Anna Karenina: What Is In Your Soul?
I’m reading Anna Karenina — today I’m on page 506 of 817 pages. I bought a lovely Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation, a trade paperback that is nicely typeset with a strong font, good line spacing, and good binding.
I particularly like the use of upper- and lower-case letters of the same height for the book’s title on the cover; I think it evokes the Cyrillic alphabet nicely while still being entirely readable.
The jacket is filled with praise not of the book itself — anyone who needs blurbs to attract them to this novel probably isn’t going to read it anyway — but of the translation, which is indeed vivid and elegant.
He had an ability to understand art and to imitate it faithfully, tastefully, and thought he had precisely what was needed for an artist. After some hesitation over what kind of painting he would choose — religious, historical, genre or realistic — he started to paint. He understood all kinds and could be inspired by one or another; but he could not imagine that one could be utterly ignorant of all the kinds of painting and be inspired directly by what was in one’s soul, unconcerned whether what one painted belonged to any particular kind. Since he did not know that, and was inspired not directly by life but indirectly by life already embodied in art, he became inspired very quickly and easily, and arrived as quickly and easily at making what he painted look very much like the kind of art he wanted to imitate.
To be “inspired directly by what [is] in one’s soul” rather than “indirectly by life already embodied in art”: in our media-saturated age, this feels more relevant and more urgent than ever. It seems to me that this is the central challenge — or at the very least one of the central challenges — for the artist who truly cares about her art.
However, this grand novel is not all contemplation and Slavic woe, so I leave you with one of my favorite lines from Part One, Chapter 3:
And so the liberal tendency became a habit with Stepan Arkadyich, and he liked his newspaper, as he liked a cigar after dinner, for the slight haze it produced in his head.