What is awful about Stiva is
what he has not done: He has never bothered
to place himself in Dolly’s position. His evil is
entirely negative. When he sees Dolly’s distress,
he is sincerely sorry for her, but the moment he
leaves, he entirely forgets her.
his companionable and accommodating disposition.’’ Such
gentlemen ‘‘are usually solitary creatures, either bachelors
or widowers. Sometimes they have children, but if so, the
children are always being brought up at a distance at some
aunt’s, to whom these gentlemen never allude in good
society, seeming ashamed of the relationship’’ (p. 773).
Love and Anna Karenina
Stiva does not exactly have a bad memory:
He remembers all the details about friends and
mistresses he loves to please. Rather, he has
what might be called a very good ‘‘forgettory.’’
He has cultivated the rare ability not to think
about anything that might be distressing, and it
is for that reason that he both enjoys life and
delights others so thoroughly. Everyone likes to
be with him. No past unpleasantness ever mars
present pleasure.
Conscience involves reflecting on past behav-
ior and considering how to improve future
behavior. As does caring for a family, and
preserving an inherited forest, it involves an
attitude toward time. To develop a conscience
is to extend one’s sense of responsibility at the
expense of present comfort. It is just this attitude
to time that Stiva has overcome.
Within a few pages, Stiva sincerely wishes
both Vronsky and Levin success in courting
Kitty, but he is not lying to either: At any
given moment, he sympathizes with whatever
person he is with, and then forgets, so he
can sympathize with the next person without
duplicity. Stiva does not let conscience interfere
with his enjoyment of the present moment.
Presentness as a way of living necessarily
entails criminal negligence. ‘‘In spite of Stepan
Arkadyevich’s [Stiva’s] efforts to be an attentive
father and husband,’’ Tolstoy remarks, ‘‘he
never could keep in his mind that he had a
wife and children’’ (AK, 274–275).
GOLD IN SAND
Dolly does not forget. She keeps in mind count-
less facts about her children; worries about the
best way to ensure their future; and as a result,
lives a life that, while difficult, is supremely
meaningful. In every important respect, she
embodies values opposite to those of her hus-
band. If by the heroine of a novel one means
the character whose values are closest to the
author’s, then Dolly is the heroine of Anna
Karenina.
From Tolstoy’s prosaic perspective, the most
important action people take is the one they do
at every moment of their waking lives: directing
their attention to or away from something. Each
time we choose to look at one thing rather than
another, or to look at someone with care or
with unconcern, we change those things and
ourselves ‘‘a tiny bit.’’ Over time, these choices
create habits of perception. The way in which
361
we think, feel, and act at any given moment
therefore reflects a long temporal perspective.
When Stiva leaves Dolly and the children
in the country to save money for Petersburg
pleasures, he prepares the cottage for them. But
when Dolly arrives, she discovers that he has
given no thought to the family’s needs. Rather,
he has prettified the place as he would for a
mistress. Dolly is at first in despair, but at last
she jury-rigs solutions. After much tinkering and
improvising,
Darya Aleksandrovna [Dolly] began to realize, if
only in part, her expectations, if not of a peaceful, at
least of a comfortable life in the country. Peaceful
with six children Darya Aleksandrovna could
not be. One would fall ill, another might easily
become so, a third would be without something
necessary, a fourth would show symptoms of a bad
disposition, and so on. . . . [And yet] hard though it
was for the mother to bear the dread of illness, the
illnesses themselves, and the grief of seeing signs
of evil propensities in her children—the children
themselves were even now repaying her in small
joys for her sufferings. Those joys were so small
that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and
at bad moments she could see nothing but the pain,
nothing but sand; but there were good moments
too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but
gold. (AK, 277).
In my view, this is the central passage of Anna
Karenina. The fact that it so undramatic, so
ordinary, and so easy to overlook is part of
the point. We usually think of life in terms
of its most memorable moments, and even in
telling ourselves the story of our own lives,
we focus either on tragedies or celebrations.
That way of thinking comes naturally, but it is
still mistaken. True life consists of the ordinary
moments we usually forget. We must train our-
selves to perceive, remember, and value them.
Dolly’s ‘‘small joys’’ are the real joys. Like
almost everything that truly matters, ‘‘they pass
unnoticed, like gold in sand.’’ We miss what is
most important because of its very familiarity. It
usually remains hidden in plain view.
It follows that the more narratable an event,
the less it truly matters. That is the idea
behind the novel’s first sentence: ‘‘All happy
families resemble each other; each unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way.’’ Twice in his
notebooks and once in War and Peace Tolstoy
cites a French proverb: ‘‘Happy people have no
history.’’ Unhappy families, like unhappy lives,
are dramatic. They have a story, and each story is
362
different. But happy families and happy lives are
undramatic. They consist of ordinary moments
well lived. There is no story to tell about them.
