Vronsky’s teeth are so often mentioned as being white and strong, you imagine something has to be up — that Tolstoy has some plan in mind with regard to Vronsky’s teeth.
You remember how, in the Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy equates the strong white teeth of the peasantry with a kind of important simple virtue and wonder if he wants to make a similar point in this book?
And sure enough, after Anna’s death, Vronsky, with his big bright smile, has developed a tooth ache. Beneath the show of excellence, there has developed an underlying issue.
That’s one of the truly artistic touches of Anna K., in which, actually, there are aren’t a lot of fine touches. The book is story-telling, philosophy, psychology, social observations, but not so much in the way of “artistic touches” as you would find in say, Flaubert, or in, say, poetry.
(Maybe what I’m most seeing here is the difference between novels and poems as such: how novels will seem a much diluted, yet more relatable, version of poems. They have a lower “artistry to word” ratio. And yet I didn’t encounter this concern with Dostoyevsky, whose prose style is so much more hectic. From my point of view, Dostoyevsky’s writing has a poetic urgency that Tolstoy’s doesn’t.)
The real artistry of Anna Karinina (and perhaps this is true of the novelistic art as a whole) is not in its “fine touches” though it has them, but in its structure. The novel blends quite perfectly two distinct but intertwining stories: of a love that leads to despair and a love that leads to hope.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 
Leave a comment