A Weekend in Old Russia

Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is a tragedy of intimate domestic life, yet it is bracketed by two wars: the disastrous Russian defeat in the Crimea in 1854 and the Serbian revolt against the Turks, to which Count Vronsky rushes off as a volunteer, with his toothache and his guilt, at the end of the novel. One thought that gave the 2003 Winter Weekend a special resonance was how few degrees of separation lie between our current state of affairs and Tolstoy’s story. Serbian nationalism leads to World War I, which brings the collapse of the Ottoman Empire (along with the Russian one), which results in the French and British "invention" of Iraq.

Not that reading the book needed any extraliterary justification. For all its length (817 pages in the vivid new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky), Anna Karenina is a real page-turner. Tolstoy interweaves the story of the beautiful, doomed, ever fascinating “fallen” woman with that of the naïve, idealistic, homebound, and ultimately rather irritating Levin (who shares many of the author’s own traits in mid-life). Their stories are told amid a panorama of life in mid-19th-century Russia, from the palaces and hovels of St. Petersburg and Moscow to the semi-pagan harvest rituals of the vast countryside. There is no doubt which side of things Tolstoy prefers. Levin discovers a meaning for his life in his love for the land and in his identification with the peasantry.

This was the sixth such humanities weekend, and, as in previous years, it combined stimulating lectures by academic specialists, lively small-group discussions, good food, and an opportunity to take part in a community of readers from all over Maine. The 125 participants — ranging from a 9th-grader to retirees — broke into smaller groups for facilitated discussions, to ponder the question, among others, of how responsible Anna actually is for her fate.

Raymond Miller (Bowdoin College) introduced the novel from a biographical perspective and asked the audience to consider another question: why do we love this book so much, when so many of us really don’t like Tolstoy the philosopher and social critic? Jack Thompson (Indiana University) surveyed 19thcentury Tsarist society and politics, and Jane Costlow (Bates College) took us on a visual tour of Tolstoy’s world.

Ronald LeBlanc (University of New Hampshire) explored the complex relationship between food and sexual desire in Anna Karenina, and Cathy Frierson (University of New Hampshire) examined the fascination felt by 19th-century Russian intelligentsia for the peasantry. Jane Knox-Voina (Bowdoin College) explained Russian attitudes toward women in Tolstoy’s era, and Sheila McCarthy (Colby College) concluded the program with a close reading of the famous steeple-chase scene, in which the death of the horse Frou-Frou prefigures Anna’s own suicide.

Winter Weekends are always interdisciplinary: Charles Calhoun introduced the 1927 silent film version (Love, the first of two versions starring Greta Garbo), for which composer Elliott Schwartz improvised a score. Dinner on Friday was a variation on traditional Russian ingredients — beets, cucumbers, mushrooms, salmon, kasha, sour cream, cherries — with a menu written in the French of vieux St.-Petersbourg.

What lingers after the event, after so much listening and talking, is a confirmation that might seem obvious: Tolstoy is a genius with few peers. Returning to the book after 30 or 40 years, some participants were once again struck by the mastery, even the strangeness, with which Anna’s final day is presented. We all know how she will end, but in Tolstoy’s nerve-wrenching account (in unexpectedly stream-of-consciousness prose) we keep thinking: it just might not happen after all.