6.4 Can you choose your own ending for Anna Karenina?

Tolstoy changed his mind. Should we? (Really, if you haven’t spoiled the novel for yourself, don’t read this.)

A Shakespeare professor I remember fondly for her red hair and black tattoo of a printing press symbol taught me that playwrights must create their plays. The writer has "wrought" the play, forged from a page into a collaborative form.

She took us to examine rare books, turning the large crackling pages with pencils or small wooden rods to avoid damaging the aged paper. We observed the difference between a folio, a huge publication with long and full sheets, and a quarto, the same page size folded into fourths. The folio was a richer collector’s item, lavish with illustrations. The smaller and less expensive quarto aimed to find a wider audience. While writing is a solitary and abstract escape, the publisher’s illustrators, printers, and artists take the writer’s prose to objectify the writing.

a folio from my camera roll circa 2017

I thought about this a lot when I learned Leo Tolstoy’s publisher denied his new ending of Anna Karenina.

The novel, syndicated from 1875 to 1878, was incredibly popular when it was published. The story originally ended with Anna’s suicide in what is now Part 7. As a war breaks out in the Balkans, Tolstoy writes an Epilogue about the debate of Russians fighting for other Slavic countries and the private spiritual debates he confesses to his wife have exhausted him.

But the publisher refuses to publish Tolstoy's epilogue.

Out of spite, Tolstoy eats the cost to circulate this new ending as a brochure. These pages live on as Part 8 and the built-in ending of most contemporary editions.

We lost a saucy argument to history when we lost the publisher’s side of the story. What made this publisher go head-to-head with one of history's most successful authors?

I wish I could know what his rationale was, because there's a part of me that agrees with this publisher. The book should have ended with Anna.

What do we gain from Part 8?

Two months have passed since Anna threw her body in front of an oncoming train. Levin’s brother, Sergey, returns to his brother’s estate and runs into Vronsky’s mother, the old countess.

Tolstoy intentionally places Vronsky’s mother in a train car. When Vronsky picks up his mother, the old countess introduces him to Anna. The countess loves her and leaves Anna, saying, “I speak plainly, at my age, and I tell you simply that I’ve lost my heart to you" (Part 1, Chapter XVIII). This maternal endorsement attracts Vronsky to Anna.

The old countess only appears in Part 1 and Part 8, though she lingers as a ghost figure in Anna and Vronsky's illegitimate household. Anna suspects the old countess invites Vronsky to her estate to meet eligible princesses he can legally marry. He can restore his reputation as a technically unmarried bachelor. By the time Anna lives with Vronsky, the affair forever stains her reputation.

In Part 8, when Sergey runs into Vronsky’s mother on a train leaving St. Petersburg, she despises Anna. “Even the death she chose was low and vulgar…Why, what is the meaning of such desperate passions? It was all to show herself something out of the way. Well, and that she did do. She brought herself to ruin and two good men—her husband and my unhappy son” (Chapter IV).

A car or two down, Vronsky is alive, and his grief is silent. He decided to join the independent Russian forces defending Serbia and Montenegro from the Ottoman Empire in what we now consider the Serbo-Turkish War from 1876 to 1878. (Russia declared war on Turkey in support of this Pan-Slavic movement in 1877.) As Sergey finds him alone in another car, Vronsky looks out on the rails and has a flashback:

“As he glanced at the tender and the rails…he suddenly recalled her—that is, what was left of her when he had run like one distraught into the cloak-room of the railway-station—on the table, shamelessly sprawling out among strangers, the bloodstained body so lately full of life;… the strange, fixed expression, piteous on the lips and awful in the still open eyes, that seemed to utter that fearful phrase—that he would be sorry for it—that she had said when they were quarreling” (Chapter V).

Vronsky and others use Anna’s death to characterize a vicious vengeance. Her morality makes her a villain easily forgotten. Even Stepan feels more pity for Vronsky than grief for his sister. When he hears Vronsky is on their train, he “looked sad, but a minute later” walks to find Vronsky and has “completely forgotten his own despairing sobs over his sister’s corpse, and he saw in Vronsky only a hero and an old friend” (Chapter II).

