Spreadsheeting the Characters and Story of Anna Karenina
Patrick D. JoyceShare
I’ve been called “a slightly crazy reader.” I guess it’s true. But isn’t it true of anyone who loves books?
Someone gave me that moniker after discovering my glossary for William Gibson’s novel Peripheral. If they’d known that one day I’d follow it up with what I’m about to share with you, they would certainly have left out the “slightly.”
I read Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina for the first time this past summer. I’d been looking forward to it for quite a while, partly because I was interested in using it as a sort of literary backdrop for the next book in my series of historical novels for young adults (in much the same way as I layered my first novel with a modern retelling of Alexander Pushkin’s classic verse novel Eugene Onegin).
Like many readers encountering Anna Karenina for the first time, I found the sheer number of characters and circumstances daunting. The books has eight parts and 239 chapters and scores of characters. Those characters are referred to in multiple ways. Several major characters share the same given name. Different characters with the same surname are sometimes referred to only by the surname. Then there’s the whole thing in Russian with patronymics, middle names derived from one’s father tacked onto one’s given name. And men and women from the same family actually have slightly different patronymics and surnames, because Russian has gendered endings. It’s a real thicket.
So I decided to spreadsheet it.
I spreadsheet lots of things. Movies I’ve seen. Books I’ve read. Espresso measurements. Personal finance. Publishing plans. Writing projects.
Wait, you say. Did he just say writing projects?
Yup. When I reach a certain stage in the process of writing a novel, usually near the end of finishing a first draft, I create a set of spreadsheets that let me assess the quality of the story I’ve written so far, both from a big-picture perspective on the whole book, and from close up, focused on individual scenes. My spreadsheets allow me to pinpoint problems in a story and find solutions.
Instead of regular spreadsheets, I use Airtable. I love it. It’s actually a relational database app, meaning you can link spreadsheets to one another. Each column in a spreadsheet can lead to a whole other spreadsheet. It allows you to connect your data in endless ways, and very efficiently, give you ways to reduce repetitive steps.
So I do that with the books I write. But before Anna Karenina, I’d never spreadsheeted anyone else’s book before.
It’s a lot of work!
Anna Karenina is special, though. Tolstoy wrote it with very short chapters, making it eminently readable. And begging to be spreadsheeted.
I map out my own books very systematically in multiple ways. I didn’t go that far with Anna Karenina. I kept it pretty simple. The only relational aspect of my AK spreadsheets is the connection I made between a list of families/groups and a list of characters. I didn’t link characters to individual chapters either, something I do with my own books, and I didn’t make a linked list of settings either. I also didn’t map out the rise and fall of dramatic tensions and various other aspects of scenes and sections in the book. I hope to fill it out with more of this after I re-read the book again, maybe in a different translation (though I did love the one I read, the original in English by Constance Garnett).
What I’ve done for now is written brief chapter summaries, generally no longer than a few sentences each, with little or no interpretation or analysis, focusing on characters’ choices and actions. For my character list, I drew on a version found in the Yale University Press edition from 2014, which is organized by families/groups, which I thought was very logical.
So here they are:
Anna Karenina Chapter Summaries
Anna Karenina Families & Groups
I hope they’re useful to you or evoke fond memories of the book. Needless to say, a warning if you haven’t yet read the book or are in the middle of it: the chapter summaries contain spoilers! Please do email me if you find errors or have any suggestions.
