Personality and society in the novel “Anna Karenina” by L. N. Tolstoy
"Anna Karenina" is one of the three epic works and peaks of creativity of the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. This novel depicts life in Russia in the 1870s in the most colorful and varied way. Despite the fact that it lacks famous historical figures or celebrated heroes, there is still a historical phenomenon in the novel. This is the development and transformation of the whole people. The author was much interested in moral and social issues in the current society, so the novel also has a social character. The main storyline of the work is connected precisely with the tragedy of the opposition of the individual to society.
The life of the main character, Anna Karenina, is tragic, and this is where the social implication lies. Being married to an eminent official, she never loved her husband, but respected and treated him well, as moral principles required. Having met true love, she challenged society. In an attempt to save her happiness, she goes against moral canons. Wherein
She cannot forgive herself for this act. As a result, a devastating and oppressive sense of guilt settles in the soul of the heroine. Such a person as Anna could not exist in lies and falsehood. The people around her should have understood and noticed this, but in the ruling circles they were indifferent to the spiritual life of a person.
Opposition to society is also visible in Anna's other actions. She boldly speaks out about women's education and is seen in disputes over women's gymnasiums. Trying to ignore public condemnation and gossip in the world, Anna begins to engage in various useless and artificially far-fetched activities. However, this only aggravates her spiritual decay and leads to a final breakdown. She begins to secretly take strong drugs in order to forget. Anna understands that she has achieved everything she wanted, but the world has not forgiven her openness and honesty. Even Vronsky at a certain moment found himself on the other side, since he did not have a spiritual beginning. Only Levin, a man himself subject to endless spiritual quests, could appreciate the intelligence, simplicity and good beginning in Anna.
The novel clearly shows how ruthless society can be. Even love cannot smooth out this confrontation between the individual and society. It only led to quarrels and misunderstandings between people. The drama of the main character is not only that she is proud and straightforward. This tragedy involved the social fetters in which the woman of the bourgeois-noble society was. According to the laws of this society, a woman had to be deprived of any independence and the right to choose. And Karenina, having the purest moral thoughts, came into conflict with this social phenomenon and lost.
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Tolstoy L.N.
Composition based on the work on the topic: Personality and society in the novel "Anna Karenina
After the end of War and Peace, Tolstoy intensively studied materials about the era of Peter the Great, deciding to dedicate his new work to her. However, modernity soon captured the writer so much that he set about creating, in which he widely and diversified showed post-reform Russian life. This is how the novel "Anna Karenina" arose, which made an unusually strong impression on contemporaries.
Reactionary critics were frightened in the novel by the harsh, with which the writer showed the Russian life of that time with all its sharp contradictions. They were frightened by the harsh condemnation of the "dishonest reality" in which such wonderful people as the heroine of the novel, Anna Karenina, live, suffer, struggle, suffer and perish. They were frightened by the mercilessly bright light directed by the artist to that side of the life of the bourgeois-noble society, about which they themselves preferred to remain silent - about the family theme of the novel.
"Anna Karenina" begins with the words: "All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." And further: "Everything is mixed up in the Oblonskys' house." Then we see an even more unhappy family - the Karenins. Before our eyes, a third family of the same kind, devoid of peace and happiness, is being created and born - Anna and Vronsky. And only the family of Konstantin Levin and Kitty is shown happy. But how much excitement and grief Levin and Kitty experienced before they created their own family!
And Levin's happiness was not serene. He is full of anxiety and anxiety for the future - and his family, and his neighborhood, and all of Russia. Levin is a deeply feeling and thinking person. At the same time, he is a man of action, action. A well-born nobleman, a landowner, he sees that all his efforts to preserve and improve his economy are doomed to failure, that noble landownership will soon come to an end, that a new era is coming, putting forward new forces into the arena of social struggle.
Levin knows the people well and loves them in his own way. He has no doubt that the interests of the peasants are "the most just". However, he still does not dare to break with the nobility and go over to the side of the people. He never found an answer to the questions: how to live, how to manage, what kind of relationship to establish with the peasants? Tolstoy writes that Levin was possessed by "a feeling of inner anxiety and expectation of a close resolution" - the resolution of all conflicts and contradictions that he encountered in reality.
In Levin's mouth, the writer put an eloquent description of the post-reform Russian life with the collapse of the old order and the search for new ways that took place in it. "In our country, all this has turned upside down and is only fitting in," says Levin.