It is hard to narrate ‘‘they didn’t quarrel again
today.’’ It is in this sense that they all resemble
each other.9
Dolly’s ‘‘gold in sand’’ moments do not fit a
story, and most novelists would not even include
them. If such moments should shape a marriage,
it would be a supremely good one, but the couple
might not be able to say why. The marriage of
Kitty and Levin turns out in just this way, as
Kitty teaches her husband Shcherbatsky values.
THE KINDS OF LOVE: HEDONISM
Marriage depends on love, and so Anna Karen-
ina characterizes the different kinds of love. The
very fact that there are several kinds of sexual
love, and that some are less suitable for marriage
than others, is part of Tolstoy point. If one imag-
ines that the sort of love depicted in romantic
literature or films is the only kind of love, as so
many people do, one is likely to marry the wrong
person and entertain destructive expectations.
If, as the old song has it, love and marriage
go together like a horse and carriage, then one
ought to recognize that there are different kinds
of horses. One does not hook up a draft horse to
a chariot.
In Book 1 of Anna Karenina, Levin and Stiva
go to an expensive restaurant where they discuss
the theories of love explored in Plato’s Sympo-
sium. It would be hard for an author to signal
more explicitly that his own theme is the nature
of love. Stiva, of course, equates love with plea-
sure, and he means emotional as well as physical
pleasure. Picking up a cigar and keeping his hand
on his glass, Stiva indulges another pleasure,
good conversation, as he turns the conversation
to women. Stiva enjoys all his favorite pleasures
at once. The very fact that he is teasing the more
conservative Levin and provokes Levin’s fiery
reactions only adds to his delight.
9
I sometimes mention to my students Huang (1981), a
book on Chinese history with a truly Tolstoyan title and
thesis: 1587, A Year of No Significance. The book begins:
‘‘Really, nothing of great significance happened in 1587, the
Year of the Pig. . . . On the whole, the Year of the Pig would
go down in history as an indifferent one. . . . [I]t is precisely
these commonplace occurrences which historians have been
inclined to overlook that often reflected the true character of
our empire’’ (p. 1).
Journal of Family Theory & Review
As we trace the history of reactions to
Tolstoy’s novel, one soon discovers that, the
closer one comes to the present day, the more
Stiva’s hedonism appeals to critics and dramatiz-
ers. ‘‘Oblonsky is one of the sweetest characters
in all of Tolstoy. . . He brings life and goodwill
wherever he goes,’’ writes Allan Bloom (1993,
p. 237). I wish I could argue that only a cranky
conservative like Bloom could admire Stiva, but
in fact, most critics at least ‘‘take an indulgent
view.’’ The Masterpiece Theatre (BBC) ver-
sion actually represents the novel’s values as
Stiva’s (on the Edmundson adaptation of Anna
Karenina, see Morson, 2006). Such interpreta-
tions evidently presume that Tolstoy made Stiva
attractive because we are to approve of him. It
has dawned on only a few that, like Dostoevsky,
Tolstoy makes evil attractive so he can show
why we are so attracted to it.
WE MAY CHOOSE BETWEEN KINDS OF LOVE
But now the time is ripe for a new type of soul
research based on the premise that when a person
speaks of sex he really means art.
—Karl Kraus10
However charming they may find Stiva, most
readers have identified with Anna. She seduces
readers as he seduces actresses. Under her spell,
readers embrace her ideal of romantic love even
more strongly than they do in daily life.
Tolstoy hoped that, seeing what romance
entails for Anna and those around her, readers
would question the romantic ideal, which he saw
as the opposite of his own belief in the prosaic.
The fact that so many have continued to admire
Anna, in spite of the best efforts of the author,
suggests how tenacious is the hold of romance.
Tolstoy wants to demonstrate a double
mistake. First, people usually assume that there
is only one kind of love—that love is romantic
love. Second, they regard it as desirable, perhaps
even the supreme good of life. For Tolstoy,
however, romantic love is but one kind of love,
and not at all the most desirable. If people were
consciously aware of other kinds of sexual love,
they might choose one of them and avoid the
disaster that romance typically entails.
10 As cited in Szasz (1990, p. 114). Kraus, of course, is
inverting the usual Freudian statement of the opposite view.
Love and Anna Karenina
Above all, romantic love is incompatible with
marriage and a family. As so much literature
testifies, it is the love of adultery. In Love in
the Western World, de Rougement (1956) also
insists that his readers realize that they have a
choice: ‘‘And what I aim at is to bring the reader
to the point of declaring frankly, either that
‘This is what I wanted!’ or else ‘‘God forbid!’’’
