If you are not up to anything right now, go find a copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I am teaching this to our 11th and 12th grades now. It is brilliant. I told my wife that I think it is a flawless novel. (She giggled. I have something like “book crushes”. I fall in love pretty easily and I fall hard—last week was Flannery O’Connor.) Here is why it is flawless. There is nothing wasted in 817 pages. That is amazing. That is semi-miraculous. It is a like a Bach fugue in terrifyingly descriptive prose. It is a massive corrective to the sexual promiscuity of our age—and of continuous lust and flirtation. Tolstoy, following Dante, I believe, strips sin of all its attractiveness and makes us stare at the utter, senseless destruction that is brings. After Anna and Vronsky commit adultery there is no joy, no satisfaction, no exulting. Here is the description that keeps echoing for me and that I am trying to knead into the minds of our oldest students:
She felt so sinful, so guilty, that nothing was left her but to humiliate herself and beg forgiveness, and as now there was no one in her life but him, to him, too, she addressed her prayer for forgiveness. Looking at him, she had a physical sense of her humiliation, and she could say nothing more. And he felt as a murderer must feel when he beholds the body he has robbed of life. That body, robbed by him of life, was their love, the first stage of their love. There was something awful and revolting in the memory of what had been bought at this fearful price of shame. Shame at her spiritual nakedness crushed her and infected him. But in spite of all the murderer's horror before the body of his victim, he must hack it to pieces, hide the body, must use what the murderer had gained by his murder.
Tolstoy, a Christian of sorts—hardly orthodox having some sort of destructive perfectionist tendencies—is a model for the Christian writer and artist in this passage. He makes the wicked appear as it really is. He shows all the destructive horror of sin. Reading this will help to keep you faithful to your wife. This “love” turns the adultery into a person who must kill, carve up and hide the person that he says he “loves.”
O’Connor is great for the same reason. Her stories are 15 pages long. Tolstoy writes on a epic scale. There should be Sunday School classes on this stuff.
