Anna Karenina
First Appearance: Anna Karenina in The Russian Messenger
Date of First Appearance: 1875–1877
Author: Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)
Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be. And if you don’t love me anymore, it would be better and more honest to say so.
When Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina was serialized in The Russian Messenger from 1875 to 1877 and published in book form in 1878, it appealed to audiences as much as today’s reality television series on lifestyles of the rich and famous. Since the October Revolution of 1917 ended the age of royalty in Russia, readers have been even more fascinated with that bygone era. Though the egalitarian in us may prefer a society where everyone exists on the same economic plane, it’s also part of human nature to fantasize about living a life of opulence and entitlement—or to be reassured that royalty and the upper class have problems too.
“More than any other book, it persuades me that there is such a thing as human nature, and that some part of that nature remains fundamentally unaffected by history and culture,” author Francine Prose told Jilly Cooper and the Guardian, adding that Anna Karenina reminds her to pay closer attention to the world. “I’ve always loved the scene in which Anna, having met the charming Vronsky, returns home to her husband and is struck by how unattractive his ears are. How could something like that not stand up to, and transcend, the so-called test of time?” Prose isn’t alone in her praise. The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books (2007) asked 125 writers to list their top ten greatest works of fiction. After the final tally, Anna Karenina emerged as Number 1.
With Countess Anna Arkadyevna Karenina, Tolstoy gives readers a realistically flawed heroine who is as passionate as she is intelligent, and as strong as she is independent. More importantly, he gives us a character so believably complicated and contradictory that even Anna struggles at times to comprehend why she behaves as she does. By novel’s end, other characters are deeply affected by her fate, yet they have remarkably different takeaways. One writes her off as a “bad woman,” while another ponders her tragedy and has a revelation that we all have the power to inject positivity into our lives. Her story makes readers question what it means to live a life of fulfillment, and to what extent morality and society’s approval should shape individual needs and desires. Is our existence a sacrifice to be made in the service of idealism, family, or community, or does pursuing one’s own destiny and happiness matter just as much, if not more? In the end, the most romantic question implied by Anna’s plight is this: Is love more important than everything else?
Anna thinks so, and because she risks everything for love and defies societal conventions in the process, she has become an inspiration to generations. The novel has spawned a radio dramatization, two touring stage productions, two multiseason television series, and more than twenty films—the earliest coming in 1911, and the most recent being Joe Wright’s theatrical-style 2012 adaptation starring Keira Knightley as Anna. As a reviewer for Rolling Stone observed, Wright “shakes things up by setting his film in a 19th-century theater to emphasize Anna’s artificial life in Russian society”—which is consistent with one of the novel’s themes of behavior as performance in upper-class Russian society. “There wasn’t anything I couldn’t relate to, and that was the most shocking thing in itself,” Knightley told Elle magazine. “Certainly being a woman now is much easier. Nonetheless, we live in societies with rules, and if you break them, the pack [can] turn against you.” Wright’s production, with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard, emphasizes the double standard of an elitist Russian society that forgives and accepts Anna’s brother after his adulterous dalliance, but ostracizes Anna for her own genuinely loving affair with a dashing military man. The film suggests that Anna ultimately plunges into depression because of society’s rejection of her, but in the novel it’s more complicated.
“Let me tell you candidly my opinion,” Anna’s brother says. “You married a man twenty years older than yourself. You married him without love and not knowing what love was. It was a mistake, let’s admit.” It was a mistake made, too, because of a rumor spread by the cold and unfeeling Karenin’s aunt, which suggested he had “already compromised the girl and that he was honor bound to make her an offer.” Accepting a marriage forced upon them by a gossiping and rigid society wasn’t the only mistake Anna would make—another thing that reinforces her humanness. The novel’s main narrative follows Anna on an emotional and psychological journey of passion, disillusionment, confusion, and resentment. Love makes people crazy, and it certainly does Anna, who wrestles with the same sorts of problems and questions that readers do. Anna has a marriage of “prudence,” but when she charms Count Vronsky at a Moscow ball with a smile that “set him on fire,” they begin the passionate affair that continues even after she informs her husband, and he refuses to grant a divorce. Karenin, who has a government job and plans on seeking elected office, wants to keep up appearances—to play the “game” society requires of its transgressors. But as Anna continues to see Vronsky away from home (and eventually in the Karenin home), “the position was one of misery for all three.”
