The Eifman Ballet production of Anna Karenina, showing in Montreal and Toronto, goes beyond a basic retelling of the plot.Anton Sazonov
When it comes to the Western canon's weightiest books – and I mean weighty in quite a literal sense – we often develop serious relationships with our own reading. Think of Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch and Phyllis Rose's The Year of Reading Proust: The subject of reading, of absorbing and interpreting, of assimilating the book's narrative into the narrative of our lives, becomes inextricable from the text. There are schools of literary theory that focus, with varying degrees of complexity, on reader response and the "event" of reading. But the underlying concept is simple. Reading isn't passive absorption; it's an active rewriting based on who you are, where you are, how old you are and, possibly, whether or not it rained that morning.
In the Tolstoy world, the reader-response trend has turned up some rich, intimate material. When Joe Wright's film adaptation of Anna Karenina came out in 2012, Joshua Rothman wrote a great online New Yorker piece on his decades-long obsession with the novel. He marvelled at the way the novel changed with his own maturity and experience, how what had seemed like a love story in his 20s became a much darker exploration of fate, chaos and happiness – and the unruliness of that happiness's distribution – as he got older.
Rereading Anna Karenina before the St. Petersburg-based Eifman Ballet's North American tour of the production (they are in Montreal through April 18 and in Toronto from April 23 to 25), I feel as though I'm having a protracted argument with my 16-year-old self. She plowed through the novel as though it contained moral, romantic and intellectual blueprints for the rooms she was building in her head. But then I wonder why she wasn't more annoyed that lust and happiness only mix well for Tolstoy's male characters (Kitty learns to tame her lust; Anna is punished for her own). And then I'm jealous of my teen-self's stubborn pursuit of readerly pleasure, the way her heart swells so easily for everyone, empathizing with the lascivious suitor and preyed-upon ingenue in the same charged moment – with no concern for paradigms of power or gender.
There's a term for all this talking to myself while reading; in literary theory it's called interpolation. It means exactly what it sounds like, a kind of interruption of the text. Of course, on a basic, cognitive level, it's how we read everything – we need to put ideas into our own terms in order to absorb and understand.
It's the ever-expanding scale of interpolation that makes adaptation seem almost counterintuitive. That hasn't deterred the movie industry; there have been numerous film (as well as TV and theatre) adaptations of Anna Karenina. The question remains: Why reduce these novels that grow so much bigger than their 1,000-odd pages into 21/2-hour movies, plays and ballets? In her 1926 essay The Cinema, Virginia Woolf is obsessed with this problem. In reference to some of the earliest film adaptations of Anna Karenina, Woolf considers how strange it is to see someone else's face imposed on a character that "the brain knows almost entirely by the inside of her mind."
Woolf's issue is how much film relies on visual distillation – "A kiss is love. … Death is a hearse" – when our experience of reading is just the opposite. Literary love is so much more than visual; the depicted relationship must travel along a twisting autobiographical pathway of ex-lovers and daydreams to make any sense to us at all. So why subject these great works of literature to such diminishing distortions?
Boris Eifman, founder and artistic director of the Eifman Ballet, tells me his production aims to explore the "unknown" in a novel we're already so familiar with. "I consider my ballet more of an interpretation, than an adaptation," he says via phone from St. Petersburg. Eifman explains that he wanted to delve into Anna's psychology and find a choreographic depiction of both her passion and her struggle between romantic and maternal love. His approach has been to cut out the large secondary plot between Kitty and Levin and turn the story into a love triangle between Anna, her lover, Vronsky, and her husband, Karenin.
Dr. Anna Berman, a Tolstoy specialist at McGill University, was blown away when she saw Eifman's production in St. Petersburg in 2006. "What Eifman does very well is get into the psychological dynamics of those relationships. I think he gets into Anna's mind in a very real way."
Berman is pro-adaptation; she thinks they can help us see things in the original that we might have missed. She points out that Eifman's version includes Anna's morphine addiction – through the use of a drug-induced dream sequence – a part of the novel that most adaptations omit. "It's not a very pretty aspect of Anna's life, but Tolstoy doesn't shy away from it. Eifman was bold to go there." Moreover, she thinks Eifman does something unique in the dream sequence: He pairs a jarring soundscape with Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture. "You get this incredible juxtaposition between Anna's disintegration and this very romantic music. The clash, the irony, of having those two effects together is something that ballet can do very well."
Prof. Donna Orwin, chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Toronto, is a bit more skeptical about whether Tolstoy's novels can truly be adapted effectively. "The greater the work of art, the more difficult it is to translate into a different medium," she muses.
For Orwin, Anna Karenina is a vastly complex novel about the relationship between duty and love, and between what's good for society and what's good for the individual. "Tolstoy is not a dogmatist about these things. Tolstoy gives you everything."
Though she hasn't seen Eifman's production, she imagines that ballet might make a rich medium for Tolstoy adaptation because of the author's fixation on physicality. But she stresses it's never just about the body in Anna Karenina; Tolstoy is interested in the dialectic between the body, the voice and all kinds of other internal and external factors that influence every character. "The novel is like a piece of baroque music. A theme of the human personality is introduced and then the great variations begin."
How do you do this in an adaptation? "I think it's impossible," she says. "Great works of art completely exploit the modes in which they are written."
But Boris Eifman holds that there's an inherent connection between the psyche and the body that ballet is poised to take advantage of. "I'm not trying to illustrate the plot of the novel. My ballet is something very different – a kind of choreographed psychoanalysis of Anna's mind."
Anna Karenina plays until April 18 at Place des Arts in Montreal and April 23-25 at the Sony Centre in Toronto.