“I took Anna Karenina along for the trip and have read it
through with very great interest. I hardly know whether to call it a very bad
book or not. There are two entirely distinct stories in it; the connection
between Levine’s story and Anna’s is of the slightest and need have existed at
all. Levine’s and Kitty’s history is not only very powerfully and naturally
told, but it is also perfectly healthy. Anna’s most certainly is not, though of
great and sad interest; she is portrayed as being a prey to the most violent
passions, and subject to melancholia, and her reasoning power is so unbalanced
that she could not possibly be described otherwise than as in a certain sense
insane. Her character is curiously contradictory; bad as she was however she
was not to me nearly as repulsive as her brother Stiva.”
For all its worth, I also like the story of Levin and Kitty
much more than that of Anna and Vronsky. But I don’t think that Anna was
insane. Now Adele
H. certainly was. Her story is told in a great movie but a very sad one.
It’s about a woman loving too much and losing everything, including her mind. Would
I know where to draw a line? I would not.
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