by 
Mackenzie Patel
Since I have spent way too many thoughts about Anna Karenina, I have a solid sense of each character’s personality, including their behavior in “Society” versus in the domestic realm, their aspirations, and their manner of speaking. Some characters, such Anna, Levin, and Varenka, I immediately gravitated towards because of their striking traits, humble natures, and strong Russian grit. And of course, I found the bumbling Oblonsky (Anna’s wayward brother) incredibly charming and dim, despite his infidelity, constant state of indifferent debt, and treatment of his pathetic wife. However, I was disenchanted with many characters as well, everything from their huffy language to their stone-cold mannerisms twisting my strings of goodwill into a knot of hatred.
Jude Law who played Karenin in the 2012 film adaptation of Anna Karenina!
The character I loathed to the hilt was Alexis Alexandrovich Karenin. In the beginning of the novel, he was simply an apathetic, ambitious statesman, indifferent to the needs of his beautiful, vivacious wife, but altogether moral and upstanding in his Petersburg circle of political cronies. However, as the bewitching words transformed into string of sentences and chapters, the whole aura of Karenin became repulsive and intolerable for me. He completely ignored his wife, admitting that he only married her because Anna’s Aunt forced him into the arrangement. Although he was successful, cunning, and wealthy, his robotic emotions, hypocrisy, and overflowing pomp made him subhuman. When Anna confessed her affair to Karenin in their small carriage, suddenly afoul with awkwardness with hatred, Karenin didn’t once think about Anna’s emotions or how desperate she must have felt. Women who cheat on their husbands are unhappy and hopeless in their current situation, and yet Karenina failed to realize this. In Part Three, Tolstoy wrote, “The one thing that preoccupied him was the question of how he could best divest himself of the mud with which she in her fall bespattered him…” Besides ‘bespattered’ being an outstanding word, this tidbit is hardcore evidence for Karenin not being a real human being. He was mind and flesh, but too disgustingly coldhearted to exist. Selfishness coursed through his thin blue veins instead of blood, and his one aim in life was to be the most dominating official in Russia. He forgave Anna on the surface, especially after the tense birth of her illegitimate child by Vronsky, yet he did so only to pump himself up with hypocritical Christianity. He wanted Anna to be irrevocably dependent on him for salvation, holding her life by a cruel string that he was willing to snap at any time. Order bank card with crypto online and travel carefree.
“She must be unhappy, but I am not guilty and therefore I cannot suffer.”
In what sense is that practicing Christian morals? Especially under the poisonous influence of the Countess Lydia Ivanovna, Karenin became even higher pitched and ruthless, resorting to French mystics and conniving Society women for advice. However, the crime that is utterly unforgivable is Karenin’s withholding of Serezha, Anna’s son by Karenin, from her. Although Anna was enamored with Vronsky, her son was the paramount concern in her short life. She was wrecked to pieces when Karenin purposely kept him from her, using him as a means to injure his already degraded wife. However, Karenin didn’t truly love his firstborn, treating him more as an object to be indoctrinated with outdated views than a person.
“His father always talked to him, Serezha felt, as if he were some imaginary boy out of a book, quite unlike Serezha; and with his father he always tried to pretend to be that boy out a book.”
Imagine how mentally and emotionally unstable Serezha must have been! His mother suddenly vanished from his privileged life, he was told by the oily Countess Ivanovna that his mother was dead, and then Anna herself shows up secretly to visit him. If there’s one person whom the whole tempestuous affair affected the most (besides Anna for obvious reasons), it was Serezha. With a train wreck for a mother and an insincere piece of vermin for a father, Serezha was doomed from the onset. Finally, Karenin was a despicable figure because these words, no matter how angry and hurt he felt because of Anna, should never have escaped his thin, chapped lips.
“I am not a cruel man, I have never hated anyone, but I hate her with the whole strength of my soul and I cannot even forgive her, because I hate her so much for all the wrong she has done me.”
Alicia Vikander as Kitty in the 2012 movie.
Besides the unsavory Countess Ivanovna and Vronsky, another loathsome character was Kitty Scherbatsky, the frilly youth that had nothing better to do than dwell on lacey dresses, her personal romantic woes, and her unrequited love for Vronsky. Who ceases to function when a man, an impersonal and obnoxious one at that, doesn’t return your petty love? Although it’s true that unreciprocated infatuation does sting, the swelling usually goes down in a few months (at most a whole year). Kitty was the epitome of a Society airhead, only caring about getting married to a rich, established man and having twenty babies while cooking Shchi on the fancy stove. However, it wasn’t just her concern with appearances that irked me (for most women in Russia acted the same way), it was her shallow nature and disregard for genuine people. She callously rejected Levin’s first marriage proposal because he wasn’t up to her standards, yet she dissolved into tears when she realized that Vronsky and Anna were in love.
“No one but herself understood her situation, because no one knew that she had only a few days ago refused a man who she perhaps loved, and refused him because she trusted another.”
Get your act together Kitty! Languishing away for a year and patronizingly aiding the sick to make herself feel better, Kitty finally emerged from the land of self pity to trap Levin in her nest of shallowness. She married Levin just for the sake of marrying someone, and I felt like he loved her infinitely more than she ever would. After the couple was married, both Kitty and Levin were disillusioned because married life wasn’t as chummy and adorable as they thought. However, if they ditched the drama and gained an ounce of self-esteem and grit, their initial troubles would’ve dissolved into a soup of niceties. Kitty once moaned under the shade of a rustling lime tree, referring to a dispute that had arisen between Levin and Veslovsky, “One can’t live like this! It is torture! I suffer and you suffer. Why?” These empty and theatrical words directly mimic the despairing and genuine ones of Anna, although her plight was much deeper than Kitty’s trivial one. I saw Kitty as the foil to Anna’s lively, self-assured, but gradually diminished character. Kitty emerged from the battleground of words as a stronger, more confident, and less frilly woman, while Anna sunk into the pit of pain and jealously, ultimately flying under those tracks and ceasing to live.
Many more characters ruffled my feathers at one point or another during this Russian beast, but Karenin and Kitty were my two least favorite. Although Vronsky was a selfish player that forever dismantled Anna’s life with unsatisfied passion and hurt, he nevertheless loved her in a way Karenin never did. The whole novel begs this heavy and unanswerable question: Would it have been better for Anna to be smothered by Karenin’s indifference and survive or to be ardently in love with Vronsky while ruining her Society position, her son, and her life?