To the Editor:

W

hat a pleasure to read the wonderful essay “The Moral Urgency of Anna Karenina” [April] and to be thereby introduced to the critical mind of Gary Saul Morson. It makes me want to teach Anna Karenina myself again. I disagree only slightly with one point Mr. Morson makes: Yes, Tolstoy encourages us to reject the illusions of romantic love, but he also has tremendous sympathy for Anna and takes care to distinguish her from others of her class who carry on affairs as if they are of no consequence. Anna’s actions lead her to be false, but something true in her does consequently tear her apart. Ironically, if she had been more like the false characters, she would have survived. Tolstoy, I think, is aware that what’s most authentic in Anna is responsible for her tragedy, which tempers somewhat his rejection of her romantic passion.

Paul Hawkins
Montreal, Canada

M

y favorite passage in Anna Karenina, which makes clear Tolstoy’s own feelings, describes an interior monologue of Vronsky’s. He posits that we are faced with a choice in life of being either one of the boring, old types who stay married to the same person, pay their debts, and always think of the consequences of their actions or one of the dashing, exciting types who live for the moment, spend borrowed money on a whim (and with no thought to repayment), and want to be seen as gay and carefree, etc. Vronsky said that he and his friends had never even considered any approach to life except the latter. Anyone who reads that cannot escape realizing Tolstoy’s own feelings about the romantic love that Anna and the Count personify.

Dwight Sutherland
Mission Hills, Kansas

T

his is one of the finest pieces of criticism I have read. I am fortunate to have found it before finishing Anna Karenina. And yet, when I came across Mr. Morson’s line, “Better than any other writer who ever lived, Tolstoy traces the infinitesimally small changes of consciousness,” I could not but disagree with him and wager that Marcel Proust would be more worthy of this statement. But more than anything, I want to note how fortunate I feel to have discovered Mr. Morson’s analysis while still reading Anna Karenina.

Michael D. Wulf
Los Angeles, California

I

enjoyed reading the article “The Moral Urgency of Anna Karenina.” The title captured my attention, and I knew I had to read it. I read Anna Karenina a number of years ago and, like Oprah, was one of those blind individuals who thought it was all about romantic love. Oh, how we’re deceptively charmed! Thank you, Mr. Morson, for your insight into Tolstoy’s masterpiece.

Joshua Brooks
Houston, Texas

I

had to write to express my gratitude to Commentary for running Gary Saul Morson’s superb essay. His ideas about Tolstoy’s moral vision for Anna Karenina were presented with affection, authority, and clarity. He made a familiar masterpiece new again for me.

Katharine Daly
Buffalo, New York

H

ere is another reminder of the moral urgency of Anna Karenina. Pope Francis has seconded Levin’s observation that happiness is tending to the world around you. “Reality,” the pope told a large group of young people, “is superior to ideas.” This is coming from the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, which for two millennia has tried to fit real life onto the procrustean bed of dogma—often with horrible, disastrous results. (Inquisition, anyone?) What a concise statement of where we all go astray. The real horrors of mankind come when we attempt to impose an abstract idea, be it religion, communism, fascism, or even democracy, by force.

Joseph Davidson
Silver Spring, Maryland

G

ary Saul Morson’s essay was so fine and thought-provoking that I felt compelled to thank you for publishing it. I missed reading Tolstoy earlier in my long life, but in retirement I now have the time to read these “books of the gaps.” I have requested Anna Karenina from my library and have ordered some of Tolstoy’s non-fiction essays. How exciting to explore this writer’s thinking! A marvelous essay, Morson’s. Thank you.

Lita Hansen
Address Withheld

T

he Generous letters of these readers pose important questions. Paul Hawkins reminds us that Tolstoy “takes care to distinguish her [Anna] from others of her class who carry on affairs as if they were of no consequence.”  That’s true, and it also distinguishes Anna from her brother Stiva, for whom life is nothing but the pursuit of pleasures. Unlike Stiva or Princess Betsy, Anna has a conscience and knows that what she is doing is wrong, which is why she has to engage in an increasingly strained process of self-deception to keep doing it. That process leads her ever further from reality and closer to suicide. By contrast, Stiva never has to lie to himself, because he does not feel guilty in the first place.

Dwight Sutherland points to one of the most delightful passages in the book. With supreme irony, Tolstoy explains that the dissolute Vronsky is not unprincipled. Quite the contrary, he adheres to a very strict code of principles. The problem is that the code is morally awful. “These principles said that one must pay a cardsharp but need not pay a tailor, that one must not lie to men but one might to women, that one could not deceive anyone but might deceive a husband, that one must not forgive insults but might insult others, and so on.” The comment about not paying a tailor is particularly telling because it shows contempt for work. In many novels, work is something that happens off stage and is something to escape from by a timely inheritance, but in Anna Karenina people are measured by their attitude to work. Tolstoy, like his hero Levin, regards conscientious work as necessary for a meaningful life, whereas Stiva, Vronsky, and most others regard that attitude as hopelessly bourgeois.

I would say in response to Michael Wolf that if there is anyone who could rival Tolstoy in describing the infinitesimals of consciousness, it is, as he says, Proust. There is a strain in modernism interested in how consciousness proceeds moment by moment, and it is no accident that this strain coincides with the discovery of the Russian novel. God must have loved the ordinary events because he made so many of them.

To Joshua Brooks I must confess that when I was younger I also read Anna Karenina as a romantic novel rather than as a novel about the perils of romanticism. When I was about 30, a friend listening to my comments on the book asked me how old I had been when I read it, and when I said 21, she observed wryly, “Perhaps you ought to read it again.” Many of my students are a lot wiser than I was at their age, and they get Tolstoy’s point without much prompting. Particularly the women: Young men are more likely to “fall in love” with Anna, while the women wonder how men could be so readily deceived.

I am delighted that my essay helped Katharine Daly experience a familiar masterpiece as it if it were new. I suppose that is what makes a book a masterpiece, that it lends itself to such re-reading, whereas third-rate books with a simple “message” are easily exhausted. What a pity that those are often the books that secondary-school teachers, and even many college professors, prefer to assign!

I could not agree more with Joseph Davidson that reality is superior to ideas. My first principle is that people are more important than principles. Somewhere Alexander Solzhenitsyn asks why Macbeth killed only a few people while Lenin and Stalin killed millions, and he answers: because Macbeth had no ideology. Abstractions are not fitted to capture the infinite gradations of consciousness, the unforeseeable contingencies of daily life, and the immense complexities of moral issues. That, at least, is the presupposition of the realist novel as a genre. The masterplot of the realist novel of ideas—Turgenev’s Fathers and Children, Conrad’s Secret Agent, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, James’s The Princess Casamassima as well as the major works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—narrates how the hero learns the limitations of an ideology. It turns out that he does not believe it for the reasons he thinks he does, and that, when put to the test, it leads to monstrous consequences. The 20th century shows how correctly that masterplot represents the real world.

To Lita Hansen, I say that I, too, am reading the “books of the gaps.” There are so many of them!