I think one of the most disappointing things of the ending of Game of Thrones (the TV Show, that is. One of my friends defines themselves as a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire to mark the difference and now more than ever I think that it’s an important distinction.) was the response the showrunners gave to themes. This wasn’t anything new, of course. In an earlier interview, Benioff responded that he felt themes were for “eighth grade book reports.”
One of my writing buddies expressed a similar view.
He felt themes weren’t important to his writing.
I happen to disagree. That’s fine, anyone who does anything is going to disagree with people doing the same thing. But I think themes matter. I think they’re ideas bigger than characters, bigger than story, bigger than any one life. Stories about themes, therefore, are bigger than stories about people, or events, or places. In fact, one of the styles of opening line is exactly this: stating a theme. A universal truth to be explored, something to be challenged, a thing to examine. A Place I Have Never Been begins this way, with a statement of theme. It didn’t originally, but it does now:
“There is not, perhaps, a more visceral or passionate war in humanity than that between freedom and control.”
They say that a writer’s first step is in emulation of the authors they love, and there’s truth to this. There are authors whose books will not be in this list that certainly influenced my writing. But this idea of thematic opening, of a large idea explored through characters interwoven not only with life but with time and setting and place and purpose, drove me to write. It’s not quite the same as setting the scene, as beginning with action, or as establishing a character. It’s something a little more. If you want to know where I got these ideas from, look no further than a shelf on one of my favorite local used bookstores.
It's also a category a few of my friends said they’d be surprised if I did not include on my Top Ten.
It’s labeled “Old Dead Russians.”
It, of course, has Tolstoy. And if it has Tolstoy, it has a copy of Anna Karenina, a story which has no comparison, let alone my own work,
It also has a thematic opening line, my favorite in all literature:
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
At the beginning of this list, I talked a little about the difficulty in defining exactly what Top Ten meant for me. Part of this was looking at objectively fantastic works. I feel, and there is plenty of agreement out there, that Anna Karenina is objectively a fantastic work.
Is it preachy? Well, it’s Tolstoy.
Are there a lot of characters? It’s Tolstoy.
Are there sections that seem to have little to nothing to do with the main plot? Dude, it’s Tolstoy.
Is it moralizing? IT’S TOLSTOY.
Is it long? IT. IS. TOLSTOY!
Does it transcend the right and proper decorum of what we’d call a novel?
Yes, of course it does.
And it is all the better for it.
That last bit, of course, depends on translation. I’ve read three different versions, (and audiobooked another). My preferred is Constance Garnett’s translation because I feel it captures the (if I mentioned romance or melodrama are y’all going to kill me?) artistic, beautiful, majestic style of voice that suits a work of this calibre. I studied Russian for a summer, the most I can say now is “The Girl Drinks Milk,” and even then someone once told me that my accent was horrid, so it’s not as though I can really comment on the translation objectively.
That’s two languages I’ve admitted to failure in. Don’t look into the rest.
But in terms of translation, consider Garnett’s:
“…so that it was in the Shtcherbatskys' house that he saw for the first time that inner life of an old, noble, cultivated, and honorable family of which he had been deprived by the death of his father and mother. All the members of that family, especially the feminine half, were pictured by him, as it were, wrapped about with a mysterious poetical veil, and he not only perceived no defects whatever in them, but under the poetical veil that shrouded them he assumed the existence of the loftiest sentiments and every possible perfection.”
To the first copy I read:
“…so that in the Shcherbatskys’ house he saw for the first time the milieu of an old, noble, educated and honourable family, of which he had been deprived by the death of his father and mother. All the members of this family, especially the female side, seemed to him covered by some mysterious, poetic veil, and he not only saw no defects in them, but surmised, behind the cover of this poetic veil, the loftiest feelings and every possible perfection.”
You may very well disagree with me, and that is again fine. I am not implying that there is an objectively better translation, only which one I prefer contrasted with my original reading of the text (note that it did not turn me off entirely from the story. But, I will say, rereading it under a different translation I felt certainly opened more of the story to me.)
Such is the nature of literature, as much in the hands of the reader as the writer.
