Anna Karenina Part 1: Readalong!

 

Reading Tolstoy's War and Peace three years ago was a revelation, because I'd always been intimidated by classic Russian literature, and perhaps slightly disinterested. Disinterest may have been my default because of the intimidation factor, but it perhaps stemmed too from a sense that a novel like War and Peace was not the kind of reading that was relevant to me. As in, it didn't really occur to me to pick up a novel by Tolstoy, or a story by Chekhov. A middle-class, rural-ish upbringing in 80s west coast Canada didn't offer much impetus to read Russian literature. I loved my teenage and young adulthood reading life, racing through books by my then favourite author Stephen King and myriad other pop fiction authors. I had my forays into the classics too. I loved A Tale of Two Cities, and I remember counting Les Misérables as the greatest reading achievement of my teen years. 

It wasn't until my work life slowed down, presaging my retirement from a medical career in 2021, that I seriously turned to the classics. It's been a revelation! There's so much of value, wisdom, and just plain good storytelling and fun in the classics. Each different, they have brought a richness to my reading life that I didn't foresee. And I have learned that these classics are for everyone. There is no need for me to be intimidated. Reading slowly and steadily is just fine, even if some bits are occasionally dry and long (I'm looking at you, Moby Dick!) It's just a different style, but the classics are accessible to most anyone who has the interest to read them. 

I started with War and Peace, as a readalong with A Public Space. Slowly and steadily, I made my way through and loved it! Classics sometimes require a bit closer reading from me, with literary style and language often very different than today's, but I'm constantly amazed how relevant the issues hold up today. I'm often taken by pithy or wise themes, and beautifully penned quotes. 

In terms of Russian literature specifically, I read War and Peace, then in 2024 I went on to read a collection or Tolstoy's short stories, which were also excellent. I followed that up with a collection of short stories by Anton Chekhov. I read these with another avid classics fan, and it was so nice to discuss the books as we went along. I was interested in how different Tolstoy and Chekhov's styles were, though I did gradually warm to Chekhov, and found a lot to like. 

So now, I turn to Anna Karenina, often described as the best novel ever written, Tolstoy's tale of domestic life, family structure and relationships, against the backdrop of Russian society in the late 1800s. It was published serially between 1875 and 1877, and released in book form in 1878. I'm reading this book over 8 weeks with a group of other dedicated readers on Instagram so that we can chat as we read the book slowly. After some consideration, I've chosen the Penguin Classic's Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation. 

I'll be blogging every day or two with some thoughts and favourite quotes! For some background info on Tolstoy, I read these articles: 

Biography of Leo Tolstoy, Influential Russian Writer 

5 Things You May Not Know About Leo Tolstoy 

By the way, I did the same type of blogging-readalong project for The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Check it out if you're interested, and feel free to use it as a reading companion if you're motivated to tackle that novel. 

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The readalong plan: The 900 page novel is divided into eight parts. As a group, we'll be reading one part of the novel per week, for a total of eight weeks. 

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Day 1: Part 1, I-V

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," and, "They felt that there was no sense in their living together and that people who meet accidentally at any inn have more connection with each other then they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys." 

All is not well between husband Stepan Arkadyich and wife Darya Alexandrovna! 

I'm enjoying getting to know Stepan Arkadyich (of the "habitual, kind, and therefore stupid smile") who seems to be born and bred to be the least offensive person possible. Liberal by ease and habit only, happy with himself and others, and "a perfect indifference to the business we was occupied with..." So in love with himself and his contentment, that he is almost comically taken aback that his wife might be upset that he's had an affair with the French governess. 

My favourite line today: to escape from his troubles, Stepan Arkadyich notes, "There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: one must live for the needs of the day, in other words, become oblivious. To become oblivious in dreams was impossible now, at least till night-time; it was impossible to return to that music sung by carafe-women; and so one had to become oblivious in the dream of life." 

Day 2: Part 1, VI-XI

A great scene that brings to life the pastime of ice skating for the well-to-do classes in Moscow, with Levin desperately seeking any sign from Kitty that she might be interested in his romantic advances. I've read before that skating was a great occasion for flirting, and I had to love this exchange when Kitty praises Levin's reputation for being an excellent skater: 

"Yes, I used to be a passionate skater; I wanted to achieve perfection."

"It seems you do everything passionately," she said, smiling. "I do so want to see you skate. Put on some skates and let's skate together." 

"Skate together! Can it be possible?" thought Levin, looking at her. 

"I'll put them on at once," he said. 

Here's a basic article about the history of skating in Russia: A History of Ice Skating in Russia

Later, getting to know more about Stepan Arkadyich and Levin's relationship was interesting. It seems that Tolstoy identified more as akin to Levin. They are true foils to each other. At lunch, Stepan Arkadyich gobbles oysters hedonistically ("Not bad," he said, peeling the sloshy oysters from their pearly shells with a little sliver fork and swallowing them one after another.") whereas Levin prefers "shchi and kasha," simple cabbage soup and grains, country food. 

Day 3: Part One, XI-XVII

I do kind of feel for the princess, Kitty's mother. Raising children can be a joy, and also difficult, and a parent's anxiety over seeing a child happy and settled is real, even if we know we shouldn't interfere so much! The princess has been much satisfied with her own arranged marriage to her husband the prince years ago. I loved this: 

"And however much the princess was assured that in our time young people themselves must settle their fate, she was unable to believe it, as she would have been unable to believe that in anyone's time the best toys for five-year-old children would be loaded pistols." 

Levin's futile proposal to Kitty was painful to read! Tolstoy contrasts Levin to the urbane, polished and handsome Vronksy, and I can't help but like Levin a bit more for it...but also pity him a bit. When Kitty's and his eyes meet as he leaves, Levin's unhappiness also includes a generous helping of self-loathing: 

"If I can be forgiven, forgive me," her eyes said. "I'm so happy." 

"I hate everybody, including you and myself," his eyes answered, and he picked up his hat.

Finally, Tolstoy refers to "muzhiks," which I took to mean as the peasants in the country. The uppity Countess Nordston refers to them with a disparaging tone, but says to Levin, whom she dislikes, "You praise muzhiks all the time." 

This is a great, short article about the term, and its telling that it can be a neutral, negative, or (like for Levin) a positive term. A Muzhik For All Seasons (The Moscow Times, 2010)

Day 4: Part One, XVIII-XXII

I'm happy to finally make the acquaintance of Anna Karenina (aka Anna Arkadyevna). She's described by others as such a singular presence: Vronksy is immediately taken with her; Dolly is comforted by her advice; and Kitty falls into platonic love with her immediately: "...she felt that she was not only under her influence but in love with her, as young girls are capable of being in love with older married ladies," and, "Kitty felt that Anna was perfectly simple and kept nothing hidden, but that there was in her some other, higher world of interests, inaccessible to her, complex and poetic." 

Next we get a ball, and Anna's loveliness is noted by Kitty again. Anna, so perfect, in her "low-cut velvet black dress"! 

"And the black dress with the luxurious lace was not seen on her; it was just a frame, and only she was seen-simple, natural, graceful, and at the same time gay and animated." 

My reading ended today with such a poignant couple of sentences that made my heart break just a little for Kitty, as the realization dawns that her passion for Vronsky may not be mutual:

"Kitty looked into his face, which was such a short distance from hers, and long afterwards, for several years, that look, so full of love, which she gave him then, and to which he did not respond, cut her heart with tormenting shame." 

Day 5: Part One, XXIII-XXVIII

Meeting (Konstantin) Levin's brother Nikolai was illuminating, because it gave me an added sense of the politics of the time. Nikolai, sickly and perhaps a sufferer from tuberculosis, is starting a metalworks collective, attuned to the communist sensibility. Levin is perhaps of the middle path in this, while his brother Sergei Ivanych is of the capitalist bent.  As written, Nikolai seems to be an exhausting type of person to deal with! 

