Anna's Search for Love -- Gorgeous Piece for Piano and Violin by Dillon and Joelle Brown
- Alyssa Holbrook
- Sep 22, 2015
- 5 min read
Dillon and Joelle composed this piece for Dillon's Tolstoy class. I love the symbolism of this piece as it follows Anna through her search for love.
One of my favorite authors on the subject of prosaics (the small everyday acts that shape our character) Gary Saul Morson helps us see clearly Tolstoy's message of my favorite novel, Anna Karenina.
“Often quoted but rarely understood, the first sentence of Anna Karenina – ‘All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ – offers a paradoxical insight into what is truly important in human lives. What exactly does this sentence mean?
“In War and Peace and in a variant of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy quotes a French proverb: ‘Happy people have no history.’ Where there are dramatic events, where there is material for an interesting story, there is unhappiness. . . . Happy families resemble one another because there is no story to tell about them. But unhappy families all have stories, and each story is different. . . .
“We tend to think that true life is lived at times of high drama. When Anna Karenina reads a novel on the train, she wants to live the incidents described . . . . [she wants to experience 'romantic love,' which Tolstoy exposes as a myth].
“The myth embodied in great romances tells us that love envelops our whole being. Romantic love presses upon us with irresistible intensity. It transcends all ordinary prosaic conditions and lifts lovers to a realm of resplendent meaning. All-consuming, it allows no room for anything else. Lovers love not so much each other as love itself.
“What is more, we do not choose such love, it befalls us. We “fall in love,” we do not jump in love. Such love is a ‘passion,’ not an action… For this reason, romantic love feels like fate, and an ideology of amoral fatalism often accompanies it. The lovers live in a realm beyond good and evil. After all, good and evil depend on choice, and where fate governs, choice is out of the question. No matter how much pain the lovers cause, one cannot condemn them. Adultery becomes as noble as revolution and only narrow moralists worry about the pain [felt by] the betrayed spouse or abandoned children.
“That is the story Anna imagines she is living… But Anna’s story is not Tolstoy’s. He places his romantic heroine not in a romance, where her values would be validated, but in the world of prosaic reality, where actions have consequences and the pain we inflict matters…
“Tolstoy is always showing us: we do not see the world, we overlook it. He wants to reeducate us to perceive the world differently, so that we are capable of understanding what passes before our eyes hidden in plain view.
"Better than anyone else who ever lived, Tolstoy traces the infinitesimally small changes of consciousness. That, perhaps, is the key to the impression of so many readers that his works feel not like art but like life, that if the world could write directly, it would write like Tolstoy.
“Anna will repeatedly say how horrible her marriage was, but we are given ample evidence to the contrary. In part II, Karenin tries to talk with Anna about her ostentatious flirtation with Vronsky, but she fends off all attempts at conversation with a feigned “cheerful bewilderment” about what he could possibly mean. Anna ‘was herself surprised, listening to herself, at her ability to lie. . . . She felt as if she were wearing an impenetrable armour of falsehood.’ The next paragraph begins:
Her look was so simple, so cheerful, that anyone who did not know her as her husband did would never have noticed anything unnatural in the sounds or the sense of her words. But to him, knowing her, knowing that when he went to bed five minutes later than usual she noticed and asked the reason, to him, knowing that she immediately informed him of any joy, happiness, or grief, to him to see now that she did not want to remark on his state, that she did not want to say a word about herself, meant a great deal. (Part II, chapter 9).
“When he went to bed five minutes later than usual, she noticed and asked the reason; she shared any joy, or happiness, or grief with him: surely this was a marriage as good as or better than most!...
“[Unlike Stiva, who also has an affair] Anna…has a conscience. She feels terrible guilt for her affair and the pain it causes her husband. Her response to this guilt constitutes one of the book’s most remarkable psychological studies.
“To escape from conscience, Anna practices an elaborate process of self-deception. So insightful is Tolstoy’s description of this process that this novel could well be the touchstone for any study of lying to oneself. How is it possible both to know something is true and yet to convince oneself that it is false? Wouldn’t the falsehood be palpable and thus unbelievable? We are so familiar with self-deception, and we all practice it so often that we often forget how perplexing a phenomenon it is. Self-deception takes time. One cannot just command oneself to believe something one knows is untrue. Rather, one accomplishes the process in tiny steps. At any given moment, one can see another person in a small range of ways, depending on whether one focuses on his attractive or unattractive qualities and on whether one chooses to see him generously or ungenerously. Within that range, one can choose how to direct one’s attention. That choice matters. By constantly focusing on the person’s worst qualities, one can gradually shift the range so that what was once at the extreme of hostility comes to lie in the middle. If one repeats the process long enough and often enough, one can come to see the person more and more unfavorably without any obvious sense of lying. To be sure, at any point one could make an effort to check one’s current impressions against earlier more favorable views. But that is an effort the self-deceiver refrains from making.
“Because Anna feels guilty for hurting her husband, she convinces herself that he cannot feel. She knows better, and is well aware that although he cannot express his feelings, he nevertheless experiences them. He suffers horribly from jealousy. But she makes sure not to see his suffering.
“Tolstoy tells us that Anna ‘schooled herself to despise and reproach him’ (part III, chapter 23). She maintains of him that ‘this is not a human being, this is a machine’ (part II, chapter 23).
“Anna’s pretense breaks down when she thinks she is dying in childbirth..." (The Moral Urgency of Anna Karenina, Gary Saul Morson).
Anna recognizes that she has deceived herself. Karenin (her husband) freely forgives her, offering her a divorce so she can be with Vronsky. Anna resents his generosity and instead runs off with Vronsky. Though she is with the man of her "romantic, ideal love" she does not find happiness here. Anna is despised by society because she is pregnant out of wedlock, and she begins to resent Vronsky’s ability to interact with society. In a frenzy of hasty words and apologies, she resolves to meet Vronsky at the train station and arrives at the station in a dazed stupor and full of despair. In this utterly bleak state, Anna throws herself under a train and dies. This tragic fate helps us to see not the Hollywood romantic view of affairs – love without consequence, but to see clearly the true consequences of a life of deception, fatalism, and infidelity.