As the rest of the chapter returns to Levin and Kitty’s idyllic countryside life as new parents and hosts surrounded by family and guests, Levin wonders at his philosophical dissatisfaction. He eventually settles on the vast beauty of the universe, an awareness of a divinity he long ignored. He weeps and runs into a storm to save Kitty and baby Mitya, trapped in a shed on the estate.

Part 8 offers a positive ending. It suggests that the search for meaning and over-philosophizing erodes our connection to other people, keeping us tethered to this world. The more disconnected characters become from each other or their setting, either in their robotic politicking or their familial neglect, the less satisfied they are.

Anna abandoned her family and refused to compromise a relationship to work for her husband and child in the pursuit of real love. She allowed her dissatisfaction to take over her life. If she could have been more like Levin, she would have saved her life.

Now let’s go back to Part 7.

The final chapters of Anna Karenina carry a propulsive energy of self-destruction the best good-for-her novels could only dream of writing. When it comes to the oncoming divorce literature trends, Anna’s story feels like the precursor. Marriage is a trap. The prospect of divorce is a trap. She is unmoored, and no person can offer a safe harbor for her spinning out. She is unwelcome in conservative Moscow and Westernized St. Petersburg crowds. No matter how she bends herself to fit a world where someone might accept her, she finds hatred.

Anna’s struggle is a universal contemplation. If you had the chance to start a new life, would you take it, even if it cost everything?

All of Tolstoy’s characters ask this question with varying dosages. Does Dolly want to entertain an affair in her loveless marriage? Would Kitty reconsider Levin's proposal, despite the embarrassment of refusing him before? Can Alexey Alexandrovitch welcome emotion to keep his family together?

Tolstoy’s omniscient third person allows him to step into everyone’s thoughts at some point. Tolstoy steps into her thoughts to confirm her intentions, but most views of Anna come through the observations of other characters. Kitty catches Anna and Vronsky talking at the ball, though she can't hear what they say. Dolly watches Anna change from bright-eyed to half-awake.

Even Levin meets her and finds her attractive:

“Levin was all this time admiring her—her beauty and her intelligence, her culture, and at the same time her directness and genuine depth of feeling. He listened and talked, and all the while he was thinking of her inner life, trying to divine her feelings” (Chapter XI).

Tolstoy disappears into his characters’ minds to reveal Anna. With her affair, Anna opted to become an attraction for others to observe.

The wall around Anna’s thoughts crumbles at the end of Part 7, one of the most gripping sections of the novel.

Anna has shades of the selfish, vengeful woman Vronsky’s mother sees. When Vronsky and Anna get into their final fight, her jealousy veers into paranoia. His shielding a telegram from her suggests how he might act when he begins an affair with a new woman. She fights about his mother and his mother’s desire to marry him with a respectful princess. When they go to bed without a reconciliation, she feels the imminent end of their relationship coming and assumes his disgust at her: “All the most cruel words that a brutal man could say, he said to her in her imagination, and she could not forgive him for them, as though he had actually said them” (Chapter XXVI).

In the middle of the night, she falls into a vindictive spiral:

"When she poured herself out her usual dose of opium, and thought that she had only to drink off the whole bottle to die, it seemed to her so simple and easy, that she began musing with enjoyment on how he would suffer, and repent and love her memory when it would be too late" (Chapter XXVI).

This dark temptation manifests as her room's shadows “with fresh swiftness" attack her, "and all was darkness.” Anna wakes from her haze and weeps: “No, anything—only to live! Why, I love him! Why, he loves me!” She enters his bedroom in the middle of the night and watches him sleep, afraid to be alone.

By seeing Anna’s thought process, Tolstoy defies Vronsky and his mother’s belief that Anna used her death as a permanent punishment. She has veered into a tornado of madness and morphine. Her depression evolves as a separate persona, a final iteration of Anna.

Anna walks into the morning afraid of the darkness, but when Vronsky’s mother sends a princess to deliver documents to Vronsky, Anna’s anger overtakes the fear. They fight before Vronsky leaves to go to his mother’s estate, and the last thing she says to him is “You…you will be sorry for this,” as Vronsky remembers on the train (Chapter XXVI). After her death, he forgets her notes and telegrams sent after his leaving, desperate for his return: “For God’s sake come! I’m afraid” (Chapter XXVII). When she passes a mirror, she doesn’t recognize her face or remember when she did her hair. More than a fear of divorce, she has learned to fear her madness.

