Knightley in Anna Karenina. (Laurie Sparham)

It’s once more around the block for Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy’s sweeping, complex saga about an adulterous heroine who loved too much and too well, ruining her reputation and wrecking her marriage while men winked and women wept (yes, they loved soap operas even on the Russian steppes). The story of Anna, the beautiful, unhappily married and doomed aristocrat who spins a tangled web of deceit and betrayal so tragic that it eventually drives her into the path of an oncoming train, has been filmed at least a dozen times, most memorably with Greta Garbo and Vivien Leigh. Keira Knightley is hardly in the same league with those icons, but she makes a decorative centerpiece in this troubled remake by her mentor, director Joe Wright, who guided her in two previous films, Pride and Prejudice and Atonement. She’s not quite up to the material this time. Her eyes are less cloudy and more like candles on a cake, but behind the reflection of their glow, there’s nobody home when the lights go out.

Joe Wright’s ornate visuals are easy on the eye, but the wooden, mannered screenplay by verbose playwright Tom Stoppard is jarringly at odds with the neo-realism Tolstoy was aiming for in his novel, a sensation from the day it was published in 1877. His tortured themes of passion, addiction and suicide are now upstaged by lavish sets, costume changes and chandeliers that would be more at home in The Forsyte Saga. Even worse, the stylistic conceit of the Wright-Stoppard team is to set the sprawling action of the entire movie on the proscenium stage of an elegant theater, robbing it of all spontaneity and sense of discovery. This audacious sense of artificial staging and calculated theatricality is intriguing for about 10 minutes—what better metaphor for a decadent and disintegrating society than a theater?—but when the plot moves from St. Petersburg to Moscow, or from lush dinner parties to railroad cars running on miniature tracks and Russian wheat fields, you realize that a stage-bound production could never work, and wonder why they ever bothered in the first place. Unfortunately, the high-concept approach more closely resembles one of those phony, hysterical, over-produced bores by Baz Luhrmann than anything by Tolstoy. Who, in his right mind, would set out to imitate Baz Luhrmann?

You probably know all you need to know about the plot. In 1874 Imperialist Russia, Anna, the virtuous but flighty wife of dull, pinch-faced bureaucrat Alexei Karenin (surprisingly well played against type by Jude Law) has been a devoted wife and mother for nine years. Weary of the pretense of keeping up appearances in a stagnant marriage, she clings to the notion of romantic love as the final illusion of Old Russia, disgracing her family and risking her wealth, security and respectability to throw herself into a reckless affair with Count Vronsky, a dashing but shallow cavalry officer (baby-faced Aaron Taylor-Johnson). The infatuation seems foolish from the start, but he awakens her long-suppressed sexuality in ways that persuade an otherwise responsible woman to break her marriage vows and sacrifice her propriety, her values and her morals to become the mistress of a foppish, prissy-mouthed dandy, going so far as to give birth to his baby. The price she pays is very high indeed.

The cast is good (especially Mr. Law) and there’s plenty to look at, from lavish balls to windmills in the snow. But it’s a blank and tedious film, like a golf ball displayed in the Hermitage museum in the jeweled box of a Fabergé egg. For all of its palaver about love, it’s strangely reluctant to show much of a pulse. Instead of walls, windows, curtains and the Russian people, you get painted flats and dress extras. When Anna moves into a clinch, the stage lights dim behind her and footlights brighten her profile, exaggerating every emotion. The movie seems even less palatable when it ditches the original intentions of Tolstoy himself. He was a spiritual anarchist, the son of land-owning nobility, who eventually denounced his privileged background and became a Christian moralist. His harsh view of Anna was a deliberate offshoot of his ascetic views. He hated the artifice of 19th-century Russian society, believed in marriage and family (he fathered 13 children) and rejected all material wealth, including his own earnings and copyrights. He preferred the sweat of hard labor in the fields of his country estate to the peccadillos of high society. I give credit to Tom Stoppard for contrasting the fate of Anna, trapped by the superficiality of the upper classes, with the parallel story of a farmer named Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) who seeks a purer life in rural scenes where he toils in the fields, shoulder to shoulder with his serfs.

