Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

………

1886

(available in paperback from Penguin, 2000)

LEO TOLSTOY’S celebrated novel Anna Karenina is set against the backdrop of czarist Russia. Through an intricate plot and in numerous settings, Tolstoy reveals the spectrum of nineteenth-century Russian politics and political philosophy and its many layers of social class, from peasantry to aristocracy and nobility.

Marriage and family are powerful themes in this complex novel, wherein characters experience intensely the joys, hopes, betrayals, and disappointments of love.

Anna Karenina—wife of the cold, officious Karenin, a wealthy bureaucrat—is trapped in an unhappy marriage. Anna’s brother, Stepan Oblonsky, has an outwardly conventional marriage to Dolly Scherbatsky, but Stepan’s infidelity and extravagant tastes create unhappiness. Konstantin Levin, an idealistic nobleman and friend of Stepan’s, is enamored of Dolly’s sister Kitty. Although Kitty loses the attentions of the charming Count Vronsky, a military officer, to the beautiful Anna, she responds to Levin’s pureness of heart and falls in love and marries him.

Central to the story is Anna’s affair with Vronsky—at first discreet, but later public—which exposes Anna to the severe censure of her husband and St. Petersburg society, and leads to her separation from her beloved son and, ultimately, to tragedy. The reader inevitably is led to judge Anna, who is portrayed as both immoral woman and victim.

WILD MUSHROOMS ON TOAST

Mushrooms, a Russian passion, appear frequently in the detailed descriptions of family life and social events in Anna Karenina. Salted mushrooms are served as an hors d’oeuvre when Levin dines with Stepan at his club. In a scene in the country, the Oblonsky family delights together in the recreational gathering of mushrooms. A conversation about mushrooms manages to derail a marriage proposal by Levin’s brother, Koznyshev, to Kitty’s friend Varenka. Levin’s sense of community with the peasants and his land is heightened when he observes the simple scene of a peasant picking a choice mushroom and setting it aside for his wife.

For centuries mushrooms have been a Russian culinary staple, and the country’s pine and birch forests are rich with wild mushrooms that Russians delight in gathering. Wild mushrooms such as morels and chanterelles are marinated, dried, salted, baked, and simmered in soups.

Our recipe for mushroom toasts, a wonderful accompaniment to Anna Karenina, is adapted from Please to the Table: The Russian Cookbook by Anya Von Bremzen and John Welchman (Workman, 1990).

1–2 ounces dried porcini mushrooms

¼–½ pound fresh wild mushrooms (e.g., shiitake, chanterelle, morel), gently cleaned with a damp cloth

4 tablespoons butter

1 small onion, finely chopped

1½ teaspoons all-purpose flour

3 tablespoons sour cream

2 cloves garlic, minced

Pinch of paprika

Salt and pepper

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1 baguette, thinly sliced

3 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese

3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

  1. Preheat oven to 350°F.

  2. Place the dried porcini mushrooms in a small saucepan with 2 cups of water. Simmer until soft, about 40 minutes. Remove mushrooms from pan with a fork or slotted spoon and pat dry on paper towels. Pour the cooking liquid through a cheesecloth-lined strainer and set aside.

  3. Finely chop both the porcini and fresh mushrooms. Melt butter in a medium skillet. Add mushrooms and onion and sauté over medium heat for 15 minutes, stirring frequently. Sprinkle the flour over the mixture and cook for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Stir in image cup of the reserved porcini cooking liquid and simmer for 2 more minutes. Stir in sour cream and simmer for 5 minutes, stirring frequently. Add garlic and season to taste with paprika, salt, and pepper. Simmer for 2 minutes. Adjust seasonings.

  4. Heat 1½ tablespoons olive oil in a large skillet. Lightly fry bread slices on both sides, adding more olive oil to the pan as needed. Arrange toast in a single layer in a baking dish. Top each piece with some of the mushroom mixture and sprinkle with Parmesan cheese. Bake for 10 minutes. Remove from oven and sprinkle each toast with parsley. Serve immediately.

