Finders Weepers, Losers Keepers
Philip Yancey
July 1, 1980
What many judge as the greatest novel ever written, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, strikes me as a beautiful parable of the core meaning of what it means to lose life and to find it.
After a few chapters of the book, it becomes clear that the novel should more accurately be called Anna and Levin, for it contains the distinct stories of two characters. Anna moves to center stage because of her intensely enchanting power and the web of intrigue and self-deception she spins around her adulterous affair. But always the camera angle shifts away to Konstantin Levin who is living out an entirely separate plot, most of which takes place on his country estate.
Two more unlike characters could not have been devised. Anna, a sophisticated, urbane princess, could sweep into a room with her low-cut ball gown and reduce all talking to hushed whispers about Ser. She could pursue fluid, fascinating conversation on any subject with any guest while she was simultaneously sizing up the dress and hairstyle of other women in the room. On a train ride from Moscow to Petersburg early in the book, Anna attracts a dashing young cavalry officer, Count Vronsky. Their affair, its effect on Anna's family, and ultimately its death-grip on Anna herself consume most of the novel's plot.
AII the while Tolstoy provides a nearly comic relief to the passion of Anna's life by involving the country bumpkin Levin, who fits best in a world of hay and piglets and farm implements and ignorant peasants. Yet he is never quite content. He ought to be happy with his gentlemanfarmer's life of snipe-shooting and forest hikes, but he's not. While other wealthy landowners are enjoying the fruits of one of the greatest concentrations of wealth in history, Levin is off brooding about ...
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