Learning to Dine with Sinners

The Great Works Can Teach You How

I just finished re-reading Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. If there were no Brothers Karamazov, it would be the undisputed best Russian novel of all time. If there were no David Copperfield, it would stand alone as the best novel from anywhere ever.

The nature of its greatness is difficult to pin down, but part of it has to do with the work Tolstoy did to remove the morality — or at least the moralism — from the story.

For all its eight hundred plus pages, the novel tells a simple, almost plotless tale of two marriages. One is the marriage of Anna and her statesman husband Alexei Karenin. He’s cold and withdrawn. She’s a beauty of dazzling energy and warmth. It is giving little away to say that the novel’s single major plot point is Anna’s adulterous love affair with a dashing cavalry officer, a passion that destroys her family life.

The novel’s other marriage, based on Tolstoy’s own, is between Konstantin Levin, a landowner, and his princess, Kitty. It is a delightful business of passionate devotion, petty spats, and profound reconciliations. It is an illustration of parenthood’s magical power to give new depth and meaning to life, and the ways in which married love can point ultimately to God.

If that sounds like a didactic moral lesson in how the sin of adultery destroys the center of human happiness, that seems to be exactly what Tolstoy intended it to be. According to translator Richard Pevear, at the time the book was written, in the 1870’s, “the radical intelligentsia had been attacking the ‘institution’ of the family for more than a decade. Newspapers, pamphlets, ideological novel-tracts… advocated sexual freedom, communal living and the communal raising of children. Questions of women’s education, women’s enfranchisement, the role of women in public life, were hotly debated in the press.” Tolstoy, on the other hand, believed “marriage and childrearing were a woman’s essential tasks, and family happiness was the highest human ideal.” His novel was meant to illustrate his point of view.

The stakes of this disagreement were as high then as they are now. Less than 40 years after the novel was published, the radicals would win the day. The result was a nation crushed under a socialist system of oppression and mass murder that made the reign of the Tsars look like an episode of Teletubbies. As it turns out, homemaking and motherhood (as certain irritating conservative podcasters keep trying to tell everyone) are the necessary foundations of human liberty.

So Tolstoy intended the novel to be a polemic, and thought he could dash it off in a couple of weeks. When he began writing, he depicted Anna as “a rather fat and vulgar married woman, who shocks the guests at a party by her shameless conduct with a handsome young officer.” The happiness of Levin and Kitty was supposed to shake a stern finger at Anna’s careless and shallow adultery.

But in fact, the novel took Tolstoy four years to write. And over that time, Anna slowly morphed into the enchanting character she is now. Her adultery became, if not blameless, at least understandable. It’s hard to read about the behavior of her husband without wanting to smack him upside the head and say, “Schmuck, you’re gonna lose that girl.”

More than this, Tolstoy takes you so deeply into Anna’s perspective that you can’t help but live her story with her. The pages that conclude her part of the novel are an immortal work of art in themselves, some of the most brilliant and insightful writing in all of fiction.

As a result of this compassionate realism, I was a couple of hundred pages into the book before I thought to myself, “Oh! This is a novel about the terrible sin of adultery!” And by then, I was — mentally — seeing the sin from within. In fact, with the exceptions of one or two brief authorial asides, it would be possible for a socialist or some other sort of idiot to argue that the book is about how restrictive marriage is, about what an oppressive state it is for men and women both. One of the novel’s most charming and, in some ways, good-hearted characters is a serial male adulterer. Motherhood has robbed his wife of her looks and vivacity. For him, the occasional fling solves that particular problem. It breaks his wife’s heart but it does not stop her, or us, from loving him.

In my long twilight struggle to convince American conservatives and other lovers of political liberty that the arts are essential to winning the heart of a nation, there has been one stumbling block that has been greater than any other: it is almost impossible to make conservatives see that conservative art does not need to depict, praise or teach conservative values. It merely has to show life as it is, including its spiritual and moral underpinnings. An art of strong-jawed heroes, doting wives and Christian verities — an art where good guys always win and bad guys always suffer — an art where faith and prayer and angelic forces solve your problems — is no art at all. Because life isn’t like that, such art can’t speak about life in any plausible way. It can’t reach into our sorrowful and messy world with anything that looks like comfort or understanding.

The purpose of art is to communicate the experience of being human. It is a snapshot of the eternal truths of human nature captured in time. Art is not a passive business. It requires a response from the reader. If you come to a novel like Anna Karenina with no notion of good and evil, I’m not convinced the story will give it to you. But if you arrive with some feeling for your neighbor’s welfare, you will walk away with an understanding that both good and evil have a human face — and they must be met with compassion if you are ever going to learn that that human face is your own.

Art at its best is practice in judging not, at accepting people as reality gives them to us, at feeling for them as they — and you — truly are. A novel like Anna Karenina gives you the answer to the question: Why do you dine with sinners? And it can teach you how it’s done.

Conservatives seem to fear that if they participate in that practice, if they open the tightly clinched fists of their moralism, morality itself will fly away. For myself, I think you will lose only the capacity to condemn uselessly what might have been lovingly transformed.