Today's highlight for me was seeing Levin return home. I learned so much about Levin as he settled back into domestic life; his house and home mean so much to him, and he is embraced by weight of generations past. In Moscow, he disparages himself, feels lesser-than, and shamed. But as he arrives at his station: 

"...he recognized the one-eyed coachman, Ignat, with his caftan collar turned up, when he saw his rug sleigh in the time light coming from the station windows, his horses with their bound tails, their harness with its rings and tassels, when the coachman Ignat, while they were still getting in, told him the village news...he felt the confusion gradually clearing up and the shame and dissatisfaction with himself going away...when he put on the sheepskin coat brought for him, got into the sleigh, wrapped himself up and drove off...he began to understand what had happened to him quite differently. He felt he was himself and did not want to be otherwise. He only wanted to be better than he had been before." 

I love this transition from one world he inhabits to another. A sloughing off of the unfamiliar and uncomfortable and a donning of the domestic, the sense of belonging. This feeling is familiar to me, and I expect to many of us. 

Day 6/7: Part One, XXIX-XXXIV

Anna's emotionally fraught train journey home from Moscow to Petersburg showed how the snowstorm outside mirror her inner storm of emotions about Vronsky. Though she's trying to escape him, when he proves to be on the same train following her back, she's secretly thrilled.

"All the terror of the blizzard seemed still the more beautiful to her now." 

Later, when Vronsky returns home to meet his friends, there's a party, and Vronsky sheds the Muscovite morality and dons his Petersburg mores: 

"In his Petersburg world, people were divided into two completely opposite sorts. One was the inferior sort:the banal, stupid and, above all, ridiculous people who believed that one husband should live with one wife, whom he has married in church, that a girl should be innocent, a woman modest, a man manly, temperate and firm, that one should raise children, earn one's bread, pay one's debts, and other such stupidities. This was an old fashioned and ridiculous sort of people. But there was another sort of people, the real ones, who which they all belonged, and for whom one had, above all, to be elegant, handsome, magnanimous, bold, gay, to give oneself to every passion without blushing and laugh at everything else."

As an example of their evening, "The coffee never got made, but splashed on everything and boiled over and produced precisely what was needed-that is, gave an excuse for noise and laughter, spilling on the expensive carpet and the baroness's dress."  

Seriously, I would hate this sort of party. I'd rather have a coffee beautifully made, nicely presented, then some quiet conversation! Though I may eschew the innocent and modest females and necessarily manly men, I'd otherwise count myself amongst the former rather than the latter type of company that Vronsky divides the world into. 

Day 8: Part Two, I-VI

I was glad to return briefly to the Shcherbatsky home, and Kitty's aggrieved state of mind. As an aside, I had to shake my head at the state of medicine in these circles, and felt for Kitty's shame from the medical exam. "With particular pleasure, it seemed, he [the famous doctor] insisted that maidenly modesty was merely a relic of barbarism and that nothing was more natural than for a not-yet-old man to palpate a naked young girl." I guess it's too much to ask that the doctor's actually talk to the patient. Kitty may be suffering from pre-tuberculosis, but it is likely to be heartbreak, as Kitty herself acknowledges. 

Dolly arrives to comfort Kitty, her own reconciliation with Stepan Arkadyich in shambles, providing Kitty the perfect opportunity for cutting cruelty to her sister, albeit as a reaction to being confronted with her own humiliation over the Vronksy affair: 

"Why bring Levin into it, too? I don't understand, why to you need to torment me? I said and I repeat that I'm proud and would never, never do what you're doing-go back to a man who has betrayed you, who has fallen in love with another woman. I don't understand, I don't understand that! You may, but I can't."

Ouch, Kitty. 

Back in Petersburg, Tolstoy is giving us a more fleshed-out picture of the "society proper" that Vronsky is a member of, and that now Anna is drawn to, headed by Princess Betsy Tverskoy, "a monde that held on with one hand to the court, so as not to descend to the demi-monde, which the members of this circle thought they despised, but with which they shared not only similar but the same tastes."

I thought this observation was interesting as the story progresses, and as I wonder how Tolstoy and Russian society of the time will treat the sexes differently with respect to infidelity:

"...but the role of a man who attached himself to a married woman and devoted his life to involving her in adultery at all costs, had something beautiful and grand about it and could never be ridiculous..." 

Day 9: Part Two, VII-XIII

As the emotional sparring between Vronsky and Anna continues (and begins to inspire gossip, no surprise!), I was interested in the first glimpse we get into her husband Alexi Alexandrovich's mind and motivation. He despises jealousy because he should not have to feel it if all is right in his world, as he assumes it should be. But it's a fiction, right? "...though his conviction that jealousy was a shameful feeling and that one ought to have trust was not destroyed, he felt that he stood face to face with something illogical and senseless, and he did not know what to do. Alexi Alexandrovich stood face to face with life..."

"Now he experienced a feeling similar to what a man would feel who was calmly walking across a bridge over an abyss and suddenly saw that the bridge had been taken down and below him was the bottomless deep. This bottomless deep was life itself, and the bridge the artificial life that Alexi Alexandrovich had lived." 

"For the first time he vividly pictured to himself her personal life, her thoughts, her wishes, and the thought that she could and should have her own particular life seemed so frightening to him that he hastened to drive it away. It was that bottomless deep into which it was frightening to look. To put himself in thought and feeling into another being was a mental act alien to Alexi Alexandrovich."

I like these passages because it explains a lot about how Alexi lives his psychological life, distancing himself to protect his own mental contentment. The "bottomless deep" is probably different for each of us. I see him as obtuse, but we all construct our realities to keep us emotionally safe and slightly oblivious. Finding the balance is the tricky thing perhaps. 

And back to Levin and his rural life. I loved these chapters, following him along with this joys and frustrations on his springtime farm, and discovering how he reconstructs his dignity and purpose on the land as opposed to feeling shamed and inferior in Moscow. 

Day 10: Part Two, XIV-XX

Stepan Arkadyich's visit to Levin's estate yielded an exchange that I liked. It does speak to the privilege of the aristocratic classes, that's for sure, but it also points to how difficult it is to be content when things are "enough." 

"'No, you're a lucky man. You have everything you love. You love horses-you have them; dogs-you have them; hunting-you have it; farming-you have it." 

'Maybe it's because I rejoice over what I have and don't grieve over what I don't have,' said Levin, remembering Kitty."

When we get back to Anna and Vronsky, it becomes clearer how society evaluates each of them in their affair. I'm not sure if this reflects a moral judgement on the part of high society, or the boredom (or socially-focused pastime) of their existence. 

"...-everyone had guessed more or less correctly about his relations with Mme Karenina-and the majority of the young men envied him precisely for what was most difficult in his love, for Karenin's high position and the resulting conspicuousness of this liaison in this society. 

    The majority of young women, envious of Anna and long since weary of her being called righteous, were glad of what they surmised and only waited for the turnabout of public opinion to be confirmed before they fell upon her with the full weight of their scorn. They were already preparing the lumps of mid they would fling at her when the time came. the majority of older and more highly placed people were displeased by this impending social scandal." 

Day 11: Part Two, XXI-XXV

*So many spoilers below! I suggest reading only after you've finished these chapters.*

Today's reading had an interesting structure: the interaction between Anna and Vronksy at her home, where so much was revealed and the dilemma that they find themselves in brought into sharp relief, framed by scenes of Vronsky at the horse races before and after. 

Vronsky is already wondering (with a "feeling of loathing" that speaks to his dissatisfaction of the status quo with Anna) how to move forward "...a feeling like that of a mariner who can see by his compass that the direction in which he is swiftly moving diverges widely from his proper course, but that he is powerless to stop the movement which every moment takes him further and further from the right direction, and that to admit the deviation to himself is the same as admitting disaster." 

After Anna reveals her pregnancy, forcing the issue of how their relationship is to proceed, Vronsky speaks some ominous words: 

"'There's a way out of every situation. A decision has to be made, ' he said. 'Anything's better than the situation you are living in. I can see how you suffer over everything, over society, and your son, and your husband.'"

I have to admit to reading the horse race scene with bated breath! Vronsky loves his horse Frou-Frou very much ("She was one of those animals who, it seems, do not talk only because the mechanism of their mouths does not permit it.") And it is he, who-though unintentionally-causes her death. 

