Anna Karenina, Parts VI-VIII
Jan. 11th, 2006 10:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtranOkay, technique aside, what a book!
Tolstoy has a way of letting you think early on "oh, this is going to end badly", then teasing and torturing until finally you realise "oh no, it's going to end *really* badly...", and then, at the very end, it pretty much does happen as you feared it would, but this time it's a relief and a surprisingly positive ending. (Dostoyevsky seems to do this a lot too.)
From a technical point of view, it's an interesting lesson in how to set up an emotional roller coaster, but there's also genius involved. None of it would work without empathy, and Tolstoy succeeds in creating empathy with a wide variety of unlikely characters.
It's interesting to consider too, whether the story would have worked as well without the political digressions and philosophical debates. By the end of the book, what had started out as slightly tiresome digressions had become as familiar as the characters themselves, an integral part of the story.
Anyway, now to bed...
Tolstoy has a way of letting you think early on "oh, this is going to end badly", then teasing and torturing until finally you realise "oh no, it's going to end *really* badly...", and then, at the very end, it pretty much does happen as you feared it would, but this time it's a relief and a surprisingly positive ending. (Dostoyevsky seems to do this a lot too.)
From a technical point of view, it's an interesting lesson in how to set up an emotional roller coaster, but there's also genius involved. None of it would work without empathy, and Tolstoy succeeds in creating empathy with a wide variety of unlikely characters.
It's interesting to consider too, whether the story would have worked as well without the political digressions and philosophical debates. By the end of the book, what had started out as slightly tiresome digressions had become as familiar as the characters themselves, an integral part of the story.
Anyway, now to bed...