(p. 25). Anna does declare frankly that this is
what she wants. As one character remarks, she
imagines herself as the heroine of a romance.
In this sense, Kraus is right: when she thinks of
sex, she really means art.
Anna’s increasing mental illness, detachment
from reality, and eventual suicide should lead us
to question her choice. So should the extremely
destructive effects of her ideals on her husband
Karenin, her lover Vronsky, her son Seryozha,
and her daughter Annie. When I teach this book,
students, who are not that far from being children
themselves, see the point right away. They often
feel liberated by the idea that love does not have
to be the love of romance.
The majority of critics, by contrast, have
presumed that no great writer could possibly
share bourgeois values and side against a great
romantic heroine. If Tolstoy said otherwise,
then he did not understand his own book. One
might as well presume that, because nobody
intelligent believes in God, The Divine Comedy
must celebrate atheism.
ROMANCE
What then is the legend [of Tristan and Isolde]
really about? The partings of the lovers? Yes, but
in the name of passion, and for love of the very
love that agitates them, in order that this love may
be intensified and transfigured—at the cost of their
happiness and even of their lives.
—de Rougement, Love in the Western World
Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind.
—Poem attached to Vladimir Mayakovsky’s
suicide note11
Romantic love is not about happiness. It offers
itself as ‘‘more real than happiness’’ (de
Rougement, 1956, p. 24), indeed as ‘‘more real
than the world’’ (p. 39). It ‘‘transports’’ lovers,
11 Mayakovsky (1962, p. 237). The line is one of the most
widely quoted from Russian poetry, and the poem is one of
the great works of 20th-century Russian literature.
363
who no longer belong to the ordinary world
but rise above it. Happiness and satisfaction
seem trivial by comparison, goals for those who
cannot achieve romance.
Romantic love is on display everywhere in
our culture, from movies and television dramas
to dime-store novels and some great literary
masterpieces: the legends of Tristan and Isolde,
Romeo and Juliet, and Wuthering Heights.
Romance sets itself against the daily
grind. Reflecting its religious origins (in the
Manichaeanism of the Albigensian heresy), it
aspires to lift us above the mundane.12 In the
modern world, romantic love has therefore read-
ily served as a secular substitute for religion.
So conceived, true love is not something
we choose. Against our will, it chooses us.
‘‘Amors par force vos demeine!’’ (‘‘Love by
force dominates you!’’), wrote Béroul (qtd. in
de Rougement 1956, pp. 26, 41). Like madness,
love takes possession of the lovers. It is a passion
in the original sense of the word, something we
suffer. In the Middle Ages, the idea of the love
potion figured this belief that love masters the
will; in the modern world, the unconscious plays
this role.
One falls in love, not leaps into love. As
we often hear people say, and as Anna her-
self claims, she could not have done otherwise.
Tolstoy maintains just the opposite, that the
belief one has no choice is itself something one
chooses. On her train ride home, with Vron-
sky in pursuit, Anna daydreams of Vronsky and
love, laughs aloud ‘‘at the feeling of delight’’
that comes over her, and slides into a kind of
delirium:
Moments of doubt were continually coming upon
her, when she was uncertain whether the train
was going forward or backward or standing still
altogether; whether it was [her maid] Annushka
at her side or a stranger. . . . She was afraid of
giving way to this delirium. But something drew
her toward it, and she could yield to it or resist it
at will. (AK, 107)
This enchanting delirium feels as if it comes
from outside, drawing Anna toward it; and she
experiences a loss of bearings, the way in a
railroad car one can experience the relativity of
motion. Tolstoy here gives us the psychological
12 The religious and mystic origin of romantic love is
central to de Rougement’s argument.
364
state that allows one to tell oneself that love
happens against our will. If we let it, it can feel
that way. Nevertheless, that state can be resisted
if one makes the effort: ‘‘She could yield to it or
resist it at will.’’
Because romantic love supposedly is not a
choice, it exists in a realm beyond good and evil.
Like Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina is
one of those Russian novels about the superior
person’s right to transgress moral standards. The
relativity of motion Anna experiences stands in
for a moral relativism as well. Anna tells Dolly
that she ‘‘was not to blame. And who is to
blame? What’s the meaning of being to blame?
Could it have been otherwise?’’ (AK, 664). She
appeals to the myth of romance to absolve her
from all the harm she does to others, but she
cannot wholly believe it, which is why she has
difficulty sleeping and takes opium. Myth is one
thing—real psychology another.
Because they transcend ordinary morals,
romantic lovers often feel like, and are celebrated
as, rebels—against family, society, perhaps the
world itself. From the perspective of romantic
literature, to worry about moral standards is to
betray a hopelessly prosaic mentality. In this
respect, the cult of romantic love resembles the
romantic cult of genius, to which it is closely
allied. One worships, not judges, Michelangelo,
Napoléon, or Byron, and so with great lovers.