The novel begins, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Unlike some literary heroines who seem unsuited for or traumatized by motherhood, Anna is a good mother who treasures her eight-year-old son and has a vibrancy that draws others to her. When she spends the day with her sister-in-law and her children, the little ones cling to her throughout the visit, and when they race to hug her goodbye she runs laughing to meet them, calling, “All together” and embracing the “throng of swarming children, shrieking with delight.” Anna is full of life, and that attracts adults to her as well. “Besides wit, grace, and beauty, she had truth,” one young man says of her. “She had no wish to hide from him the bitterness of her position,” he thinks. “What a marvelous, sweet and unhappy woman!”
Anna Karenina ends sadly, of course, because it is, after all, a Russian novel—which is also why the book runs close to 900 pages in translation and there are so many main characters that you need a chart to keep them all straight. Like Jay Gatsby, Anna doesn’t make an appearance until well into the novel—chapter 18. Later, after she meets her tragic end, the novel continues for nineteen more chapters. But it’s her story that propels the novel. All the other characters are foils and counterpoints.
In 2018, the famed Bolshoi Ballet debuted Anna Karenina with Olga Smirnova dancing the lead role in an adaptation that sets the story in the present day. “The tragedy of Anna and Vronsky in the book is the impossibility of divorce at the time,” Smirnova says. “But today, because everyone can file for a divorce, it is not such a tragedy.” As a result, the ballet focuses on the forces that influence Anna’s decisions throughout the novel and the emotional and psychological states that she experiences—which, of course, are the elements that make the novel itself timeless, and Anna a wonderfully complicated character.
Bibliography
Anna Karenina: A Novel in Eight Parts (1878)
Works Cited
Banka, Mike. “Keira Knightley on Her Starring Role in ‘Anna Karenina.” Elle, November 15, 2012. https://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/news/a16239/keira-knightley-interview/.
Cooper, Jilly. “Why Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina Transcends the Ages.” Guardian, September 1, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/sep/02/anna-karenina-tolstoy-five-writers.
Shpakova, Anna. “An ‘Anna Karenina’ for Our Times at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre.” NPR. March 23, 2018. https://www.npr.org/2018/03/23/595199671/an-anna-karenina-for-our-times-at-moscow-s-bolshoi-theatre.
Travers, Peter. “Anna Karenina.” Rolling Stone, November 15, 2012. https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-reviews/anna-karenina-128192/.
Zane, J. Peder. The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. W. W. Norton, 2007.
—JP
Mick Kelly
First Appearance: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Date of First Appearance: 1940
Author: Carson McCullers (1917–1967)
But there’s one thing I would give anything for. And that’s a piano. If we had a piano I’d practice every single night and learn every piece in the world.
As the filmmaking Farrelly brothers might say, There’s Something about Mick—the main female character in Carson McCullers’s 1940 novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Maybe it’s the restless energy that comes from being on the cusp of adolescence. Maybe it’s the incongruence of a rough tomboy from a poor family hearing music in her head all the time and wanting to become a famous composer-conductor. Or maybe it’s that Mick is always thinking, and there’s so much for her to process as life tries to spin her in circles.
Biff Brannan notices. He owns a café two blocks from the house Mick’s parents’ opened to boarders after her father couldn’t find work. The youngest girl of six Kelly children, Mick stops in his café several nights a week for a hot chocolate and Biff always gives her a discount. He’s fascinated by this “gangling, towheaded youngster, a girl of about twelve” who wears “khaki shorts, a blue shirt, and tennis shoes—so that at first glance she was like a very young boy.” One night she asks to buy a pack of cigarettes and he asks if her parents know she’s out after midnight. After she leaves, Biff has second thoughts about selling her tobacco, not knowing she’s taken up smoking because at 5′6″ Mick is hoping cigarettes will stunt her growth. Biff “thought of the way Mick narrowed her eyes and pushed back the bangs of her hair with the palm of her hand. He thought of her hoarse, boyish voice and of her habit of hitching up her khaki shorts and swaggering like a cowboy in the picture show. A feeling of tenderness came in him.” That feeling makes him uneasy. Later in the novel, after Biff’s wife dies, he feels especially drawn to Mick again, wanting to “reach out his hand and touch her sunburned, tousled hair—but not as he had ever touched a woman.” That, too, makes him uneasy, for if it isn’t sexual, what is it?
When Mick’s own father needs to tell someone how isolated he feels being a provider who’s not providing, he turns to Mick, not his wife or her siblings. People at the vocational high school she attends also respond to her differently, because she received “special permission and took mechanical shop like a boy.” And at the house where Mick would sneak into a dark yard every night and hide in a bush next to a window to listen to Mozart and Beethoven playing on the radio, if the rich people who lived there knew about Mick they would also sense she’s far from typical. Then there’s Portia, the daughter of a black doctor in town who, despite the Kelly family’s poverty, works for them as their cook. Mick reminds Portia of her own father: neither goes to church, and neither seems sure about God. Although Mick and Portia argue, Portia loves her and can’t help but notice Mick is always lost in thought. Portia is convinced that “one of these days she going to really surprise somebody. But whether that going to be a good surprise or a bad surprise I just don’t know.”