"...Vronsky felt to his horror that, having failed to keep up with the horse's movement, he, not knowing how himself, had made a wrong, an unforgivable movement as he lowered himself in the saddle...He barely managed to free the foot before she fell on her side, breathing heavily and making vain attempts to rise with her slender, sweaty neck, fluttering on the ground at his feet like a wounded bird. The awkward movement Vronsky had made had broken her back." 

To summarise today's passages: a bounty of foreshadowing and metaphor. 

Day 12: Part Two, XXVI-XXIX

Stepping into Anna's husband Alexei Alexandrovich today, Tolstoy has strengthened the view of him as very avoidant. Denial is his primary coping mechanism. 

"...he did not realize that he had invented things for himself to do that year, that this was one way of not opening the drawer where his feelings where for his wife and family and his thoughts about them lay, becoming more dreadful the longer they lay there." 

I particularly enjoyed the sentences that Tolstoy used as a way to drive this point home: "He did not want to see, and did not see, that in society many were already looking askance at his wife; he did not want to understand, and did not understand, why his wife insisted especially on moving to Tsarskoe..." and this device is repeated for the whole paragraph. 

Finally, Anna stops dissembling and now Alexei will not be able to look away. "I love him, I am his mistress, I cannot stand you, I'm afraid of you...Do what you like with me." Nowhere to hide in that confession. 

I was curious to dive into the phrase, "taking the waters," as Alexei had gone for a couple of months in spring/early summer yearly. Apparently they aren't helping for his terrible health. It turns out the the Russian Banya, or spa/steam room, is a very important cultural feature. Here's an overly long but quite fascinating article to read or skim, and I wanted to include it just for the pictures! 

The Russian Bania (at mikkelaaland.com)

Day 13/14: Part Two, XXX-XXXV (end of Part Two)

More "taking the waters," as Kitty and family spend time at the spa in Germany, to aid Kitty's recovery from the wounds of a broken heart. It was amusing that Kitty is not the only young woman who's taking the waters for heartbreak: "But the main company of the Shcherbatskys involuntarily constituted itself of Moscow lady Marya Evgenyevna Rtishchev, her daughter, whom Kitty found disagreeable because, like Kitty, she had become ill from love..." 

Kitty is trying on different ways to overcome her sadness and shame, by way of befriending Mlle Verenka, a saintly young woman. Kitty falls so hard in platonic love with Verenka; her mother calls it one of Kitty's engouements (infatuations). 

Today I had fun with reading Tolstoy's descriptions of folks at the spa: 

Varenka: "She would also have been of good build, if it had not been for the excessive leanness of her body and a head much too large for her medium height...she was like a beautiful flower which, while still full of petals, is scentless and no longer blooming." Also, she has, "big but beautiful teeth." 

Nicolai Levin: "a very tall, stoop-shouldered man with enormous hands..." 

Kitty's father the prince: "...in his long coat, with his Russian wrinkles and bloated cheeks propped up by a starched collar..." 

And finally, the invalid Mme Stahl, who is reposed in, "a bathchair in which something lay, dressed in something grey and blue, propped on pillows under an umbrella." 

Day 15: Part Three, I-V

Spending time withe Konstantin Levin and his brother Sergei Ivanovich, who has come to visit on the country estate, gave Tolstoy some room to talk politics and to delve more into Levin's character. Sergei idolizes the muzhik peasantry, but Levin has such a much more complex feeling towards them. He considers himself a part of them, or at least an integral part of a greater whole as he (the nobility) and they (the peasantry) are mutually dependent. 

"Of course, being a good man, he tended to love people more than not to love them, and therefore the peasantry as well. But it it was impossible for him to love or not love the peasantry as something special, because not only did he live with them, not only were all his interests bound up with theirs, but he considered himself part of the peasantry, did not see any special qualities or shortcomings in himself or in them, and could not contrast himself to them...To say that he knew them would be the same for him to say that he knew people. He constantly observed and came to know all sorts of people, muzhik-people among them, whom he considered good and interesting people, and continually noticed new traits in them, changed his previous opinions, and formed new ones." 

In reading this section, Levin is clearly drawn to the muzhiks, but also retains his aristocratic privilege, an interesting mix. But I appreciate the messiness and the complexity of his views and connections: he lives the country life where interdependencies of this sort are crucial. So often these days views we suffer from polarized views. 

I've been on committees that seem big on talk and procedure, and short on getting things done, so I can empathize with Levin's frustrations around the zemstvo affairs, though here I see his brother's arguments loud and clear. Levin says, "...no activity can be solid unless it's based on personal interest." I'm not sure I agree, though perhaps this is debatable. 

However,  Levin isn't suited to committees ("I need physical movement, otherwise my character definitely deteriorates"); he'd rather be out on the fields, and I loved these sections as Levin mows. 

"The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own. These were the most blissful moments." 

Is Tolstoy describing "flow"? 

Day 16, Part Three, VI-XII

Some interesting words about parenthood, and I can understand the sentiment that with kids, when things are good they're good, and when they're bad they're awful (even though we still love them!): 

"...however painful the mother's fear of illnesses, the illnesses themselves, and the distress at seeing signs of bad inclinations in her children, the children themselves repaid her griefs with small joys. These joys were so small that they could not be seen, like gold in the sand, and in her bad moments she saw only griefs, only sand; but there were also good moments, when she saw only joys, only gold." 

And the dreamer Levin again, laying on a haystack, deciding to change his life. Perhaps he'll give it all up and marry a peasant woman! One glimpse of Kitty, however, and all that wishful thinking falls away: 

"'No,' he said to himself, 'however good that life of simplicity and labour may be, I cannot go back to it. I love her.'" 

In today's reading, this is the second time that characters have rejoiced at finding the "birch boletus" mushroom, apparently tasty and prized for the dinner plate. Here's some information; it looks like this mushroom is found all over Europe, and must be cooked well to avoid toxic effects. 

Brown birch bolete 

Day 17, Part Three, XIII-XVII

I was struck by Alexei Alexandrovich's enormous capacity for black and white thinking, for "seeing and not seeing" things, as we'd seen in previous chapters. Confronted with his wife's infidelity, he's trying to figure a way out:

"'I made a mistake in binding my life to hers but there is nothing bad in this mistake, and therefore I cannot be unhappy. I am not the guilty one,' he said to himself, 'she is. But I have nothing to do with her. Fore me she doesn't exist...' All that was going to befall her and their son, towards whom his feeling had changed just as it had towards her, ceased to concern him." 

Jealousy has been replaced by another feeling, one of vengeance: 

"...the wish not only that she not triumph, but that she be paid back for her crime. He did not acknowledge this feeling, but in the depths of his should he wished her to suffer for disturbing his peace and honour."

There was a couple of pages of details of Alexei's government job that seemed to come out of nowhere. Interesting but I wonder how relevant they are to the story?

Anna has a lot to figure out. She didn't like living with deceit, "she told herself that she was glad, that now everything would be definite and at least there would be no falsehood and deceit. It seemed unquestionable to her that now her situation would be defined for ever. It might be bad, this new situation, but it would be definite, there would be no vagueness or falsehood in it." 

And as has been true so often for women, Anna's son is Alexei's threat against her. 

Day 18: Part Three, XVIII-XXII

There was so much new information revealed today! Vronsky, "squares his accounts," taking stock of his financial situation and his progress in life. I'm not sure how much I'm reading into things, but it was a revealing chapter, with more subtle foreshadowing...perhaps. I can only speculate, but I wonder how much our newfound knowledge of Vronsky's debts will play into his future decisions about his relationship with Anna. 

Everything for Vronsky is clearly defined by his internal set of ethics. "Vronsky's life was especially fortunate in that he had a code of rules which unquestionably defined everything that ought and ought not to be done." So far, it's worked for his affair, but "recently there had appeared new, inner relations between her and himself that frightened Vronksy with their indefiniteness." 

Tolstoy also reveals details about Vronksy's ambition, his secret that he "does not even confess to himself", which was "so strong that even now this passion struggled with his love." 

Debt, his shaken code of ethics, his secret career ambitions: there's a lot of new information here to digest, and this may not bode well for Anna. Perhaps this is the distant early warning of a change of heart by Vronksy. Or, maybe not. 

