From my book in progress Fields of Love: Themes of Romance and Agricultural Reform in the Work of Leo Tolstoy (this volume is not yet under contract).
Leo Tolstoy started Anna Karenina, arguably his finest novel, with a hypothesis. “Happy families”, he conjectured, “are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This is the first general systems theory of love. Tolstoy investigated his thesis by means of a set of rather elaborate case studies: principally those of the troubled marriage of Stiva and Dolly Oblonsky, the crumbling marriage of Count Alexei and Anna Karenin (Oblonsky’s sister), the ill-fated romance of Anna Karenin and Count Alexei Vronsky, and starting the cycle over, the courtship and marriage of Konstantin Levin and Kitty Shcherbatskaya. My task here is to translateAnna Karenina from this series of informative but ultimately idiosyncratic case studies into a more precisely formulated theory of love, one that might be helpful to any one of us in navigating the vicissitudes of love.
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The novel starts with consternation in the Oblonsky household. Stiva’s dalliance with the French governess (Mademoiselle Roland of the roguish black eyes and that smile!) has been discovered and Dolly wants him out of the house. Assuming that his wife was aware and had turned a blind eye to his shenanigans, Oblonsky, despite his feelings of guilt, concludes that an injustice is being perpetrated on him. The upset in the home is precipitous, coming as it does somewhat out of the blue. A situation deemed tolerable before is tolerated no longer; a full-blown crisis has emerged. Those forces that had held the family together function no longer and Stiva is propelled out the door.
Stiva is everyman. Likable, thoroughly average: his newspaper, by way of illustration, is Liberal but not extreme. He is not however a self-deceptive fellow. The incompatibility of his corporeal needs and his obligation to family consigns him to a life of deception and lies that run contrary to his generally open and affable nature. His wife is no longer attractive to him and he is not yet prepared to retire to a life without frolics. He will fornicate again one suspects.
Dolly is everywoman, though she is less mitigatingly described than her husband, at least in the opening scenes. Her once lustrous hair is knotted into thin plaits. Her face is gaunt. On the morning when we join them Dolly receives her husband in her chambers from which he had been expelled. It is but a few days after the discovery of his indiscretion. He weeps, she spurns. “Your tears,” she exclaimed, “are water.” There is apparently no turning back. So seemingly small a catastrophe – after all, the tryst with the smiling Mlle Roland was by no means Stiva’s first infidelity – has sundered the mechanism that had previously bound their home together.
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Let us, for the purposes of theory-making, call the Oblonsky family a system. We will simply define a system as a set of elements that have a pattern of interrelations.
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