Tolstoy’s novel teaches that sexual freedom actually enslaves women.

By Carmel RICHARDSON

Under our senseless conditions, the life of a good woman is a perpetual struggle against self; it is only fair that woman should bear her share of the ills she has brought upon man. — Rousseau, Emile

As we ride feminism’s third wave to new lows of late-stage capitalism, we’re often at a loss for what cures, if any, remain. What word of sanity can bring us back from the breach of normalizing pedophilia, for example, when the slope everyone swore wasn’t slippery has indeed led to the prophesied transgender craze and the celebration of every manner of sexual perversion?

While there may be other ways to #slowthespread of post-modern sexual mores, I would submit that a rather effective one is by picking up an old friend of 145 years: Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The story of an adulterous 19th-century Russian noblewoman is more than just a juicy plot to sink your teeth into and escape our malaise (though it can be good for that, too). Tolstoy’s novel presents a potent lesson in the enslaving nature of sexual freedom that is uncannily applicable today.

(Spoilers ahead.)

For its multitude of colorful characters, each with at least one patronymic you’ll likely mispronounce, the story of Anna Karenina is relatively simple. Woman (Anna) cheats on husband with young military officer (Count Vronsky), and suffers consequences (social stigma, separation from her son, despair). But of course, in a novel of nearly 1,000 pages—depending on your translation—there’s a whole lot more to the story than that. The reader watches as Anna, a brilliant socialite with a respected husband and a smart young son, falls from grace: she nearly dies in childbirth of her illegitimate daughter; is cast out of all polite society; is isolated from her son, family, and friends; drives herself mad imagining her paramour is in love with other women; and, ultimately, commits suicide. Through all this, Anna refuses to repent her decision to be unfaithful. If there’s one idea Tolstoy wants you to come away with, it’s that affairs have consequences.

Yet it’s more than that. Anna leaves her husband for Vronsky in search of sexual freedom, autonomy, as Tolstoy later reveals through the adulteress’ own lips, when she projects her own guilt onto her lover: “Yes, there was in him the triumph of successful vanity. Of course there was love too; but the greater part was pride in his success.” Caught in all the trademark traps of jealousy, she sees her own faults in everyone but herself.

What Anna seeks in her extra-marital affair is power—confidence that she can still conquer men, though her husband Karenin has ceased to bend to her wiles. Her lust for control is far greater than her lust for Vronsky himself. This is no sin of Tolstoy’s invention, of course, but the curse of Genesis 3, and though Anna, for a little while, seems to circumvent it, her increasingly hysterical attempts to control Vronsky through emotional abuse only work to drive him away, as he seeks to rule over her. Yet her proto-feminist quest for equality has nothing to do with equal treatment, and everything to do with power—power over men.

(No, Tolstoy didn’t hate women. On the contrary, his treatment of the fairer sex is more than fair.)

Perhaps you are thinking a story of a woman cheating on her husband is far too tame to speak to our current culture. After all, compared to the shows Netflix et al. write in 2021, this whole affair is so heteronormative. Except, in its ends, adultery is not so different from other perversions. Tolstoy knew this, though he may not have foreseen the 21st century, because human nature over time and place is not that different after all. It is the ego which seeks gratification, which demands—craves, even—the acceptance of the society that condemns it. Yet as his title character can attest, no amount of acceptance is enough to secure the happiness of the one who lives in sin. The wheels churn incessantly.

Though she only has one affair of the body, Tolstoy shows Anna dabbling in countless little affairs of the heart as she attempts to will her wishes into reality. Though, not without irony, Anna is haunted by the thought that Vronsky is unfaithful to her, she thrills in flirting with every man she can get her hands on—even the honest farmer, Levin, whose wife Kitty once received Vronsky’s attentions. Anna delights in flexing her good looks and charisma on every unwitting male, making a game of how easily she can make them fall in love with her.

Paired with the thrill of the forbidden—the fomes peccati—this cocktail of emotion and ego leads the two lovers to do what was unthinkable in Russian society at the time: live out their infidelity publicly, rather than behind closed doors. This is Anna’s greatest attempt at control. Believing too much in her ability to bend people to herself, she hopes to change society rather than admit her wrongdoing. So, too, with our sexual activists, who demand we accept their version of reality, despite all of biology, and morality, and human nature, which say otherwise.

