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Browsing my parents’ bookshelves recently, in the dog days that followed sending Anna Karenina off to press, I found myself staring at a row of small hardback volumes all the same size. One in particular, with the words Romola and George Eliot embossed in gold on the dark green spine, caught my attention. It was an Oxford World’s Classics pocket edition – a present to my grandmother from her younger sister, who wrote an affectionate inscription in curling black ink (“with Best Love to Dellie on her 20^th birthday from Mabel, July 3^rd 1917”), and forgot to rub out the price of 1 shilling and 3 pence pencilled inside the front cover. Inside the back cover, meanwhile, towards the bottom of a long list of World’s Classics titles, my heart missed a beat when I espied “Tolstoy, Anna Karenina: in preparation”: Louise and Aylmer Maude’s translation was first published only in 1918.

As I drove homethat night with Romola in my bag, I thought about my grandmother reading Eliot’s novel (unusually set in Florence during the Renaissance, rather than in 19^th-century England), and I also thought about the seismic changes taking place in Russia at the time of her birthday in 1917. I wondered whether she was given the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of Anna Karenina for her 21^st birthday, and was disappointed on a later visit to my parents to be presented with her copy of Nathan Haskell Dole’s pioneering but wholly inadequate translation, reprinted in the inexpensive Nelson Classics series. I pictured my grandmother struggling with sentences such as those describing Anna’s hostile engagement with her husband. After Karenin has begun upbraiding Anna for consorting too openly with Vronsky at the beginning of the novel (Part 2, chapter 9), we read, for example: ‘“Nu-s! I hear you,” she said, in a calm tone of banter’. The Maudes later translated this sentence into English (“Well, I’m listening! What next?” said she quietly and mockingly”), but they also changed Tolstoy’s punctuation, and the sarcastically deferential tone of Anna’s voice (Nu-s, ya slushayu, chto budet, – progovorila ona spokoino i nasmeshlivo – “Well, I’m ready to hear what is next,” she said coolly and derisively”).

Back in 1917, Oxford Word’s Classics “pocket editions” featured a line-drawn portrait of the author, but no other illustration. These days, nearly every edition of Anna Karenina has a picture of a woman on the cover, even if Tolstoy’s bearded face is absent opposite the title page. More often than not it will be a Russian woman, painted by a Russian artist, and while we know this is not Anna, it is as if the limits of our imagination are somehow curbed before we even start reading. The dust-jacket for the new hardback Oxford World’s Classics edition of Anna Karenina reproduces Sir John Everett Millais’ portrait of Louise Jopling. The fact that this is an English painting of an English woman already mitigates against identifying her too closely with Anna, but this particular portrait is an inspired choice for other reasons, as I began to understand when I researched its history. To begin with, it was painted in 1879, just one year after Anna Karenina was first published as a complete novel. And the meticulous notes compiled by Vladimir Nabokov which anchor the events of the narrative between 1872 and 1876 also enable us to infer that the fictional Anna Karenina was about the same age as the real-life Louise Jopling, who was 36 when she sat for Millais. Their very different life paths, meanwhile, throw an interesting light on the theme at the centre of Tolstoy’s novel: the predicament of women.

Louise Jopling was one of the nine children born into the family of a railway contractor in Manchester in 1843. After getting married for the first time in 1861 at the age of 17 to Frank Romer, who was secretary to Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild, she studied painting in Paris, but returned to London at the end of the decade when her husband was fired. By 1874, her first husband (a compulsive gambler) and two of her three children were dead, she had married for the second time, to the watercolour painter Joseph Jopling, exhibited at the Royal Academy, and become a fixture in London’s artistic life. To enjoy any kind of success as a female painter at that time in Victorian Britain was an achievement, but even more remarkable was Louise Jopling’s lifelong campaign to improve women’s rights. She founded a professional art school for women in 1887, was a vigorous supporter of women’s suffrage, won voting rights for women at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters after being elected, fought for women to be able to paint from nude models, and became the first woman member of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1902. None of these doors were open to Anna Karenina as a member of St. Petersburg high society, although we learn in the course of the novel that she has a keen artistic sense, is a discerning reader, writes children’s fiction, and has a serious interest in education. Tolstoy’s wife Sofya similarly was never given the opportunity to fulfil her potential as a writer, photographer, and painter.