Classic literary giants as diverse as Faulkner, Proust, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Mann and Woolf have all openly declared Tolstoy a genius. James Joyce once wrote that he was “never dull, never stupid, never tired, pedantic or theatrical.” He might change his mind if he saw Anna Karenina.

ANNA KARENINA

Running Time 130 minutes

Written by Tom Stoppard
(screenplay) and Leo Tolstoy (novel)

Directed by Joe Wright

Starring Keira Knightley, Jude Law
and Aaron Taylor-Johnson

2/4

rreed@observer.com

It’s not clear what Mr. Paulson was angling for when he decided to publish a 477-page autobiography. If he wanted to burnish a legacy, to get himself removed from the list of the crisis’ great villains (he’s No. 6 on Time’s), it didn’t work. The phrase “we had little choice” is actually the best he can come up with to justify the bailouts.

And he couldn’t have wanted to simply provide a good inside look at his life and times, because On the Brink is a portrait of the bureaucrat as a nauseous and drowsy man. He solemnly describes how he dry-heaved in front of an American flag, in a bathroom stall and in front of Senator Judd Gregg. Other hour-by-hour details (especially a chronicle of his work-related sleeplessness) would be autobiographical triumphs if they didn’t contrast so grimly with the book’s void of thoughtful analysis. With the exception of a short and intensely dry afterword, it lacks any dissection of the intricacies of the crisis, its causes or its aftermath.

What’s much worse is the sense he gives that there wasn’t much fussing over detail as the crisis unfolded, either. He and his colleagues flew by the seat of their pants, Mr. Paulson concedes, “making it up as we went along.” He says he realized on Sept. 12, 2008, that AIG was “one more institution to put on our watch.” The government spent $85 billion to bail it out on Sept. 16.

His memoir is like Tolstoy. It gives the spectacularly unsettling sense that world history is decided by an assortment of guys who are improvising, and may not be particularly good at it. Only, unlike in Tolstoy, there’s a lot of nausea.

THE GOOD NEWS HERE is that Mr. Paulson is not shy about his personal eccentricities. He concedes a fondness for locking himself “in the bathroom with Sports Illustrated to relax in quiet.” He used to speed through his children’s bedtime stories because of his work schedule; one night, his wife, who likes to call him Pea, forced him to read with expression. “No, no!” the kids objected. “Read like a daddy, not a mommy.”

During his own childhood, he bailed hay, turned butter, fostered pet raccoons and took Canadian canoe trips “with difficult portages.” Dad used to cut his hair: “He did such a bad job that he left bare patches on our scalps, then he filled in the bald spots with pencil and said no one would notice.” He didn’t mind, though it traumatized his little brother, whose fragility ensured he’d become a mere Lehman Brothers bond salesman and not a Goldman Sachs CEO or Treasury secretary.

After leaving one job for the other in 2006, Mr. Paulson says his “number one concern was the likelihood of a financial crisis,” and that he told George Bush, in a wood-paneled Camp David conference room, all about credit default swaps, systemic risk and the growth of unregulated hedge funds. If that’s true, it’s Wall Street’s version of the “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US” presidential brief.

Then again, Mr. Paulson doesn’t explain why his first sleepless night didn’t come until Bear Stearns began to collapse two years later. Instead, he offers that he could kick himself for saying in an April 2007 speech that the subprime problem was “largely contained,” then points out that plenty of other people were wrong, too.

But he should have known better. At a dinner with top bankers at the Fed a few months later, as he tells it, the most powerful chief executives on Wall Street were mournful addicts begging to be forced to quit their opiates. “Isn’t there something you can do to order us not take all of these risks?” Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince asked; Blackstone’s chief, Stephen Schwarzman, said he couldn’t resist taking easy money. What does it mean that these kingpins knew what they were doing and were begging to be stopped? Mr. Paulson won’t say.