Eventually, Anna’s lust for control takes control of her, in her suicide. She intends the act as revenge on Vronsky, for not loving her as she thinks he must—by which she means he must never correct her faults, never go against her will (in the final case, Anna rages against him for proposing they leave Moscow on a Tuesday rather than a Monday), and never—ever—keeping anything from her. But her surrender to self-destruction is telling. It is Anna, not Vronsky, who ultimately breaks under the pressure of the affair. She fails to control both men and herself, and at the last has less freedom than she ever did when living with her husband, Karenin. Her suicide, trapped under a moving train, is a grotesque but unmistakable symbol of her ultimate slavish condition.

As Rousseau writes in his Emile, the damage is worse for the unfaithful wife than the unfaithful husband, because she robs both her husband and her children of her good faith. Rousseau writes:

No doubt every breach of faith is wrong, and every faithless husband, who robs his wife of the sole reward of the stern duties of her sex, is cruel and unjust; but the faithless wife is worse, she destroys the family and breaks the bonds of nature; when she gives her husband children who are not his own, she is false both to him and to them, her crime is not infidelity but treason. … Thus it is not enough that a wife should be faithful; her husband, along with his friends and neighbors, must believe in her fidelity; she must be modest, devoted, retiring; she should have the witness not only of a good conscience, but of a good reputation.

The Anna Karenina affair is an ego-trip for both parties, but it is undoubtedly worse for Anna. Vronsky can still go into society, after all, while Anna is condemned in all polite circles. While Anna goes mad with jealousy, Vronsky goes to clubs, the theatre, and elections. While retaining her reputation may have preserved Anna, Tolstoy seems to think that a “coming out” is inevitable, since Anna at first was content to consort with Vronsky while living with Karenin. The truth will always come to light, and often is pushed into the light by the very ones who should most want to hide it.

For the feminist of today, Tolstoy’s message is probably exactly what she doesn’t want to hear: sexual freedom enslaves females. Most poignantly, it enslaves women to their bodies—quite the opposite of what the abortion clinics claim. Anna seeks sexual freedom, but what she gets is exactly the opposite. Near the end of the novel, Anna confesses to her sister-in-law, Dolly, that she is not only unhappy, but feels trapped. Her means of control—her physical attraction and charisma—while terrifyingly powerful on a fresh victim, eventually wear out in steering Vronsky. Outside vows of marriage, she knows her only hope to hold him is her flesh, and that only while there is no one younger and prettier.

Later on, meditating in solitude on that look—which expressed [Vronsky’s] right to freedom—she, as usual, came only to a consciousness of her own humiliation. ‘He has a right to go when and where he pleases. Not only to go away, but to leave me. He has every right and I have none at all.’ … She could not do anything, could not in any way change her relation to him. Just as heretofore, she could hold him only by means of her love and attractiveness; and just as heretofore, only by occupations by day and morphia by night could she stifle the terrible thought of what would happen if he ceased to love her.

Her suicide, in her own words, is an escape—from the misery in which she ensnared herself and the one thing left to her, her beauty, which is no longer useful.

“Why not put out the candle, if there is nothing more to look at?” she thinks to herself.

Anna’s hamartia, her fatal flaw, is not her belief that women should be free, nor even her desire for freedom, but her belief that she will find greater freedom without her marriage than within it.

Near the end of the novel, Anna’s friends notice her new habit of screwing up her eyes whenever the conversation turns to her affair, as though blurring her vision not to see the truth that repeatedly confronts her. So, too, can the modern reader squint up his eyes to avoid the truth Tolstoy presents, and the consequences of sexual sin, which are catastrophic. But for the honest, there is an entreaty to fidelity—the highest chord played throughout Tolstoy’s masterful work—and it’s one worth tuning into again and again.