Harry, the boy next door, has always been drawn to her. Though he’s Jewish and lately can only talk about Hitler and the threat of Fascism, at a party that functions as Mick’s coming-out—with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and punch and her father writing out the “prom” cards—he presents a card so he can walk with her, though she can see there’s nothing written on it. Later, in winter, they will ride their bikes sixteen miles to go swimming. As the narrator tells it from Mick’s point of view, while waiting around she is full of restless energy. “Music was in her mind. Just to be doing something she picked up a ten-penny nail and drove it into the steps with a few good wallops.” On their swimming excursion Harry tells her, “It used to be I had some big ambition for myself all the time,” but not anymore. Seeing the look on Harry’s face makes her feel sad, and before you know it she’s daring him to go skinny-dipping.
Mick is a mixture of restless energy, confusing emotions, and raw potential. Ironically, the one person who doesn’t seem to see something special in her is John Singer, a mute who, after losing his best friend and fellow mute roommate of ten years to “the state insane asylum” 200 miles away, had taken a room at the Kellys’ boardinghouse. Mick practiced piano every day at the local gym, then deliberately walked past the store where Singer worked. “Then every night she waited on the front porch for him to come home. Sometimes she followed him upstairs. She sat on the bed and watched him put away his hat and undo the button on his collar and brush his hair. For some reason it was like they had a secret together. Or like they waited to tell each other things that had never been said before.” Their imagined connection is symbolized by his name and her habit of singing everywhere she goes.
Though the song came later, readers can almost hear her vocalizing “Up on the Roof” as she climbs to the top peak of a new two-story house being built in the neighborhood, something most kids were afraid to do. “Nerve, Mick, you’ve got to keep nerve,” she says as she almost slips on the way down. She goes inside the construction and adds to the graffiti: “EDISON, DICK TRACY, MUSSOLINI, M.K. [her initials],” and on the opposite wall, she writes a “very bad word” with chalk she brought with her—“PUSSY”—and her initials underneath. Mick is complicated and so richly drawn that Sondra Locke received an Oscar nomination for portraying her in the 1968 film adaptation.
McCullers was only twenty-two when she wrote her first novel, and there’s something about the way she describes Mick and her complex feelings and thought processes that really make Mick stand out among fictional characters. Mick paints pictures with titles like “Sea Gull with Back Broken in Storm” and writes music in notebooks she keeps in an old hatbox alongside pieces of instruments she’s using to build her own violin. When older, she has a beer and ice cream sundae, together. Unlike other girls “scared a man would come out from somewhere and put his teapot in them like they was married,” she walks and sings late at night, unconcerned, convinced she can run from the biggest attackers and beat the smaller ones. She grapples with or tries to understand pubescence and the loss of virginity her thirteenth summer, as well as her sister’s serious illness, her family’s extreme poverty, the incarceration and mistreatment of Portia’s brother, the death of a close friend, and ultimately the mixture of feelings and dreams that makes her who she is. When her younger brother asks, after overhearing a slur, “Are we common, Mick?” she responds, “I’m not.” And it’s the truest thing she says.
Bibliography
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
—JP
Kurtz
First Appearance: “The Heart of Darkness” in Blackwood’s Magazine
Date of First Appearance: February–April 1899
Author: Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
The horror! The horror!
Joseph Conrad’s mysterious Mr. Kurtz from Heart of Darkness isn’t exactly an enlightened or politically correct figure. He’s an ivory trader, which justifiably angers animal rights activists, and he’s a commercial arm of colonialism, which ought to infuriate anyone sensitive to the many ways in which Western powers used their might to oppress peoples and loot precious resources and national treasures. Anyone who’s antiracism and who values humility and fair treatment of others can’t be thrilled, either, that Kurtz set himself up as a “god” among the tribal people of the Congo River basin, or that he used cannibals to attack other tribes in order to acquire more ivory. But Kurtz also happens to be literature’s most memorable “shadow character,” whose haunting offstage presence is felt throughout the novella—even though he doesn’t appear until twenty pages or so from the end. While we see him only briefly when he’s sick and dying, Kurtz remains at the center of the narrative, an elusive key to interpreting the book’s symbolic title and an ongoing obsession for the narrator.