In its hostility to the ordinary, romantic love
devotes itself to extremes. As William Blake
(1963) wrote, ‘‘The road of excess leads to the
palace of wisdom’’ (one of the ‘‘proverbs of
hell’’). In extremis veritas (‘‘Truth is in the
extreme’’). Overcome by passion, and drawn
irresistibly to the most intense state of soul,
the lovers forsake all moderate pleasure and
compromised joys. They value the very opposite
of Dolly’s ‘‘small joys’’ and ‘‘gold in sand.’’
Ascribing the highest value to whatever is
most intense and most extreme: This is the mis-
take that, for Tolstoy, also leads to the romanti-
cization of war and revolution. As with romance,
both these kinds of violence have often been cel-
ebrated for their sheer intensity, even though
both necessarily involve killing. Today, we have
largely rejected war as something glorious—it
is always justified as an undesirable necessity
forced on one by others—but the cult of revolu-
tion grows all the stronger. Even advertisers can
sell products by calling them revolutionary. The
term is almost always used as a compliment; one
never praises another as counterrevolutionary.
Journal of Family Theory & Review
For Tolstoy, who disapproved of Russian rev-
olutionism (revolution as something desirable
in itself), such thinking derives from the same
errors as the romanticization of love, above all
the failure to appreciate the prosaic. True life,
and true love, lies not in the extreme but in the
tiny alterations of daily life.
Anna also knows that romantic love culti-
vates obstacles. Mystery, not intimacy, excites it.
Frustrated desire, far from discouraging roman-
tic lovers, excites them, and the plot of romantic
fiction always centers on obstacles that are ulti-
mately insuperable. Romantic lovers seem never
to miss a chance to be parted (on this motif,
see de Rougement 1956, p. 37). Romantic love
needs to be illicit, frowned on by social norms
and prohibited by taboos whose violation only
intensifies it. In the Paolo and Francesca scene in
The Inferno, Dante himself swoons with admi-
ration and pity at the exalted fate of the great
romantic lovers, who love now even though it
has meant hell.
The last thing romance seeks is a conven-
tional marriage. In The Brothers Karamazov,
Dostoevsky (1950) mocks this belief in romance
by telling the story of a noble woman of
the last ‘‘romantic’’ generation who after some
years of an enigmatic passion for a gentleman,
whom she might quite easily have married at any
moment, invented insuperable obstacles to their
union, and ended by throwing herself one stormy
night into a rather deep and rapid river from a high
bank, almost a precipice, entirely to satisfy her
own caprice, and to be like Shakespeare’s Ophelia.
Indeed, if this precipice, a chosen and favorite spot
of hers, had been less picturesque, if there had been
a prosaic flat bank in its place, most likely the
suicide would never have taken place. (pp. 3–4)
As this parody suggests, the romantic lover
above all loves love itself, not the other person.
However desirable the other may be, he or she
is really loved as the occasion for one’s own
vertiginous transport.
FATE
My lords, if you would hear a high tale of love and
death.
—The Romance of Tristan and Isolde13
13 The Bedier version, as cited in de Rougement (1956,
p. 15).
Love and Anna Karenina
Anna knows that romantic love is fatal in both
senses of the word: It leads to death (what the
German romantics called the liebestod, or ‘‘love-
death’’), and its outcome is predetermined, set
by fate itself. Lovers are star crossed, and they
are chosen, like Achilles, for a short and glorious
life.
De Rougement (1956) argues the following:
Love and death, a fatal love—in these phrases
is summed up, if not the whole of poetry, at
least whatever is popular, whatever is universally
moving in European literature. . . . Happy love has
no history. Romance only comes into existence
where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by
life itself. What stirs lyrical poets to their finest
flight of fantasy is neither the delight of the senses
nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple;
not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. (p. 15)
For Tolstoy, romantic fatalism reflects three
errors. First, it implies that life should conform
to a narrative, whereas for Tolstoy, as we have
seen, the more narrative, the less happiness.
‘‘Happy love has no history’’: De Rougement
is alluding to the same French proverb as the
opening sentence of Tolstoy’s novel.
Second, fatalism necessarily involves the
sense that time is closed. The end is given,
and life resembles not just a story but a story
that is already written. Generally speaking,
all extremist views promise or presuppose a
clear ending, whereas prosaic views typically
treat time as open. For prosaic thinkers like
Tolstoy, countless choices and contingencies
that tend nowhere in particular shape the future.
