Comparison Paper
ANNA KARENINA/DOCTOR ZHIVAGO

Sonya | Russian Literature | February 10, 2016

Summary of Anna Karenina
A crisis develops in the Oblonsky household when Dolly finds out about her husband's affair. Stiva's sister, Anna Karenina, arrives to reconcile the couple and dissuades Dolly from getting a divorce. Konstantin Levin, Stiva's friend, arrives in
Moscow to propose to the eighteen year old Kitty Shtcherbatsky. She refuses him, for she loves Count Vronsky, a dashing army officer who has no intentions of marrying. Meeting the lovely Madame Karenina, Vronsky falls in love and begins to pursue her.
Kitty falls ill after a humiliating rejection by Vronsky. At the German spa where she takes a rest cure she tries to deny her womanly nature by becoming a religious do-gooder. Realizing the hypocrisy of this new calling, Kitty returns to Russia cured of her depression and ready to accept her ultimate wifehood.
Consummating her union with Vronsky, Anna steps into a new life with much foreboding for the future. By the time she confesses her adultery to the suspecting
Karenin, she is already pregnant with Vronsky's child
Devoting himself to farming, Levin tries to find life meaningful without marriage.
He expends his energies in devising a cooperative landholding system with his peasants to make the best use of the land. Seeing his brother Nicolai hopelessly ill with tuberculosis, he realizes he has been working to avoid facing the problem of death. He also realizes he will always love Kitty.
Vronsky's career ambitions rival his love, and as he has not chosen between them, he is still uncommitted to Anna. Having rejected her husband, but still unable to depend on Vronsky, Anna finds her situation desperate. Her life is in a state of suspension. Kitty and Levin are engaged to marry. Karenin, who has tried to maintain appearances of domestic tranquillity, finally builds up enough anger to hire a divorce lawyer. Anna is confined of a daughter, but dangerously ill from puerperal fever. At her deathbed, Karenin forgives her and feels sanctified by this surge of humanity and Christian charity. At this sudden reversal of their roles Vronsky feels so humiliated he attempts suicide. These incidents form the turning point of the novel. After Anna's recovery, the lovers go abroad and Anna refuses divorce
(though Karenin agrees to it) for fear of giving up her son

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Levin and Kitty, after some initial difficulties, adjust to being married. Nicolai's death affects Levin deeply, and he realizes that emotional commitment, not reason, enables one to overcome life's problems. As if to underscore his lifeaffirmation, they learn Kitty is pregnant.
After they honeymoon in Italy, Anna and Vronsky return to Petersburg. Violently affected from seeing her son again, Anna's love for Vronsky becomes more desperate now that she has no one else. Despite his objections, she boldly attends the theater as if to affirm her love before conventional society. Humiliated at the opera, she blames Vronsky for lacking sympathy with her suffering, while he is angry at her indiscretion. This keynotes the decline of their relationship, although it is temporarily restored as they go to live in the country.
Among Levin's summer visitors is a socialite who pays so much attention to Kitty that Levin asks him to leave. Visiting Anna at Vronsky's estate, Dolly finds her own drab life preferable to the formal luxury and decadence of Anna's. Complaining that Vronsky is eager for independence, Anna tells Dolly she must rely on her beauty and her love to keep his interest. Vronsky feels especially burdened by the demands of Anna's love when she calls him home from a refreshing political convention. Kitty gives birth to a son. Karenin, under the influence of his fanatically devout friend, Countess Lydia Ivanovna, becomes religious and uses his hypocritical faith as a crutch to overcome his humiliation and loneliness. Anna, seeing the irreversible decline of her love affair, has no more will to live and commits suicide.
Vronsky volunteers for service in the Russo-Turkish war. Tolstoy uses this part of the novel to express his pacifist principles. Levin discovers salvation" when he resolves to "live for his soul" rather than for selfish goals. He realizes the meaning of life consists in living according to the goodness inherent in every individual.
Understanding death as part of a reality-oriented life, Levin is at peace with himself Summary of Doctor Zhivago

