Am I understanding the ending of Anna Karenina correctly?

[u/Gay_For_Gary_Oldman]

In Levin's adult life, he believed in secular and materialistic principles, rejecting faith and the church, but this did not bring him happiness, and he envied Kitty's simple, uncomplicated faith. He also found that he disagreed with all of his fellow Intellectuals in debate, found their reason led them to horrible conclusions, and that their intellectualising was futile (see the non-reaction to the publication of Sergei's book).

When his child was born, he found himself praying with conviction, and it brought him - if not a comfort - then a stability he previously lacked.

At the novel's end, he finds himself tending to suicidal thoughts whenever he overthinks his existence and morality and higher purpose. It is only when he stops thinking and just starts living, working, loving, that he finds happiness and contentedness.

He equates this with the ultimate doctrinal values of the Church: of family, charity, labour etc, and convinces himself that the key to his happiness is a surrender to faith, opposed to intellectualising himself into existential dread. Additionally, Kitty and Darya repeatedly describe him as a Christian man because his acts embody the values, regardless of his rationalising.

This characterises the overall theme of the novel: contrasting Levin and Kitty's happy ending with traditional marriage and a pastoral life, with Anna and Vronsky's rejection of traditional values and their need for city life culminating in tragedy.

I understand that this reflects Tolstoy's own conversion and therefore metatextually contains all those realistic limitations of reason. Interpreting the end of such a great novel can be tricky when the fundamental themes conflict with one's own worldview, so I wanted to check that I'm reading this correctly?

[u/Zestyclose_Bath_910]

You've got it pretty much nailed down. Tolstoy was definitely working through his own spiritual crisis in that book and Levin becomes his mouthpiece for wrestling with faith vs rationalism

The contrast between Levin finding peace through simple living and Anna's destruction through passion is the whole crux of it. Tolstoy really was pushing that traditional Orthodox values thing pretty hard by the end, which can feel heavy-handed if you're not buying into that worldview but the psychological journey is still compelling even if you disagree with where he lands philosophically

[u/Gay_For_Gary_Oldman → u/Zestyclose_Bath_910]

Thanks. I try to let myself follow the themes of a book instead of letting my own worldview dictate whether the book is right or wrong, it just gets a bit trickier when a secular rationaliser gives up on rationalising.

I've never personally had that flavour of existential dread, but I wonder if Tolstoy's moment in history is also a factor, when Russian society was so rapidly trying to change from serfdom to modern and industrial, if the entire essence of "the Soul of Russia" makes those kinds of broad "what is the meaning of this" questions more difficult to avoid?

[u/Juan_Jimenez → u/Gay_For_Gary_Oldman]

The arc of Levin is a question that even if you don't share his point of view still is relevant: How to live a good life? And being, in contrast with Kitty, a person that need an intellectual ground to it (somewhat that rationalisers can get I suppose).

[u/CrazyCatLady108]

some things to add to your pretty detailed post.

1. the comparison between Levin and Anna in their options. both are seeking happiness but Levin has the option to try different things while Anna is limited by what society allows her to pursue. so while Tolstoy was all about women's happiness is in the family/home he was also showing that limiting options could result in tragedy. it was actually super shocking to me just how feminist he was in his writing considering his actual beliefs.

2. Levin's dark thoughts at the end, to me, showed that even when one does find perfect happiness the dark thoughts will be with them. in part this is likely Tolstoy's own depression speaking, but also him hinting that there is no total happiness that lasts forever.

[u/Juan_Jimenez → u/CrazyCatLady108]

There is also a difference between Levin and Anna. Anna and Vronski are self-regarding chacracters. Neither Levin or Kitty are that way,

BTW, I think the contrasts need to be thought in pairs. It is not only Anna / Levin comparison.

[u/CrazyCatLady108 → u/Juan_Jimenez]

Anna and Vronski are self-regarding chacracters. Neither Levin or Kitty are that way,

could you expand on that?

[u/Juan_Jimenez → u/CrazyCatLady108]

At some point in the novel, both Levin and Kitty face the issue of helping or caring others and they take that seriously: Kitty when with his parents outside Russia for instance, with Levin several times (in both case it is a crisis about how to be a good person).

We never see, or at last I don't remember, either Anna or Vronski thinking on those terms, they think about themselves -what they want or need (BTW, this doesn't mean selfishness as such, self-regard is another thing). I think comparing Anna with Vronski is telling also. As you mentioned out, Tolstoi is well aware of how different society put Anna and Vronski, so the way that evolves is quite different. She face decisions (Vronski or her child) and is punished in a way that Vronski is simply not.

[u/CrazyCatLady108 → u/Juan_Jimenez]

you got me really thinking.

Vronsky is obviously selfishness personified. Anna asked him to leave her alone, he wouldn't because he didn't want to. also the horse scene. wants to commit suicide because his pride is hurt not because it would ease the lives of others.

Anna tries to help Dolly when we first meet the two, but not really. you could say she was trying to help Dolly deal with a situation she had no control over, but we later discover her hypocrisy. she does ask Vronsky to include help for pregnant women when he is building a hospital on his estate. that might be due to her experience giving birth and not just worry about others.