Consequently, Tolstoy regarded novels, with
their happy or unhappy endings, as false to the
very nature of time. He refused to call War and
Peace a novel, because, as he explained, novels
have a ‘‘denouement, at which point interest in
the narration ceases’’ (Tolstoy, 1966, p. 1363).
They tie up loose ends. But life is not like
that. ‘‘I couldn’t help thinking that the death
of one character only aroused interest in other
characters, and a marriage seemed more like a
source of complication than a diminution of the
reader’s interest’’ (Tolstoy, 1966, p. 1365).
In fact, War and Peace, which was published
serially, does not have an ending; after one of a
long series of installments, the story just stops.
Readers of Anna Karenina presumed that it
ended with Part 7, when Anna commits suicide,
but then Tolstoy, as if to mock the very desire
for closure, added Part 8. A Part 9 is easily
365
conceivable because, as some problems have
been resolved, new ones have arisen. Anna
believes in closed time, but one begins to
understand this novel when one realizes that
the temporality of the author and the heroine are
radically at odds. So are romantic love and its
prosaic alternative.
Third, fatalism necessarily implies narcis-
sism. When the trainman is run over in Part 1,
Anna pronounces it an ‘‘evil omen’’ foretelling
her own fate. Readers who see this novel as a
romance take the incident the same way. But
even if the death were an omen, how does Anna
know that, of all the people present, it is meant
for her? Tolstoy repeatedly suggests that Anna is
a narcissist: She is constantly looking in the mir-
ror, and even on her way to suicide, she checks
her appearance in the mirror. Moreover, her ser-
vant is Annushka, her daughter is Annie, and
the English girl she takes under her protection
is Hannah. Everywhere around Anna is Anna.
Tolstoy makes her a narcissist because romantic
love involves the sense of chosenness. Fate has
selected one to act out the plot of love. Although
this plot leads to death, it ensures significance.
Readers inclined to romance, or those who
do not pay close attention, usually presume
that Anna’s suicide proves the omen true. They
detect foreshadowing, the novelistic equivalent
of omens. Both foreshadowing and omens entail
backward causation: The earlier event—omen
or foreshadow—does not cause, but is caused
by, the catastrophe to come (I discuss the logic
of foreshadowing, omens, and related tempo-
ral concepts in Morson, 1994). That catastrophe
must somehow already exist if it can shape ear-
lier events. Omens and foreshadowing demand
inevitability, the ineluctable power of fate.
But that is emphatically not what is happen-
ing in Tolstoy’s novel. The catastrophe happens
not because the author is using foreshadowing
but because the character believes in fate. The
causality is entirely hers; it does not belong to
the novel as a whole. It reflects her misunder-
standing of time, which is as profound as her
misunderstanding of love. Just before she jumps,
she thinks of the omen and chooses to fulfill it:
And all at once she thought of the man crushed
by the train the day she first met Vronsky, and
she knew what she had to do. With a rapid, light
step she went down the steps that led from the
water tank to the rails and stopped close to the
approaching train. (AK, 798)
366
‘‘She knew what she had to do’’: The omen
is fulfilled only because she believes it must
be. Tolstoy is not using foreshadowing; he is
describing the consequence of a belief in a future
already written.
Tolstoy narrates the nine-chapter sequence
leading to Anna’s suicide from her perspective.
The last pages are almost entirely in stream
of consciousness, which means that we can tell
what she does not think about. She does not think
about her children or what her death will mean to
them. Seryozha once crosses her mind, but even
then it is in relation to her happiness, not to his
needs. She does not once think of her daughter.
Anna’s death means that Annie will be raised
by her legal father, Karenin, who is by now
half crazed, and his friend, the sadistic religious
fanatic, Countess Lydia Ivanovna. Anna knows
all about Lydia Ivanovna, but so focused is she
on herself that the future of her daughter does
not once occur to her.
Again, evil bespeaks neglect, caused, in this
case, by the narcissism of romantic love.
VRONSKY AND LOVE
Anna has to teach Vronsky the romantic complex
of beliefs. He begins looking for nothing more
than another conquest, but she teaches him that
sex does not hold a candle to romance.
‘‘Yes, you have conquered me, and I am yours,’’
she said at last pressing his bands to her bosom.
‘‘So it had to be,’’ he said. ‘‘So long as we live,
it must be so. I know it now.’’
‘‘That’s true,’’ she said, getting whiter and
whiter, and putting her arms around his head.
‘‘Still, there is something terrible in it after all that
has happened.’’
‘‘. . . Our love, if it could be stronger, will be
strengthened because there is something terrible
in it,’’ he said. (AK, 456)
If Tolstoy meant to offer this tissue of clichés
seriously, he would be a mediocre writer. But
the language here belongs not to Tolstoy but to
Anna and her pupil, Vronsky. A love that is all
the stronger for being terrible, a love that ‘‘had
to be’’: That is the romantic script they follow.