About the problem of rococo Wall Street greed, he admits that he “pushed back hard” against TARP’s pay restrictions, adds that he “was as appalled as anyone at Wall Street’s pay practices” and then jogs away from the mess. Eventually, he shuffles back to describe a conversation with a Democratic senator—“once again my ear was being chewed off about compensation.” He doesn’t mention that he sold half a billion dollars’ worth of Goldman stock when he came to the Treasury, reportedly saving more than $100 million in taxes thanks to new I.R.S. rules about federal service.

Except for whiffs of his ire for politicians (Nancy Pelosi makes him pour his Diet Coke into a glass), the book flatters widely and passionately. The Watergate villain John Ehrlichman, a boss during Mr. Paulson’s early days at Nixon’s Domestic Council, is “dedicated”; Bob Rubin “put the public interest ahead”; the Chinese are old friends of his; AIG’s Bob Willumstad is “an incredible gentleman”; and Lehman’s Dick Fuld is “direct and personable.” Never mind that Mr. Paulson reportedly considered the latter to be a thuggish glutton.

What’s much worse is that the book makes the circumstances of Lehman’s fall even more convoluted. Mr. Paulson says that he and Tim Geithner, despite their public stance against more bailouts, agreed just a few days before the bankruptcy that “a Lehman failure would be more expensive for the taxpayers.” He writes that he would have helped the firm by supporting a takeover, as he did with Bear Stearns, but that the government’s “hands were tied” because no suitors wanted Lehman. That makes no sense: Bank of America and Barclay’s were both interested, and both shrank away when the government said it couldn’t help.

AS TARP WAS BEING DEVELOPED, his own chief of staff and a White House deputy both took Mr. Paulson aside to complain he was moving too fast. The steps needed to be analyzed more carefully, and they felt his approach discouraged dissent. “I told them that if I had waffled one bit,” he writes, “we wouldn’t have a program to debate.”

Last weekend, two days before the release of the book, TARP’s inspector general released a report to Congress outlining the program’s neon-colored shortcomings: “It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the system have been addressed to date.” Most of TARP’s goals have simply not been met: Home foreclosures remain at record levels, unemployment is the highest it has been in decades and lending to American businesses and consumers continues to fall.

As far as that last point goes, the only thing he says on the matter is, “I didn’t think I could tell the banks how much to lend or to whom.” That’s because his message, which he can’t help but eventually make explicit, is, “I make no apology.”

Bear Stearns was rescued but Lehman wasn’t. Citigroup was going to buy Wachovia until Wells Fargo swooped instead. Cancerous Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were given clean bills of health by their regulator just before nationalization. AIG was given a gruesome amount of money that will almost never be returned. And that’s just the way it is, On the Brink says.

Not only did Mr. Paulson “not have time for regret, recriminations, or second-guessing,” but he doesn’t use the newfound power of hindsight. He even calls it a pandering “political approach” to criticize the rating agencies, which were essentially paid to say all was well with a diseased system.

Surely he has more sophisticated and subtle insights into the ugliness of American finance, but he keeps them to himself. “I don’t mean to minimize our troubles,” the book’s finale declares, “but every major country has more-significant problems.”

mabelson@observer.com

“Somehow I managed to make it through college and into late middle age without having read War and Peace… W&P was always too intimidating in scale, and too show-offy to bring to the beach.” Mr. Keller’s at once self-deprecating and coy; there’s a whiff of attachment to good, bourgeois ideals (work hard, but don’t try to be the smartest guy in the room; it’s more important to seem like a “regular guy” than a brain) that are not dissimilar to, one could argue, how the Times is now struggling to perceive itself.

Likewise, in response to Mr. Tanenhaus’ question about whether War and Peace is, in fact, a novel, poem, and a historical chronicle: “I am not clever enough to make a case that this thing is not a novel. It is a complex, ambitious prose work of imagination. The reporting may be prodigious, the characters may be plucked from real life, but it’s certainly not journalism or history.” In other words, he’s not going to play those lit-crit games! The Book Review can have its fancy-pants ivory-tower analysis, but what Mr. Keller is interested in is the facts. Journalism. Objectivity. Yes!