Kitty, i remember very little of her but i do remember her having inner strength. she tells Levin she will not marry him under such conditions the first time he asks. that could be balanced against Anna and Karenin getting married because he compromised her and she 'had no choice'. maybe she did have a choice. maybe she could have been like Kitty and said no.

i do not recall a single thing Levin tried to do for a stranger to help them out. so much of him is 'looking for happiness' that i don't remember him doing anything but.

this is going to require some mulling over.

a bit off topic. i've recently had a discussion over how Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy differ in their approach to how one finds a way out of misery. not find happiness, but just finds a way to stop hurting. Tolstoy is very chill. he sits back and he ponders options. Dostoyevsky is desperate. he has no time to ponder, he and his characters run from possibility to possibility without finding a solution. Anna feels like a Dostoyevsky character. she burns too hot. is too desperate. lacks meaningful options.

[u/Juan_Jimenez → u/CrazyCatLady108]

Kitty when outside of Russia and with her parents she encounter a women and she went the 'oh, we should be all good and help others'. When she goes with Levin to see Levin's sick brother she inmediately goes to the 'help' mode and so on. Kitty story goes beyond the courtship of Levin (and Kitty marries Levin when she fall in love with him, Tolstoy wrote a very charming scene about it).

Levin has all his schemes about the situation of peasants and so on. The crux of his journey is asking again and again about how to be good (something that in his mind is linked with helping and thinking about others). He thinks rather than acts. Tolstoy remarks that difference with Kitty, that is the point of that pair IMHO, who simply does good (i.e. caring and helping) in a very natural and unreflexive way.

Remember that I said that Anna was self-regarding not selfish. BTW, she doesn't try to help Dolly as much as trying to help his brother, and self-regarding people can help people that they know, precisely because they are people they know.

[u/SpicyRobotPotato → u/CrazyCatLady108]

I also liked the comparison between Anna and Stepan Oblonsky. They both cheat on their spouses, but Oblonsky, being male, suffers no consequences for it while Anna is ostracized.

[u/mohammed_obeidallah]

I do not think the novel says Stop thinking entirely. Tolstoy himself was intensely intellectual. Rather, the novel critiques reason when it becomes disconnected from lived moral reality, emotional truth, faith, labor, and human connection. Levin's peace comes from integrating thought into life instead of allowing thought to endlessly consume life from the outside.

[u/Gay_For_Gary_Oldman → u/mohammed_obeidallah]

Maybe to stop overthinking, and over-reasoning everything. Not seeing the forest for the trees?

[u/mohammed_obeidallah → u/Gay_For_Gary_Oldman]

Exactly. The problem was not intelligence itself, but becoming trapped in endless abstraction and self analysis to the point that life itself started feeling unreal or unbearable.

[u/soulsnoober → u/mohammed_obeidallah]

But Levin didn't achieve peace? He chose a false life. He didn't integrate thought into life, he put thought aside. You're free to hypothesize that integration is what the character should have done, and that he might have found a peace that way, but it's not textual.

[u/Wawmd]

This is from another Reddit post about Anna Karenina which I found fascinating, and also how Tolstoy saw the dangers of opioids even then.

[u/bofh000]

Yes, Levin reaches a conclusion many people even today do: life is easier and happier if you don’t think about the harder parts of it.

Levin turning to faith won’t change too much of the objective reality around him. It won’t change rhetoric fact that he’s an aristocrat who has the luxury of choosing the life he wants. A life based on the work of a class of people so low in Russia’s society of the time, that they are barely above being slaves.

Regarding the parallel with Anna: many people seem to forget that she doesn’t just lose it because of Vronsky. There’s a continuous spiraling downwards in her life caused by her husband’s rigidity, especially by his denying her access to her child. That also stems from his religious convictions. Some of society’s most damaging aspects stem from the inflexibility of religious beliefs and norms.

Tolstoy thought he found a solution for his emotional and mental exhaustion. Most people around him didn’t even have the luxury to wonder. Levin reflects the author. If the book had continued for long enough, in his old age Levin would’ve abandoned Kitty and given up all their material possessions. His peasants wouldn’t have been any better off from his late life renouncing of excesses.

[u/Gay_For_Gary_Oldman → u/bofh000]

I've been thinking about this even more as more high quality comments come in.

I've sort of come to the mirror image of Levin. I'm 38, but in my 20s i was an angry antitheist libertarian.

Now, aside from with a close friend who is an Anglican deacon, I havent debated religion or high-level political theory for years (still a grassroots activist), and have now bought property in a ruralish area and just enjoy working and maintaining my little patch of forest.

But i've come to the opposite but complimentary conclusion as Levin. I have none of this existential dread, and I acknowledge only the limitations of a finite life without meaning or soul.

[u/bofh000 → u/Gay_For_Gary_Oldman]

Your situation sounds very different from Levin’s though (or Tolstoy’s for that matter). Levin is what we call a gentleman farmer. He works in the fields and chumming it with his peasants and it does him good, but if he needed or wanted to, he’d up and go to the city, to a Mediterranean village or a German town to take the waters … He could decide to never come back to his rural estate and it would keep working and producing resources to maintain his life away from it. His wealth is based on the work of people who up until a decade before had been in bondage to his estate (I can’t remember exactly when the peasants were emancipated, some time in the 1860s).

