The Not-So-Smart Anna Karenina
- 01.27.2008 - 12:57 PMMatthew Yglesias points to a Facebook study of the most popular books in college. He notes that readers who cite Crime and Punishment (#98) had SAT scores 200 points higher than readers who cite Anna Karenina (#84). I can’t make head or tail out of the study itself, but Yglesias wonders why there would be this gap between two novels that “would seem to me to appeal to more-or-less the same audience.”
There’s a deep answer and a simple answer to this. The deep answer is that readers of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are not the same audience and never have been — that Tolstoy’s full-bodied portrait of life as it is actually lived stands in marked contrast with Dostoyesky’s exploration of people who find themselves drawn to extreme acts of social and moral transgression. When I was young enough to have heated conversations at the campus bar on such matters, it was invariably the case that a Tolstoy lover really disliked Dostoyesky, and that a Dostoyevsky lover had a certain amount of scorn for Tolstoy. So perhaps an argument can be made that Dostoyevsky’s more emotionally demanding work is more alluring to a more restless and probing intelligence. (Which was I? Sorry — as I recall, I loved both writers equally, though it was The Brothers Karamazov rather than Crime and Punishment and War and Peace rather than Anna Karenina that meant the most to me. And I fear I didn’t do especially well on my SATs anyway.)
But let’s go for the simpler answer: Anna Karenina was the May 2004 selection of the Oprah Book Club selection, and what it gained in mass sales it probably lost in SAT selectivity. Crime and Punishment hasn’t yet been favored by Barack Obama’s savior, nor has any other Dostoyesky work. (It has, however, been made into a television movie starring Patrick Dempsey as Raskolnikov. That’s right. McDreamy from Gray’s Anatomy took an axe to the pawnbroker’s head. No wonder you never saw it.)
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January 27th, 2008 at 1:41 PM
“But let’s go for the simpler answer: Anna Karenina was the May 2004 selection of the Oprah Book Club selection, and what it gained in mass sales it probably lost in SAT selectivity.”
Excellent! Still, how many Oprah fans are there among high school and college students? I always thought it was mostly a show for middle-aged married women.
January 27th, 2008 at 4:58 PM
I would bet that only a tiny percentage of American college students have ever heard of either one of these works.
January 27th, 2008 at 6:01 PM
The so-called Facebook “study” compared average test scores at the colleges where the books are popular, not the test scores of the individuals who like these books. Mr. Podhoretz, you might have mentioned that “Lolita” was the highest scoring book and “Life of Pi” beat “Hamlet” by over 100 points.
This is one of the worst Contentions contributions I’ve seen to date.
January 27th, 2008 at 6:33 PM
Doestoyevski and Tolstoy. Was the apples and oranges comparison ever more apt? Fyodor dug deeper, the county cast a wider net.
January 27th, 2008 at 6:34 PM
Count, of course.
January 28th, 2008 at 11:33 AM
They both wrote real long books that you couldn’t pay me to reread. The books may be good for you, like broccoli. I just don’t want any more broccoli, ever.