Doctor Zhivago is the story of Yury Zhivago, a man torn between his love for two women while caught in the tumultuous course of twentieth century Russia. Yury's mother dies when he is still a young boy, and he is raised by his uncle Kolya. He

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enrolls at the university in Moscow, studying medicine. There he meets Tonya, and the two marry and have a son, Sasha.
Yury becomes a medical officer in the army and is stationed in a small town. He meets Lara, a woman whom he has met before. Once when he visited the house of a woman who tried to commit suicide, and he saw Lara, the woman's daughter, exchanging glances with an older man, Komarovsky. And again when Lara tried to shoot Komarovsky at a party and instead wounded a prosecutor from the courts.
Lara is married to Pasha, a young soldier who is missing, and she has come west to find him. She has a daughter, Katya, whom she has left in Yuryatin.
Yury is captivated by Lara, but he returns to his wife and son in Moscow. Times are difficult, and the family must struggle to find food and firewood. They decide to move east to Varyniko, an estate once owned by Tonya's grandfather but now being worked as a collective. The journey is long and difficult, but when they arrive they find plenty of food and wood. Yury goes to the nearest city, Yuryatin, to use the library. There, he sees Lara once more. They begin an affair that lasts two months before Yury decides to break off contact and confess all to his wife. On his way, he is captured by the partisan army, which conscripts him as a medical officer. Yury is forced to remain with the army through the end of the war between the
Tsarist Whites and the Communist Reds. When he is released, he returns to
Yuryatin to find Lara. The two spend several months together, and then they go to
Varykino to hide. Lara's former husband, Pasha, became a leader in the Urals but is now wanted. Komarovsky returns and urges them to go east with him to avoid being killed. Yury's family has been exiled to Paris, and he is promised the opportunity to join them. Yury tricks Lara into taking her daughter and going with
Komarovsky, while he remains at Varykino.
Yury returns to Moscow and finds work. He begins living with Marina, the daughter of a family friend. He and Marina have two children. Yury's old friends
Misha and Nicky encourage him to resolve his divided loyalties toward Tonya and
Marina. He finds a new job but on the way to his first day at work he dies of a heart attack. Lara comes to the funeral and asks Yury's half-brother, a lawyer, if there is any way to track the location of a child given away to strangers. She stays for several days and then disappears, likely dying in a concentration camp. Years later,
Misha and Nicky are fighting in World War II and encounter a laundry-girl, Tanya,

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who tells them her life story. They determine that she is the daughter of Lara and
Yury.
The Main Female Character
Anna is the beautiful, and educated wife of Alexei Karenin, a cold and dull government official. Her character is complex: she is guilty of desecrating her marriage and home, for instance, but she remains noble and admirable nonetheless. Anna is intelligent and literate, a reader of English novels and a writer of children’s books. She is elegant, and understated in her dress. Her many years with Karenin show her capable of playing the role of cultivated, beautiful, society wife and hostess with great grace. She is very nearly the ideal aristocratic Russian wife of the 1870s.
Among Anna's most prominent qualities are her passionate spirit and determination to live life on her own terms. She is a feminist heroine of sorts.
Though disgraced, she dares to face St. Petersburg high society and refuses the exile to which she has been condemned, attending the opera when she knows very well she will meet with nothing but scorn and derision. Anna is a martyr to the old-fashioned Russian patriarchal system and its double standard for male and female adultery. Her brother, Stiva, is far looser in his morals but is never even chastised for his womanizing, whereas Anna is sentenced to social exile and suicide. Moreover, Anna is deeply devoted to her family and children, as we see when she sneaks back into her former home to visit her son on his birthday.
Anna’s refusal to lose Seryozha is the only reason she refuses Karenin’s offer of divorce, even though this divorce would give her freedom.
The governing principle of Anna’s life is that love is stronger than anything, even duty. She remains powerfully committed to this principle. She rejects Karenin’s request that she stay with him simply to maintain outward appearances of an intact marriage and family. In the later stages of her relationship with Vronsky,
Anna worries most that he no longer loves her but remains with her out of duty only. Her exile from civilized society in the later part of the novel is a symbolic rejection of all the social conventions we normally accept dutifully. She insists on following her heart alone. As a result, Anna contrasts with with the ideal of living for God and goodness that Levin embraces in the last chapter, and she appears self-centered by comparison. Even so, Anna’s insistence on living according to the

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dictates of her heart makes her a pioneer, a woman searching for autonomy and passion in a male-dominated society.