I'm increasingly seeing a difference in how much time Tolstoy gives to the inner workings of women and men and in this story. Men, like Vronsky, Alexi Alexandrovich and Levin (and even Stepan in earlier sections) seem to have a bit more time on the page than the women. Women certainly have their pages, such as Kitty's vacation to the spa, but I feel that I know Anna less than I'd like to. 

Day 19: Part Three, XXIII-XVII

Anna and Alexei seem to be digging their heels in. Anna takes such a diffident tone: "I am a criminal woman, I am a bad woman...and I've come to tell you that I cannot change anything." But she's not backing down. "...our relations cannot be as they have always been." 

Alexei won't back down either. 

"I want that I not meet that man here, and that you behave in such a way that neither society nor the servants can possibly accuse you...that you not see him. It doesn't seem too much. And for that you will enjoy the rights of an honest wife, without fulfilling her duties."  

It's interesting to see Levin's sudden disgust with the farming life. I suspect it has little to do with farming, and more about his glimpse of Kitty on the road, who is now staying with Dolly only twenty short miles away. Levin runs away to go hunting with his enigmatic friend Sviyazhsky. 

The political discussion that ensued was a bit interesting, but I confess to being more distracted by the humourous details of the assembled dinner guests.  Poor sister-in-law Nastya is displayed like a tempting gift package to attract Levin, to his great discomfort. It made me almost giggle. 

"...he felt painfully awkward because the sister-in-law sate facing him in a special dress, put on for his sake, as it seemed, cut in a special trapezoidal shape on her white bosom. This rectangular neckline...deprived Levin of his freedom of thought...he had no right to look at it and tried not to look at it; but he felt he was to blame for the neckline having been made at all." 

And Sviyazhksy "sitting sideways to the table, leaning his elbows on it and twirling a cup with one hand, while with the other he gathered his beard in his fist, put it to his nose as if sniffing it, and let it go again." 

Such interesting company!

Day 20/21: Part Three, XVIII-XXXII

There is a lot on farming today, and it seems that Levin is determined to solve Russia's agricultural problems. He's decided to reform farming, and has grand plans: "I need only persist in going towards my goal and I'll achieve what I want...This is not my personal affair, it is a question here of the common good. Agriculture as a whole, above all the position of the entire peasantry, must change completely." And Levin will do it! However, a small, revealing sentence at the end of this grandiosity perhaps reveals his continued, inner insecurities:

"Yes, that is a goal worth working for. And the fact that it is I, Kostya Levin, the same one who came to the ball in a black tie and was rejected by Miss Shcherbatsky and is so pathetic and worthless in his own eyes-proves nothing." 

After Nikolai shows up ("He was a skeleton covered with skin.") so sick and clearly dying, Levin's emotions cloud and thoughts of death make everything seem worthless. So poignant is the way that the two brothers know that Nikolai will die soon, but cannot speak of it. 

"He wanted to weep over his beloved dying brother, and he had to listen and keep up a conversation about how he was going to live." 

This blackness of thought is new to the novel. "death would come and everything would end, that it was not worth starting anything and that nothing could possibly be done about it." 

Part Three ends as Nikolai takes his leave and Levin must find a way through, via his agricultural pursuits. 

"Darkness covered everything for him; but precisely because of this darkness he felt that his undertaking was the only guiding thread in this darkness, and he seized it and held on to it with all his remaining strength."

Day 22: Part Four, I-V

Another great character description from Tolstoy. The foreign prince: 

"...had attained such strength that, despite the intemperance with which he gave himself up to pleasure, he was a fresh as a big, green, waxy Dutch cucumber." 

It seems everyone is in a holding pattern: Alexei feels that Anna's passion will naturally pass, Anna and Vronsky think "something independent" will clear everything up. But a fleeting meeting between Vronsky and Alexei the entrance to the Karenin home is likely going to force the issue. 

Reality is setting in. When Anna and Vronsky meet, "she studied his face to make up for the time in which she had not seen him. As at every meeting, she was bringing together her imaginary idea of him (an incomparably better one, impossible in reality) with him as he was."

As for Vronksy: 

"How many times had he told himself that her love was happiness; and here she loved him as only a woman can for whom love outweighs all that is good in life-yet he was much further from happiness than when he had followed her from Moscow. Then he had considered himself unhappy, but happiness was ahead of him; while now he felt that the best happiness was already behind. She was not at all as he had seen her in the beginning. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. She had broadened out, and her face, when she spoke of the actress, was distorted by a spiteful expression. He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has plucked, in which he can barely recognize the beauty that had made him pluck and destroy it." 

I've got to feel for Anna here. I suspect she's broadening due to pregnancy, and she's jealous because as a woman, she has few options in the outside world whereas a man can go where he pleases. Even if Vronksy is innocent of her jealous thoughts, I get it. 

And lawyers never seem to get a break! A divorce? "The lawyer's grey eyes tried not to laugh, but they leaped with irrepressible joy." He'll have new office furniture with all the money he stands to make. 

Day 23: Part Four, VI-VIII

A short, interstitial bit of reading today. I was amused by Tolstoy's little jabs at "institutional activity," that can be nothing short of the absolute truth: 

"Three months later a report was presented. The life of the minorities was investigated in its political, administrative, economic, ethnographic, material and religious aspects. All questions were furnished with excellent answers not open to doubt, since they were not the product of human thought, which is always subject to error, but were the products of institutional activity." 

Levin is back from his European adventures, but still thinking gloomily. Talking with the persistently optimistic Stepan (I was happy to see him today!) he says, "Once you understand that you'll die today or tomorrow, and there'll be nothing left, everything becomes so insignificant! I consider my thought very important, but it turns out to be as insignificant, even if it's carried out, as tracking down the she-bear. So you spend your life diverted by hunting or work in order to not think about death."

Since I'm doing a Camus deep dive this year, I see shades of Absurdism everywhere, including here. 

With Alexei back in Moscow and reluctantly pressed to attend Stepan and Dolly's dinner party, where Kitty and Levin will also be guests, tomorrow's reading may prove to be action packed. 

Day 24: Part Four, IX-XII

I was riveted to see how Levin and Kitty's reunion would play out, and it seems that each is extremely taken with the other. "Levin knew that she was listening to his words and liked listening to them. And that was the only thing that mattered to him. Not just in that room, but in all the world, there existed for him only he, who had acquired enormous significance, and she." 

Tolstoy has used dinner party conversation to advance a couple of interesting contemporary Russian issues. First, a classical eduction vs. the teaching of natural sciences. 

"...it cannot be denied that the influence of classical writers is moral in the highest degree, whereas the teaching of the natural sciences is unfortunately combined with those harmful and false teachings that constitute the bane of our time." 

Which is, apparently, the new-fangled philosophy of nihilism. The footnote shares that nihilism (a concept begun in Germany) became key to a political doctrine of younger socialists in 1860s Russia, who "advocated the destruction of the existing social order without specifying what should replace it." 

The second key discussion concerns women's rights. The guest Pestov notes: 

"It's a vicious circle. Women are deprived of rights because of their lack of education, and their lack of education comes from having no rights. We mustn't forget that the subjugation of women is so great and so old that we often refuse to comprehend the abyss that separates them from us." 

I was shaking my head at the traditional old prince, who notes, "long hair, short..." The whole proverb is "Long on hair, short on brains." Sigh. 

Day 25: Part Four, XIII-XV

You've got to love these couple of chapters, just for the way Tolstoy writes about how love feels. Admittedly, this is mostly from Levin's point of view, and we've understood the evolution of his love for Kitty over time because Tolstoy has written much from Levin's perspective. I'm wondering a bit over Kitty's dramatic love for Levin, but I won't think too hard about it. 

Suddenly, they have almost paranormal communication happening between the two of them. They have, "laconic and clear, almost wordless, communication of the most complex thoughts." 

Then, they're communicating via letters! How Kitty discerns what Levin's written "w.y,a,m:t,c,b,d,i,m,n,o,t" means is beyond me. And then they keep it up, a whole conversation of letters written in chalk on the tablecloth that leads to a sort of proposal. Weird but kind of cool. 

