The Gilmore Book Club

Can Anna Karenina teach you how to interact with others?

Do you ever dream that you’re back in high school? Well I do, and it often includes me panicking because I’ve forgotten some important paper or test and just know I’m going to fail. When I wake up, I’m flooded with relief as I realize my high school days are far behind me. No more homework, no more tests, no more pretending I care- even a little bit- about football. I don’t miss anything about high school, except for my friends.

Ever since kindergarten, I’ve had an issue with making friends and them losing them. For most of Elementary and Middle school, I would find a new bestie and after about a year, they would move away, and the friendship-making process would start all over. It wasn’t until 8th grade that my friend broke the pattern when her parents decided not to move, and she and I would be going to the same high school. From there, my friend group expanded. My immediate group of friends, and the ones I was with the most, consisted of eight girls, two of which conveniently lived in my neighborhood. By my junior and senior year, every class had several friends that made up my extended circle. For each group of friends in each class, we even had inside jokes and secret languages conveyed by single look so we could talk about everything that was happening in class. My graduating class was large, about 400, so it was impossible to know everyone, but it felt as if I did. When I compare my social situation now with what it was then, it seems so different. My social circle, which was at one point so large, has now dwindled down. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m lucky if I get to see some of my friends once a year as we all live so far away from each other, and I’ve moved away from where I grew and all the people I grew up with. But still, how did I go from having so many friends, to having so few?

Anna Karenina, a dazzling darling in the19th Century Russian society, seems to have it all: good looks, a good marriage, and good friends. Well, at least she seems to have it all. I’ll take Tolstoy’s word on her looks, but her marriage is undeniably not so good. Devoid of love and companionship, her marriage was simply a good match, and though it resulted in a child she cherishes, Anna is not happy. And so begins the love affair of Anna Arkadyenva Karenina and Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky. Personally, I favor the sweet and adorable love story that blossoms between Kitty and Levin. (And as they’re my favorites, I’m introducing them by their nicknames here as if we were intimate friends, and am leaving out the three-name titles called patronyms by which everyone is introduced and often referred to.)

The lives of these characters are interwoven with fate. Chance meetings spark love affairs, heartbreaking disasters, and change destinies, but through all this, the Russian society observes its members, commenting on everyone’s every move and crushing hearts and feelings as easily as it creates moments of happiness.

But there are those who navigate society better than others. I bet you can think of at least one person who can always light up a room, who can make you feel like you’ve been friends for years even though you’ve just met, and never falter when in need of a topic of conversation. A person who makes you feel seen, appreciated, and celebrated. Anna Karenina is such a person.

Though not the right person to look to for how to keep your marriage vows or how not to steal the guy your friend is in love with, Anna, as well as a few others in the novel, may be a good model for how to socialize.

I’ve lived in three major cities since I graduated high school and for each one, besides when I moved to NY and knew my roommate and my sister, I knew no one. I had to start building my society from nothing. Building strong relationships takes time, but, as many other internet articles have chronicled, it can be more difficult to make friends as an adult than as children. Our schedules and responsibilities encase us in a web so time consuming to dismantle, that even making the time for fostering friendships is a trial, not to mention actually having meaningful conversations, bonding experiences, and building trust and devotion. All those things take time, but they also take genuine forms of love and friendship.

I’ve often thought of those people whom everyone instantly likes. How nice it must be to make friends everywhere you go, to be able to connect with so many people on a personal level. How nice it must be to have so many social circles in which you always feel at home.

When all the world is against you, it’s easier to feel stronger and better able to fight back if you have a good friend by your side, one who is willing to listen to your troubles and to offer solace and assistance. Anna Karenina’s characters often rush to each others’s sides during times of crisis to lend their help or simply be a shoulder to cry on. In fact, the very first time the titular character is introduced, she is traveling to see her brother and sister-in-law’s to try and reconcile their marital troubles. If life were like literature, or at least this novel, we’d be less isolated and less focused on work and more devoted to our friends and families. But how do we get there? How do I get there?

What if I could ignore Anna Karenina’s adultery and the agriculture and the Russian politics, and focus on the social interactions? What if I studied how the characters carried on a conversation and formed new relations? What if the answers to building my New York society were hidden in the over 900 pages of one of Tolstoy’s most famous works?

Continue to Part 2

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