Louise Jopling was a beautiful woman, as is immediately apparent from Millais’ portrait. In her memoirs she describes posing for him in a carefully chosen embroidered black gown made in Paris, and consciously donning a charming and typically feminine expression to match. On the third day she came to sit for Millais, however, the two friends chanced to talk about something which made her feel indignant, and she forgot to wear her “designedly beautiful expression”. What was finally fixed in the portrait was a defiant and “rather hard” look, which, as she acknowledges, ultimately endowed her face with greater character. This peculiar combination of beauty and defiance is perhaps what most recalls the character of Anna Karenina, who in Part 5 of the novel confronts social prejudice and hypocrisy head-on by daring to attend the Imperial Opera in the full glare of the high society grandes dames who have rejected her.

Louise Jopling’s concern with how she is represented in her portrait, as a professional artist in her own right, as a painter’s model, and as a woman, also speaks to Tolstoy’s detailed exploration of the commodification and objectification of women in society and in art (as discussed by Amy Mandelker in her important study Framing Anna Karenina). It is for this reason that we encounter women in a variety of different situations (ranging from the unhappily married Anna, to the betrayed and careworn housewife Dolly, the young bride Kitty, the unmarried companion Varenka, and the former prostitute Marya), and three separate portraits of the heroine, seen from different points of view. Ernest Rhys interestingly compares Anna Karenina to “a woman’s Iliad” in his introduction to the 1914 Everyman’s Library edition of the novel. Another kind of woman’s Iliad could also be woven from the differing stories of some of Tolstoy’s intrepid early translators, amongst them Clara Bell, Isabel Hapgood, Rochelle S. Townsend, Constance Garnett, Louise Maude, Rosemary Edmonds, and Ann Dunnigan, to whom we owe a debt for paving the way.

The post A Woman’s Iliad? appeared first on OUPblog.

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My  spiritual director called this morning. A lovely man who visits once a month and as I no longer take church services we spend the time talking about books and poetry.   After discussing Japanese poetry, we reached the subject of the Booker and the Nobel prize for literature. For many years I spent the week before the Booker Prize, at a college with others, trying to decide the winner.

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Rex Reed pointed to perhaps the best criticism of the new adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, written by Tom Stoppard and directed by Joe Wright, a criticism that is over 100 years old. On 18 September 1905, James Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus about Tolstoy: "He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical." Wright's film of Anna Karenina is often dull, often stupid, sometimes tired, sometimes pedantic, and literally theatrical.

I have a fundamental problem with any adaptation of Tolstoy's novel. If someone (e.g., William Faulkner, F.R. Leavis) were to tell me that Anna Karenina is the greatest novel ever written, I would not disagree. Not having read all of the novels ever written, I'm not in a position to rank them, but I've certainly never read a better novel than Anna Karenina (and I've read War & Peace, — but for all its glories and wonders, it falls apart at the end, so Anna has a point up on it there). Additionally, Konstantin Levin is just about my favorite character in any novel.

Much of what I love about the book and its characters is not, though, its drama. One of the things that distinguishes Anna Karenina for me is that it doesn't work as anything but a novel, because novels can encompass, enliven, and embody so many discourses: dramatic, yes, but also philosophical, journalistic, political, historical... It takes genius to do the same with a dramatic genre, a play or a film, and Joe Wright is not a genius.



Alas, though I've seen more than my fair share of the many adaptations of Anna Karenina, none has struck me as getting very much of a glimmer of what makes the book so marvelous. My favorite is the 1935 version, mostly because of Greta Garbo and the fine cinematography of William Daniels. As with most of the adaptations, the 1935 focuses primarily on Anna and her affair with Vronsky, but despite my love of Garbo I find it all grows tedious because Fredric March is so utterly uninteresting as Vronsky (and at least 10 years too old) and Basil Rathbone plays Karenin as such a caricature that it's often unintentionally humorous. The script had a difficult time getting through Joseph Breen's censorship office, leading to an adaptation that is mostly chaste and staid.* (Garbo is magnificent, but that goes without saying.)