(Here we'll just venture to point out that the reason for all of this is this new translation coming out, which could be subjected to some journalism, too.)

Along similar lines, Mr. Keller wonders: “What was Tolstoy banging on about? Was he just messing with our heads? Or did his ego demand that his work be in some definitive way without precedent? Frankly, who cares?”

Well then! So much for authorial intent, the bete-noire of undergraduate English majors since the dawn of postmodernism. Mr. Keller is not interested in authorial intent because, at the Times, who needs authorial intent? There is one kind of intent that’s worth parsing, and that’s the intent of the institution of the Times—not of its individual reporters.

In his most recent post, dated October 18, Mr. Keller muses that Tolstoy “humanizes and universalizes his characters … by refusing to treat them with reverence. He allows his major figures to speak and act foolishly, to be caught in moments of pettiness, cowardice, naivete, humiliation.” Reporters, likewise, should not lionize their subjects.

The first translation, out on Knopf in October, is by all-stars Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. It clocks in at 1,219 pages, and according to editor LuAnn Walther, it represents “what Tolstoy would have wanted us to read if he were alive today.”

The other one, translated by the lesser known Andrew Bromfield, will be published by Ecco in September; it is being marketed as the “original version” of Tolstoy’s classic, one that has never been seen in this country. This edition comes with pictures—illustrations commissioned by Tolstoy himself—and it is about four hundred pages shorter than Knopf’s.

The two books are scheduled to arrive in stores about a month apart, and in the grand tradition of Russian confrontation, Ecco and Knopf are ready to duel.

Knopf has mounted an aggressive effort to discredit Ecco’s edition, arguing that it is not an “original version” at all but a dumbed down misrepresentation that violates Tolstoy’s work and misleads readers. Ms. Walther told Publisher’s Weekly last month that Ecco was making “a serious mistake,” while Mr. Pevear has written an open letter to journalists at her behest, in which he condemns Ecco’s “philistine attitude towards Tolstoy as an artist” and warns readers against falling for their sales pitch.

In an interview Monday, Ecco vice president and publisher Daniel Halpern said his only aim is to offer Toltoy fans and scholars a potentially enlightening text, while giving new, more casual readers a chance to read War and Peace without having to slog through all of Tolstoy’s philosophical digressions.

Ecco had put out two well-received translations when they got started on Tolstoy—one of Death in Venice, the other Don Quixote—and Mr. Halpern wanted to keep the series going. So it was decided that Ecco's next project would be War and Peace, and the Ecco staff went looking for a translator.

At first, as Mr. Halpern tells it, they wanted Mr. Pevear and Ms. Volokhonsky, the celebrated husband-and-wife duo whose profile had recently swelled when Oprah Winfrey selected their translation of Anna Karenina for her book club. According to Mr. Halpern, he was close to finalizing a deal with the couple when they had a change of heart and decided to stay with Knopf instead. (Asked about Pevear and Volokhonsky’s flirtation with Ecco, Ms. Walther suppressed a laugh and went through the impressive list of Russian classics that the couple had already translated for Knopf when they started War and Peace).

With that, the search committee at Ecco reconvened and eventually settled on Mr. Bromfield, who had translated a pile of contemporary Russian writers, among them Boris Akunin and Victor Pelevin. It turned out Mr. Bromfield was already working on it for a British imprint of HarperCollins called Fourth Estate.

He wasn’t working on the well-known version of the novel, though, but an early draft, first made available to the Russian public in 2000 by a philologist-turned-publisher named Igor Zakharov. Intrigued, Mr. Halpern swiftly arranged for Ecco to publish the book in the United States.