The novel shows how Russian society lived during this period, how the "old foundations" that had been established over the long years of serfdom were broken.
Konstantin Levin spends most of his life in the countryside. Describing his deeds and days, Tolstoy broadly shows rural Russia - the Russia of a landowner and a peasant.
Anna Karenina spent her whole life in the city. Anna most often appears in those chapters of the novel where the Petersburg and Moscow aristocratic society is depicted. The life of this society is shown by the writer as artificial, far from real human interests and goals, full of hypocrisy and falsehood. However, these unsightly features are covered with external brilliance and gloss, and it is not so easy to see them. And even Anna Karenina, such a sensitive and subtle person, did not immediately understand what kind of people surrounded her.
The fate of the heroine of the novel is deeply sad. When Anna was a young girl, her aunt married her to Karenin, a dry, callous man, a prominent official who made a career in the service. A soulless, cold egoist, he even spoke to his son in the language of clerical orders. “This is not a man, but a machine, and an evil machine,” Anna says about him.
Reading the chapters of the novel dedicated to Anna, we clearly see that the reasons for her death lie not only in her passionate and proud character, but also in those social bonds that bind a woman in a bourgeois-noble society. The "laws" of this society deprive a woman of any independence, give her complete subordination to her husband.
The fate of the heroine of the novel is tragic. Full of anxiety for the future Konstantin Levin. And yet the novel does not evoke a feeling of hopelessness in the reader.
There is a wonderful scene in Anna Karenina, which tells how, during a hunt, Levin, walking through the forest, noticed moving old, dry leaves. It was them from below that were pierced by sprouts of young grass, sharp as needles. "What a feeling! You can hear and see the grass growing," Levin said to himself. Drawing the spring renewal of nature, Tolstoy instills in the hearts of his readers the belief that the forces of life are irresistible. He affirms the beauty of living life, its victory over the forces of evil and darkness.
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After finishing work on War and Peace, Tolstoy began to create a work about the Petrine era: he collected a lot of material, made several rough sketches. However, the process of writing moved very slowly. Tolstoy more and more felt the historical remoteness of persons, events and the difficulty associated with this to penetrate into the souls of the people of that time. Not wanting to write about what was contrary to his own plan, he refused to implement it.
Tolstoy, like many of his contemporaries, painfully searched during these years for an answer to the question: what does capitalism bring to Russia, how will the new way of life affect the position of various social classes, especially the peasantry? He was more and more inclined to write a "novel of modern life" that would "take to the soul" and in which philosophical, aesthetic, moral and ethical problems would be expressed through the relationships of people in the family. "The plot of the novel is an unfaithful wife and all the drama that came from it."
The novel "Anna Karenina" was originally conceived as a great epic work on the theme of family life. This is evidenced by at least its beginning: "All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"; the arrangement of figures: Anna and Vronsky, Levin and Kitty, Stiva and Dora Oblonsky, etc. But gradually, as the characters entered the framework of the era described, the novel began to be filled with broad social content. As a result, Tolstoy not only showed the crisis of the old family, which was based on deceitful public morality, but also, by contrasting the artificial life in the family with natural relations between spouses, tried to outline ways out of this crisis. They, according to Tolstoy, are in the awakening of a sense of personality, in the intensive growth of self-consciousness under the influence of the social changes of the era. deliberately breaks with the norms of morality legalized in a noble-bourgeois society.
In the tragedy unfolding between the individual and society, she defends her right to life, to happiness, to love, not constrained by the conventions of high society. Anna's death marks an ending worthy of Hamlet and King Lear.
Another way out of the impasse is Levin's way. Marrying Kitty made Levin a happy family man, but did not alleviate the tragedy of his social position. Perceiving capitalism as a general calamity, Levin opposes its advance in every possible way. He successfully carries out the restructuring of his economy. He fertilizes the land, grows good crops - and all this skillfully, with love and knowledge of the matter. But the feeling that the question of changing the socio-economic structure of the entire country cannot be resolved in this way puts Levin in the face of insoluble contradictions. And he thinks deeply. Comparing his personal life with the life of people from the people, Levin comes to the conclusion: the possibility of overcoming the tragedy of the position of the ruling classes lies in rapprochement with the people. It is important to feel one's innocence before the people, for the truth is on the side of the latter. The common good as a result of the moral improvement of each individual, according to Levin, will come by itself, regardless of the will and efforts from the outside.
