A good book is the one that whenever you open it, you can always find new inspirations in it.
Apart from social conflicts in this book, such as women emancipation, serfdom, and modern technology invasions (train v.s. carriage), let's talk about the emotions only.
Anna Karenina, our heroine, was kind, intelligent, pretty, and eager for love, however, she was too emotional and worried?too much. She filled her life with only love from others, for instance,?she felt happy when Levin showed his admiration towards Anna. Actually, women, not only men, should have their own life and dream, too. When people only have love but not anything else, they would be so desperate, so sensitive, and this is lethal.
At first, Anna was struggling between love and virtue until she was surrendered into her emotion. On the bed after she delivered Vronsky's daughter, Anna was contradicting with Karenin:"with one feverish hand she held in to his arm, while with the other she pushed him away." She hated Karenin, she hated not only his shortages?but also his virtue. She also felt guilty about Karenin since he was a kind and responsive person. Her rationality was beaten by her sensibility.
She also had a high self-esteem. When she was "destroyed" by her affair, she still insisted on going to the theater, which was a public event. Vronsky thought she wanted:"to show up at the theater in that outfit, with a Princess who is known to everyone, not only means acknowledging your position as a fallen woman, but throwing down the gauntlet to society, that is, renouncing it for ever." Unluckily, her fight failed, and she failed.
On the other hand, Karenin, Anna's husband, was obviously intelligent in business and politics, but not in relationships. He was snobbish;?he only cared about power;?he was ambitious, prudent, and pious.
Vronsky's friend, Serpukhovskoy, said:" Women are the chief stumbling-block in a man's career. It's hard to love a woman and achieve something. There's only one comfortable way of doing that and loving without any stumbling-blocks, and that's marriage." This might also be Karenin's opinion?and always was what Karenin did to Anna?so that he would not sacrifice his career, the only thing Karenin cared about.
Karenin was a coward, a liar; he lied?for power and for social reputation, and he even lied to himself, to persuade himself that Anna was still genuine while all the evidence was so obvious there. Was he a kind person? Maybe. Did he love Anna? Maybe not.
In Part two, Chapter 28, when Anna and Karenin went to watch horse racing that Vronsky failed, Karenin even cannot recognize his own wife from the crowd, while Anna recognized him immediately. "She caught sight of her husband from afar. There were two people who were the focal points of her life, her husband and her lover, and she had no need of external stimuli to be aware of their proximity."
Anna's other man in her life, Vronsky, was urbane, passionate about love. Although he shared the same name with Karenin, he was absolutely opposite with Karenin. He can give Anna the most virtuous and precious thing Anna was pursuing, which is love. The horse racing could be seen as an analogy or a synecdoche?on his relationship with Anna. Everything was charming and exciting at first, but with a slightly fatal mistake, he lost his horse, just like how he lost Anna. He lost her, without even noticing what he has done to her, and the only thing he would live with, was his regret.
Love is important, but love should not be everything.
The second line in this book, Kitty, who lost Vronsky's love and hated Anna deeply, married Levin at last, and had a?happy ending. She suffered the same torment as everyone in this book before:" But on sooner had she opened her mouth than a torrent of reproach driven by meaningless jealousy, and everything that had been tormenting her during that half-hour she had spent sitting motionless on the window-ledge, burst out of her." The difference was, with love and care from Kitty's family, friends, and Levin, Kitty survived and found her own life.
Love makes you happy, and makes you suffer. The tragedy was, they all love themselves more than they love each other.