This version of the book was based on three serialized chapters Tolstoy published in a Russian journal in 1865 and 1866. According to a note at the front of the Ecco edition—and the introduction by Nikolai Tolstoy, who is vaguely related to the author—Tolstoy used these chapters as the foundation for a draft he completed in December 1866. At that point, he is said to have written “The End” on the last page of the manuscript, but soon after, he changed his mind, left Moscow for his country estate, and for three years made extensive revisions that would lead to the publication of the complete work, totaling six volumes, in 1869. This version, for the most part, served as the basis for the widely used English translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude, published in the 1920’s.

Mr. Zakharov, the Russian publisher, had taken quite a beating from critics when he put out this edition of War and Peace in Moscow. The text of the book, totaling about 700 pages, was adapted from an academic monograph compiled over the course of 50 painstaking years by a Russian Tolstoy scholar and published in 1983. The general public had been largely unaware of this first draft until Mr. Zakharov decided to clean it up—that is, remove all the cumbersome footnotes, brackets, and variants that its editor had lovingly inserted for the benefit of academia—and repackage it for trade.

“I’m a popularizer,” Mr. Zakharov said in an interview, speaking to the Observer in Russian from Berlin. “I see something interesting and I start waving my hands and yelling ‘hey, hey, everyone come here! I’ve got something here! Maybe you’ll like it too!’”

Mr. Zakharov spent a month editing Zaidenshnur’s monograph and printed 5,000 copies of it when he was done. On the back, he included a rousing editorial statement declaring that his version of War and Peace was better, shorter, and above all more authentic than the one people were used to.

“Twice as short, four times as interesting,” he promised. “More peace, less war.” Almost no philosophical digressions or incomprehensible French. A happy ending: “Prince Andrei and Petya Rostov remain alive.”

Before long, Mr. Zakharov was at the center of “a huge wave of protest, objection, and fury of the wildest variety.” He even participated in a “public trial” of the book, shown on national television, during which he fielded criticisms from various Tolstoy scholars (Mr. Zakharov recalls, “One person said, ‘Igor, how could you? You are in Russia! If a stick of butter says “real” on it, then everyone knows it is definitely margarine!’ I hadn’t thought of that.”)

Mr. Zakharov was insulted by the reaction: “‘The hell with you all,’” I said to them, “let them read it overseas—there are normal people over there, who actually read books.’”

With the help of his literary agent (who also represents Mikhail Gorbachev), Mr. Zakharov has since gotten his War and Peace translated into fourteen languages. Mr. Zakharov said that seeing the English translation, which appeared in the UK last April, made him feel like Napoleon.

Mr. Halpern and his staff at Ecco have deliberately distanced themselves from Mr. Zakharov, avoiding his rhetoric as they prepare to release the book; as a result, according to Mr. Halpern, the venom coming from Knopf is misplaced.

“All the stuff in [Pevear’s] letter, the headlines that he quotes in there, we chose not to use it,” Mr. Halpern said.

Actually, the press release Ecco issued in advance of the book’s publication does quote Mr. Zakharov’s remarks quite prominently, but qualifies them by saying that he “went a little overboard.” (Mr. Zakharov said he does not blame the American editors for abandoning his sales pitch: “Sometimes understatement is better than running out and beating your chest.”)

Still, Mr. Halpern said, Ecco is not claiming that their book “will replace the canonical version.” In fact, he said, Mr. Bromfield is about to start work on a translation of the actual War and Peace—that is, the long one everyone knows—and in all likelihood Ecco will be publishing it when he’s done.

“It’s confusing until you just sit down and read the introduction to our book,” Mr. Halpern said, “which clearly LuAnn hadn’t done.”

Tolstoy scholars, meanwhile, seem distrustful of Ecco’s “original version,” pointing out that Tolstoy’s work on the book was too scattered for there to be any one authoritatively “first” draft.

“This is certainly not a duel,” said Donna Orwin, who used to edit the Tolstoy Studies Journal from the University of Toronto, “because the Bromfield version of War and Peace really is a fraud. It is an early version of War and Peace, that’s certainly true, but it’s not War and Peace.”

