Anna Karenina

 There is a rumour going around that says that when William Faulkner was asked which were the three best novels of all time his reply was: "Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, and Anna Karenina". That is high praise from an author I do not know. I have heard of him. I have not read any of his novels, but his reply now makes me very sceptical of anything he might have written. Not that I think that Anna Karenina is bad, it is just that it is not even the best Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace is a masterpiece that is far superior to Anna Karenina. But let us leave it at that.
  Now, when I think of the past I usually think of it as atavistic. I say that in a negative way. We should not be fooled by the splendor of empires, the unchecked power of the nobility, the palaces and the superstitious religious rituals. Think of the rigid social hierarchy, of the oppressive classism, of the unbending gender roles and consequently of sexism and the invisible misogyny. Invisible to the eyes of most of the members of past societies. Now, of course, all of that is still very much present in contemporary societies. But Anna Karenina is testament of how much worse it was in the past. Who killed Anna Karenina? Let me answer the question: it was the patriarchy. Interestingly—yet completely as expected from someone who was born in the third decade of the nineteenth century—the word "patriarchy" appears exactly zero times in Anna Karenina. I know very little of Leo Tolstoy but I am choosing to believe that he joins me in sympathising with Anna Karenina. Not because she was an exemplary human being—we know that like all of us she was deeply flawed. But because of the cruel way that she was treated by society. Some of the characters in Anna Karenina behave in a way that, to me, they are evidence that at least there were some people who had a nagging sense that there was something wrong with the double standards between men and women. That is what, in turn, makes me believe that Leo Tolstoy was one of them, and that hence this novel was at least in part critical of society. Assuming that I am right in saying that, it is therefore impressive that a man of the nineteenth century could write a novel that, however tangentially, was aware of the problems that women faced in the society he lived in. I say "man of the nineteenth century" but in reality, I wonder if is possible for a man of the twenty-first century to be that aware of the struggles that women nowadays go through every single day. Perhaps we are more aware of them now. Hence us now using words like "patriarchy" to refer to something that was left unsaid in Anna Karenina. That awareness is what makes Anna Karenina so special, and so worth reading and recommending to others.