The Main Female Character of Dr Zhivago
Larisa Antipova is a bit hard to describe on her own because the book is written entirely in Yury’s point of view, so much of what we know of her is what he sees.
She a poor, but beautiful, smart student and she is always looking for something to spice up her life. She is manipulated into having an affair with her mother’s boyfriend and she find it thrilling at first but soon realizes how wrong it is and takes a job far away from her mother just to get away fro him. She grows to resent what he did to her and attempt to kill him but she fails. Yury meets her for a second time when he is called (as a doctor) to respond to the attempted murder.
She later falls madly in love with Pasha Antipov and it is strange when he suddenly decides to join the army. She becomes a nurse so that she can travel with him, but not long after joining she learns that he is MIA and presumably dead.
Soon after she starts seeing Yury as a friend and eventually they have sex. But she is uncomfortable because she is friends with Yurys wife Tonya. She later finds out that her husband is alive and she realizes that she loves her husband more than
Yury. In the end both of her lovers are dead and she is left with only regret. She dies in a concentration camp.
Anna is a woman who is ruled by emotion and Lara is not.

The Influence of religion in the books
In Anna Karenina, religion rules most of the decisions. There is a need to be following all the rules of the Orthadox faith. Kitty’s decision to become a nun was based in her duty to God. Annas decision to stay with her husband was partly based in religion and partly based in the rules of society. In Doctor Zhivago not very many deciions were based in faith. Lara was not a religious woman. Yury was a religious man and his decision to stay with his wife was based in faith. Compared to Anna Karenina, Doctor Zhivago was a godless book.

The Changes in the World during the books
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In Doctor Zhivago, the empirial family had just been overthrown and the Soviet
Union had not been formed yet. The Red Guard was formed to take over the government and the White Palace was captured. And the Russian Civil War had just started which lasted until 1921. The government adopted war communism which entailed the breakup of the land estates and the forcible seizure of agricultural surpluses. In the cities there were intense food shortages and a breakdown in the money system. At the time many Bolsheviks argued that ending money's role as a transmitter of "value" was a sign of the rapidly approaching communist epoch. Many city dwellers fled to the countryside often to tend the land that the Bolshevik breakup of the landed estates had transferred to the peasants. Even small scale capitalist production was suppressed.

In Anna Karenina Alexander 11 had just started his reign over Russia. Russia continued to expand its empire, the Crimean war was beginning to end, and the serfs had just been emancipated. After the Crimean War, Russia pursued cautious and well-calculated foreign policies. The Treaty of Paris, signed at the end of the
Crimean War, had demilitarized the Black Sea and deprived Russia of the southern strip of Bessarabia, located at the mouth of the Danube River. The treaty gave the
West European powers the nominal duty of protecting Christians living in the Ottoman Empire, removing that role from Russia, which had been designated as such a protector in the 1774 Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji. The first phase of Alexander II's foreign policy had the primary goal of altering the Treaty of Paris to regain Russian naval access to the Black Sea. Russian statesmen viewed Britain and Austria as opposed to that goal, so foreign policy concentrated on good relations with France, Prussia, and the United States.
Many changes were happening during both novels and it is easy to see the changes taking place. It is not possible to say which time period it would have been easier to live in. Living in the countryside was great for Levin (Anna Karenina) but was not for Yury because there were so many people trying to claim land.
I preferred the writing of Boris Pasternak. It was easier to follow along with the story, verses Leo Tolstoy who jumped from each characters story too often and it was difficult to keep up. I also preferred his story line over Leos. It was more interesting to me. I felt like I was reading a fictional story, rather than a history book. The language was simpler and easier to understand and the writing was more fluid than Anna Karenina.

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