Vronsky has difficulty learning this script and
does not adhere to it for long. When Dolly
visits them in the country, she discovers that, to
Anna’s great annoyance, Vronsky has come to
love her as a wife. He wants to marry her, and he
wants more children, but she resolutely refuses
Journal of Family Theory & Review
to ask Karenin for the divorce he has offered
and she has once refused The last thing Anna
wants is prosaic marriage. As she says to herself
just before her suicide, she does not want to be
‘‘anything but a mistress . . . I don’t care to be
anything else. And by that desire I rouse aversion
in him, and he rouses fury in me’’ (AK, 793).
He does not experience aversion, but he cannot
understand why she does not want a normal
marriage. She, however, wants him to have
absolutely no interest but obsessive romantic
love for her, and even his love for their daughter
irritates her. From Tolstoy’s perspective, by
contrast, nothing is ever pure, much as it never
fits a neat story. To desire everything to be one
way is the sort of extremism romance encourages
and Tolstoy regards as leading to insanity.
PROSAIC LOVE
Kitty also has to teach Levin love. He gradually
learns the prosaic wisdom of the Shcherbatskys.
Levin initially misunderstands love not in terms
of romance but in terms of another literary
genre, the idyll. The key passage occurs when
he reflects on the beginning of their marriage, so
different from what he expected:
Levin had been married three months. He was
happy, but not at all in the way he had expected
to be. At every step he found his former dreams
disappointed, and new, unexpected, surprises of
happiness. He was happy, but on entering upon
family life, he saw at every step that it was utterly
different from what he had imagined. At every
step he experienced what a man would experience
who, after admiring the smooth, happy course of
a little boat on a lake, should get himself into that
little boat. He saw that it was not all sitting still,
floating smoothly; that one had to think too, not
for an instant to forget where one was floating;
and that there was water under one; and that one
must row; and that his unaccustomed hands would
be sore; and that it was only to look at it that was
easy, but that doing it, though very delightful, was
very difficult. (AK, 504).
It is a passage that ought to be read aloud
at every wedding. When we read that Levin
is disappointed, we at first imagine that he is
less happy, because that is what disappointment
usually entails. But in fact the disappointment of
his dreams allows for a joy he never imagined.
It is a joy that thrives on hard work, work that
not just is necessary to a marriage but is the
marriage and is itself a source of joy. Unlike the
Love and Anna Karenina
love of romance and the love of idyll, real love
is difficult delight.
Prosaic love, the love that makes a good
marriage, entails friction because it thrives on
everyday contact. As romantic love feeds on
distance, obstacles, and, above all, mystery, pro-
saic love seeks intimacy. The more one knows
about the other—including all those less-than-
romantic habits, illnesses, and deficiencies—the
better. If one understands the literary conven-
tions of the day, it is clear Tolstoy wants us to
know that Levin and Kitty’s sex life gets bet-
ter and better as their knowledge of each other
grows.
Levin has always ‘‘imagined married life
to consist merely in the enjoyment of love,
which nothing must hinder and from which
no petty details must distract’’ (AK, 504). But
Kitty concerns herself with what he considers
‘‘the pettiest details’’ and becomes absorbed in
what to him are ‘‘trivial cares and anxieties’’
(AK, 504–505). What he considers petty are the
prosaic needs of daily life, the foundations of
happiness in ordinary moments. He has imagined
the height of bliss to be their honeymoon, but
she anticipates that until they really get to know
each other, things will be most difficult.
When they quarrel, especially in the first
months of marriage, it is because they do not
yet know each other. Having expected idyllic
lack of cares, Levin had not expected quarrels
at all. But the quarrels have a character of their
own that reflects the prosaic desire for intimacy.
They therefore cause ‘‘an agonizing sense of
division. . . . He felt for the first moment what
a man feels when, having suddenly received a
violent blow from behind, turns around, angry
and eager to avenge himself, to look for his
antagonist, and finds it is he himself who has
accidentally struck himself, that there is no one
to be angry with, and that he must put up with it
and soothe the pain’’ (AK, 506).
The sections on Levin and Kitty in the
novel’s second half constitute the wisest pages
on marriage I know. We watch their growing
intimacy, a process that is anything but smooth.
I do not have enough pages to describe their
various experiences in coming to understand
each other and in beautifying daily experience.
I know of no other novel (except War and Peace)
that offers a realistic description of childbirth
as both husband and wife experience it. Once
again, Kitty faces it realistically, and Levin is
constantly surprised by his own feelings.