What follows is a master class on how to write a man in love. Levin sees men arguing at a committee meeting but he realised "none of them was angry, they were all such kind, nice people and all things went so nicely and sweetly among them." His hotel lackey Yegor is, "in a rapturous state." 

"All night and morning Levin had lived completely unconsciously and had felt himeself completely removed from the conditions of material life. He had not eaten for a whole day, had not slept for two nights, had spent several hours undressed in the freezing cold, yet felt not only fresh and healthy as never before but completly independent of his body. He moved without any muscular effort and felt he could do anything. He was certain that he could fly into the air or lift up the corner of the house if need be." 

He sees kids, a pigeon, and smells baked bread and "All this together was so extraordinarily good that Levin laughed and wept from joy." 

The love endorphins are like hallucinogens for Levin! 

Day 26: Part Four XVI-XVIII

A bit more of Levin and Kitty in love before the story moves to more serious matters. But I loved that even though Levin kind of detests the rituals around engagement, "it ended with him doing the same things as others, and his happiness was only increased by it and became more and more special, the like of which had never been known and never would be." It's true sometimes, isn't it, that even if the rituals that we mark our lives by may seem antiquated, we can often take such comfort in them. 

Contrast Levin's bliss with Alexei Alexandrovich's ire. Nothing goes right. He's passed over for promotion, he turns red, he paces, he is "bilious." And as he journeys to Anna in Petersburg, he intends to pursue divorce, or, if his wife is truly dying in childbirth, to practice magnanimity and forgive. 

Today, Tolstoy surprised me! The narrative took turns I didn't anticipate at all. Anna is postpartum and suffering from puerperal fever, at death's door. Alexei Alexandrovich...forgives? And all of a sudden he is in a different, blissful mental state: "the joyful feeling of love and forgiveness of his enemies filled his soul." To Vronsky he says, "My duty is clearly ordained for me: I must be with her and I will be. I will let you know, but now I suppose it will be better if you leave."

The second shocker is Vronsky's repsonse to all this. Tormented by his own inadequacy in this perilous time, he cannot sleep, beset by intrusive negative thoughts. 

"'This is how people lose their minds,' he repeated, 'and shoot themselves...so as not to be ashamed.'"

"'Of course,' he said to himself, as if a logical, continuous and clear train of thought had brought him to an unquestionable conclusion. In fact, this 'of course' that he found so convincing was only the consequence of a repetition of exactly the same round of memories and notions that the had already gone through a dozen times within the hour. It was the same memory of happiness lost for ever, the same notion of the meaninglessness of everything he saw ahead of him in life, the same consciousness of his humiliation." 

I wasn't sure he'd do it until he did (though he missed). On a serious note, this strikes me as a sadly realistic portrayal of the tragedy of impulsive suicide. A temporarily intolerable mental state, in the context of an immediately available means, that leads to self-inflicted violence or suicide. 

Day 27/28: Part Four, XIX-XXIII

As Alexei Alexandrovich becomes attached to the idea of lofty forgiveness and increasingly fond of his son and the new baby girl, the impossibility of continuing as usual with Anna becomes obvious to everyone. Society is looking askance, subtly, and Anna can't even look at him without recoiling. "...there could be no dignity in his position." Tolsoy writes this well, I think. It would be so easy if things could just work out, right? But they cannot. 

I'm also wondering if Anna is in the grips of a postpartum depression. I felt for her when she hears that her daughter isn't feeding well. "I asked to nurse her, they didn't let me, and now I'm being reproached." She bursts into sobs. She begins to talk openly about suicide. 

But things move at a dizzying pace, and somehow it doesn't seem surprising by this point that all of the sudden, Anna has left for a life "abroad" with Vronsky, leaving her son (and not sure about her daughter...) behind. 

Day 29: Part Five, I-V

Preparation for a wedding, and the wedding itself! Levin and Kitty will finally tie the knot. Although still largely from Levin's point of view, Tolstoy gives us glimpses into Kitty's motivation, and her strength. While in the throes of love, Levin is content to let everyone set his life's agenda, but Kitty "had certain requirements of her own regarding their future life." Levin has doubts aplenty, a quick crisis of love, and Kitty has to reassure him: "'You're out of your mind,' she cried, flushing with vexation." 

Levin also has a crisis of faith when forced to attend a rather involved confession, necessary to complete before marriage. I hear Tolstoy's voice when he writes,

"With regard to religion, Levin, like most of his contemporaries, was in a very uncertain position. He could not believe, yet at the same time he was not firmly convinced that it was all incorrect." 

Levin doubts religion; indeed, he is an avowed unbeliever. He doubts in general. "'My chief sin is doubt. I doubt everything and for the most part live in doubt.'" He sees this as a sin, but perhaps it can be a virtue as well. After confession, he doubts that he doubts religion. 

Finally, pomp and circumstance! And some comedy, almost slapstick disorganisation around wedding prep. All is lost almost for the lack of a proper shirt. 

As an aside, today I noticed lots of descriptions of hands: The old priest has "small, old man's hands." Anna's hands: "He recalled kissing that hand and afterwards studying the merging lines on its pink palm." The deacon has "a stubby hand," and at the end of confession, "the hand in its velveteen cuff having discreetly received a three-pound rouble note," the ritual is over. Tolstoy mentioned that Kitty wasn't looking well lately, and that came into sharp focus when the priest put the ring on Kitty's, "pathetically frail finger." 

Day 30: Part Five, VI-XI

Spending some time in Italy with Anna and Vronsky, it remains clear that all is not particularly healthy in their relationship. Though on the surface Vronsky is happy, he finds his life monotonous, and is bored with all the leisure time in Europe. Anna, in contrast, is happy and in love, at least on the surface. She recalls leaving her husband and her son, and all the drama that preceded it: "all this seemed to her a feverish dream from which she had awakened abroad, alone with Vronsky. The memory of the evil done to her husband called up in her a feeling akin to revulsion..." Best to forget it all, Anna thinks. "Even the separation from her son, whom she loved, did not torment her at first. The little girl, his child, was so sweet and Anna had become so attached to her, once this little girl was all she had left, that she rarely remembered her son." 

It does seem a bit unhealthy, as Anna feels like nothing as compared to her admiration for Vronsky. "She did not dare show him her awareness of her own nullity before him. It seemed to her that if he knew it, he would stop loving her sooner." 

Vronsky, for his part, "despite the full realization of what he had desired for so long, was not fully happy. He soon felt the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error that people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires." 

Day 31: Part Five, XII-XVIII

As we leave Anna and Vronksy in Italy (and on their way back to Russia, as Vronksy is so bored!), I wondered about a thought that the painter Mikhailov had when the visitors took leave of him. He'd been so perturbed their admiration and their comments, but: 

"When the visitors had gone, Mikhailov sat down facing the picture of Pilate and Christ and went over in his mind what had been said, or not said but implied, by these visitors. And, strangely, what had carried such weight for him when they were there and when he put himself mentally into their point of view, suddenly lost all meaning for him. He began to look at his picture with his full artistic vision and carried at that state of confidence in the perfection and hence the significance of his picture which he needed for that tension, exclusive of all other interests, which alone made it possible for him to work."  

It struck me that this might be how Tolsoy viewed his own writing process. 

Levin and Kitty settle into married life, and I liked the way that Tolstoy likens the new family life to sailing: 

"At every step, he felt like a man who, after having admired a little boat going smoothly and happily on a lake, then got into this boat. He saw that it was not enough to sit straight without rocking; he also had to keep in mind, not forgetting for a minute, where he was going, that there was water underneath, that he had to row and his unaccustomed hands hurt, that it was easily only to look at, but doing it, while very joyful, was also very difficult."

Finally, what a description of brother Nikolai, as he lays in his malodorous, filthy room deathly ill from consumption. Levin is shocked, but, "despite the terrible change in the face, Levin had only to look into those living eyes raised to him as he entered, notice the slight movement of the mouth under the matted moustache, to realize the terrible truth, that this dead body was his living brother." 

