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Essay Judgment in Anna Karenina

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The question of judgment and sympathies in Anna Karenina is one that seems to become more complicated each time I read the novel. The basic problem with locating the voice of judgment is that throughout the novel, there are places where we feel less than comfortable with the seemingly straightforward, at times even didactic presentation of Anna and Vronsky's fall into sin alongside Levin's constant moral struggle. As Anna's story unfolds in its episodic manner within the context of the rest of the novel, Tolstoy seems to be trying to make the fact of her guilt more and more clear to us; at the same time though, we have more and more difficulty in tracing out the specific locus of that guilt. In a novel as consummately constructed …show more content…

There is something very resonant about the "stupid smile"(3) Stiva gives Dolly as she confronts him with the evidence of his philandering‹he is made to seem constitutionally incapable of an appropriate response.

In an irony almost too glaring to call irony, Anna enters on to this scene in the role of restorer of her brother's familial harmony. Before she is off the train from Moscow though, before her name even appears in the text, the seduction has begun. From the moment Vronsky sets eyes on her, the narrator makes it abundantly clear that the attraction and flirtation are, on Anna's part anyway, genuine and involuntary. When she looks back at Vronsky as he has stood aside to let her leave the carriage, Tolstoy, through Vronsky, notes

"the restrained animation that played over her face and fluttered between her shining eyes and the barely noticeable smile that curved her red lips. It was as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will, now in

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