Anna Karenina: Being loved vs Feeling loved

There's nothing quite so tragic as those tragedies that seem both unnecessary and avoidable. It's perhaps this more than anything which makes Tolstoy's rendition of Anna Karenina's ruin a horror transfixing.

And what is the tragedy? It is her inability to feel loved in spite of being loved. It is the waking nightmare of a mind unable to live in a shared reality. If only Vronsky actually did not love her. But he does. If only her jealousy and vexation did not make quite so much sense. But they do. If only Vronsky and Anna could understand each other and merge their worldviews into one. But they remain segregated into parallel worlds, each telling a different story from the same set of "facts" in their relationship.

***

It has been almost a year since Anna, having survived childbirth, left Karenin for Vronsky. After an Italian honeymoon and some months spent at Vronsky's countryside estate, the couple is now in Moscow awaiting in vain for Karenin to grant her a divorce. Meanwhile, under the strain of Anna's jealousy, the relationship is perishing.

Her apprehension is mostly unfounded: Vronsky loves Anna, all in all. Vronsky is, arguments with Anna aside, more or less happy. His title, wealth and gender have allowed him to retain a position in society and while he has foregone a hitherto coveted military career, sufficient opportunities remain for him in politics and the management of his own estate.

Anna, on the other hand, is an outcast and a dependent. Prejudice has stripped her of social identity - as wife, mother, friend and fashionable lady - and she is denied or fails to acquire a new sense of purpose. Whether by lack of education or, as the moral of the novel would like to have it, spirituality, neither philanthropy nor motherhood manage to provide for her sufficient sense of self worth. Hence Vronsky's love becomes Anna's only source of validation. Soon,

She was jealous not of any particular woman but of the decrease of his love. Not having got an object for her jealousy, she was on the lookout for it.

Resentment and suspicion follow swiftly and we see her failing to fight them off, trapped in a mary-go-round of tenderness and exasperation.

For everything that was difficult in her position she blamed him (...) in his tenderness now she saw a shade of complacency, of self-confidence

What does he know of love for children, of my love for Seryozha, whom I’ve sacrificed for him?

“I am myself to blame. I’m irritable, I’m insanely jealous. I will make it up with him, and we’ll go away to the country; there I shall be more at peace.”“Unnatural!” She suddenly recalled [the word of a previous quarrel which she interprets as insult to her nursing of their child] And perceiving that, while trying to regain her peace of mind, she had gone round the same circle that she had been round so often before, and had come back to her former state of exasperation, (...) “Can it be impossible? Can it be beyond me to control myself?”

Henceforth we see all the hallmarks of a looming disaster - the constant brooding, the obsessive reminiscing, her manner of arguing "partly repeating phrases she had prepared beforehand", the fixation on details (“From whom is the telegram? she asked, not hearing him"), the negative bias. What annoys her most, fundamentally, is Vronsky's own happiness and peace of mind. When he greets her cheerfully one evening upon returning home, she notes

There was something mortifying in the way he had said “Come, that’s good,” as one says to a child when it leaves off being naughty, and still more mortifying was the contrast between her penitent and his self-confident tone; and for one instant she felt the lust of strife rising up in her again,

When Vronsky rearranges his errands so they might leave on the day demanded by Anna ("I shall go no later. Monday or never!" she had said) her first thought is: "so then it was possible to arrange to do as I wished". When Vronsky tries to spare her the pain of news from Karenin, she suspects the telegram is from another woman and to her mind "his embarrassment confirmed her suspicion". She interprets his desire to have children as proof that he no longer cares for her beauty. Soon her suspicions descends into outright paranoia.

"He hates me, that's clear", she thought, and in silence, without looking round, she walked with faltering steps out of the room. "He loves another woman, that's even clearer" 

She lifted her cup, with her little finger held apart, and put it to her lips. After drinking a few sips she glanced at him, and by his expression, she saw clearly that he was repelled by her hand, and her gesture, and the sound made by her lips.

Anna supplied, too, the words that he had unmistakably wished to say and could have said to her, and she grew more and more exasperated. All the most cruel words that a brutal man could say, he said to her in her imagination, and she could not forgive him for them, as though he had actually said them.