367
In War and Peace, Prince Andrei is surprised
by his feeling after Natasha accepts his proposal
of marriage. Instead of a poetic transport, he
feels a new sense of vulnerability. That feeling,
‘‘though not so bright and poetic as the former,
was stronger and more serious’’ (Tolstoy, 1968,
p. 579). For Tolstoy, that is what real love feels
like: It includes a capacity to be hurt.
The parallel scene in Anna Karenina occurs
when Levin first sees his newborn son. Instead
of poetic uplift or fatherly pride,
He felt nothing but disgust. But when the baby was
undressed . . . such pity for the little creature came
upon him, and such terror . . . Levin sighed with
mortification. This splendid baby excited in him no
feeling but disgust and compassion. It was not at
all the feeling he had looked forward to. (AK, 747)
But that is what love for an infant entails: pity,
terror, disgust, and compassion. Once again, the
idyllic proves false, but something ‘‘stronger
and more serious’’ takes its place. That is the
course of prosaic love.
ROMEO AND JULIET AND LEVIN AND KITTY
One cannot imagine such scenes with Anna.
She idealizes her absent son, but the boy she
loves is the always-four-year-old child of her
imagination. This ideal boy does not have needs
but, as she pictures him, is entirely enraptured
by his mother. The daughter who is with her
does not fit her romantic story; bores her;
and oppresses her with her trivial, repulsive
Dolly-like needs. As Dolly notices, Anna leaves
Annie entirely to the care of servants.
I sometimes ask my students to imagine what
would happen to Romeo and Juliet if—let us
say, after family therapy—their parents relent
and let them marry. Two years later, we see
Juliet as she grouches while making breakfast
and an unshaven Romeo burying his face in the
sports pages. Both are thinking, Where has love
gone? They do not question their ideal of love
but imagine they have chosen the wrong partner.
Both are ripe for adultery. Adultery belongs to
the very essence of romantic love because such
love despises the everyday. If there are children,
they suffer.
By contrast, prosaic love, the love of intimacy
and hard work, grows over time. It does not
promise or seek a maximally intense present.
It entails no high drama. To outsiders, it is
not particularly interesting, and literature rarely
368
deals with it. The genius of Tolstoy was required
to make absorbing reading from such apparently
unpromising material. He gave us a picture of
marriage and love richer and wiser than can be
found anywhere else.
NINETEEN CONCLUSIONS
Let me summarize some key conclusions. They
represent Tolstoy’s views, not necessarily my
own. In some cases, I draw dotted lines to the
present; that is, I imagine how Tolstoy would
respond to conditions and beliefs today.
1. To think of marriage in terms of the
satisfaction of two interacting monads is to
overlook an important historical dimension that
shapes expectations and goals, including those
that partners cannot explicitly specify.
2. Marriage, as every important social
institution, comes to us shaped by great
dialogues of the past. We sense the effect of
those dialogues but have difficulty in stating the
cause of that effect.
3. For most of Western (if not human) history,
children have been regarded as an essential part
of marriage. It is not adequate to understand
having children as a choice couples make
depending on their expectations of satisfaction.
Marriage is about family. Children are not
additions to a marriage; rather, a childless couple
is an embryonic family.
4. One should consider family in terms of
the long view, as a link across generations. The
present achieves its meaning as a continuation
of the past and a contribution to the future. To
think only in terms of present needs and desires
is mistaken, for much the same reason that it
is mistaken to regard nature as something to
exploit with no thought of what will be left to
future generations.
5. The most important work is what is
traditionally thought of as women’s work. Men
need to use that standard in judging their own
efforts.
6. A family is not just a collection of
individuals who happen to be related; it is a
small culture of its own.
7. ‘‘True life begins where the tiny bit
begins—where what seem to us minute and
infinitely small alterations take place.’’ By a trick
of perception, we are inclined to attribute too
much importance to dramatic and extraordinary
events: We remember what is most memorable
while forgetting the sum total of small events
Journal of Family Theory & Review
that make a life what it truly is. This prosaic
view applies to historical events, to the tenor
of cultures, to individual experience, and to
marriage and the family.
8. Most evil (if not the worst evil) results
from the smallest of actions: how we direct our
attention, what we bother to remember, the daily
habits we form. Its cause is often negative, what
we overlook or do not train ourselves to see.
It often resembles criminal negligence and may
even happen without ill intent.
9. Unless we train ourselves to see them,
the most important moments of our lives pass
unnoticed.
10. It is a mistake to assume that love is
romantic love. Love comes in many varieties,
and we must choose among them. Some are
more compatible with marriage than others. If
one does not recognize the multiplicity of loves,
one may easily choose romantic love by default
when a conscience choice among alternatives
would yield a wiser outcome.
