Maybe this is what Tolstoy meant when he allegedly called the camera (“the little clicking contraption with the revolving handle”) a “direct attack on the old methods of literary art.” Novels were not meant to be films. Or as Graham Greene wrote then, “it is Greta Garbo’s personality which ‘makes’ this film, which fills the mold of the neat respectful adaptation with some kind of sense of the greatness of the novel.” The problem of adaptations - of great novels in general, and of Tolstoy’s in particular - is that they must reduce too much complexity, cut out too many characters and vital subplots, and boil down the wider themes of the book to focus almost solely on the tragic romance at its center. Garbo’s version is often considered the pinnacle of Tolstoy film adaptations - largely because of Garbo. Five more would follow before Greta Garbo stepped into the role for a loose 1927 adaptation titled Love, then again a 1935 film version directed by Clarence Brown, with Fredric March as Vronsky and Garbo as the “most famous and critically-acclaimed of all the Annas Karenina,” Dan Sheehan writes at LitHub. “All the same,” argues Rosamund Bartlett at the OUP blog, Tolstoy “would probably have taken a dim view of the twenty odd screen adaptations of Anna Karenina.” The author died the year before the first filmed adaptation of his work, a silent French/Russian adaptation of Anna Karenina made in 1911.
On one occasion, he supposedly confessed a love of the cinema to his visitors and told them he was thinking of writing “a play for the screen” on a “bloody theme.” His extreme experiment in Christian anarchism notwithstanding, however, Tolstoy was fascinated by new technology and allowed himself to be photographed and filmed near the end of his life.
Not long after publishing his most beloved novel Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy gave away his wealth, renounced his aristocratic privileges, and embraced the life of a peasant.
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