As an aspiring writer myself, this concerns me immensely.
You may notice that we are so far into a discussion of Anna Karenina without actually discussing its contents. Part of this naturally is a result of the strong emotions evoked by the novel, the nerdy fights about translation, and the necessity of explaining how to discover its contents. The other half of this, of course, is that it’s long, and kind of complicated. I don’t think it’s as complicated as some of Tolstoy’s other works, but even a brief summary of the plot can run into more than a few hundred words. In short, Anna Karenina deals with the upheaval in high Russian society through more than a few affairs, one involving the titular character and a charming officer, with a subplot about a rejected man working on himself and trying to woo back the woman who rejected him.
And that sounds… like a lot and like so little, and it is. But the magic of Tolstoy’s writing is in its minutiae, so important in navigating the society he explores. There’s the little intonations of tone, of motion, of décor and display that drive the interactions. Are you overthinking the way someone closes their eyes, or their sudden switch from French to Russian, or how exactly their dog hunts, or are you paranoid, victimized by a society you think desires naught but your exclusion? Who dances with whom, who house do you call upon, what to wear, eat, drink, or (even more important) serve (and if you think I’m merely talking about entertaining, then you’re missing the point.)?
The thing about everything above is that, in Tolstoy’s hands, you need to know. It’s what invests you, infects you, and draws you in.
But the other reason it’s hard to explain the contents of Anna Karenina relates to how I started writing this post, and why the story earns its place in my Top Ten. It’s that all-important word: theme. Anna Karenina, though a majestic look at Russian society and intricate interpersonal interactions, is a book of ideas. Ideas bigger than its characters, its places, and its time because its ideas shape everything within. It’s not necessary to agree with them, or even realize that they’re there, but it is impossible not to be swept up in them.
This is not to say it is the only book with themes. Plenty of books have themes. Plenty do even if they don’t mean to, and some don’t even if they were intended. That themes exist isn’t anything new, and me pointing it out isn’t some kind of grand revelation. But the thing is, I’m not arguing that Anna Karenina has themes- I’m saying it is its themes. That it does not exist without them. Or rather would not? The book’s ideas are what make its story, what it explores is what it is. There are a few works like this, real books of ideas, that stay because they are what they explore. The Great Gatsby (a runner up on this list) is one. Its characters seem almost secondary to its themes because, in a very real sense in Gatsby, its characters are the themes themselves.
Anna Karenina takes this extreme further, in that its characters aren’t the themes themselves, but the entirety of the story is. Its content is not the drama of Russian aristocrats dallying, partying, judging, and dancing about society. Its characters are as much setting as estates and Italy. If we are to discuss them properly, these are Anna Karenina’s real contents:
Love.
Betrayal.
Urban corruption.
Rural idealism.
Religion.
Duty.
Honor.
Decisiveness.
Death.
Family.
Meaning.
These things make up its drive. Its characters are players on the stage of life, ships at sea swept along by forces larger than themselves in a storm only the skillful survive. There’s some of that moralizing for you. But skillful does not mean good, and good does not promise happiness.
Somewhere Tolstoy seeks to haunt me for saying that.
But like so many works written in a different place in a different time, Anna Karenina’s interpretations shift with the generations exposed to it. Who you side with and where you find the drama and the relief exposes as much about you as it does Tolstoy or the book itself. It’s as intricate a performance as selecting someone to dance with at a ball (beware of those). But the universality of the ideas it explores is what makes it everlasting in its readability, in whatever form you find it most readable.
So, equipped with whatever you have morals, whatever you give as your cause for happiness, whatever you believe about write and wrong, whatever you believe gives life meaning, enter Tolstoy’s world at its start of a cheating husband and his wife, clinging to the rope of salvation promised by the arrival of Anna Arkadyevna Karenina.
Meet Vronsky, Kitty, and Levin.
Party with the Princess Betsy.
Recover afterwards with Madame Stahl.
Attend a ball.
Shoot some birds.
Ride a train.
Harvest some grain.
See how each family is unhappy in its own way.
And ask which unhappiness you prefer.