11. Romantic love comes complete with a
mythology we take to be real. It involves,
among other things, a quasi-religious aspiration
to transcendence, contempt for ordinary life, and
a fatalism that seems to place one beyond good
and evil. It is incompatible with marriage and
the family, and if the couple persists in romantic
expectations, it easily leads to adultery.
12. Romantic love is closely connected with
other mythologies that exhibit contempt for the
prosaic and cultivate the idea that life is lived
best at maximally intense and extreme moments.
It resembles the cult of the hero, of war, and of
revolution.
13. Romantic lovers may love the state of
being in love more than the one they love.
14. Among the other types of love are
hedonistic love (most compatible with the idea
of marital satisfaction), idyllic love, and prosaic
love. Anna Karenina is a celebration of prosaic
love. It is the type most suitable for marriage
and family.
15. Prosaic love thrives on intimacy rather
than mystery. It grows with knowledge of the
other. Its sexuality depends not on romantic
adventure but on knowing the other’s needs and
desires in all their inimitable particularity. If it
is successful, there is no story to tell about it.
16. Prosaic love demands constant work.
17. Love of spouse, and especially children,
involves a sense of vulnerability. It may even, at
times, resemble disgust.
Love and Anna Karenina
To those Tolstoyan conclusions, I add two of
my own.
18. It is important to understand love and
marriage partly in historical terms.
. The richest portraits of human psychology
and of ordinary institutions—like marriage—can
be found in literature, especially in the great real-
ist novels, and above all in the novels of Tolstoy.
REFERENCES
Baxter, L. A. (2004). Relationships as dialogues.
Personal Relationships, 11, 1 – 22.
Blake, W. (1963). The marriage of heaven and hell.
In H. Bloom (Ed.), English romantic poetry (Vol.
1, pp. 55 – 70). New York: Anchor.
Bloom, A. (1993). Love and friendship. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Bradbury, T. N., Fincham, F. D., & Beach, S. R. H.
(2000, November). Research on the nature and
determinants of marital satisfaction: A decade in
review. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 62,
964 – 980.
de Rougement, D. (1956). Love in the Western world
(Trans. M. Belgion). New York: Harper.
Dostoevsky, F. (1950). The devil: Ivan’s nightmare.
In The Brothers Karamazov (Trans. C. Garnett,
pp. 771 – 791). New York: Modern Library, 1950.
Dostoevsky, F. (1994). One of today’s most important
questions. In A writer’s diary. Vol. 2, 1877 – 1881
(Trans. Kenneth Lantz). Evanston, IL: Northwest-
ern University Press.
Duby, G. (1991). Medieval marriage: Two models
from twelfth-century France (Trans. E. Foster).
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Eliot, G. (1984). Middlemarch. New York: Modern
Library.
Huang, R. (1981). 1587: A year of no significance.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Maguire, R. A. (Ed. & Trans.). (1974). Gogol from
the twentieth century: Eleven essays. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
369
The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld (Trans. L.
Kronenberger). New York: Random House, 1959.
Mayakovsky, V. (1962). Past one o’clock . . . In
P. Blake (Ed.), The bedbug and selected poetry
(Trans. M. Hayward & G. Reavy). Cleveland, OH:
Meridian.
Morson, G. (1987). Hidden in plain view: Narrative
and creative potentials in War and Peace. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Morson, G. (1988a, Autumn). Prosaics: An approach
to the humanities. American Scholar, 515 – 528.
Morson, G. (1988b). Prosaics and Anna Karenina.
Tolstoy Studies Journal, 1, 1 – 12.
Morson, G. (1990–1991, Winter). Prosaic Chekhov:
Metadrama, the intelligentsia, and Uncle Vanya.
TriQuarterly, 118 – 159.
Morson, G. (1994). Narrative and freedom: The
shadows of time. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Morson, G. (2006). Signs of design. Tolstoy Studies
Journal, 18, 96 – 101.
Snow, C. P. (1993). The two cultures. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Szasz, T. (1990). Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus’s criticism
of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press.
Tolstoy, L. (1961). Why do men stupefy themselves?
In A. Maude (Ed. & Trans.), Recollections and
essays (pp. 81 – 82). London: Oxford University
Press.
Tolstoy, L. (1965). Anna Karenina (Garnett trans.,
revised by L. J. Kent & N. Berberova). New York:
Modern Library, 1965.
Tolstoy, L. (1966). Drafts for an introduction to War
and Peace. In G. Gibian (Ed.), War and peace
(p. 1363). New York: Norton.
Tolstoy, L. (1968). War and peace (Trans. A.
Dunnigan). New York: Signet.
Tolstoy, L. (1995). Anna Karenina (Norton Critical
Ed., 2nd ed., Ed. G. Gibian). New York: Norton.
Wittgenstein, L. (1968). Philosophical investigations
(Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd ed.). New York:
Macmillan.