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Knapp, Liza. Anna Karenina and Others: Tolstoy's Labyrinth of Plots. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016. 326 pp. $79.95 (hardcover).
In Anna Karenina and Others, Liza Knapp offers a thoughtful and penetrating exploration into human relatedness, plot relations, and the links between these two. The book follows Tolstoy's "paradigmatic mode" of composition, as it "plays Anna Karenina off' a series of works Tolstoy knew well to illuminate Tolstoy's use of the multi-plot format to construct meaning. Knapp begins from the claim that "Tolstoy was not just interested in the relations of lovers or family members" when he composed Anna Karenina, but instead in "questions of faith in God and loving one's neighbor" (3). By the end of the book, however, these hardly seem to be separate concerns for Tolstoy; the questions Knapp keeps returning to- who is my neighbor? which others [should I care about]?-seem to include the lover and the family, in addition to neighbors, countrymen, coreligionists, or failed mothers/adulteresses.
"Others" in Knapp's book refers to both the "other" within the text-Anna herself, who goes unmentioned in part eight; "thy neighbor"; or the suffering Slavs in Serbia-and also the other texts with which Tolstoy is in dialogue. Chapter one explores how Tolstoy constructs meaning through parallelisms and contrasts between elements in the different plots he weaves together. Knapp's reading illuminates the potential significance of details- the estate names Pokrovskoe and Vosdvizhenskoe, Levin's relationship to cattle and Vronsky's to horses-that seem to offer a moral message, without reducing Tolstoy to a single simplistic meaning. She is sensitive to the tension between "realism" and the potential symbolic meanings that details can take on, and her analysis stresses the openness and "unfinalizability" of the text. While Dostoevsky is usually credited with coming out of Gogol's overcoat and Tolstoy is traditionally treated as a follower of Pushkin, the main textual "other" Knapp focuses on in this chapter is Gogol's Dead Souls, drawing out points of potential borrowing or re-appropriation.
Chapter two puts Anna Karenina in dialogue with Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850). Knapp treats The Scarlet Letter as a multiplot novel, paralleling Arthur Dimmesdale's quest to save his soul with Levin's plot. "[B]oth...