Their arguments are never resolved because the presumption of guilt is not falsifiable. Every new incident renews the old, down to Anna's arguing "recalling the words of a still earlier quarrel". As the crisis intensifies she loses the ability to empathise and to think in any categories other than her own ("Respect [what Vronsky values] was invented to cover the empty place where love [what Anna values] should be"). This escalated lack of empathy together with her paranoia collude to make Anna herself design situations which can only end badly, such as when the maid is instructed to tell Vronsky that Anna has a headache:

"If he comes in spite of what the maid says, it means that he loves me still. If not, it means that all is over, and then I will decide what I'm to do"

She dramatises and strips interpretation of nuance. It's all or nothing.

"I want love, and there is none. So then all is over.”

"Where love ends, hate begins" 

Finally, the paroxysm of pain and suffering leads her to crave revenge.

And death rose clearly and vividly before her mind as the sole means of bringing back love for her in his heart, of punishing him and of gaining the victory in that strife which the evil spirit in possession of her heart was waging with him. (...) she began musing with enjoyment on how he would suffer, and repent and love her memory when it would be too late.

In her final, semi-delirious journey from the house to Dolly's, to the train station, to her death, Anna's perception of the world grows steadily darker: the passers-by are loathsome, the train seats "dirty", the conductor "impudent", even children appear "hideous and affected". The world is universally abhorrent and pointless.

"Why these churches and this singing and this humbug? Simply to conceal that we all hate each other."

Finally, the delusion engulfs her: that Vronsky hates her, that she hates him, that she is an outcast, that her friends despise and hate her and would rejoice over her misery -these are now no longer "mere supposition". Rather, she "sees" it all "distinctly in the piercing light, which revealed to her now the meaning of life and human relations".

And all the while Vronsky loves her, Dolly loves her, her children love her.

***

This just goes to show that when we say we want love what we really mean is that we want to feel loved. And that, it appears, has more to do with our own sense of self-worth than with any other people.

Sergey Ivanovitch and Konstantin Levin or Why Everyone Always Lies

Sergey Ivanovitch used to say that he knew and liked the peasantry, and he often talked to the peasants, which he knew how to do without affectation or condescension, and from every such conversation he would deduce general conclusions in favour of the peasantry and in confirmation of his knowing them. Konstantin Levin did not like such an attitude to the peasants. To Konstantin the peasant was simply the chief partner in their common labour, and in spite of all the respect and the love, almost like that of kinship, he had for the peasant - sucked in probably, as he said himself, with the milk of his peasant nurse - still as a fellow-worker with him, while sometimes enthusiastic over the vigour, gentleness, and justice of these men, he was very often, when their common labours called for other qualities, exasperated with the peasant for his carelessness, lack of method, drunkenness, and lying. If he had been asked whether he liked or didn't like the peasant, Konstantin Levin would have been absolutely at a loss what to reply. He liked and did not like the peasants, just as he liked and did not like men in general. Of course, being a good-hearted man, he liked men rather than he disliked them, and so too with the peasants. But like or dislike "the people" as something apart he could not, not only because he lived with "the people", and all his interests were bound up with theirs, but also because he regarded himself as a part of "the people", did not see any special qualities or failings distinguishing himself and "the people", and could not contrast himself with them. Moreover, although he had lived so long in the closest relations with the peasants, as farmer and arbitrator, and what was more, as adviser (the peasants trusted him, and for thirty miles round they would come to ask his advice), he had no definite views of "the people", and would have been as much at a loss to answer the question whether he knew "the people" as the question whether he liked them. For him to say he knew the peasantry would have been the same as to say he knew men. He was continually watching and getting to know people of all sorts, and among them peasants, whom he regarded as good and interesting people, and he was continually observing new points in them, altering his former views of them and forming new ones. With Sergey Ivanovitch it was quite the contrary. Just as he liked and praised a country life in comparison with the life he did not like [Moscow], so too he liked the peasantry in contradistinction to the class of men he did not like, and so too he knew the peasantry as something distinct from and opposed to men generally. In his methodical brain there were distinctly formulated certain aspects of peasant life, deduced partly from that life itself, but chiefly from contrast with other modes of life. He never changed his opinion of the peasantry and his sympathetic attitude towards them.

