Hele n Edmundson's Anna Karenina is an atmospheric piece of theatre which draws emotional force from the text , writes Eileen Battersby
Death stalks the beautiful dissatisfied society wife in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina- the reader suspects it, but Anna knows it. She reveals to her lover, Vronsky, almost half-way through the action, the details of a sinister dream she had once had. "I shall die. I had a dream about it . . . I dreamed that I ran into my bedroom to fetch something or find out something - you know how it is in dreams . . . and in the bedroom, in the corner, stood something . . . and the something turned around, and I saw it was a peasant with a tangled beard, little and dreadful looking. I wanted to run away, but he stooped down over a sack . . ." Here is a woman with everything that would have mattered to a woman of her time - a respected, high-ranking husband, a healthy young son, a well-run household and the right to move within her social circle. Yet Tolstoy makes her restlessness obvious, and in this very human restless yearning and vanity lies her destruction.
When Tolstoy set down to work on this novel, he was already revered as the author of War and Peace (1863-9), which was published when he was in his 30s. Anna Karenina(1873-7) is the work begun by a man approaching 50, and it is also possibly the culmination of the 19th-century psychological novel. If ever a work of fiction explored the individual chaos which bombards the human mind, it is Anna Karenina.
It could also be the novel to which Henry James was most specifically referring when he spoke of the novel form as the "loose baggy monster". Anna Karenina is a loose baggy monster running to more than 800 pages. It is true that it never achieves the excruciating sexual tension of Pride and Prejudice, but then Jane Austen was a highly disciplined observer of human foibles. Tolstoy, the aristocrat who liked the idea of being a peasant, lived and wrote within his own turmoil, a torment created by his many failings, his hypocrisy, his campaigning moralising and his wayward ambition to be good.
On first hearing that a stage version of Anna Kareninais about to open, most readers of the novel will ask the obvious question - "how about the train?" But the fact is, the train is only a cohesive symbol - Anna meets Vronsky as she disembarks from a train, she later ends her life under one.
For all the sub-plots, the domestic detail, the revealing conversations and exchanges, as well as the way in which Tolstoy creates a dramatic narrative which proceeds as day follows night, and establishes a vivid sense of lives being lived all around Anna's disaster, it is a very small story. An admired society woman is as safely protected as she is trapped - security is equated with a loss of freedom, but then freedom for a 19th-century society woman could only be won through disgrace. Anna becomes obsessed with Vronsky, a young officer with a known aversion to marriage, when his obvious infatuation for her becomes a passion. She is married, he is not, and so a triangle is born. For a while, the lovers are the darlings of their small society. Then, they become boring and ultimately, ridiculous.
BUT AS PLAYWRIGHT Helen Edmundson, whose play, Anna Karenina, directed by Michael Barker-Caven, opens at the Gate Theatre tomorrow, correctly conveys, Tolstoy's novel is about far more than Anna. Her disaster is central, but equally important is the personal struggle endured by Levin, who is determined to live well and of course, to marry Kitty, whose young heart has already been bruised by none other than the casual, easily bored Vronsky. Levin is the Tolstoy figure, and the play makes effective use of the two parallel stories, Anna's and Levin's.
Edmundson has not "adapted" Anna Karenina, she has written a carefully choreographed play which reveals a close reading of the novel and a grasp of its psychological ironies as well as its respective dilemmas. Anna meets Vronsky when she is on a mission, saving her brother, Oblonsky's (Stiva's) marriage, which has been undermined by his affair with their French governess. Unfaithfulness is almost expected of husbands and is to be forgiven; but for a wife to err is a crime.
Tolstoy, the moralist, examines the society in which Anna and Vronsky move. The fashionable St Petersburg and Moscow sets with their French culture and knowing behaviour and Vronsky's military world are very different from the rural life of the peasants. Even more dramatic is the contrast provided by Levin's idealised version of exactly what this rural life should be as opposed to what it actually is.
There is also Tolstoy's handling of domestic life. This is a novel of extraordinary activity. Anna, however, does very little, except try to please her lover, and she frets in increasingly obsessive levels. She fears for her beauty, her hold on him. The price of her passion is stress, humiliation and degradation - a word which is used throughout the text. Only a quarter way into the narrative, Anna's passion has already become a nightmare. The task facing Tolstoy is to make her sympathetic - as he certainly succeeds in rendering her convincingly human, particularly when she begins to see compromise as the best form of survival. Levin is more interesting for Tolstoy because Levin's problems are also his.