Day 32: Part Five, XIX-XIII

Two things struck me about today's reading. The first event was the death of Nikolai, Levin's brother. It was quite a chapter on its own, and curiously had a title below the chapter number Roman numerals: "DEATH". But it was Levin's musings about how he thought of death very differently than Kitty and Marya Nikolaevna that got to me. For Levin, "to be in the sick-room was torture for him." But Kitty feels pity for Nikolai, "and pity in her woman's soul produced none of the horror and squeamishness as it did in her husband, but a need to act." 

Levin feels he's more intelligent than the women, and "he could not help knowing that when he thought about death, he thought about it with all the forces of his soul. He also knew that many great masculine minds, whose thoughts he had read, had pondered death and yet did not know a hundredth part of what his wife and Agafya Mikhailovna know about it." Yet the women: 

"...unquestionably knew what life was and what death was...The proof that they knew firmly what death was lay in their knowing, without a moment's doubt, how to act with dying people and not being afraid of them. While Levin and others, though they could say a lot about death, obviously did now know, because they were afraid of death and certainly had no idea what needed to be done when people were dying." 

This made me wonder about the way death was experienced differently between women and men in that time. Tolstoy is addressing a religious belief question, I think, but aside from that, death would have been a not uncommon event in daily life. Perhaps women knew how do deal with dying-the care, ministrations needed, the emotional comfort, the laying out of the body-because it was in the purview of the domestic; and men knew how to deal with the dead: war, accidents and the like. A gross generalization, but it seems reasonable to me. 

Secondly, learning a bit more about Alexei Alexandrovich's upbringing illuminated his character. An orphan, his brother was his closest friend, but his brother moved away and then died. He had no close friends in university, and was rather forced into a marriage with Anna. He had to abandon his rule when considering the pressure to marry Anna: "when in doubt, don't"; but her aunt insinuated he'd compromised Anna, so Alexei had little choice. Previous descriptions of his character in which he holds himself away from emotional involvement, make a lot of sense, and his fear of abandonment was probably hugely triggered by Anna's affair and departure. Now, he is "utterly alone with his grief." 

Day 33: Part Five, XXIV-XXIX

I'm pondering a theme in the novel of how people have a remarkable ability to construct the world the way that they want or need to see it. Many characters have a great capacity for self-delusion, usually unconscious, but sometimes creeping into awareness. Today, first Tolstoy makes an example of Alexei Alexandrovich, who has won a prize and isn't aware of how society scorns him. His career has ceased upward movement. "This cessation was an accomplished fact and everyone saw it clearly, but Alexei Alexandrovich himeslf was ot yet aware that his career was over." He's now engaged in seeing the fault in others' proposals, and "he began writing a proposal about the new courts, the first in an endless series of totally unnecessary proposals..." 

"Alexei Alexandrovich did not only not notice his hopeless position in the official world or feel upset by it, but was more satisfies with his activity than ever." 

I note that he's also found meaning in religion, and (likely related) the Countess Lydia Ivanova's love. 

Then Vronksy, trying to reenter Petersburg society with Anna, can't make it happen, but "Despite all his social experience, Vronsky, owing to the new position in which he found himself, was strangely deluded. It seems he ought to have understood that society was closed to him and Anna; but some vague arguements were born in his head, that it had been so only in olden times, while now, progress being so quick...society's outlook had changed." Not so. 

The chapters where we finally get to spend time with Seryozha were charming! What a portrait of a boy, who chafes against the confines of the academic classroom and rote memorization (and the silliness of "such a short and clear word such as 'thus' was an adverbial modifier or manner."), and instead finds joy in intrigues with the hallway porter, and in making windmills with his tutor Vassily Lukich. What a treat to end the chapter with his wish fulfillment, to see his mother on his birthday. 

Day 34/35: Part Five, XXX-XXXIII

I begin to understand Anna and Vronksy's patterns more as I move through the second half of the novel, if only because the same patterns repeat endlessly. Both seem to have unquiet, mildly chaotic inner lives, and difficulties with genuine attachment. Tolstoy gives glimpses into both Anna and Vronksy's thoughts today, beginning with Anna. 

Her relationship with (or, more accurately her feelings towards) her children feels unstable. In Italy (Day 30 in our reading), she had almost forgotten her son in favour of her bond to Anna. Now, she finds the baby Anna cute, but, "the sight of this child made it still clearer that her feeling for her, compared to what she felt for Seryozha, was not even love. Everything about this little girl was sweet, but for some reason none of it touched her heart." It's as if she only wants what she can't have. It's also painful to watch her frantic thoughts to assure herself of Vronsky's love while ruminating over the fact that he may have stopped loving her. There's such a chaotic, desperate quality to her emotion. 

Vronsky can't see why Anna would put herself in harm's way by going to the theatre: "To appear in the theatre in that attire and with that notorious princess is not only to acknowledge your position as a ruined woman but also to throw down a challenge to society-that is, to renounce it forever." And later, "However you look at it, it's stupid, stupid...And why does she put me in such a position?" 

After they return from the horrid experience at the theatre (particularly for Anna), they argue: 

"'I hate your calmness. You shouldn't have driven me to that. If you loved me...'

'Anna! What does the question of my love have to do...'

'Yes, if you loved as I do, if you suffered as I do...' she said, looking at him with an expression of fear.

He felt sorry for her, and still he was vexed."

I'm a bit vexed with both of them! But perhaps that's the point. Anna and Vronksy are not unique, and their personalities have been shaped by the world around them and their life experiences, so no judgement! This dramatic, push and pull, approach and retreat type of interpersonal dynamic is common, and often doesn't bode well for a couple. Their attachments to each other, and Anna for her children, seem markedly insecure, and probably reflect their past relationship experiences that have led to a poor sense of self. Anna's desperation also likely reflects her increasingly narrow options for a social life and friendship during this time, while trying and failing to escape society's harsh critique. I think Tolstoy is contrasting this with Levin and Kitty's relationship, where they can argue or misunderstand, but keep their sense of self intact and work through issues more easily, resulting in a much more stable union. So far! 

Day 36: Part Six, I-VI

I really enjoyed all of the domestic scenes and dialogue today at the Levin estate. It's fun watching Levin be so happy and so uncomfortable at the same time, when so many visitors have descended for the summer: "And though he loved them all, he slightly regretted his Levin world and order, which was smothered under this influx of the 'Shcherbatsky element,' as he kept saying to himself."  

I was particularly taken with the making of the jam, with its clash between the old way and the new (should water be added, or not??), and how the women are all sitting outside while the jam is made right there, with several offering advice, or jumping up to participate. Kitty's mother can't help but be interested. 

"The princess, feeling that Agafya Mikhailovna's wrath must be directed at her, as the chief advisor on making raspberry jam, tried to pretend she was busy with something else and not interested in the jam, talked about unrelated things, but kept casting sidelong glances at the brazier." 

I'm also wondering if covering the jam with a piece of paper soaked in rum will keep my jam fresh all winter. 

The scene when Kitty and Levin walk in the woods, he contemplating his love for her, his joy in her pregnancy and his respect for his brother while Kitty is enjoying the exercise and musing over another couple's marriage prospects was simply charming. 

Day 37: Part Six, VII-XI

In chapter VII, I just had to shake my head at Levin's jealousy! As Kitty speaks with newcomer Vasenka Veslovsky, a rather meaty man who has joined their house party unexpectedly, Levin misinterprets Kitty's every look and blush as affection directed towards Vasenka. "Strange as it was for him to recall it later, it seemed clear to him now that if she asked him whether he was going hunting, she was interested only in knowing whether he would give this pleasure to Vasenka Veslovsly, with whom, to his mind, she was already in love." Honestly! And two pages later: "Levin's jealousy had gone further still. He already saw himself as a deceived husband, needed by his wife and her lover only to provide them with life's conveniences and pleasures..." 

One one hand, this could be a very menacing pattern of jealously and control on Levin's part; but it seems less so because it's almost humourous, and so far in the book Levin doesn't seem to have a violent or malevolent character, and also because Kitty doesn't let him get away with it. One of my least favourite plot devices is "miscommunication" between characters, particularly in romance novels. Luckily, Tolstoy allows Levin and Kitty to clear this misunderstanding up quickly. Anna is secretly pleased of his jealousy even as she is slightly vexed, and Levin recognises the "horror and comicality" of his own fragility. 