In the discussions that arose between the brothers on their views of the peasantry, Sergey Ivanovitch always got the better of his brother, precisely because Sergey Ivanovitch had definite ideas about the peasant - his character, his qualities, and his tastes. Konstantin Levin had no definite and unalterable idea on the subject, and so in their arguments Konstantin was readily convicted of contradicting himself.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karennina

Sometimes you talk to people and ten thoughts at once scramble for airtime. Halfway through every sentence you think of five more and you barely scrape enough patience to see your initial reply through. Verbal communication is so frustratingly inefficient. It is slow, it requires this absurd real-time encoding and decoding of messages at either end ("sulky" or "sullen", "testy" or "tetchy"?!), it is linear, contextual and only as good as the weakest link. But above all, unlike writing, it is time-bound.

If all communication is a representation of reality (the act of projecting meaning into some external vehicle) then verbal communication is the representation of reality with limited bandwidth. In other situations, more words might increase accuracy (like more pixels in a photograph), but in conversation this extra accuracy has quite the opposite effect: it is like trying to stream high-definition films over a patchy Wi-Fi.

Conversation, then, is a compromise between truthfulness and conveyance, between staying faithful to one's own meaning and getting some of that meaning across. Here is where Konstantin Levin and Sergey Ivanovich come in.

Sergey Ivanovich always gets the better of his brother in debates, not because he is necessarily right but because he is a better communicator. That "[Levin] liked and did not like the peasants, just as he liked and did not like men in general" is at once perfectly accurate and completely void of argumentative vigour. It is a complex idea and most people don't have time for complex ideas, especially if they require effort to understand.

Sergey's ideas win because they propose a representation of reality that is pithy, compelling and readily understandable, largely by doing away with nuance and variation, and the inconvenient messiness of real life. Levin might be right in reality but he is always wrong in conversation: the picture he holds of "the people" is simply too complex for jaunty delivery and, as a listener, his brother is incapable, or unwilling, to admit meaning that is poorly conveyed. An intellectual and public figure, for Sergey debating is a sport: winning is as much about content as about good form.

Also interesting is the observation that Sergey "never changed his opinion of the peasantry and his sympathetic attitude towards them" while Levin "was continually watching and getting to know people of all sorts, and among them peasants, whom he regarded as good and interesting people, (...) continually observing new points in them, altering his former views of them and forming new ones". It is as if holding a system of beliefs that is a steady structure of coherent, valid opinions, coexisting in a logical edifice like a well-constructed building, you must necessarily be conservative about changing individual views on a whim, lest you unwittingly bring the whole thing tumbling down. Levin's beliefs are more like tapioca pearls in a swirling drink of bubble tea: they can float and evolve freely, without the risk of invalidating, by their dynamism, every other aspect of Levin's life.

This is not to say that Sergey Ivanovitch is wrong or deceiving himself. In fact his opinions may be quite valid and possibly more useful than Levin's, who anyway refuses to get involved in politics altogether. The point is only to notice that perceiving reality in all its ever-changing complexity and communicating, making 'sense' of it are fundamentally opposing forces. When you take a picture, draw a sketch, record a sentence, form and voice a belief, you may capture a small drop of truth, but the very minute when it is captured, it is falsified: out of context, all representation of reality is a slight falsification of it. Yet representation of reality is what all communication is.

The only way we can talk about the real world is through some degree of falsification. Levin's falsification is minimal, so his communication poor.

There is, however, a possible escape from this conundrum: through empathy. Sergey fails to imagine what is not being said, he won't allow valid meaning if presented in bad form. He holds Levin up to his previous statements and exposes his contradictions. His style of communication is very much of the adversarial kind, of lawyers and politicians. He refuses to acknowledge meaning beyond what is submitted to the debate through explicit statements. This is not in itself a bad style: it is in fact quite useful when dealing exclusively in "visible" currency (like spoken words) helps to keep people accountable. But important things may be left out of it.

Empathy (as well as compassion, kindness, friendship, love) can bridge the rift between what is being said and what is being meant. Empathy allows people the freedom to be wrong, to change their minds, to go back and refine their statements, to say things which are contradicting or silly or incomplete, to misunderstand and be misunderstood, to ask and to stand corrected - and still, eventually, get themselves across.

Empathy allows people to communicate without lying.

Sergey and Levin never speak with genuine empathy and despite their frequent conversations, in the end, they never really understand one another. Eloquence and pithiness, precision and panache, alliterations, lilting and good form may all make great speakers, but great consensus-builders cannot succeed without a good measure of emotion. That is: empathy, patience, goodwill, compassion.