Levin's spiritual quest absorbed the painful path of reflection and reflection on the meaning of life of Tolstoy himself for a whole decade after "War and Peace". To some extent, these searches continue the line of Olenin ("Cossacks"), Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov ("War and Peace"), with the only difference that Levin, unlike his predecessors, is looking for the reasons for his own failures not in the absence of useful activity , but in the economic structure of society.
“Through the mouth of K. Levin, in Anna Karenina, L. Tolstoy expressed extremely clearly what the pass of Russian history consisted of ... Now all this has turned upside down in our country and is only just fitting ... Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's new major step towards the heights of realism , a new major phenomenon of his writing skills, which excited wide circles of the public in Russia and abroad," wrote Dostoevsky in his Diary of a Writer.
Reactionary critics were frightened in the novel by the harsh truth with which the writer showed Russian life of that time with all its sharp contradictions. They were frightened by the harsh condemnation of the "dishonest reality" in which such wonderful people as the heroine of the novel, Anna Karenina, live, suffer, struggle, suffer and perish. They were frightened by the mercilessly bright light directed by the artist to that side of the life of the bourgeois-noble society, about which they themselves preferred to remain silent - about the family theme of the novel.
"Anna Karenina" begins with the words: "All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." And further: "Everything is mixed up in the Oblonskys' house." Then we see an even more unhappy family - the Karenins. Before our eyes, a third family of the same kind, devoid of peace and happiness, is being created and born - Anna and Vronsky. And only the family of Konstantin Levin and Kitty is shown happy. But how much excitement and grief Levin and Kitty experienced before they created their own family!
And Levin's happiness was not serene. He is full of anxiety and anxiety for the future - and his family, and his neighborhood, and all of Russia. Levin is a deeply feeling and thinking person. At the same time, he is a man of action, action. A well-born nobleman, a landowner, he sees that all his efforts to preserve and improve his economy are doomed to failure, that noble landownership will soon come to an end, that a new era is coming, putting forward new forces into the arena of social struggle.
Levin knows the people well and loves them in his own way. He has no doubt that the interests of the peasants are "the most just". However, he still does not dare to break with the nobility and go over to the side of the people. He never found an answer to the questions: how to live, how to manage, what kind of relationship to establish with the peasants? Tolstoy writes that Levin was possessed by "a feeling of inner anxiety and expectation of a close resolution" - the resolution of all conflicts and contradictions that he encountered in reality.
In Levin's mouth, the writer put an eloquent description of the post-reform Russian life with the collapse of the old order and the search for new ways that took place in it. "We have ... all this turned upside down and only fits in," says Levin.
The novel shows how Russian society lived during this period, how the "old foundations" that had been established over the long years of serfdom were broken.
Konstantin Levin spends most of his life in the countryside. Describing his deeds and days, Tolstoy broadly shows rural Russia - the Russia of a landowner and a peasant. Anna Karenina spent her whole life in the city. Anna most often appears in those chapters of the novel where the Petersburg and Moscow aristocratic society is depicted. The life of this society is shown by the writer as artificial, far from real human interests and goals, full of hypocrisy and falsehood. However, these unsightly features are covered with external brilliance and gloss, and it is not so easy to see them. And even Anna Karenina, such a sensitive and subtle person, did not immediately understand what kind of people surrounded her. The fate of the heroine of the novel is deeply sad. When Anna was a young girl, her aunt married her to Karenin, a dry, callous man, a prominent official who made a career in the service. A soulless, cold egoist, he even spoke to his son in the language of clerical orders. “This is not a man, but a machine, and an evil machine,” Anna says about him.
Reading the chapters of the novel dedicated to Anna, we clearly see that the reasons for her death lie not only in her passionate and proud character, but also in those social bonds that bind a woman in a bourgeois-noble society. The "laws" of this society deprive a woman of any independence, give her complete subordination to her husband.
The fate of the heroine of the novel is tragic. Full of anxiety for the future Konstantin Levin. And yet the novel does not evoke a feeling of hopelessness in the reader.
There is a wonderful scene in Anna Karenina, which tells how, during a hunt, Levin, walking through the forest, noticed moving old, dry leaves. It was them from below that were pierced by sprouts of young grass, sharp as needles. "What a feeling! You can hear and see the grass growing," Levin said to himself. Drawing the spring renewal of nature, Tolstoy instills in the hearts of his readers the belief that the forces of life are irresistible. He affirms the beauty of living life, its victory over the forces of evil and darkness.