Still, most of the academics contacted for this story were wearily disinterested in the controversy that has erupted over the two translations.

“This is purely commercial bullshit,” said Stanford Slavist Gregory Freidin. “I do not think it deserves anyone’s attention. It is about which car gets the best gas mileage, that kind of thing. Anyway, it is a great book though.”

It's a passage in which Hertz Grein, the novel's antihero, the former prodigy turned prodigal adulterer, simultaneously torn by lust and self-laceration, wanders out of a synagogue where he's made a first hesitant step toward penance for his sins. Emerging from the dim interior into the painfully blazing sun of a Central Park morning, he comes upon a sleeping derelict:

"On the sidewalk, next to a trash can, lay a drunk, his face battered, unshaven, inflamed as though with plague, babbling and slavering while his eyes cried out with the pain of those who have lost all control over themselves. This derelict seemed somehow ignited from the alcohol, as if he might burst into flames at any moment like a paper lantern."

We never meet this derelict again, but in some essential way, he may be the single most emblematic character in the novel. That derelict: He is Grein, seeing himself. He is us seeing ourselves. He is, one senses, Singer's tormented vision of himself and-in another, deeper sense-of the nature of his own fiction.

The paper of the paper lantern metaphor is the hint: What are Singer's fictions if not word-intoxicated inscriptions on the paper lanterns of his pages, inscriptions that ignite and blaze up in our brains? What are Singer's characters but paper lanterns always on the verge of igniting and consuming themselves in the intoxicating fire of their conflicting passions, in the fires of God-intoxicated heresy, of unholy longing and holy remorse simultaneously.

Simultaneity, it seems to me, is the key, the vision of blazing simultaneity at the heart of the heart of human nature in Shadows in Singer's cosmos. As I raced through this amazing novel, reading and writing about it simultaneously, I found myself struck by the recurrence of the word "simultaneous" or "simultaneously" and explicit images of simultaneity.

Let me begin with the explicit uses of the word. In a dream, Hertz Grein is in a room with a corpse. "Someone was searching for the corpse, but the person was not dead. He was sitting in a chair in the gloomy daylight, yellow, terrified, his melancholy eyes glazed in unearthly stupor, and Grein was giving him a loaf of bread with an egg. He was simultaneously both the deceased and the mourner. But how was that possible?"

How possible? One way, one might suggest, is that the dying corpse in his dream is Grein's own dying soul, the soul he's mourning for. The dream is not surprising in the light of a previous passage, in which he leaves his wife to run off with another woman. Here, Singer tells us, "Grein did things and was astonished at what he did, almost as if he were a being divided into two, with one half watching the other."

Grein is not the only one in the novel who expresses or apprehends simultaneity. The word blazes forth on the paper lantern of Singer's prose in frequent, occasionally unexpected, manifestations. The painter in the novel, Anfang, is "simultaneously smiling and sorrowful." In a cafeteria, Grein finds "a short fat man was simultaneously eating and doing a crossword puzzle," the sensual and the intellectual facilities simultaneously, unconnectedly engaged.

The moral universe that surrounds him is a blazing profusion of simultaneity, but Grein's trouble is his resistance to it. He knows, he says, there's "a Cabalistic teaching that the Evil Spirit bears witness to the existence of God. If a left or dark side exists, then a right or light side must exist also." But Grein, Singer somewhat intrusively reminds us, wants the uncomplicated, nonsimultaneous accommodation to the contraries of life: "What Grein sought did not and could not exist: he wanted the fear of heaven without dogma; religion without revelation; discipline without proscriptions; Torah, prayer and isolation built on a pure unadulterated religious experience."

