I’m reading Anna Karenina right now. I’ve been meaning to for a while, but Oprah has told me to do so many things lately that Tolstoy kept getting pushed to the bottom of the stack.

I have American Joel Carmichael’s 1960 translation, because it was the smallest paperback I could find–no idea if it’s the right translation. Who knew that Anna Karenina was so gay?

I don’t think I’m just reading this into the narrative. It’s not just the frilly dresses and the plumed hats and the handsome, mustachio-ed young men cheek-kissing. Something is manifestly gay, Carmichael tells us, on almost every page. From Chapter XX of Part One:

“It’s going to be a splendid one. One of those balls that are always gay.”

“And are there any that are always gay?” said Anna with tender irony.

“It’s strange, but there are. It’s always gay at the Bobrishchevs’, at the Nikitins’ too.”

Oh, you know those Nikitins!

As you might suspect, “gay” already meant “homosexual” in 1960–but apparently only in hipper, campier circles than Russian translation scholars tended to travel in. 1960 was, after all, the same year Fred Flintstone began having a “gay old time!” weekly on ABC.

What’s interesting about Carmichael’s constant use of “gay” to describe the Moscow and St. Petersburg social whirls is that there doesn’t appear to be any word in modern English that would smoothly replace it. It’s a standard lament among certain grandstanding hand-wringers that “gay” used to be a perfectly respectable word for “happy” before Those People took it over, but that doesn’t appear to be true here. Read the above sentences with “happy” instead of “gay.” Pretty awkward. “Merry” or “festive” or “lively” might be better, but they don’t sound particularly timeless. “Enjoyable” is clunky. I wonder if a modern speaker would use “fun” instead–but you lose something there, too.

According to Gutenberg, the standard Constance Garnett translation recasts the sentences to avoid the adjective altogether. I have no idea which construction is closer to the original Russian. There are obviously some nuances of meaning I’m going to have to study up on before I start larding my conversation with extraneous uses of “gay”:

“We had such a gay time at your Super Bowl party! Is it always so gay?”

Why is there no good, all-purpose modern English word for all the things that used to be gay? Maybe modern life is just a lot less gay.