Yield: 6 servings

image   NOVEL THOUGHTS

The Reading Society, a group of faculty members at the private Dwight-Englewood School in Englewood, New Jersey, meets monthly at the home of literature teacher Frimi Sagan. The Reading Society is primarily interested in classic texts because, as Sagan says, “they promise challenges and rewards.”

Sagan is passionate about Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, calling it one of the great nineteenth-century novels. She bristled when the group’s discussion began with a member expressing annoyance at the predictability of the book’s theme of adultery. “Anna Karenina is not boring,” says Sagan. “Tolstoy offers an intense characterization of Anna, the wife of a government official in St. Petersburg, and her desire and despair. This is not just a novel about a woman having an affair. Anna has an extraordinary range of gifts. She is vital, imaginative, beautiful, and kindhearted. But she is consumed by Vronsky, a wealthy and handsome army officer, and can’t function without this relationship.”

The novel’s two pivotal characters, Anna and Levin, provided considerable fodder for the group’s examination. “Anna’s crude, vulgar, sexual love for Vronsky is contrasted with Levin’s sacred love for Kitty,” says Sagan. “Levin struggles with the meaning of his life. He tries desperately to be a good person. Anna’s struggle is circular. She is consumed by her passion for Vronsky, and can’t think about society, religion, or family as Levin can. Her inability to change is catastrophic.”

The group discussed society’s condemnation of Anna’s adulterous behavior. Countess Vronsky, Vronsky’s mother, has a reputation for sexual liaisons, but unlike Anna, who flaunts her affair with Vronsky in public, the countess plays by society’s rules. “Anna has lived quietly, but suddenly has intense feelings, and seeks sexual and emotional fulfillment,” says Sagan. “Yet, marriage and family are Anna’s only options.”

Also under discussion were the limited options authors had for dealing with adulterous women toward the end of the nineteenth century. “Authors frequently got rid of adulterous women,” Sagan adds. “It wasn’t until the twentieth century that writers could stop sacrificing them. There’s no doubt the story would have ended differently if written later.”

The Reading Society also appreciated Tolstoy’s artistry. “We all admired the beautiful prose, such as Levin’s first glimpse of Kitty at the skating rink, or Vronsky’s first glance of Anna at the train station,” says Minsky.

Members agreed that Tolstoy’s narrative writing is exhilarating. “His writing is so alive,” says Sagan. “You are drawn in immediately. As an example, take the scene where Kitty meets Levin. Levin has his skates on, and goes dashing down steps to the rink, yet he doesn’t fall—he jumps down and lands brilliantly on the ice. Tolstoy makes you want to do all of those things yourself.”

More Food for Thought

The Maine Humanities Council’s Winter Weekends focus on a classic work and combine lectures by academic specialists, small group discussions, film versions of the book, and excellent food. Proceeds from the events fund the Council’s programs for troubled teenagers. More than one hundred participants, from high school students to retirees, met to explore and discuss Anna Karenina for the council’s “Weekend in Old Russia,” held at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

During the weekend, Ronald LeBlanc, professor of Russian and Humanities at the University of New Hampshire, explored the complex relationship between food and sexual desire in a presentation to the group. “He explored the notion of how emotional and gastronomic appetites were linked in the novel,” says Charles Calhoun, codirector of the Winter Weekends program.

The Friday night menu for Dinner à la Russe, prepared by the Bowdoin College Dining Service, was written in the French of “vieux St.-Pétersbourg.” “French was the language normally spoken by most of the characters in Anna Karenina,” says Calhoun. The lavish buffet dinner featured many traditional Russian foods mentioned in the novel, such as beets, cucumbers, mushrooms, salmon, and kasha (buckwheat groats), and included champignons à la grecque (mushrooms cooked with lemon, olive oil, and spices), salade de betteraves (beet salad), potage borsch (borsch soup), and boeuf à la mode de M. le comte Stroganoff, or beef Stroganoff, an authentic Russian dish with origins in St. Petersburg.

“What lingered after the event, after so much listening and talking, is a conclusion that might seem obvious,” says Calhoun. “Tolstoy is a genius with few peers.”