War and Peaceis an epic, and is set during Napoleon's ill-fated invasion of Russia. It centres on three aristocratic families and as Tolstoy had first-hand experience of a soldier's life, it is an exciting work. To read War and Peace is to live it, it is an experience. The battle scenes are vivid and many of the characters step from the pages. Their preoccupations become our concerns. Anna Karenina is different in that it makes the reader more of a observer than a participant. There is a moral weight to the story - it is a cautionary tale.
Edmundson's play, which was first performed in London in 1992, conveys not only the moral dilemma, but articulates the sense of doom that surrounds Anna. It is no coincidence that Edmundson includes the ballroom scene in which Anna arrives dressed in a black velvet gown. Even the choice of colour expresses Anna's awareness of fate. Another pivotal point in the novel is the steeplechase during which Vronsky's careless riding causes the death of his beloved mare, Frou-Frou. Vronsky laments this event with an emotional depth he never quite lavishes on Anna, upon whose life he has had such an appalling impact.
Edmundson has done far more than adapt a beloved classic to the stage, she has crafted an atmospheric piece of psychological theatre which draws its inspiration and emotional force from the text. She has achieved this not only from a close reading of the text and a clever use of telling detail - she has engaged with the essence of the novel. It is vital not to see Anna as either a tragic heroine or as a victim. She chooses to gamble and pays heavily. It is this which makes the novel so interesting.
While Tolstoy is looking at human behaviour, he is also examining the way society views a man's right to do as he pleases and a woman's duty to defer to convention. These rules are well laid down. Anna's brother has affairs and his wife is expected to forgive him. Long before Anna becomes pregnant by Vronsky, her conversations with him in public are conducted in an overly intimate manner which, as her husband warns her, is not becoming.
Written almost 20 years after Flaubert's Madame Bovary(1857) Anna Karenina, despite its outcome, is not as dark because Anna is not a schemer, she muddles into her disaster. Tolstoy, in common with Ibsen (if without Ibsen's concerns for the rights of women) decided to look at what happens when a woman actively attempts to break free of one situation. Ironically Anna, unlike Nora, is merely exchanging one relationship for another. She is not an idealist, she is a romantic and above all, an egoist.
Tolstoy, as did many 19th-century writers, wrote by instalment. The final instalment did offend many readers, who would have preferred if Anna had died by accident rather than by suicide.
ALMOST A CENTURY has passed since his death at a railway station in 1910. He is acknowledged as one of the defining masters of the novel. War and Piece is a masterpiece set firmly in its time and history, while Anna Kareninais a modern novel. Interestingly, considering the way readers tend to choose one or other of them as Tolstoy's great book, it is important to stress the towering achievement of his unsung late work, Resurrection(1899). This is a sombre miracle which demonstrates exactly how fine a writer, particularly a reporter, Tolstoy was.
It is a remarkable work in which mood, atmosphere and Tolstoy's complex love for Russia overshadows plot and character. Even by the bizarre standards of genius, Count Leo Tolstoy was an enigma, a monster or a saint, a reformer or a sanctimonious hypocrite, and certainly a domestic tyrant, ever battling his spiritual doubts. Yet while the man himself was divided between what he was and the ideal to which he aspired, torn between wealth and idealised poverty, his prose is stately and architectural in contrast to the frenzy of Dostoyevsky's pulsating narratives.
Modern fiction writers continue to aspire to the riches of the 19th-century Russian masters. Tolstoy wrote the big books, and there is no doubt that Pushkin, Turgenev and the magnificent Dostoyevsky continue to inspire. The 19th-century Russian world, divided between aristocrats and peasants, holy idiots, criminals, revolutionaries and madmen, is irresistible. It was Chekhov, the greatest of them all, who said he couldn't live in a world without Tolstoy. He didn't have to - he died at 44, some six years before Tolstoy, whose life was almost twice as long.
At the close of Edmundson's Anna Karenina, her Levin looks to the night stars and confides to Kitty, "I prayed . . . I prayed for you . . . I prayed. And in those moments I believed - with all my heart, I believed. But now everything is dark again and I understand nothing." It echoes the doubts Tolstoy expresses in the closing scenes as Levin debates whether or not he is happy. Anna Karenina is not a happy story. Tolstoy set out to tell a story about life and individual lives, the hopes and the mistakes - and he did.
Anna Karenina opens tomorrow at the Gate Theatre, Dublin
