Lessons In Love from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
How the greatest novel ever written can help you love better
Anna Karenina, despite its age, has much wisdom to impart to modern lovers, from the dangers of idealising a partner, to the pitfalls of Romanticism, the difficulty of marriage and the importance of communication.
Naturally, there are elements of Anna Karenina which do not translate to our own time very well; set in 19th century Russia, the drama unfolds in a society where marriage for love was still contentious, peasants worked the lands for aristocrats and wife’s were expected to stay in the domestic sphere, raising children and obeying their husbands. Nonetheless, human love is one of the constants of history, and the tales of romance within do not have an expiry date.
There are two central loves that play out in the novel: The scandalous affair between the titular Anna Karenina and the impetuous Count Vronsky, and the initially unrequited love between Levin and Kitty which eventually comes to fruition. Anna is pursued by Count Vronsky after meeting at a ball, and after initial hesitation, falls head-over-heels in love with the man, and her idea of him.
Whilst Kitty and Levin find peace and contentment within marriage, albeit after Kitty initially chooses Vronsky over Levin, Karenina sacrifices her reputation, marriage and motherhood to taste true love, and pays the ultimate price.
Karenina and Vronsky, Kitty and Levin’s relationships teach us important lessons which can help us to love better by learning from their mistakes. Without further ado, these are a few lessons in love from what has been labelled the greatest work of literature ever:
Marriage is hard work, but it’s worth it
Levin and Kitty’s story in particular shows us that passionate, heady love will fade as a couple becomes closely acquainted, but that a settled and nourishing love can and does take it’s place, offering new pleasures. With that being said, it also brings challenges, not least of which is that whilst married, you have to think for two. Additionally, marriage is a trade-off where the complete freedom of a single life, both sexual and professional, is relinquished for a lifelong love founded on trust, compromise and friendship.
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Naturally, in marriage we lose our ability to pursue love interests or find validation in strangers, but in turn, we gain stability, a partner who understands us and a comfort that is never present in new love. At least, we can do.
Tolstoy masterfully articulates the joys of marriage in their subtle but profound beauty. Take the following, as Tolstoy describes Levin bathing in the presence of his spouse:
“He experienced what was for him a new and joyful delight, completely free of sensuality, in the closeness of a loved women.”
Or the following passage, in which he articulates the intuitive communication of a husband and wife:
“Levin was used now to speaking his thought boldly, without troubling to put it into precise words; he knew that his wife, in such loving moments as this, would understand what he wanted to say from a hint, and she did understand him”.
This love is stable, intuitive and nourishing, but it lacks the passion and excitement of a new love affair; it is what two becoming one looks like in practice, and one of the fruits one reaps for forsaking the freedom of bachelorhood.
Nonetheless, Tolstoy does not sugarcoat the pill of marriage: This type of love can also feel claustrophobic and oppressive, and whilst bearing the troubles of a loved on can feel like a privelege, it can also feel like a ture.
As in War and Peace, the characters grow and develop throughout the narrative, and we witness their contradictions and inner drama. In particular, we get to see Levin develop from a young bachelor who is in love with the idea of love, into a happy and fulfilled husband, with all the struggles of that journey laid before us.
One important lesson Anna Karenina teaches us is that whilst early love is exciting, it can become daunting over time. We pine to be loved, but forget depending on another- and being depended upon- is scary.
Early in their marriage, Levin smiles to himself after his wife forbids him from hunting bears with his brother and friend:
“The idea of his wife not allowing him pleased him so much that he was ready to renounce for ever the pleasure of seeing bears”.
Still intoxicated by the affection and possessiveness of his spouse, his freedom seems a small price to pay for her love. Later, however, once his love has settled and he has grown accustomed to his partners love, his wife's possessiveness begins to leave him indignant; when his wife wishes to accompany him on a visit to his dying brother, Levin exclaims in horror:
“No, this is terrible. To be some sort of slave!”.
He goes on to feel that the love he longed for is a burden, and to lament his lost freedom:
“How strange it was for him (Levin) to think that he, who so recently had not dared to believe in the happiness of her loving him, now felt unhappy because she loved him too much!”
One can expect too much from marriage, and young Levin does so. Like many today, he grew up believing that romantic love would bring final and lasting happiness, and that after saying his vows, a lifetime of bliss would ensue. Furthermore, he thought marriage would be the honeymoon phase until death:
His notion of marriage was therefore not like the notion of the majority of his acquaintances, for whom it was one of the many general concerns of life; for Levin it was the chief concern of life, on which all happiness depended.”
