Anna Karenina vs. The Museum of Innocence: Tolstoy/Pamuk Mash-up

While home on vacation, I was watching “Charlie Rose,” which is always a good idea. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that the guest was Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 Nobel Laureate from Turkey, was talking about his new book, The Museum of Innocence. I started reading Pamuk’s books in 2007 when I was traveling in Turkey. I have to say that I don’t actually think his novels are all that good--after I finished both Snow and My Name is Red, I had the feeling that I had read a long, strange book about basically nothing. I’m a pretty big fan of his memoir Istanbul: Memories of the City, however, and through that book have come to appreciate his writing style, which is sentimental and self-aware of being sentimental at the same time. Istanbul is all about Pamuk finding himself through wandering through the old neighborhoods of Istanbul. After reading it, I often fancied myself to be Tempe’s Orhan Pamuk while riding my bike through Tempe’s more dilapidated neighborhoods!

In the interview, Charlie Rose asked Pamuk what he thought was the greatest novel of all time, and Pamuk answered “Anna Karenina” without any hesitation. This interested me, since people usually pick War and Peace for the greatest novel of all time if they are into Tolstoy. To explain his love of Tolstoy, Pamuk retold an anecdote about Nabokov, who once explained Tolstoy’s writing style by simply opening a window in a dark classroom. His point: Tolstoy has a way of lighting up the entire room for you in every scene. He also talked about his new novel The Museum of Innocence, which I fortuitously received for Christmas. I just finished it a few days ago and was struck by the similarities to Anna Karenina. Both Anna Karenina and The Museum of Innocence are explorations of unhappy people in unhappy relationships and how they got that way.

So, I decided to try my hand at a little literary analysis. I haven’t read Anna Karenina in about three years, but I think I can pull it off. You can take the girl out of AP English, but you can’t take the AP English out of the girl!

Both The Museum of Innocence and Anna Karenina are essentially about women who rebel against restrictive social codes in 1860s Russia and 1970s Turkey, respectively. Anna, a married woman, has an affair with Vronsky, and Füsun, the heroine of The Museum of Innocence, has premarital sex with her distant relative Kemal (the narrator). These violations eventually earn them the scorn of society and a great deal of unhappiness. At the end, both choose death by machine: Anna throws herself under a train and Füsun drives a car into a tree. Their deaths symbolize the fact that their decision to violate sexual mores was essentially choosing to throw themselves into the gears of an unfeeling social machine. The endings of these novels are both tragic and arguably misogynist. Are the authors lamenting the restrictive social codes that destroy Anna and Füsun, or are they “punishing” these heroines for their transgressions? Are they saying that women who break sexual codes destroy their potential happiness? The gendered element of these stories is what makes them so compelling.

The settings are also quite interesting. Both Pamuk and Tolstoy see themselves as chroniclers of a particular socio-historical moment. Tolstoy captures the time of Tsar Alexander II, the “Tsar-Liberator,” which was an era of modernization in Russia. The serfs had been freed, but society still was remained traditional in many ways. You had to get permission from the tsar to get a divorce! Pamuk sets his story in 1970s Istanbul, during a time of terrorism and political upheaval in Turkey. Pamuk lovingly records the details of the historical moment down the brands of soda and the movie posters. In fact, the preservation and reification of these quotidian details is one of the main themes of The Museum of Innocence.

Both authors record the glittery and cruel workings of an élite, Westernized social class that is alienated from the main mass of society. Tolstoy’s aristocrats may at least speak Russian (unlike their forebears in War and Peace, who mainly speak French), but they can’t relate to the peasant class. When Levin tries to show his belief in equality by working with the ex-serfs on his estate, he knows he is making a fool of himself in front of them and his social peers. Try as he might, an aristocrat isn’t the same as a muzhik and they both know it. Likewise, the rich Istanbul élite described in Pamuk’s novel are educated abroad and have partially absorbed Western values. This only seems to make them more frustrated as they attempt to live Western sexual mores in a society that remains traditional. Pamuk constantly contrasts the Western, sometimes hedonistic values of Kemal and the conservative, religious values of his driver Çetin. At the same time, neither of these two aristocracies has succeeded in fully digesting the European culture they mimic. They are still peripherally Western cultures with more than a whiff of the East about them. Not quite authentically Russian or Turkish, not quite Western, they are caught in an uncomfortable limbo.

Both of these books succeed because they present complex characters in complex societies. You can definitely feel Tolstoy’s influence in Pamuk’s writing: a strong sense of character and tragedy, a desire to tell a compelling story rather than moralize. Pamuk is definitely striving to deserve his Nobel laurels, trying to capture the obsessions and ennui of his own people for history. Overall, I would highly recommend both of these books to anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of reading them. Both novels are stimulating, readable, and quite rewarding!

Well, how did I do? Any comments from the Russian literature fans/Orientalists/English teachers out there?

PS--Coincidentally, as I post this I am listening to "One for the Cutters" by the Hold Steady, which has the similar theme of a woman who violates social mores and class boundaries!

Analogy: The Hold Steady : Minneapolis :: Tolstoy : Russia?