Helenistic | You Tube | May 9, 2000
Anna Karenina is the young wife of an older husband. She has an affair with the handsome Count Vronsky. By following her desires, Anna complicates her life.
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How should a woman live her life? Survive to the age of 70, fearfully, being as everyone else instructs her to be? Or play the heroine, passionately, in the knowledge that trying and failing need not equal defeat?
This is the timeless conundrum Tolstoy’s vivid heroine, Anna Karenina, took on, long before it became fashionable to discuss the conflict of desire and expectation in women’s lives. She was an original of her era, but what are the resonances of Anna’s story for the modern woman?
Born into the wealthy, decadent upper class of 19th-century St Petersburg, Anna confronts the hypocrisy of the day when she breaks free of an empty marriage after falling in love with army officer Vronsky. She scandalises her contemporaries when she chooses to live with him as his mistress, after her husband refuses her a divorce. But her passion for her lover is tempered by the pain of leaving her son and the disapproval heaped on her by the Russian aristocracy. Spiralling into depression and opium addiction, she starts to doubt Vronsky. A bout of morbid jealousy tips her over the edge and she throws herself under a train.
Tolstoy can’t have known, when writing a novel back in the 1870s, that trains rushing into tunnels would become a cinematic euphemism for sex. But his book about a Moscow political wife’s passion for a soldier – in which the speed of trains is a metaphor for the dangers and consequences of sexual passion – has consistently attracted film-makers. David Selznick cast Garbo in 1935, while Alexander Korda chose Vivien Leigh for the role in 1947. More recently, the writer-director Bernard Rose made a movie version with Sophie Marceau. Now Helen McCrory stars in a new four-part TV adaptation of Anna Karenina (Tuesday, 9pm, Channel 4).
Penelope Fitzgerald – a fine novelist who died last week – once expressed the hope that television would soon run out of great novels to adapt, and return literature to readers. But, although there are the inevitable losses – authorial tone and psychological complexity – Anna Karenina is, at the basic but crucial level of plot, the perfect book for TV.