Knapp, Liza Anna Karenina and Others: Tolstoy's Labyrinth of Plots (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 543 Puleri’s first monograph is sure to confront scholars of both Ukrainian and Russian studies with the need to put aside binary schemes by challenging rigid schemes of national exclusivity and monological narratives. Puleri’s ability to show the vividness of Russian-language Ukrainian culture, its diversity and its rootedness in the cultural life of contemporary Ukraine, will surely help both specialists and non-specialists to better grasp the vitality of the culture of Europe’s largest country. The book, at the same time a model of solid, although accessible, literary scholarship and an indirect political statement promoting dialogue and openness, clearly deserves to be translated into English, Ukrainian and Russian. Monash University Alessandro Achilli Knapp, Liza. Anna Karenina and Others: Tolstoy’s Labyrinth of Plots. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2016. x + 326 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $79.95. All roads lead to (and from) Tolstoi in this beautiful book, which reads nineteenth-century novels of adultery as works that explore the complexities of loving one’s neighbour. In Anna Karenina, as Liza Knapp convincingly demonstrates, Tolstoi ‘novelized’ (p. 4) the spiritual questions that would afflict him thereafter. Taking her cue from Tolstoi’s own oft-quoted statement about ‘an endless labyrinth of linkages’ (p. 19) that comprised his art, Knapp investigates these linkages, first within the novel itself and then between Anna Karenina and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, English evangelical Protestantism, Pascal’s Pensées and, finally, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. The linkages seem endless indeed, especially in the first chapter, where Knapp shows how ‘segments of the novel that appear unrelated […] complement one another in Tolstoi’s labyrinth through the subtle interaction of mundane details from related spheres’ (p. 23). Thus, Petritskii’s spilt coffee is linked to the spoilt broth eaten by Oblonskii’s children as both episodes allude to the chaos these adulterers’ behaviour provokes, while Levin’s care for his cow is contrasted to Vronskii’s mistreatment of his horse, each signalling those men’s treatment of their human paramours. In addition to the many intratextual linkages, Gogol´’s Dead Souls and Tiutchev’s poem ‘Day and Night’ appear as intertextual influences on certain parts of the novel. ChapterstwoandthreecompareAnnaKareninatoherAmericanandEnglish ‘cousins’ in what I would call a contiguous reading of these novels. While neither The Scarlet Letter nor Middlemarch bore a direct influence on Tolstoi’s SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 544 novel (in fact, as Knapp points out, Tolstoi disliked the former), they belong to the ‘many sources figuring in the depths of Tolstoy’s creative consciousness’ (pp. 54–55) and the parallels are too many to be ignored. If they abound in the case of Hester Prynne and Anna Karenina — from the particulars of their fine attire to the shame they experience as adulteresses — they also exist in the case of Arthur Dimmesdale and Tolstoi’s autobiographical Konstantin Levin, both of whom struggle with a guilty conscience. Between Middlemarch and Anna Karenina, the parallels appear in the form of contrasts as Dorothea and Lydgate’s soulful interaction is juxtaposed with Levin and Anna’s, and Dorothea and Rosamond’s with Dolly and Anna’s last meeting. While Levin’s attitude towards Anna changes from judgement to pity, the answer to the question, ‘Could a bond have developed between Levin and Anna analogous to that between Dorothea and Lydgate?’ (p. 109) is a resounding no. In Tolstoi’s view friendships between men and women cannot exist without sexual tension, while compassion is a zero-sum game and must, therefore, be confined to one’s family. This is why Dorothea manages to, in Eliot’s own words, ‘save’ Rosamond, while Dolly cannot save Anna, whose visit, tellingly, interrupts Dolly and her sister’s breastfeeding consultation. This particular juxtaposition of female friendships displays the productiveness of Knapp’s contiguous approach as, for the present reviewer at least, Dolly’s failure to save Anna never appeared so stark or cruel until compared to Dorothea’s compassion for Rosamond. Chapter four describes the ministry of Lord Radstock in Russia and examines the drafts of the novel where Miss Flora Sulivan is replaced by Varenka as Kitty’s...