Can Tolstoy explain Anna Karenina?

Writers are notorious for not being able to communicate adequately a justification of their writings. As a reader, you read a great novel, and you look for some explanation of the reading experience. So, once I had finished reading Anna Karenina, I looked for some external description of the power of the novel. Of course, I did not expect a full explanation from Tolstoy explaining how he managed to create such an overwhelming reading experience, but nonetheless, given the title of his treatise What is Art?, it is tempting to think he might be able to describe why that novel was so powerful.

The key theme of What is Art? is the infection theory:

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art … Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

Of course, Anna Karenina comprises many separate stories interwoven, and as a reader I will have a response to each of them. As a reader I respond to good or bad characters as they are presented to me. But there does remain, after reading a vast novel such as Karenina, the perhaps foolish feeling of a single work; and if it is a single work, does it create in this reader a single over-riding impression? Perhaps the impression I have is that of Konstantin Levin, by no means perfect, but struggling to make some kind of meaning from his life. That “impression” is indeed a feeling, perhaps, as Tolstoy says, similar to the boy recounting an experience with a wolf, even if the experience never took place:

a boy, having experienced, let us say, fear on encountering a wolf, relates that encounter; and, in order to evoke in others the feeling he has experienced, describes himself, his condition before the encounter, the surroundings, the woods, his own light-heartedness, and then the wolf's appearance, its movements, the distance between himself and the wolf, etc. All this, if only the boy, when telling the story, again experiences the feelings he had lived through and infects the hearers and compels them to feel what the narrator had experienced is art. If even the boy had not seen a wolf but had frequently been afraid of one, and if, wishing to evoke in others the fear he had felt, he invented an encounter with a wolf and recounted it so as to make his hearers share the feelings he experienced when he feared the world, that also would be art.

Does is convince? Yes. Is that a sufficient explanation of Anna Karenina? Certainly not, since that novel contains far more than evoking a feeling. Nonetheless, as a justification for creative writing, I think it is a good start. It isn't even necessary for you to have experienced the wolf to be successful in communicating the feeling of an encounter with it.