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We are all meant, of course, to follow breathlessly the birth of a bright new star in the firmament of contemporary Russian literature. Her name is Maria Stepanova, a lady whose daring literary style (on the unquestionable authority of The New York Times) is a “combination of family history and roving cultural analysis,” if that is your kind of thing. Ms Stepanova’s characteristic genre can perhaps best be described as literary antiquarianism. She obsessively rummages through the artefacts of her family’s past, goes off on sometimes fascinating and always very convoluted tangents to relate their personal tales to the larger flow of twentieth century Russian history, and weaves a personally unique tapestry perhaps represented best by the eccentric title of her so far principal production, “In Memory of Memory.”

Well and good, and let readers sensitive to that sort of subject matter, as well as professional literary critics, have the final say concerning the merits of Ms. Stepanova’s emerging literary opus. She is still relatively young, under 50, may not have reached her full scope and maturity as a writer, and we may yet be pleasantly surprised by unsuspected and more universally meaningful manifestations of her literary talent. There is no denying that Stepanova is a serious and very persistent writer. She has chosen as her trademark topic something not entirely hackneyed (the mode of literary execution can rescue even the dreariest of texts) but certainly also falling short of reaching transcendence. Whether or not, as she continues to develop as a writer, she will manage to overcome autistic tribal “antiquarianism” and ultimately ascend to a more universal perspective, time will tell.

In terms of that ascent, which Stepanova must undertake if she is to address more than her family audience, understood in the broadest sense of the word, and if she is to function as a legitimate writer without publicity props helpfully provided by the same tribal milieu, she seems to be off to a rather poor start. That is what usually occurs when a writer opportunistically wades into quotidian political issues and – even worse – uses them as a crutch to attract attention, and – worse still – as an ingratiation device for seeking favors from the powers that be, foreign or domestic.

Congratulations are certainly in order to Stepanova for her nomination for the International Booker Prize. But in the background, the familiar rumblings of the propaganda machinery which redefines talent and determines the parameters of achievement, in the occidental portion of the known universe at least, are clearly audible. There is no firm indication at this point that Ms. Stepanova has been preselected for apotheosis, but she is clearly in the running as one of the nominees from the Russian literary world. Again, time will tell.

Perceptive antiquarian that she is, Ms Stepanova is evidently just as comfortable in the labyrinths of the present moment. The laudatory Deutsche Welle puff piece a few days ago leaves few dilemmas about her navigational skills. “Russia is experiencing a hijacking of history,” she is quoted by her interlocutor in the DW interview. Clearly, the lady is not just an accomplished collector of scraps from the past; she also knows which buttons need to be pushed in order to get present results.

Portrayed dramatically as having “fled,” which actually turns out to mean that “for many months, she has been living with her family at a dacha near Moscow” (oh, bitterly painful exile, but also exquisite joy at not having to mingle with the common folk!), Stepanova elaborates on her hijacking thought:

“Putin’s version of history presents itself as an unbroken chain of victories,” Maria Stepanova told DW. “It’s an ascending greatness: from Tsarist Russia to the victorious Stalin era and finally to the radiant Putin present full of dignity and stability.”

“The impression is created,” she continued, “that there was neither the revolution, nor the civil war, nor millions of victims of Stalin’s terror. And for this version of history, the authorities [in the DW text, власть is oddly mistranslated as “power” – S. K.] are ready to fight by any means. Among other things, laws are being passed to falsify history.”

Are they? Those apparently less knowledgeable in Russian affairs than Ms. Stepanova had the contrary impression, that laws were being passed precisely to prohibit the dissemination of historical falsifications, mainly regarding who was who in World War II, and the other subjects that she casually mentions.

The ingenious Russian government, she continues, “has found a way to continue to oppress people, to keep them obedient and fearful without resorting to concentration camps and executions”. Ms. Stepanova, it appears, has been left largely exempt from the impact of this otherwise successful intimidation campaign:

“Both the pandemic and the harsh political climate have driven numerous cultural workers into a kind of ‘dacha exile,’” a calamity that also includes our literary heroine, as Deutsche Welle ominously informs us. “From here, she communicates with her publishers worldwide, coordinates the work of colta.ru, one of the last independent journalistic platforms in Russia, of which she is editor-in-chief, and she writes. She also gives numerous interviews, sometimes several per day in the run-up to the International Booker Prize awards. Although the telephone connection is poor, you can hear the birds chirping in the background.”