Wright's Anna Karenina begins promisingly, introducing an anti-realistic conceit in which all the events take place in a theatre — and not just the stage, but the orchestra, balconies, and wings. It's as if Wright had set himself up to adapt a Nabokov novel and ended up with Anna Karenina at the last minute. While utterly un-Tolstoyan, it does at least give the film some energy and inventiveness. Additionally, the film begins with Matthew Macfadyen, who is perfectly cast as Stiva. Every moment Macfadyen is on screen is delightful, and the character is quite faithful to Tolstoy's original. An early scene in his office, with robot-precise clerks, is great fun and also redolent of an earlier film scripted by Stoppard, Brazil. Unfortunately, Wright doesn't seem to know what to do with the theatrical conceit, and he moves in and out of it without, as far as I could tell, any good reason, though this may just be a failure of attention on my part. It is hard to maintain attention on the film, because so much of it is just so tedious, with a plodding clunkiness to most of the scenes. I had to keep reminding myself that Stoppard had written this, because little of the intellect, complexity, playfulness, and lightness of touch that we generally associate with Stoppard as a writer was present. Taking a glance at a draft of the script, the fault seems to me mostly Wright's. At least when Fassbinder took Stoppard's adaptation of Nabokov's Despair and turned it into a very Fassbinder and very un-Stoppard and un-Nabokov movie in its feel, he did so by absorbing it into his own style and concerns. Wright doesn't seem to have any concerns, so what he has is a mishmash of style to no purpose. Sometimes it looks nice, sometimes it's at least momentarily interesting, but it's all too random and off the shelf. For a simple comparison, see how a theatrical conceit can add to the power and meaning of films made by two of the greatest directors ever to work in the cinema: Lola Montès (Ophuls) and The Golden Coach (Renoir). Comparing a pedestrian filmmaker like Wright to Ophuls and Renoir is like comparing Tolstoy to Terry Brooks, but such exemplary uses of theatricality highlight just how shallow Wright's choices are.

What of Keira Knightley, our Karenina? She's not as terrible as she could have been. Given the film that she had to be in, she seemed to me to do as well as anyone could be expected to, and I can't think of another actress who would have moved the film from being a patchwork dud to something smarter and more engaging. Some of her scenes with Karenin, played quite well by Jude Law, are interesting, but that's mostly because Stoppard and Wright seem to have wanted to give Karenin a bit more depth than he's gotten in other feature film adaptations, so those scenes are given the time and seriousness they need to build into something. On the other hand, the scenes with Vronsky, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, are mostly awful. Vronsky is in many ways the most difficult character to pull off, because it's easy for him to be little more than a dumb pretty boy (or, as played by Fredric March, a plodding middle-aged man). The observational dramatism of film especially struggles with such a character. Taylor-Johnson gives it a good shot, and is sometimes successful, particularly toward the end of the movie, at showing Vronsky's evolution, but he's not given enough to work with, and Wright is frequently tone-deaf in his staging of the scenes between Anna and Vronsky.

And then there's my beloved Levin. You might think it would be good thing for the story of Levin and Kitty to be given more time than it is in other adaptations (I don't know of one that's not a tv mini-series that gives him much, if any, time at all). That would be true, if the filmmakers were actually interested in him. However, they are only apparently interested in Levin as a symbol of some sort. The casting of Domhnall Gleeson in the role is the first sign that Wright isn't much interested in the character Tolstoy created, because the Levin of the novel is described as having a large build, strong shoulders, and a curly beard. This is not a description one could fit to Gleeson in the film, despite his beard. Certainly, no movie needs to capture every physical detail from a novel, and actors of very different build and physicality from a description could still give a powerful performance, but Levin's largeness and strength seem especially important to his characterization, particularly once he's out in the fields working with the peasants. The meaning is quite different if he is a small-framed, weak-shouldered man working in the fields, clearly out of his element, than if he is a man who looks like he could physically fit right in and is distinguished from the peasants purely by the circumstances of his birth. Worse, though, Levin suffers the same problem as the portrayal of Vronsky: most of the life and richness he possesses in the novel isn't translated into the performance or its staging. It's okay for Vronsky to be a bit bland, so long as he's pretty, because his blandness is a part of his character, but Levin is such a vivid, richly imagined person that it's heartbreaking (in a bad way!) for him to be so often little more than a holy fool in the film.

It's okay that this Anna Karenina is not Tolstoy's. We have Tolstoy's, and it is superior to any possible adaptation. But it's unfortunate that this film is not more enlightening, more thoughtfully clever rather than just cleverly clever, more, at least, entertaining.