When Kitty explains the innocent dinner conversation she and Vesenka had, all is well: 

"'Katia, I'm tormenting you! Darling, forgive me! It's madness! Katia, it's my fault all round. How could I suffer so over such stupidity?'

'No, I'm sorry for you.'

'For me? For me? What am I? A madman...'" 

Then, the hunting! Vasenka is beyond hilarious, with his driving the carriage into the swamp, and his almost shooting Levin. 

There's a fascinating conversation between Stepan and Levin about financial inequality, about wealth acquired through acquisition or inheritance, and about what to do about it. Levin rails against "gain without work," but Stepan sees it as the natural order. It puts Levin in an intellectual quandry: He thinks it is very unjust, but Stepan challenges him: "Yes, you feel it, and yet you don't give him [the muzhik] your property."

"'I don't give it to him because no one demands it of me, and I couldn't if I wanted to,' replied Levin, 'and there's nobody to give it to.' 

'Give it to this muzhik; he won't refuse.'

'Yes, but how am I going to give it to him? Shall I go and draw up a deed of purchase with him?'

'I don't know, but if you're convinced you have no right...'

'I'm not at all convinced. On the contrary, I feel that I don't have the right to give it up, that I have responsibilities to the land and to my family.'

'No, excuse me, but if you think this inequality is unjust, why don't you act that way?...'

'I do act, only negatively, in the sense that I'm not going to try to increase the difference of situation that exists between him and me.'"

And Levin is troubled by his conclusion; it is not a great argument or an answer to what is just and what is unjust. This section resonated with me, because it points to the ever-present debate in our own society about income inequality, that only grows and grows these days. Wealth increases for the wealthy, and even for those of us who aren't conventionally "rich," it's often very hard to give up a lot of what one has to help others. 

And if anyone wants to know what a snipe is: 

EBird: Great Snipe

Day 38: Part Six, XII-XVII

Just over two thirds of the way through this book, and I had a curious sensation reading this morning, as I rose with the sun to accompany Levin and his dog Laska on their morning hunt. It felt like an episode that developed Levin's character a bit more, but also just a thing that happened, and I was simply hanging out with the now-familiar characters that populate the book. It struck me that this is one of the neat things about a slow reading of a grand and long classic novel, the sense that I'm now dwelling in their world. 

But they're also frustrating folks to hang out with sometimes! After all Levin and Kitty's clearing the air and resolving misunderstandings, Levin still can't help but succumb to jealousy. They resolve it again, but Kitty laments: "'It's impossible to live this way! It's torture! I'm suffering, you're suffering. Why?'...'these people...Why did he [Vasenka] come? We were so happy!'" 

When Dolly explains to Levin that Vasenka is just doing what young men do in high society, attach themselves romantically to a married woman, Levin cannot accept looking the other way even if it is innocent and will lead to nothing. He doesn't play the society games, and he can't even bring himself to make up an excuse to Vasenka to get him to leave. He just goes and tells Vasenka the truth while ordering him to leave. Another way that Tolstoy contrasts Kitty/Levin and Anna/Vronksy. Tradition and the modern. 

Then, as I journeyed with Dolly on her way to visit Anna, she's got some pretty dark thoughts about motherhood. Give her four hours away from the children and all sorts of sadness and anger rear up. Dolly recalls a conversation with a peasant woman who'd lost one child. "I had one girl, but God freed me, I buried her during Lent." Though horrified, Dolly "could not help but admitting there was a dose of crude truth in those words." Having been pregnant or nursing for much of her marriage, she thinks: 

"'Labour, suffering, ugly suffering, that last moment...then nursing, the sleepless nights, the terrible pains...'"

"'Then the children's illnesses, this eternal fear...and on top of it all, the death of these same children.' And again there came to her imagination the cruel memory, eternally gnawing at her mother's heart, of the death of her last infant boy, who had died of croup, his funeral, the universal indifference before that small, pink coffin, and her own heart-rending, lonely pain..." 

"And all for what? What will come of it all?" Later, "Well, and if we take the most fortunate outcome: the children won't die anymore, and I'll bring them up somehow. At best they simply won't turn out to be scoundrels. That's all I can wish for." 

Such negative ruminations, but somehow the hopelessness, grief and bitterness are not wholly unfamiliar to many parents in darker moments, and Dolly was parenting in a time of much higher child mortality. No wonder she envies Anna's choices in some ways. 

Day 39: Part 6, XVIII-XXII:

A couple of quotes that caught my attention today: 

Dolly to Anna: 

"'I have no opinion,' she said, 'but I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.'"

Anna to Dolly:

"But I'm glad you'll see me as I am. Above all, I wouldn't want people to think that I want to prove anything. I don't want to prove anything, I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. I have that right, haven't I?"

At the Vronsky estate, everything is bustling, rich, moneyed and modern. Dolly, who is not so ostentatiously well off, feels uncomfortable, and I was struck by how much of a "scene" that Vronsky (and Anna?) has created around himself. At dinner, all is so perfect, and Dolly realizes, "everything was done and maintained through the care of the host himself." 

"The dinner, the wines, the table-it was all very fine, but it was all the same as Darya Alexandrovna had seen at big formal dinners and balls, which she had become unused to, and had the same impersonal and strained character; and therefore, on an ordinary day and in a small circle, it all made an unpleasant impression on her." 

And finally, as the party plays lawn tennis, Dolly is even more struck by the artifice of the gathering: 

"All that day she had had the feeling that she was playing in the theatre with actors better than herself and that her poor playing spoiled the whole thing." 

Day 40: Part 6, XXIII-XVII:

I found the conversation between Dolly and Anna a bit opaque with respect to pregnancy in the reading today. Anna rejects the notion of now asking for a divorce from her husband Alexei Alexandrovich, despite Dolly hinting that Vronksy asked her to persuade Anna to do so. Anna sees no benefit: "'What wife, what slave, can be so much a slave as I am, in my situation?"'she interrupted gloomily." And when Dolly suggests the her current daughter and any future children would "have a name," Anna is clear that she will have no more children. 

"'I won't, because I don't want it.'

And, despite all her excitement, Anna smiled, noticing the naïve look of curiosity, astonishment and horror on Dolly's face. 

'The doctor told me after my illness.......'"

Dolly, after her previous musing on the burdens of motherhood, is having none of it. 

"This was the very thing she had dreamed of that morning on her way there, but now, on learning that it was possible, she was horrified. She felt it was a much too simple solution of a much too complicated question.

'N'est-ce pas immoral?' [Isn't it immoral?] was all she said, after a pause.'"

It's a bit puzzling to me, because I had assumed that Anna meant that her last pregnancy had caused her to be unable to become pregnant, but Dolly's comment makes me think there is a subtext about contraception. Hmm.

They separate, Anna dosing herself with morphine to sleep, and the next day Dolly finds herself heartily relieved to part ways, heading back to the Levin estate. 

Later, Levin gets involved in provincial politics and voting. I have to say that I got just slightly bored here. These words resonated with me: 

"The debate went on for a long time and ended with nothing." 

Regarding politics: "Levin would even have been glad to acquire a taste for it, but he could not understand what the point was..."

Day 41/42: Part 6, XVIII-XXXII:

I think that Levin is a servant, or a muzhik at heart. He'd rather hang out with the servants and cooks than with the landowners and nobility who are busy arguing politics and preparing to vote for the next provincial marshal. He did have an interesting discussion with a fellow landowner, and it put me to wondering about tradition versus innovation and progress. 

The elections, the landowner says, are, "an obsolete institution that goes on moving only by the force of inertia." 

"'Then why do you come?' asked Levin.

'Out of habit, that's all. And one must also keep up one's connections. A moral responsibility in a sense..."

'But you yourself say that it's an outdated institution.'

'Outdated it is, but still it ought to be treated more respectfully...You know, when you want to make a garden in front of your house, you have to lay it out, and there's a hundred-year-old tree growing in that spot...Though it's old and gnarled, you still won't cut the old-timer down for the sake of your flower beds, you'll lay them out so as to include the tree. It can't be grown in a year...'"

