I just finished the 10-hour BBC miniseries of Anna Karenina. Never touched the book.
How much am I missing? Is the novel really just a story, and can be filmed without losing much, or do I really need to read to fully appreciate it? I don’t expect a dramatization to be the same as a book, but I mean more whether it can be a substitute.
You didn’t miss much. The series was pretty faithful to the book.
I have to say, I’ve never understood why the world is so gaga over this novel. I thought it was incredibly boring, and I found none of the characters appealing, including (and especially) the “heroine.”
I know that (like in all of his other works) Tolstoy was trying to make moral points, but the whole tone of the book just put me off. I was quite happy when Karenina threw herself under the train at the end.
In one of Heinlein’s novels, The Nature of the Beast, one of the characters mentions that she learned Russian so she could read “those great Russian novels” in the original.
Then she says “Would you believe that something is gained in translation? The originals were even more boring…”
I love Anna Karenina the book, never seen any of the films. Anna herself is a subtle portrait of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage inevitably descending into despair. Personally I find her story unengaging, as the trope of the beautiful spirited wealthy woman destroyed by society’s strictures is boring to me. Maybe I can’t identify with it.
The book lights up for me with Levin and Kitty, and yes, the descriptions of reaping and hunting and serfs and vodka tasting are a big part of the charm. Tolstoy put a lot of himself into Levin.
“Oh, yeah … and as part of our marriage contract, you have to agree to write out all my manuscripts for me, in longhand, as many times as I think it’s necessary. You can start with this new book I’m working on, War and Peace.” :eek:
I enjoyed reading the works of Gogol (once wrote a paper on The Nose, which isn’t about a nose at all :rolleyes: ), Ilf and Petrov, and Solzhenitsyn.
Dostoyevskii’s Crime and Punishment (the Soviet version) made one helluva good movie, but I found the book a bit tedious. Same for War and Peace (again, the Soviet version), mainly because I just like watching Napoleonic battles.
I quite liked MGM’s version of The Brothers Karamazov because it starred Yul Brynner, Richard Basehart, and William Shatner, but I know now it was, uhm, somewhat different from the book.
They are differently great. I enjoyed Dostoyevsky vastly when I was in my teens and early twenties, Tolstoy was only appreciated by mature me, when I stopped identifying so heavily with people who slammed their fingers in doors in self-torture.