Tolstoy V. Modern Fiction

Anna Karenina is a very long book and I’m only about halfway through it. However, I know I will have a lot to say so I am going to do a few posts as I progress through it. So, this post is spoiler free, given that I myself do not know any spoilers yet.

What I want to focus on today is Tolstoy’s writing style. It is so different from modern fiction. Today, novels have almost been whittled down in comparison. There are 1-2 main characters and very few pages are spared on details that don’t drive the main plot forward.

In Anna Karenina, you spend hundreds of pages with characters and settings that (at least so far) have nothing to do with Anna Karenina. I am not sure if this is because of Tolstoy’s personal style, or a characteristic of Russian literature, or a characteristic of mid/late 19th century literature.

For example, a significant chunk of the book focuses on Konstantin Levin and his existential agricultural identity crisis. He is Anna (the protagonist)’s brother’s friend, and as such is quite distantly removed from the central plot. We spend a lot of time with Levin. One day he’s idealizing the peasantry and saying he’s going to give up all his money and plough fields and marry a peasant woman. Then an hour later he’s like nah never mind I like my money and the peasants shouldn’t be educated. And then the next day he’s writing a book about best practices for agriculture in Russia in comparison to agriculture in Europe. And then we don’t hear about the book again for 275 pages but he has several extended debates on the topic at dinner parties that are covered over the span of 40 pages each. And I’m over here like, wait, who is Levin again and where did Anna go?

I am curious about this shift in writing styles. Is the move away from using novels as platforms for the author’s philosophical musings the result of social media and TV shows and our dwindling attention spans?

Also, it’s clear from all of Levin’s anguished nights spent agonizing over serfdom and sharecropping that this topic was top of mind in Russia when Tolstoy was writing this novel. Which poses another interesting idea: can fiction be viewed as a window into the social issues prevalent in the author’s lifetime? I think so. Many books I’ve read in the past few years address social issues that are very top of mind in the United States today, such as climate change, racism, homophobia, our relationship with technological progress, etc. In a sense, fiction can almost be used as an anthropological study of humanity.

Ok that’s all for this post. More to come on my rambling thoughts on Tolstoy!