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*It's an interesting comparison to Garbo's earlier outing as Anna Karenina in the 1927 silent film Love (also shot by Daniels) where she was paired with perhaps the only great love of her life, John Gilbert. Their relationship had reached a complex and quite public moment by then, one that at least partly motivated the title change of the movie: the studio reportedly got very excited at the idea of making posters and publicity materials reading, "Gilbert & Garbo in Love!" It's less epic than the 1935 adaptation, and less faithful to Tolstoy, but there are some lovely scenes. Unfortunately, the only readily available version I know of is the Warner Archive DVD, which features an atrocious soundtrack recorded at a live performance of the score where an audience of idiots had a great time laughing at every close-up. The sound can be turned off, but the other flaw of the Warner disc is that it only includes the happy ending, while some television broadcasts have included both that ending and the alternate, more-accurate-to-Tolstoy end.

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After a long day and an even longer week, I collapsed on the couch with my New Yorkers.  Does anyone else feel this way?  My New Yorkers.  I want to know what these writers know.  I want to write a single sentence like they (or some of them) write.  I want to give you what I read and think.  For now, here is this.  It's James Wood talking about Tom Wolfe's latest novel, Back to Blood.  Wood is reflecting on details that resonate, those that feel organic, and those that sour the prose with obvious, unlived research.  Listen in (for the whole, buy the October 15, 2012 issue):

The important details, the ones that make fiction's intimate palpability, cannot simply be scooped up off the sidewalk.  Tolstoy, praised as a realist by Tom Wolfe, took the germ of "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" from an actual story about a judge in a nearby town who had died of cancer; but one of the most beautiful moments in the novella surely came from Tolstoy's imagination—or, rather, from his patient loyalty to Ivan's invented reality.  I mean the moment when Ivan Ilyich, lying on his couch, in great distress and loneliness, remembers "the raw and wrinkly French prunes of his childhood, their special taste, and how his mouth watered when he got down to the stone."

Very occasionally in this novel, Wolfe gives evidence that he knows the difference between those French prunes and "Hotchkiss, Yale ... six-three."  At one point, Nestor, fleeing the opprobrium of his community, ends up at a favorite Cuban bakery, where he enjoys "a whiff of Ricky's pastelitos, 'little pies' of filo dough wrapped around ground beef, spiced ham, guava, or you name it.... He had loved pastelitos since he was a boy."  It's a rare passage without exclamation marks, and superficially it resembles Ivan and the prunes.  But the detail about the patelitos has the whiff not of pastry but of research.

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Happy Monday to you, everyone.  I’ve plenty of tasty treats to bestow on the good little boys and girls this morning.  First off, the only thing that I can figure when I look at the baby versions of various Harry Potter characters by Artful Babies is that whomever the creator is they must spend a lot of time skulking about maternity wards.  How else do you manage to capture that brand new ugly/cute look of newborns?  Of all the characters, the Snape amuses me the most.  Anyone who has ever seen a pissed off baby will recognize the look on his face.  And for those of you reading this with your morning coffee, I will spare you the baby Lord Voldemort.  Needless to say, be prepared to spittake.  I liked my friend Marci’s suggestion that someone take the Voldemort baby and put him under a bench in a train station somewhere, though.

• I love Leila Roy of bookshelves of doom, but I think I love her best when she’s taking down a bad book.  Whether it’s Flowers in the Attic or her recent smackdown of John Grisham’s Theodore Boone sequel, nobody snarks like she does.

• A hitherto unknown Arthur Rackham drawing has been discovered in an obscure book?  Hot diggety dog!  That is awfully cool to me.

• New Blog Alert: Well, as I live and breathe.  I hereby declare myself unobservant.  Since March of this year there has been a group blog of middle grade authors called Smack Dab in the Middle.  Group blogs are a perfect way for authors to blog without having to distract themselves from their real jobs.  In this particular case it’s a great line-up of folks and I’ve taken a great deal of pleasure checking out some of their upcoming books.

• I know you all read your Morning Notes from 100 Scope Notes without fail.  Be that as it may be, how can I not link to a man who knows when to use the phrase, “This cover needs more maracas“?

• Seems a bit unfair.  I complained some time ago about the fact that Kadir Nelson somehow managed to be able to write AND illustrate his books with aplomb.  Hey, Kadir!  Save some talent for the rest of us!  Now I feel the same way knowing that not only did illustrator Leo Lionni make some of the greatest picture books of the 20th century, he could sculpt as well.  9 Comments on Fusenews: More cowbell/maracas, last added: 7/28/2011