On a trading company pleasure boat anchored in the Thames, Charles Marlow tells the story of how he traveled to Africa to captain a river steamboat transporting ivory collected by the most successful agent in company history—a “phantom” named Kurtz, who comes up constantly in conversation and seems to reside somewhere in the back of his mind almost every minute of his journey. Even seemingly unrelated details often have to do with our understanding of Kurtz. In one such instance, when Marlow goes to Brussels and undergoes a routine physical exam, the doctor brings up the issue of madness and remarks that once men are in Africa, “changes take place inside.”
After a thirty-day ship’s voyage to the company’s coastal station in Africa, Marlow hears from the chief accountant about “a very remarkable person” in charge of an important trading post. But there’s also hesitancy. “When you see Mr. Kurtz, tell him from me that everything here . . . is very satisfactory. I don’t like to write to him—with those messengers of ours you never know who may get hold of your letter—at that Central Station.” After an outburst over “those savages,” the accountant predicts Kurtz will “go far, very far. He will be a somebody in the Administration before long. They, above—the Council in Europe, you know—mean him to be.” Kurtz eventually looms so large in Marlow’s mind that when he keeps hearing the man might be dead, he’s first angry and then disappointed, having “traveled all this way for the sole purpose of talking to Mr. Kurtz. . . . Hadn’t I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all the other agents put together?”
Part of what makes Kurtz a compelling character is the shroud of mystery that surrounds him. He is legendary, but controversial. Marlow overhears one agent complaining about Kurtz’s methods and how he’s ruining the trade for everyone else. Meanwhile, the Central Station manager thought it a happy “accident” Marlow’s boat was wrecked so he couldn’t disembark immediately on the two-month journey to reach Kurtz. Does he mean to sabotage Kurtz or replace him without his superiors’ knowledge? Kurtz “got the tribe to follow him” and they “adored him,” but when Marlow and the manager steam upriver and their boat is attacked, it’s unclear whether the cannibals attack because they don’t want their beloved Kurtz leaving, whether they think it is someone hostile, or whether they attack at Kurtz’s command. Such a swirl of confusion!
When Kurtz finally appears he makes a grand entrance, emerging from the jungle on a stretcher borne by a large group of men “waist-deep in the grass” who appear suddenly “as though they had come up from the ground,” while “a cry arose.” Then, “as if by enchantment, streams of human beings—of naked human beings . . . were poured into the clearing. . . . The bushes shook, the grass swayed for a time, and then everything stood still in attentive immobility.” When Kurtz sits up, Marlow sees that he is “lank and with an uplifted arm” that extends “commandingly.” He looks to be “at least seven feet long,” though the narrator muses that “Kurtz” in German means “short.” When the covering slips off, Marlow can see the man’s rib cage. “It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze.” Then, as Kurtz opens his mouth wide, the narrator imagines that “he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.” The narrator hears a deep voice and realizes Kurtz “must have been shouting,” though this “shadow looked satiated and calm.” When he finally speaks to Marlow, who had trekked 200 miles from the coast, he says, “I am glad”—nothing nearly as profound as Marlow might have hoped.
Readers, like Marlow, must piece together their impressions in order to make sense of Kurtz and understand why he looms so large. At Central Station, Marlow overhears the barely competent manager and a relative conspire against Kurtz, whose methods disgust and frighten them. In the interior, Marlow finds the devotion of two Kurtz’s aides almost disciple-like. Yet, he says of one, “I did not envy him his devotion to Kurtz,” further clouding the waters for readers hoping for the mystery of Kurtz to finally be explained.
Heart of Darkness was first published as a three-part serial in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899, with book publication following in 1902. It has been frequently taught in high schools and colleges, but those who haven’t encountered Kurtz in their English classes likely learned about him through watching Francis Ford Coppola’s inventive 1979 screen adaptation, Apocalypse Now. Coppola updated the story by setting it in the Vietnam War, with Marlon Brando playing Col. Walter E. Kurtz—sent to Vietnam to compile a report on the failings of current military policies, just as Conrad’s Kurtz was asked to compile a report on best practices to control the “natives.” Colonel Kurtz took a group of Green Berets and their families deep into the jungle, where from a base camp they launched attacks on the Vietcong—just as Conrad’s Kurtz had an indigenous lover and used her tribe to attack surrounding peoples. His methods—which included staking the heads of tribal enemies in a circle around his hut—struck fear in the hearts of men.
In the end, Kurtz is best known for his last words: “The horror! The horror!” Does he mean darkest Africa? Human nature? What isolation does to a man? What greed does to a man? Since Kurtz’s report to the Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs ends with his recommendation to “exterminate all the brutes!” readers can only hope that his last spoken words indicate that he was aware he had become more savage than any of the “natives” he encountered or wrote about. And yet, he remains hauntingly mysterious.
Bibliography
Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories (1902)
—JP