"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Adultery is a prominent literary theme in Western literature - One of the most well-known novels with the theme of adultery, along with Flaubert’s Madam Bovary and Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, is Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina .
In Tolstoy’s text, we have both adulteress and adulterer. However, while the main protagonist Anna’s story is in the foreground, her brother Stiva’s adultery constitutes a subplot of the story. What is the outcome of these adulteries? Stiva’s adultery is an "insignificant" love affair. Normally, as we know, a man is not deeply involved, emotionally, in his extra-marital relations. Traditionally, he seldom reaches the point of abandoning his wife and children, thus dissolving his family. So it is no surprise - as a reflection of socio-psychological parameters - that Stiva implores his wife to forgive him, thus intending to keep his marriage intact. This is not the case, however, with our adulteresses.
Anna Karenina, unlike her brother, abandons her husband. She begins to take drugs and her relationship with Vronski turns more and more strained and complicated. She suspects that he has become bored with her and that he will abandon her. The only way out of her emotional abyss is suicide.
Here I come to a nagging question - why did Tolstoy choose such an end for his adulterous heroines?
One answer may be obvious: the author consciously seeks to portray a woman’s emotional deprivation and turbulent psychology, and, to make the tale more interesting and convincing, he writes them into suicide. But another, and equally obvious question may also be posed: is it not possible that the authors of that time chose suicide as an end for their heroines in order to appease society’s implicit and explicit demand of punishment for adultery?
In the case of Tolstoy, there may be an additional, personal, reason in place. Tolstoy, in his writing evolved his fiction with regard to adultery from the simple and scornful treatment of Helena, the adulteress wife of Pier in War and Peace, to the suicide of his heroine in Anna Karenina. In a context of a biographical and psychological influence on his fiction, could it not be that Tolstoy was dramatizing a personal situation? Tolstoy was a Russian aristocrat and a successful writer. He was, however, ugly(forgive the word) and his wife was seventeen years younger than he was. When Tolstoy began to write Anna Karenina, he was forty-four years old while his wife was twenty-seven.
It appears that Tolstoy suggests to the reader that women in great need for a man’s love throw themselves into the arms of the first man who, they think, will satisfy their emotional needs. For Anna Karenina this is the successful politician Karenin, despite the fact that the difference of age between them is rather great.
Some critics have seen Anna’s death as a way of self-punishment for an adultery committed by himself(he seduced a young peasant woman).
"And death, as the sole means of reviving love for herself in his heart, of punishing him, and of gaining the victory in that contest which an evil spirit in her heart was waging against him, presented itself clearly and vividly to her "
To her? Well, I don’t quite think so!
Despite that, the book’s brilliant. Please read it:)