Anna Karenina - Een nieuwe ontmoeting

Boland”s talk will be followed by a screening of Clarence Brown”s Hollywood adaptation of Tolstoy”s celebrated novel, and two short documentary films from the Desmet collection.

Film director Brown was responsible for one of the most legendary film adaptations of Tolstoy”s tragic love chronicle, starring Greta Garbo in the leading role and Fredric March as Count Vronsky. Brown”s Anna Karenina is more concerned with the love story than with the political and economic situation in contemporary Russia. The film won the award for best foreign film at the Venice Film Festival, while Garbo”s performance earned her the highly prestigious New York Critics Best Actress Award.

In addition, two short films will be screened to live musical accompaniment:Anna Karénine Maurice André Maitre (FR/RU 1911) 7”Dutch intertitlesA melodramatic adaptation of the passionate but doomed love affair between Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky, released by the Russian branch of Pathé.+Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (RU 1909) 13”A compilation of footage showing Count Leo Tolstoy, including images of his eightieth birthday (1908), which he celebrated at his estate Yasnaya Polyana, and a visit to Moscow in 1909. The trip to Moscow was filmed by Pathé cinematographer Joseph-Louis Mundviller (also known in Russia as 'Meyer').

Hans Boland (1951) is a writer and a translator. His translations include work by Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vsevolod Garshin.

Vladimir Nabokov proclaimed Anna Karenina to be the best novel ever written, but Anna Akhmatova considered it the misogynist product of a misogynist author. The debate about the novel”s “intention” is still continuing. Did Tolstoy produce an indictment of a sexist society or did he reflect the orthodox Christian view that women are here to serve their husbands and children?

As we might expect from good literature, the “solution” offered by the novel oscillates between these two poles of opinion, with all shades in between. Anna is in the first place a strikingly beautiful, intelligent and affectionate woman, whose life crumbles before her eyes the moment she falls in love with a man who is not hers by law.

Anna Karenina owes its status as the “best novel ever” to the superb structure that connects the several storylines, to Tolstoy”s razor-sharp observations of human nature and social pressure and to the thematic richness that makes this novel timeless.