But he lives in a realm, this world-an underworld, really-in which nonadulteration is a delusion, and adultery is a metaphor for the moral chiaroscuro of simultaneous good and evil inclinations within us. Not that all simultaneity is exalted for its own sake in Shadows . There is a mismatched meshugah simultaneity that is a kind of Bizarro version of God's creation. I somehow doubt Singer would have been a reader of the Superman comics' Bizarro episodes (my personal favorites as a kid), the ones that featured a parallel Bizarro-world where everything was drawn badly and shakily, everything and everyone, even the Man of Steel himself, Bizarro-Superman was off-kilter, off-center, just off . But there's a similar feel of Bizarro simultaneity in Singer's vision of what I called last week the "palm-fringed purgatory of Miami Beach":

"Everything was jumbled together: day and night, summer and winter, dishabille and elegance … The air smelled of oranges and gasoline."

What is going on with these visions of simultaneity, both in the world around us and the realm within us? And how does this vision of simultaneity relate to the blazing ignition of the paper lantern image? I knew you'd ask me that, and I know some might think it a stretch, but I think it hearkens back to the primal image of blazing simultaneity in the Bible: the burning bush. A living entity simultaneously burning up and remaining unconsumed as it serves as the medium for the voice of the Creator. Blazing into flame but remaining eternally the same. It's the friction of simultaneous contrarieties that ignites the blaze within us; it's the friction of simultaneous contrarieties that sets the fiction-the inscriptions on the paper lantern of Singer's prose-on fire.

Or so it seems until the very end of Shadows on the Hudson , when it appears as if Singer collapses the contrarieties, crushes the simultaneities within Hertz Grein and turns him into someone who extinguishes the flame within himself for the sake of his soul. It's an ending-an epilogue, really-that is likely to mislead and displease many because it seems so uncompromising, such a lurch toward ultraorthodox piety, a lurch not so much from sincere conviction but from weakness, because the alternative-living any longer with the searing blaze of conflicting simultaneity-has become simply unbearable.

I'm not sure the epilogue should be taken as Singer's own final vision. Here's where The Kreutzer Sonata comes in. You know The Kreutzer Sonata , right? Consider yourself lucky if you don't. It is, in many ways, one of the most repugnant texts you'll ever encounter. It radiates a poisonous distillation of Tolstoy's final bitterness against the world of flesh and sensuality, women and sexuality. At least that's one way of looking at it; it may indeed be Tolstoy's way of looking at it, alas. Most interpreters read it almost purely as a screed, knowing how closely the views of the main character-a confessed wife-murderer who buttonholes a fellow passenger on a long train journey in order to discourse endlessly about the evils of contemporary sexual mores-reflect Tolstoy's own views at the time.

The train traveler is obsessed in particular with what he regards as the depraved and degrading practice of continuing sexual relations between husband and wife after childbirth. But he goes beyond that to come close to arguing that all sexual relations, even for procreation, are deplorable, and that the human race would be better off chastising itself into nonexistence through total chastity. Tolstoy actually seemed to believe in some of these nutty ideas in his later years. He seemed to endorse an utterly non-ironic reading of their expression in The Kreutzer Sonata in a "postface" (as opposed to "preface") or afterword that he added to The Kreutzer Sonata after receiving many letters asking him whether he really believed in what the man on the train was expounding.

But I believe The Kreutzer Sonata is better read as fiction than propaganda, that Tolstoy was too much the artist to produce just a tract, that the artist in Tolstoy subverted the propagandist, even if part of him believed the propaganda. I believe one can (in fact one can't help ) but read The Kreutzer Sonata as a story that subverts itself: It's a tale told by a madman so maddened by his own self-loathing and despair at his inability to control his own impulses that he must try to generalize his own pathological state into a disease of all humankind and impose an iron law of chastity on the rest of mankind to make him feel better about his own lack of self-control. He is, in some ways, like the paper-lantern derelict Hertz Grein comes across in Singer's novel, "babbling and slavering with the pain of those who have lost all control over themselves."