It’s not uncommon for men and women to subscribe to unrealistic ideas of marriage and love, and to expect too much from their partners and the institution of marriage itself. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy dismantles unrealistic ideas about what lifelong love looks like, not to put us off, but to prepeare us for what is messy and difficult, but ultimately, worthwhile:
“Though he had thought that he had the most precise notions of family life, he had, like all men, involuntarily pictured it to himself only as the enjoyment of love, which nothing should hinder and from which trifling cares should not detract.”
Levin discovers disenchantments in married life, naturally, but he also discovers new enchantments he never expected. In fact, through solving conflict with his wife, which he didn't think they could ever have during their honeymoon period, he finds that him and his wife Kitty “redouble” their love. Gradually, Levin learns that marriage is far messier than Disney films, but also far more rewarding in the long run.
Our partners are flawed and we ignore it at our peril
In Anna Karenina, we are reminded on multiple occasions that the hatred we feel towards our partners can be as intense- if not more so- than that we feel for our enemies, and that the line between these two ostensibly conflicting states is a thin one. Furthermore, this is shown in both Levin and Anna to be, at least in part, the result of putting the beloved on a pedestal and expecting them to do no wrong.
“At every meeting, she (Anna) was bringing together her imaginary idea of him (an incomparably better one, impossible in reality) with him as he was”.
Levin also idolises Kitty whilst courting her, believing her to be unquiely flawless among the opposite sex:
“He knew so well this feeling of Levin’s, knew that for him all the girls in the world were divided into two sorts: one sort was all the girls in the world except her, and these girls had all human weaknesses and were very ordinary girls; the other sort was her alone, with no weaknesses and higher than everything human.”
This idolisation of the beloved is common in the early stages of love, however it almost always causes issues; no one can live up to such heights of perfection, and it will hurt when the illusion is shattered as we grow to know our partners more intimately, warts and all.
Furthermore, this initial deification of our partners- an inheritance from the Romantic movement- is one of the reasons that love and hate are so closely related. In short, we feel betrayed and hurt when our partners show themselves to be human; when our lover hurts us we don’t expect it, so we hold them in contempt because we thought they were different- from us and the human race.
It might sound silly, and yet many of us are shocked when our partners disappoint us, even though it’s almost guaranteed to happen in a lifetime. It can be painful, but it is the price we pay for making idols of our lovers.
Both Levin and Anna, Vronksy and Kitty eventually discover that their lovers are weak, human, jealous and flawed; they might have saved themselves the realisation if only they had assumed from the beginning this was so. We would all do well to realistically appraise our partners, and to remind ourselves that they, like us, will have flaws as well as virtues. We should not be deterred by this, however, but excited to grow alongside our partners and to better each-other.
The more we know someone, the harder it is to love them
Moreover, there is a lesson to be had from this lesson: Philosopher Alain De Botton has noted that when people commit adultery, they are intoxicated by the novelty of a new person more than anything else. Simply put: The less we know about someone, the easier it is to love them. When we first meet someone, and all we know is that we both like the same T.V show and that we would quite like to see the other undressed, it is easy to be enamoured.
Moreover, when we grow to know a person, and they inevitably show you certain parts of their character which were suppressed during the courting stage, suddenly we feel that our lifelong vows were premature. As Botton notes:
“Our certainty that we might be happier with another person is founded on ignorance, the result of having been shielded from the worst and crazier dimensions of a new character’s personality- which we must accept are sure to be there, not because we know them in any detail, but because we know the human race.”
The comforting thing is, we need not spend our entire life’s jumping from partner to partner and trying to find someone who will keep us enamoured all the time– no one is capable of doing so.
Instead, we should acknowledge that strangers seem like attractive prospects because we have not yet had the time to discover all their maddening idiosyncrasies. With this knowledge, we can learn to embrace marriage and monogamy, growing deeper in our love instead of chasing shallow affairs.
If jealousy and paranoia are not controlled, they will destroy a relationship
An element of jealousy is natural, and of course, in some cases entirely founded. With that being said, it is easy to let our imaginations get carried away and to allow our suspicions to enjoy the status of facts; when this happens, we can then begin to act in a way that makes our fears come true. Tragically, we can fear that our partners will leave so much that we make this come true.
Anna’s growing suspicion of her lover, and her erratic behaviour as a result, are a case in point. After moving to an extravagant country estate with Vronksy, Anna grows jealous of her partner, which manifests itself in her being controlling, hostile and possessive. What’s more, Anna starts reading judgement into entirely innocent comments made by Vronsky and projecting her own fear and insecurity into what Vronsky says.
