A Painted Lady: Ekphrasis in Anna Karenina

Abstract

C OMMENTING ON Tolstoy's treatise on aesthetics, What Is Art? (Chto takoe iskusstvo? 1897) John Bayley complained that treatises on are unsatisfactory (235).' Extending this statement into a Tolstoyan aphorism might yield the observation that treatises on are unsatisfactorily alike; all works of are treatises on in their own way. While the current vogue in literary theory emphasizes a perception of the text as self-referential and meta-textual as a whole, there are also specific moments in literary texts that are consciously so. One of these is the topos of ekphrasis, most succinctly defined as a literary description of a visual work of art. The power of the ekphrastic moments in Anna Karenina motivated Bayley to draw the conclusion that Tolstoy's views on are expressed more powerfully in the narration of Anna than in his theoretical statements on art (235). If, as Gary Saul Morson has recently argued, War and Peace is a work concerned with the problems of representation and the formation of false narratives, Anna Karenina may be read as a companion piece, concerned with the creation of false and vision.