Need to download an essay? Press and save - » The tragedy between the individual and society in the novel "Anna Karenina". And the finished essay appeared in the bookmarks.After the end of War and Peace, Tolstoy intensively studied materials about the era of Peter the Great, deciding to dedicate his new work to her. However, modernity soon captured the writer so much that he set about creating a work in which he showed the post-reform Russian life in a wide and versatile way. This is how the novel "Anna Karenina" arose, which made an unusually strong impression on contemporaries.
Reactionary critics were frightened in the novel by the harsh truth with which the writer showed Russian life of that time with all its sharp contradictions. They were frightened by the harsh condemnation of the “dishonest reality” in which such wonderful people as the heroine of the novel Anna Karenina live, suffer, struggle, suffer and die. They were frightened by the mercilessly bright light directed by the artist to that side of the life of the bourgeois-noble society, about which they themselves preferred to remain silent - about the family theme of the novel.
"Anna Karenina" begins with the words: "All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." And further: "Everything was mixed up in the Oblonskys' house." Then we see an even more unhappy family - the Karenins. Before our eyes, a third family of the same kind, devoid of peace and happiness, is being created and born - Anna and Vronsky. And only the family of Konstantin Levin and Kitty is shown happy. But how much excitement and grief Levin and Kitty experienced before they created their own family!
And Levin's happiness was not serene. He is full of anxiety and anxiety for the future - and his family, and his neighborhood, and all of Russia. Levin is a deeply feeling and thinking person. At the same time, he is a man of deeds, actions. A well-born nobleman, a landowner, he sees that all his efforts to preserve and improve his economy are doomed to failure, that noble landownership will soon come to an end, that a new era is coming, pushing into the arena of public fighting new forces.
Levin knows the people well and loves them in his own way. He has no doubt that the interests of the peasants are "the most just". However, he still does not dare to break with the nobility and go over to the side of the people. He never found an answer to the questions: how to live, how to manage, what kind of relationship to establish with the peasants? Tolstoy writes that Levin was possessed by "a feeling of inner anxiety and expectation of a close resolution" - the resolution of all conflicts and contradictions that he encountered in reality.
In Levin's mouth, the writer put an eloquent description of the post-reform Russian life with the collapse of the old order and the search for new ways that took place in it. “We have… it all turned upside down and is only fitting in,” says Levin.
The novel shows how Russian society lived during this period, how the “old foundations” that had been established over the long years of serfdom were broken.
Konstantin Levin spends most of his life in the countryside. Describing his deeds and days, Tolstoy broadly shows rural Russia - the Russia of a landowner and a peasant.
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Anna Karenina spent her whole life in the city. Anna most often appears in those chapters of the novel where the Petersburg and Moscow aristocratic society is depicted. The life of this society is shown by the writer as artificial, far from real human interests and goals, full of hypocrisy and falsehood. However, these unsightly features are covered with external brilliance and gloss, and it is not so easy to see them. And even Anna Karenina, such a sensitive and subtle person, did not immediately understand what kind of people surrounded her.
The fate of the heroine of the novel is deeply sad. When Anna was a young girl, her aunt married her to Karenin, a dry, callous man, a prominent official who made a career in the service. A soulless, cold egoist, he even spoke to his son in the language of clerical orders. “This is not a man, but a machine, and an evil machine,” Anna says about him.
Reading the chapters of the novel dedicated to Anna, we clearly see that the reasons for her death lie not only in her passionate and proud character, but also in those social bonds that bind a woman in a bourgeois-noble society. The "laws" of this society deprive a woman of any independence, give her complete subordination to her husband.
The fate of the heroine of the novel is tragic. Full of anxiety for the future Konstantin Levin. And yet the novel does not evoke a feeling of hopelessness in the reader.
There is a wonderful scene in Anna Karenina, which tells how, during a hunt, Levin, walking through the forest, noticed moving old, dry leaves. It was them from below that were pierced by sprouts of young grass, sharp as needles. “What! I can hear and see how the grass is growing,” Levin said to himself. Drawing the spring renewal of nature, Tolstoy instills in the hearts of his readers the belief that the forces of life are irresistible. He affirms the beauty of living life, its victory over the forces of evil and darkness.
