CHAPTER V
"ANNA KARÉNINA"
Anna Karénina is, perhaps, considered as a whole, a more artistic work than War and Peace; the very fact that its scope is less gigantic permits Tolstoy to make it clearer and more concentrated; everything is directed towards the one end—the tragic death of Anna—and though the novel has an under-plot, that is very skilfully blent with the main plot, and is everywhere kept subordinate.
Anna Karénina is much less distinctively Russian and national than War and Peace; it shows very plainly the influence of the French novel, and its plot is of the type that French novelists are fond of selecting, though the moral intensity with which Tolstoy invests it is unusual with them.
Notwithstanding the power and beauty of its telling, it seems, however, somewhat restricted when compared with the vast spaces and terrific issues of War and Peace, where individual tragedies, however great, are forgotten in the crisis of a nation.
Anna Karénina is a very great novel, but no one would dream of saying that it suggested Homer. It is a domestic tragedy only, but, like Shakespeare in Othello, Tolstoy has known how to make his domestic tragedy a revelation of the heights and depths, of the passionate potentialities of the human soul.
Tolstoy openly refrains from judging his heroine, and it is a mistake to consider Anna Karénina as being essentially a protest against the breaking of the marriage bond. Tolstoy does believe in the indissolubility of marriage, but the book is just as much a protest against the dangers of marriage without love or the cruel injustice of society.
The truth is that it is a picture of life, and expresses, as Tolstoy acutely says an artistic work always should, a moral relation to life rather than a moral judgment.