This is a potentially plot-spoiling post if you have not gotten far in our group reading of Anna Karenina. If you are not yet up to Section Two, Chapter 10 please put down this post and catch up on other adoption blog reading.

For the rest of us, I want to talk about what happens in chapters 10 and 11 of Section Two, or perhaps more appropriately, what doesn't happen.

Section Two, Chapter 10 seems almost a throwaway. It's only 246 words, shorter than the blog posts on this site. But some times you don't need many words to relate a major change of events (like giving a shout-out to the group about a referral or a court date!), which in this case was that Karenin had begun to doubt the faithfulness of his wife.

But then the reader is dropped like a boulder into Section Two, Chapter 11. It's pretty clear, from the opening lines that this chapter takes place after Anna and Vronsky have consummated their relationship. What happened, where did it happen, when did it happen, where were Karenin and Seryozha at the time? We don’t know. Tolstoy, perhaps in deference to the censorship or mores of the time, didn't write about any of that. Instead, he gives us a chapter of Anna and Vronsky clearly not in the afterglow. "The louder he spoke," Tolstoy writes of Vronsky, "the lower she dropped her once proud and gay, now shame-stricken head…". Anna feels "so sinful, so guilty", and Vronsky is not doing much better.

Some movie versions have filled in the gap in Tolstoy's writing, some not. The so-called Production Code, which governed Hollywood in the 1930s resulted in a highly sanitized version of Anna (starring Greta Garbo) in 1935.

While researching this post, I came across a very amusing piece from the March 28, 1949 issue of Time (who knew they had digitized their archives that far back?) Apparently, Pocket Books had just issued a version of Anna Karenina with a cover featuring Vivien Leigh (a.k.a. Scarlet from Gone with the Wind) just a fraction away from the lips of the actor who had played Vronsky in the 1948 movie version. The then Soviet Union was annoyed by the celebrity treatment--and the fact that Pocket Books, perhaps to actually make the hefty tome fit into a pocket, slashed the novel by two-thirds. The Soviet Union's chief spokesman attributed the move to censorship, and said that America had the "world's worst" restrictions on freedom of expression, neatly glossing over of course what was going on in the Soviet Union at that time.