Amour passionnel et idéalisme passionné : une lecture psychiatrique du roman Anna Karénine de Léon Tolstoï

Abstract

Tolstoy's landmark novel, Anna Karenina, showcases human passion and desperation at its penultimate, where the main character is carried away by passionate love to the point where she succumbs to overbearing psychological pain. This remarkable novel paints a sophisticated landscape of emotions, feelings and desires in Anna Karenina's dynamic “inner world”, thus demonstrating Tolstoy's masterful insights into the human psyche. As such, there is an intriguing opportunity to provide a modern day psychiatric diagnosis to Tolstoy's key work and lead character. Nevertheless, much care should be taken in applying such a current psychiatric diagnosis, which may unfortunately place Anna in certain pre-established categories, without properly considering the author's time context and literary genius. In this light, Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina well before psychiatry became a modern medical science, with its current framework of understanding for various mental illnesses. His portrait of Anna's psyche is all the more remarkable, as it richly displays the inner workings of Anna's psyche: Her emotional experiences, her feelings, her dreams… all perfectly illustrating a so-called Tolstoian psychology. Thus, this paper provides several current psychiatric insights to Anna's character, to her destiny, and the “denouement” of the storyline. And even more interestingly, it explores the story and its characters by keeping in mind Tolstoy's own personality structure, beliefs, needs, and desires. Similar to a Freudian interpretation of dreams, the novel's characters could, in certain respects, be understood as representing different aspects of the author himself. One hypothesis is that Anna Karenina could be considered Tolstoy's “literary testament”, in that the figure of Anna is the expression of the powerful emotional momentum behind its author.