The conversation moves to their own lands, and how they two aren't innovators. Some merchants advise cutting down the trees on the property for profit and use the money to buy cattle, or more land, but Levin and this landowner don't do it. They feel a tug to keep up tradition, continue faming the land as they always have. Others, like Vronsky, want to innovate. 

"'But why don't we do as the merchants do? Cut down the lindens for bast?' asked Levin...

'It's tending the fire, as you say. No, that's no business for noblemen. And our noblemen's business isn't done here at the elections, but there in our own corner. There's also the instinct of your own class, what's done and isn't done. And the muzhiks are the same, to look at them sometimes: a good muzhik just takes and rents as much land as he can. No matter how poor it is, he ploughs away. Also without reckoning. For an outright loss.'

'Just like us,' said Levin."

So a lot of discussion around the value and moral imperative around upholding tradition, a way of life, the "old ways" as opposed to innovation, profit, progress. This echoes the dichotomy that Tolstoy is presenting around the Kitty/Levin vs.Anna/Vronsky relationships with respect to social mores. Of course this is such a a nuanced issue, and not black and white at all, even in the book. At what cost progress? But also when does aversion to the new start to become willful blindness? 

At the end of Part 6 we head back to Anna and Vronsky, with a move to Moscow, and Anna finally requesting the long-anticipated divorce. 

Day 43: Part Seven, I-VI:

In the last part of her confinement, Kitty is in that endless last stage of pregnancy, when everyone is on pins and needles waiting for the joyous event (or, the terrible event for Levin, "who could not think of the approaching event without horror.") But I like how Kitty is feeling about things. 

"She was no clearly aware of the new feeling of love being born in her for the future child who, for her, was already partly present, and she delighted in attending to this feeling...Everyone she loved was with her, and everyone was so kind to her, took such care of her, she saw so much of sheer pleasantness in all that was offered to her, that if she had not known and felt that it must soon end, she would not even have wished for a better or more pleasant life." 

Though I am very aware that pregnancy is different for everyone, this resonated with me because I fortunately had an easy pregnancy, and loved being pregnant. Kitty feels the way that I felt! 

Following Levin around for part of the day, there was lots of academic discussion and such, but I managed to find another way that Tolstoy contrasts the traditional and modern divides: music and art. Levin goes to a concert (? a symphony), King Lear on the Heath, and my footnotes tell me that this was a parody created by Tolstoy to mock the "programme music" that was newly popular. "Tolstoy believed that the need for adjusting music to literature or literature to music destroyed creative freedom." Levin is lost as he tries to interpret the music despite how he listens so fastidiously! 

"...fragments of musical expressions, good ones on occasion, were unpleasant because they were totally unexpected and in no way prepared for. Gaitey, sadness, despair, tenderness and triumph appeared without justification, like a madman's feelings. And, just as with a madman, these feelings passed unexpectedly. 

All through the performance Levin felt like a deaf man watching people dance." 

At intermission, Levin argues with a music connoisseur Pestsov, who adores the music. They argue about mixing genres, Levin citing the example of sculptor M.M. Antokolsky who drew a model for a Pushkin memorial in 1875 that showed various characters from Pushkin's poems coming up to him on a staircase, which Levin finds silly. 

"Pestsov maintained that art is one and that it can reach its highest manifestations only by uniting all its forms." 

An interesting debate. I looked on the internet but was unable to find an image of the 1875 Antokolsky drawing. 

Day 44: Part Seven, VII-XI:

As Levin's day continues, I liked this line when he entered the club that he finds so restful and full of propriety: 

"There was not a single angry or worried face. It seemed they had all left their cares in the porter's lodge together with their hats and were now about to enjoy the material blessings of life at their leisure." 

This seems like a wonderful way to feel, and occasionally I feel like that as I sit down to a nice meal out with friends, or even sometimes during a gathering at home. Also, I'd love to know what Gagin's "indecent and stupid" yet hilarious joke was! 

When Levin and Stepan visit Anna, I was annoyed at Levin for his uncontrollable, sudden love for Anna. I suppose it's human nature, but I wish he wasn't so easily swayed by a pretty face and a beautiful voice (and intelligent conversation, I'll admit!). I could see no good to come of it, but I have to give Levin credit for spilling all to an angry Kitty. I felt for Kitty, with Levin out and about, returning late, while she is in her late pregnancy. They talk it out but the chapter ended with an interesting observation about Moscow's (read: modern society's) influence, though probably too impugning of Anna : 

"It took Levin a long time to calm his wife down. When he finally did, it was only by confessing that the feeling of pity, along with the wine, had thrown him off guard and made him yield to Anna's cunning influence, and that he was going to avoid her. The one thing he confessed most sincerely of all was that, living so long in Moscow, just talking, eating and drinking, he had got befuddled." 

Day 45: Part Seven, XII-XVI:

A quick note on Anna's thoughts in the aftermath of Levin's visit and Vronksy's return: She's truly distressed, and thinks, "I can't do anything, start anything, change anything. I restrain myself, wait, invent amusements for myself...but it's all only a deception, the same morphine again." In a battle of wills with Vronsky, she says, "If you knew how close I am to disaster in these moments, how afraid I am, afraid of myself!" But, interestingly, she realises that this threat of self-harm is a card she has played deliberately, 

"He was colder to her than before, as if he repented of having given in. And, recalling the words that had given her the victory-'I'm close to terrible disaster and afraid of myself'-she realized that this was a dangerous weapon and that she could not use it a second time." 

And then to Levin and Kitty and the birth! What a portrait of an anxious father to be, and of course Levin being Levin, his anxiety and doubt is ramped up astronomically. Worry for his wife has led him back to God! (and the pharmacist, and the doctor). I loved that the doctor was in no hurry...have a coffee, wait an hour. Waiting is agony: 

"But when he came back from the doctor's and again saw her sufferings, he began to repeat more and more often: 'Lord, forgive us and help us,' to sigh and lift up his eyes, and he was afraid that he would not hold out, that he would burst into tears or run away. So tormenting it was for him. And only one hour had passed." 

Women are awesome, right? "The whole world of women, which had acquired a new previously unknown significance for him after his marriage, now rose so high in his estimation that he was unable to encompass it in imagination." 

And finally, there is a never ending well of things to worry about. Now, Levin can worry about his son: 

"What he felt for this small being was not at all what he had expected. There was nothing happy or joyful in this feeling; on the contrary, there was a new tormenting fear. There was an awareness of a new region of vulnerability. And this awareness was so tormenting at first, the fear lest this helpless being should suffer was so strong, that because of it he scarcely noticed the strange feeling of senseless joy and even pride he had experience when the baby sneezed." 

Day 46: Part Seven, XVII-XXI:

Poor Stepan Arkadyich, so short of money. He has none! He needs a vanity job and he needs someone like Alexei Alexandrovich or Lydia to put in a good word for him with the government minister. But there's no love. Alexei distrusts jobs whose salaries do not correspond to work done: "I conclude that salaries are appointed not by the law of supply and demand but directly by personal influence." Countess Lydia just wants to read him religious tracts. The scene with Stepan trying to impress her while understanding none of what is going on with her allusions to Alexei's opinions or religion is almost farce. 

As compared to yesterday's reading, I found it funny that Levin had noticed that simply living in Moscow had begun to corrupt his morals as compared to living the wholesome life in the country. Today, Stepan laments the fuddy-duddy he becomes in Moscow. He's relieved to be in Petersburg, where he has no cares for wife, children or service to others. Less amusingly, he admires all these high-living men, who actually are in deep debt. I thought to myself that it isn't so far off to see the seeds of a revolution in the oblivious behaviour of the nobility as compared to commoners. 

Tolstoy made a couple of references to Jewish people, with respect to the railways, and to Stepan feeling very offended for having to wait for the Jew Bolgarinov in order to plead his case for the posting he wants. A bit of supplementary reading on Wikipedia informed me that even prior to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 (when antisemitism intensified), anti-Jewish sentiment was marked in Russia. 

Antisemitism in the Russian Empire (Wikipedia)

And this article speaks directly to today's reading and the translations of the pun that Stepan was making in the waiting room of Bolgarinov, then gives a pretty comprehensive discussion of Tolstoy's attitudes. 

Was Leo Tolstoy Really and Antisemite (Forward)