To shake it off, she takes a carriage to visit Dolly. Staring at town, she decides to leave Vronsky. She hopes Dolly will give her a human connection, even if Dolly disapproves of Anna’s decision to leave Vronsky. When she arrives, she finds Kitty at Dolly’s house. It’s safe to say that between Anna's flirtations with both of Kitty's beaus, Kitty and Anna have beef. But Anna detaches from reality. As Kitty looks “compassionately into [Anna’s] eyes,” Anna taunts her: "'I have heard so much of you from every one, even from your husband. He came to see me, and I liked him exceedingly,' she said unmistakably with malicious intent." Before this biting comment that Kitty naively ignores, Anna projects her societal inadequacy on Kitty’s expectations. She imagines Kitty will see her as other women have: “I know that in my position I can’t be received by any decent woman. I knew that from the first moment I sacrificed everything to him” (Chapter XXVIII).

Because of her social exile, Anna judges other people the way they have judged her. She assumes they think the worst of her because her constant rejection from Vronsky and society has, understandably, destroyed her self-esteem. When a stranger nods at her on the street, Anna says, “Well, he knows me as well as anyone in the world knows me. I don’t know myself. I know my appetites, as the French say” (Chapter XXIX). She concludes everyone operates on hatred, and it makes everything disgusting for her. Now, the darkness Anna feared has taken over her agency, as “[t]he house threw a shadow now right across the street, but it was a bright evening and still warm in the sunshine” (Chapter XXIX).

She travels down to the train station, intent to surprise Vronsky at the old countess’s home. As she hallucinates talking to imaginary people in a train coach, she cuts through at truths of Vronsky’s view of Anna as an accomplishment rather than a partner: “Of course there was love too, but the chief element was the pride of success…My love keeps growing more passionate and egoistic, while his is waning and waning…I’m not jealous, but I’m unsatisfied” (Chapter XXX). She understands he resents any sacrifices of his societal position to be with her, and whatever sacrifice she makes can’t fix the constraints on her life and the dissatisfaction.

Anna’s internal fight against despair is one of the most seamless in literature. She assesses her life with clinical objectivity, critical of her past and her desires for more. While her despair drives her to see life as an exercise in hatred, she questions if that’s true, her hope diluting the intensity of her conclusive depression: “Is there possible, if not happiness, some sort of ease from misery?”

She sits dazed at the train station, confused about her original plan. She has left the physical world for the battle inside her mind: “And again at all the sore places, hope and then despair poisoned the wounds of her tortured, fearfully throbbing heart” (Chapter XXX). This frustration and hatred for how her life turned out and whether she knows love enough to continue living leaves her afraid at the train station.

In the final chapter of Part 7, she wields the same disgust she had felt reflected toward her to strangers. For Anna, life is made for misery. “It’s all falsehood, all lying, all humbug, all cruelty!...” (Chapter XXXI). Her train car passengers, the conductor, and a young girl all disgust her, and she enters into complete isolation, emotionally removed from the world. Full of irredeemable hatred, she decides, “I will punish him and escape from everyone and from myself.” As she goes under the train, ignoring the disappearance of the shadows and the brightness of life’s joys playing in her mind, she wakes up and wonders where she is and how she ended up here as if possessed.

Compared to Levin's definitive conclusion of goodness, Tolstoy places us in ambiguiety with Anna’s final moments: “And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever” (Chapter XXXI). What does she see in the darkness and the light she couldn’t see before? Does she find her philosophies confirmed?

The truth is that Tolstoy probably didn’t know how to defeat despair when he wrote this. While writing Anna Karenina after several significant family deaths, he stopped hunting because he was afraid to hold a gun for fear he would turn it on himself.

This is the distinction between Part 7 and Part 8. The endings feel separate because they feel that two different Tolstoys wrote them. The same writing styles and philosophies, but in Part 7, we are in a portrait of despair. By the time the brochure circulates with a new ending where Levin concludes life “has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”

This disdain for Anna’s despair and the apathy its characters, including Dolly, feel toward her loss continue to isolate her, assuming a narrative for her. Tolstoy may have turned on the light for himself, but Anna encapsulates the truth of his despair.