By Lee Chang-kook
I've recently finished reading an English translation of ``Anna Karenina,'' a lengthy 19th-century Russian novel by Leo Tolstoy, and afterwards felt as if I had had a weighty burden removed from my back.
You wouldn't believe me if I say that it took me almost a year to finish the story. Believe me. It did. One morning, looking at the novel lying before me on my desk, I felt very proud of the fact that I had read it, at least once, in my life.
A year to read a novel, are you crazy? You may well yell at me. I could have finished it earlier by reading more pages and faster in one sitting, but the text was in English and there was no reason for an old man like me to do so.
Like a man sipping a cup of good hot coffee in the morning, I read only one or two chapters a day. Often I put it away for several days, coming back to it later only to completely forget what I had read about, resulting in me having to go back to the previous chapters in order to follow the flow of the story and identify the names of the characters.
In fact, I did not have to bother myself with reading it. Like most people my age, I had seen it as a movie long ago. The novel is about a married woman called Anna with a young son.
By chance she meets a handsome unmarried military officer, Count Vronsky, on a train. The two fall deeply and passionately in love and commit adultery. She gives birth to a daughter before finally ending her life by throwing herself under the wheels of an oncoming train.
But, fortunately or unfortunately, the voluminous novel has always been on my bookshelf, and whenever it caught my eye I said to myself that I would read it someday, however, I had always put it off.
I picked it up one day last year, opened it and became immensely intrigued by the first sentence of the long novel: ``Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I began to read it and continued to the end in spite of myself.
Reading the entire novel was quite a different experience. I found the novel very complex in its construction, plot and characters. It consisted of many other stories other than the love story between Anna and Vronsky.
While reading it I felt as if I had traveled far and wide into the land, nature, history, society and people of 19th century Russia. At the same time I could attend to Tolstoy's philosophical lecture on life, love, religion and death. It was a unique pleasure as well as a laborious one.
After reading it, somewhat excited and elated, I felt a strong desire to talk about the novel and tried to find someone who had read it so as to share the experience and pleasure, however I failed.
Most people I contacted said that they had only seen it as a movie, or read something written about it somewhere, or heard the story from somebody else. I could not find anybody else who had actually read the whole story'.
``Anna Karenina'' is, like many other long novels of the 19th century, one whose title and story is known to us one way or another. However, most people are daunted by the sheer size of these novels.
We always wish to read them some day, but few of us have the time, obligation or patience to read them to the end. We know about them but rarely read them. That is the common destiny of many great works of literature in the world.
Once there was a time when reading the great works of literature, especially novels, such as ``Tess of the d'Urbervilles", ``The Brothers Karamazov," ``Crime and Punishment," ``The Red and Black," ``Les Miserables," ``Don Quixote," ``Moby-Dick," ``David Copperfield," and ``Of Human Bondage," to name just a few, was regarded as one of the most important as well as valuable means of entertainment.
In fact, it was more than that. Readers of these novels considered themselves more cultured, educated, enlightened and even superior to those who hadn't.
Indeed in the novels, readers sought and found all they wanted to learn ― philosophy, psychology, history, sociology, moral teaching, and lots more.
But to my sadness, the fate of these great novels of the past seems to be doomed. The great days of reading these long and lengthy novels are gone. The great novels of realism are no longer being written. Only fantastic bestsellers are being made.
To make matters worse, novels are being transformed into or replaced by other forms of entertainment ― movies, videos, cartoons and comics. Instead of reading stories, people now prefer to see them. All the great novels have lost their former glory, distinction and merit. The age of the great novel is definitely past. I feel very sorry about this.
I persist, however, in reading. Now having finished ``Anna Karenina" I am thinking of attacking another big novel, `War and Peace," by the same author, Leo Tolstoy.
This novel has also been made into a movie and I have seen it, but I know I will be amply rewarded by reading the millions, billions, nay, trillions of small black letters printed on white paper. I don't know if it will take me another year or longer. I don't care.
However, I will have to buy the book, as I don't have it. Therefore, I will go to a downtown bookstore sometime next week. I hope they have a copy of it. Very fortunately I know that these novels are still being printed and are available to readers, for this I am glad.
It means there are still some ardent readers of these lengthy novels like me who prefer reading them instead of seeing them. I am getting excited again imagining myself as an adventurer, like Christopher Columbus, embarking on an extraordinary expedition into a brave new world.
The writer is a professor emeritus of Chung-Ang University in Seoul. He can be reached at cklee@cau.ac.kr.