Allowing critics a dacha lifestyle, with unrestricted access to their international patrons, albeit over a poor telephone line, to produce acclaimed literature surrounded by chirping birds instead of concentration camp turrets, that is rather magnanimous of a repressive regime, is it not?

Stepanova may be living in oppressive “dacha exile,” but she is no Pasternak. She may be straining assiduously to be heard on the major political issues of the day, but she just as clearly is no Solzhenitsyn.

The latter observation is, unfortunately, appropriate, particularly in light of recent history in awarding the once undoubtedly prestigious prize. Over the last several decades, for reasons that can only be conjectured, the Nobel literature committee did not impress anyone with the wisdom of its choices. The international intellectual community was bewildered by the awkwardness of many of the Committee’s decisions, which greatly devalued the literature prize. It suffices to mention a few of the more recent obviously politically dictated literature prize winners, such as Svetlana Aleksievich, Herta Miller, and Bob Dylan to make the point. (Bob Dylan should be given credit for saying a few kind things about the Serbs when that was most unpopular, but that hardly qualifies him for what is considered the world’s most prestigious literature prize, never mind the fact that Dylan is a pop artist, not a writer.) Handke’s future behavior will be a clue to solving the interesting puzzle of how and why malgré tout the Committee settled upon him as this year’s winner, but the proposition that after numerous failures of judgment it was motivated this time by purely aesthetic considerations must at first glimpse appear rather dubious. Looking at it in the most favorable light, however, we may have a situation analogous to 1958, when Pasternak won the Literature Prize. In contrast to the series of politically suitable but utterly forgettable literary non-entities over the last several decades who were adorned with the prize, the winner Handke – just as Pasternak in his day – has undoubtedly earned the honor, but prudence requires that we also keep an eye on the political context. Of course, in Handke’s case we still lack sufficient facts to make sober judgments on this subject.

Anyway, the gist of the enraged high priests’ objection is that Handle simply is not a ball player. They denounce him for crossing important red lines while obstinately ignoring some of the obligatory propaganda axioms of their public ideology. Chief among these is his headstrong refusal to express solidarity with the moral lynching of the Serbian nation (which has today been assigned the World War II role of the Jews, a fact that the heretic Handke has publicly pointed out). Further, Handke is excoriated for disbelieving that genocide was committed in Srebrenica, although it is not at all clear why a writer, whether good or bad at his craft, should be required to assent to that discredited propaganda claim in order to prove his literary worth. (Handke’s eulogy at the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic has also been included in the charge sheet, but it is an item simply too preposterous for serious comment.) Finally, they are infinitely enraged by a man who declined their ticket to the celebrity pantheon of the New World Order and insists on identifying with its victims, instead of opting for the glory, tributes, and benefits that accrue from opportunistically identifying with the oppressors.

All men of good will and sound moral character who care about world class literature and intellectual honesty welcome the honor that was bestowed on Peter Handke, not because of “pro-Serbian” views maliciously and irrelevantly attributed to the author but because of the genuine positions he takes vis-à-vis the key issues of our time. Handke is a personification of unshakable commitment to justice and truth, and if such a stance has on occasion resulted in expressions of support for one of the most maligned nations of our time, so much the worse for the slanderers. The excerpt from Albert Camus’ Nobel acceptance speech in 1957, seized upon and twisted in a furious comment by the journalistic hack Ed Vulliamy (of indecent memory from the 1990s) is in fact entirely applicable to this year’s laureate Peter Handke and encapsulates his admirable human profile: “The duty of the writer,” Vulliamy misquotes Camus in his hit piece, “is to do more than write, but also testify to truth.” (What Camus actually said on that occasion was “It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth,” but never mind, that still makes the same essential point even if the fraudster Vulliamy altered the remark to give it his personal imprint.)

Exactly right. Except that the sold out scoundrel and false reporter from the Bosnian war theater, undeserving Pulitzer Prize winner Vulliamy does not know the first thing about truth. That is precisely why he made this ridiculous slip, falsely invoking Camus in a servile attempt to smear Handke. Just another brilliant example, isn’t it, of the generous tribute that, without intending it, vice regularly pays to virtue?