Believing that Vronsky no longer loves her, she tells him that their liason is over and demands that he leave her forever. Taking her at her word, Vronsky does so, but Anna, secretly hoping he would understand what she really meant and embrace her, takes him leaving her as evidence that her suspicions were correct and he is cooling towards her.
Anna’s love becomes “gloomy and oppressive” for Vronsky, and when Anna adorns herself with a nice dress to spark his affection, it has no effect, namely because she has driven him away with her anxious attachment and possessiveness. As Tolstoy writes:
“He liked it all, but he had already liked it so many times!”
Tragically, Anna’s jealousy- expressed through anger and controlling behaviour– makes her fears come true. This goes to show that we should communicate our insecurity calmly and honestly, instead of going nuclear when we feel neglected.
Moreover, many of us expect our partners to read our minds and understand that we don’t mean what we say, however this is an unhealthy attitude; we must learn to communicate our fears and insecurities clearly, and fact check our thoughts. Instead of interpreting our partners silence as bulletproof evidence that they love someone else, we should consider other, less catastrophic explanations for their behaviour first. Better still, we should ask them what is on their mind.
Adults can be infants in love
Intelligence is not a bulwark against emotional immaturity, and whether we are scientists, writers, engineers or teachers, at some point we have probably made quite a mess of expressing our emotions, and acted like infants towards our partners.
In Anna Karenina, Anna convinces herself that Vronsky doesn't love her, that he will marry a suitor his mother has waiting and that he judges her for lacking feeling towards their child:
“All the cruellest words a coarse man could say, he said to her in her imagination, and she could not forgive him for them, as if he had actually said them to her”
More than anything, she craves his love, and wants reassurance that she is still desired. What’s more, Anna projects her own feelings onto her partner, and unjustly grows angry at him for imagined words. In her panic, jealousy and anger, her plea for love and assurance becomes an attack on Vronsky, and perplexed, he decides that he can do nothing more in the moment and so leaves her alone. Anna, panicked, sends after him once he has already set off, but he is not able to return until the end of the day. In his absence, Anna throws herself in front of a train.
Vronsky is certainly in his right to dismiss Annas attacks as unfounded and harsh, but equally, tragedy might have been averted had he understood that her anger and hostility was a cry for help, and that, like a child, she was being monstrous because she was scared.
In The School Of Life: An Emotional Education, Alain De Botton notes that “adulthood isn't a complete state”, and that parts of our psyche are forever, in some ways, tethered to how they were in early life. Botton says that sometimes, we should benevolently read our partners outbursts and aggression, just as we do so for children; perhaps they are being hostile because they want to be told they are loved, or are belligerent because they didn't sleep or have a sore knee. Let me clarify, a partner cannot be excused for being cruel, angry or belittling all the time, but if a partner has a sudden, uncharacteristic outburst, it can never hurt to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Love is an element of happiness, not happiness itself
Levin learns that life is bigger than love, and that a happy marriage does not guarantee spiritual contentment long-term. This is not to say love is inconsequential; on the contrary, the novel shows that we can be deeply enriched by it, but as in the case of Anna, it can also destroy us.
To clarify, there are certainly social factors that lead to Anna’s suicide: the tension between her and Vronsky is born of the fact that she cannot enter high society until she is granted a divorce. Whilst awaiting this she is forced to self-isolate and live among books. Whilst locked up in her country home and abusing morphine, she grows paranoid of her lover who continues to move freely, and wrongfully suspects him of growing uninterested in her.
Nonetheless, her story demonstrates the perils of valuing love too highly; Anna chooses romantic love over her first child and just about everything else. This goes to show that fetishising love can actually make us neglect our other relationships and commitments.
Levin also demonstrates that there is more to life than finding love. Whilst courting Kitty, and in the early days of his marriage, Levin feels that love is all he needs to be happy, and suddenly, he begins to neglect his interest in farming, philosophy and religion, feeling them to be dull besides his beloved. Moreover, Levin initially feels that being loved is enough to sustain him and immerses himself entirely in being a husband.
Despite being happily married and a father, he descends into despair, and does not even go hunting for fear that he would turn the gun on himself. He is tormented by thoughts of his own mortality and questions of God and morality. Levin eventually has a religious realisation whilst conversing with a peasant, but his spiritual crisis goes to show that contrary to his belief as a bachelor, happiness is dependent upon more than love.
In conclusion, these are but a few of the lessons that can be taken from Tolstoy’s masterpiece Anna Karenina, and whilst I have focussed on love, it is, like all his works, rich with lessons on how to live and more. Beyond this, it is a page-turning drama with a rich host of characters worthy of your time and emotional investment. Don’t just take my word for it– go and read it for yourself. You won’t regret it.
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