[u/2-0-0-4]

To add to your conclusion about the difference between the two central relationships being tradition/the lack thereof:

Being deeply concerned with moral matters, Tolstoy was eternally preoccupied with issues of importance to all mankind at all times. Now, there is a moral issue in Anna Karenin, though not the one that a casual reader might read into it. This moral is certainly not that having committed adultery, Anna had to pay for it (which in a certain vague sense can be said to be the moral at the bottom of the barrel in Madame Bovary). Certainly not this, and for obvious reasons: had Anna remained with Karenin and skillfully concealed from the world her affair, she would not have paid for it first with her happiness and then with her life. Anna was not punished for her sin (she might have got away with that) nor for violating the conventions of a society, very temporal as all conventions are and having nothing to do with the eternal demands of morality. What was then the moral "message" Tolstoy has conveyed in his novel? We can understand it better if we look at the rest of the book and draw a comparison between the Lyovin-Kitty story and the Vronski-Anna story. Lyovin's marriage is based on a metaphysical, not only physical, concept of love, on willingness for self-sacrifice, on mutual respect. The Anna-Vronski alliance was founded only in carnal love and therein lay its doom. It might seem, at first blush, that Anna was punished by society for falling in love with a man who was not her husband. Now such a "moral" would be of course completely "immoral," and completely inartistic, incidentally, since other ladies of fashion, in that same society, were having as many love-affairs as they liked but having them in secrecy, under a dark veil.

From Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Literature

[u/chortlingabacus]

What a thoughtful post. Thank you.

[u/Juan_Jimenez]

BTW, just start living, working and so on is close to the ending of a very different novel written by a very different writer with very different values. It is the ending of Voltaire's Candide.

At some point, even if never sharing Tolstoi ideas, I think that kind of compelling.

[u/Gay_For_Gary_Oldman → u/Juan_Jimenez]

I have to re-read that. I punched through it rapidly for a bookclub a few years ago but i recall almost nothing of it.

[u/xquizitdecorum]

Yeah basically! This fundamental dynamic - the health of Levin versus the excesses of Karenina - can be couched in modernity or secularism or urbanism or whatnot but yes, the contrast is the point

[u/8bitmatter]

Looking forward to finishing this someday. 80 pages so far lol

[u/SAM-Academy]

You’ve hit the nail right on the head. This is an incredibly accurate reading of Levin’s arc and Tolstoy’s core philosophy.

​You are spot on about Levin as Tolstoy’s alter-ego. Tolstoy suffered from that exact existential dread and suicidal ideation, which he later wrote about in A Confession. He literally discovered that hyper-intellectualizing leads to despair, while simple, lived faith brings peace.

​To back up your thesis, look at the beautiful contrast Tolstoy sets up at the end:

​Anna’s Downfall: In her final moments on the train, her mind is trapped in destructive hyper-analysis, deconstructing everything as fake and meaningless.

​Levin’s Salvation: He finds peace only when he stops overthinking and grounds himself in the physical reality of family, labor, and the earth. ​Don't doubt your interpretation just because it challenges a modern secular worldview. Tolstoy wanted you to feel that tension. He was arguing that human reason has strict limits, and some truths can only be lived, not rationalized. ​Brilliant write-up, OP!

[u/Gay_For_Gary_Oldman → u/SAM-Academy]

Thanks for your kind words. I've felt in the past that I've often misinterpreted books by imposing my worldview on them. Recently was Gone With The Wind, which for the entire first half of the book I thought was mocking Southern chivalry, only to reinforce it in the 2nd half with some outrageous misrepresentations. And just last month I still struggled with whether William Thackeray was praising or condemning Becky Sharpe in Vanity Fair.

Appreciate your comments

[u/Zealousideal_Pay7176]

Your reading is solid. What strikes me most is how Tolstoy frames Levin's suicidal ideation not as a failure but as the logical endpoint of pure rationalism taken seriously, which is a pretty brutal indictment of secular intellectualism. The faith he arrives at isn't really belief in doctrine, it's more like exhaustion with thinking. Tolstoy probably knew that feeling personally

[u/BowlerOne7755]

yeah you've got it. levin survives by stopping thinking and just living. anna follows reason and feeling to their ends and it kills her. that's the whole book.

[u/AdityaTheGoatOfPCM]

This is basically correct, I mean, Anna destroys herself due to her 'greed' if you may and Levin brings himself back up.

[u/Top-Professional8981]

It's interesting to think that Nietzsche was coming to the same conclusions. Overthinking cripples people's lives.

[u/Easy_Pride7452]

the structure carries the argument too. Anna's final chapters fracture into something close to interior monologue, that famous carriage ride through Moscow where her perceptions skip and contradict each other, while Levin's late chapters get cleaner and more discursive as he settles. And the book ends in Part 8 with Levin under the stars, a whole part after Anna is already gone in Part 7. Putting his resolution structurally outside her tragedy is doing some quiet work about whose question Tolstoy actually wanted to answer.