So says Joshua Rothman in an enlightening account of why we shouldn't confuse the movie version of Anna Karenina (directed by British filmmaker Joe Wright and screen-written by Tom Stoppard) with Leo Tolstoy's novel of the same name.
Anna Karenina the film, according to Rothman, predicates itself on romantic love, whereas Tolstoy's is not a love story: "if anything, it is a warning against the myth and the cult of love."
I agree with Rothman when he says that it wouldn't have been possible for Tolstoy to conceive of a romantic love story, not because Tolstoy didn't have a romantic bone in his body, but because he had conceived of love as one of the many significant things that, when indulged in without discretion, can have extreme consequences:
Tolstoy, when he wrote the novel, was thinking about love in a different way: as a kind of fate, or curse, or judgment, and as a vector by which the universe distributes happiness and unhappiness, unfairly and apparently at random.
Rothman's reflective piece makes me want to read Anna Karenina--again.
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