And I believe it is in this light we can read Singer's shocking Kreutzer Sonata -like "postface" epilogue to Shadows on the Hudson : the letter from Hertz Grein to his childhood friend and Holocaust survivor Morris Gombiner. Grein writes the letter from Me'ah Shearim, the ultraorthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem. He's fled there after his uncontrollable adulterous erotic appetites have left a trail of devastation behind him in America. Ruined the lives of men and women he was close to, ruined his own life.

Now he's cut himself off from everyone he knew in America, cut himself off from his own children, and he's writing a long letter denouncing the secularized lives they all led in America, denouncing himself as well, but also praising himself for the new choice he's made: to become one of the ultraorthodox in Me'ah Shearim.

There's lots of language about bridling himself with the leather straps of the phylacteries he wears for morning prayers, about the need for the external restraints, metaphorical bridles, of Orthodox garb to curb that which cannot be controlled from within-as a signal to the world that he has rejected the way of all flesh to harness himself to his vision of God's demands. "As long as the other nations" do not harness themselves thus, he writes, "they will remain unbridled beasts and will go on producing Hitlers and other monstrosities. That is now as clear as day to me."

Clear as day? To Grein, yes, but to Singer? Is this his final resolution of what seemed to be his most dark and questioning novel? Just as we shouldn't read Singer's endorsement into the most bitter challenges to God in the novel-the ones that certain of his Holocaust survivors raise, the ones that go beyond blaming God for Hitler to speaking of God as Hitler-we also shouldn't automatically assume that Singer is endorsing the argument Grein makes in the epilogue.

Even though it's Grein's vision that concludes the novel, I'd argue that Shadows on the Hudson is an argument about these issues that Singer has not resolved in his own heart. That he entertains conflicting visions of the question within himself simultaneously. That it's a novel about his own blazing simultaneity. Grein's answer is not necessarily the answer, but the answer of someone like that derelict who's abandoned hope of ending the pain of controlling himself, someone like the wife-murderer in The Kreutzer Sonata . Curiously, more than curiously, I think, Grein actually invokes Tolstoy, the Tolstoy of the Kreutzer Sonata period, in his letter. In speaking of the way Orthodox Jewish garb signals a renunciation of the hell on earth he believes this world and its temptations to be, Grein tells his friend, "That's why Tolstoy finally put on a peasant blouse. That piece of clothing was his attempt to separate himself from the corrupt world … I'm certain that if Tolstoy had lived longer, he would have turned to Judaism-that is, to the prayer shawl and phylacteries, fringed ritual undergarments …"

Tolstoy turning Orthodox Jew? The evidence of his attitude toward Jews recently adduced by Lev Navrozov suggests otherwise, but the comic extremity of the remark may be Singer's sly way of subverting Grein's grim rant by pushing it just a bit too far to be taken completely seriously, or at least taken as completely Singer's.

Certainly, the evidence of Singer's own life and practices do not bear out an uncritical adoption of Grein's ultraorthodoxy. On the contrary, to the end he maintained the vision of contradictory simultaneity that is, I believe, the true heart of Shadows on the Hudson . He maintains it in one of the last interviews he gave before he died, a fascinating conversation Singer had with writer Norman Green in December 1987, an interview that has yet to be published in English.

It took place on a wintry Friday afternoon as shadows fell on the Hudson, two blocks away from Singer's Upper West Side apartment. Singer was talking about his own continuing uncertainty about the nature of God, the nature of human nature and the relations between the two. It's "all guesswork," Singer said. "Human nature and nature … do not reveal to us any clear way or idea what we should do … We are made to guess things." But "much of our morality is built on" going against the impulses of nature God has apparently given us, he added.

The struggle for control of those impulses is a painful one, Singer said. "So in a way, we cannot just all the time give compliments to the Almighty and praise Him … We have a feeling of protest. Why has He made this whole ordeal for us to suffer? So I think that one can admire God, admire His wisdom, and at the same time [simultaneously!] protest His so-called neutrality … The great religious leaders were also protesters in their own way. The Book of Job is a book of protest. And so are many great books …"

And so is Shadows on the Hudson , Isaac Bashevis Singer's Book of Job.