B. Anna Karenina as epic
Despite the basic structure of a multiple plot, Anna Karenina is essentially amorphic, lacking what Henry James called a "deep-breathing economy of organic form." Considering, then, the novel as epic prose, we must analyze its temper by contrasting Tolstoy with Homer, rather than his contemporaries like Flaubert or James.
Tolstoy's pagan spirit — his sensual immediacy, his primitive attachment to nature — reflects the Homeric more than the Christian spirit. He himself stated the comparison, remarking of his first works, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, "Modesty aside, they are something like the Iliad." Tolstoyan and Homeric epic have these characteristics in common, writes Steiner: "the primacy of the senses and of physical gesture; the recognition that energy and aliveness are, of themselves, holy; the acceptance of a chain of being extending from brute matter to the stars and along which men have their apportioned places; deepest of all, an essential sanity . . . rather than those dark obliquities in which a genius of a Dostoevsky was most thoroughly at home."
As an epic intrudes "alien materials" among the main themes without disturbing the artistic equilibrium, Anna Karenina embraces excess details, ignoring novelistic form where particulars must all ramify into the main theme. "All things live their own life" in the epic, creating the "proper 'finish' and roundedness out of their own integral significance," writes Steiner. Anna Karenina provides many examples of this epic technique. Vividly describing Laska, Levin's pointer, Tolstoy shows an uncanny insight into a dog's experience. The detailed childbirth scene, his sensual awareness of Anna's "beautiful ring-adorned hands," the sympathetic narrative of Seriozha's daydreams, all testify to this voracious appetite for sensual experience — his "genuine epic temper" in other words. Minor characters also live independently, as do minor characters of Homer. Though Karenin's steward, Korney, for example, appears briefly, we sense he has a past and future as much as his master has. This reverence of life for its own sake, not for the sake of the novel, drives Tolstoy to describe with pagan matter-of-factness whenever his characters dine, sweat, bathe, or think sublime thoughts. These epic qualities generate the power of Tolstoyan novels, allowing them to elude the structural bounds which distinguish the "artistically successful" novel from the more imperfect one.
"The truth is we are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art," Matthew Arnold concluded in a criticism; "we are to take it as a piece of life . . . and what his novel in this way loses in art it gains in reality." Tolstoyan epic, basically a reflection of life, seems a titanic re-creation of life that stands by itself.
