AK: (I.9-11) Love in the time of Cachet Blanc

We're back! I had a rough time deciding how to write about this next section. But a passage from The Genesee Diary showed me the way. Like I said earlier, it's an account of a Dutch Catholic writer and priest who goes to spend seven months in a Trappist monastery, living as a monk.

Here's the passage:

Contemplative life is a human response to the fundamental fact that the central things in life, although spiritually perceptible, remain invisible in large measure and can very easily be overlooked by the inattentive, busy, distracted person that each of us can so readily become. The contemplative looks not so much around things but through them into their center. Through their center he discovers the world of spiritual beauty that is more real, has more density, more mass, more energy, and greater intensity than physical matter. In effect, the beauty of physical matter is a reflection of its inner content. Contemplation is a response to the world that is built in this fashion. That is why the Greek fathers, who were great contemplatives, are known as the dioretic fathers. [not diuretic - ed.] Diorao means to see into, to see through. In celebrating the feast of Corpus Christi, the body of Christ, we celebrate the presence of the risen Christ among us, at the center of our lives, at the center of our very being, at the heart of our community, at the heart of the creation...

Keep this in mind as we talk.

Mountaintop At The Garden. Levin meeting Kitty at the ice skating rink might be described best as a mountaintop experience.* In the full flush of his yearning to be joined to Kitty, he uses language that is religious in its fervor to praise her: "Everything became bright in her presence. ... The spot where she stood seemed to him an unapproachable sanctuary... He went down, trying not to look long at her, as though she were the sun, but he saw her, as one sees the sun, without looking." And like someone who looks too long at the sun, he is blinded.

Here's a poem I wrote way back when. If I explain much about what it means, it'll be obvious who it was about. The title is the name of a place on the moon, originally thought to be a sea, and thus called Sea of Tears. One night I looked into the sky, which was quite clear, and saw an enormous silver ring around the moon. Think of it, if you like, as another take on Levin.

Mare Imbrium

Your halo crowning the dark skies
You're too far above me
I sought the sun and I found you
I stared so long my eyes hurt
When I looked around, your image
Was reflected in all I saw
You were imprinted in my brain
I staggered blindly and still your face
Stared back at me endlessly

Maybe you didn't know, when I went into orbit
Circling around, in empty space
Pulled by an irresistible force
I was not an immovable stone
I hate to think you ignored it.

Stay blameless
You'll remain pristine forever in my memory
That is what you deserve-
You never attacked
But maybe I did
And I burned out my own eyes
For sight of you

It's a little hard for me to write about this particular chapter, Chapter 9, because of stuff like this. Not God's gift to poetry. I see several changes to make ten-ish years later, including some ghastly punctuation, some clunky phrases. But I was idealistic enough then to believe that Levin was piercing the mystical veil and seeing Kitty as she is. I thought you could have "childlike serenity and goodness," "gentle, calm, and truthful eyes," "an enchanted world," if you only went on a quest for this perfect woman. This attitude spills from the margin, from my high school attitude, into my reading.

Only lately have I seen Levin's attitude being portrayed here as quixotic and a bit unreliable. I transcribed that passage on contemplation, though, because perhaps I have this exactly upside down. It's hard to tell whether visionaries are mad or geniuses. We could all be wrong. Even Tolstoy could be wrong, in a sense, about Levin. Maybe we have only the common sort of sight and he sees the things that are really important.

Faith is the belief in things unseen. That's the common point of view, straight from a quotable Bible verse. The spiritual realm that lies behind or permeates the physical realm is not accessible to our senses. But faith is also the seeing of things believed. Sometimes when I am in the church building, I imagine to myself, what if we could see through this physical thing to the spiritual thing behind it: a pristine church as beautiful as a Monet painting, angels singing in the rafters along with the congregation, the radiance of God shining in every person and from every corner. Sure, there are these brown wooden pews, and the water damage, and the PA is a little too loud this morning and they're out of stubby pencils. And now we must decide which view, which vision of the church is more essential. My instinct is to say that the first one is more real, even though it is, from the common point of view, wholly imaginary.

Once Levin's head floats off its shoulders, action that is altogether prosaic becomes gold-leafed. "Skate together?" Levin asks himself. "Is that possible?" The undercurrent of this action is not Levin's epic romantic destiny, though. Back on the ground, Kitty is frowning and turning things over in her mind. When Levin lets slip his intentions, saying to Kitty regarding the length of his stay in Moscow, "It all depends on you," she is shocked and runs away from him.

We are thus not surprised that she thinks of him as "her favorite brother", and says "I know that I don't love him." On this paragraph, the story pivots, and we grimly anticipate the failure of Levin's marriage proposals, and understand how loosely he is anchored to reality. To his credit, Levin is at least by turns hopeful and hopeless about his prospects. But again, this has more to do with his uncertain view of himself than anything Kitty might have said or done, which he might have paid attention to.

It's a pitiable situation; Tolstoy skillfully sets it up so we tensely await the reveal throughout the following action, until Levin asks Kitty, as he's come to Moscow to do, to fulfill his destiny, to be complete, to find Jesus and God and heaven and be burned up in the sun. Then, presumably, she will say no.

Coming Down The Mountain. Once the radiance of Kitty fades away, Levin finds himself down in the twilight of a dinner with Oblonsky. Quickly, he feels like he and his idealistic thoughts of beauty and truth and Kitty do not belong in this sybarite's world. A woman wearing makeup is the first target of his ire, but more follow over the course of their luxurious meal. "He was afraid of besmirching that which filled his soul." And if there's one thing that really smirches the place up, it's Flensburg oysters.

Levin can't tell Oblonsky all that, so he channels his discomfort into classic town mouse, country mouse talk:

O: "Well, naturally. But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment."
L: "Well, if that is so, I'd rather be a savage."

The friendly banter starts to unravel as Oblonsky brings the conversation back around to the Shcherbatskys, though. It's hard not to hear Oblonsky dragging a source of holiness for Levin down into a source of enjoyment for himself. Levin reaffirms, once more in religious language, both what this love means to him ("It is not mere feeling, but a sort of force outside me which has taken possession of me") and why he feels unworthy of it ("that we--who are no longer young and have pasts... er... not of love but of sins--that we find ourselves drawn close suddenly to a pure, innocent being!").

But in this affirmation we can hear Levin's confession that all the disgust he had directed outward at the evening, the tarted-up woman, the luxuries, and Oblonsky, the paunchy nobleman, also convicts him. I am tempted to say that Levin's opinion of himself is just as valid as his opinion of Kitty. Another phrase springs to mind: "in humility, consider others better than yourselves." Is Levin's attitude humility, or do we need a more destructive word?

As If. As if the night couldn't get any worse, Oblonsky talks about one of Kitty's suitors, the handsome, intelligent, young Vronsky, then forces Levin to talk about adultery. I have wondered for a while whether there is a subtext here that Levin is too old for Kitty. No one really comes right out and says it. It's all couched in terms of experience.

I'll leave the talk of Vronsky for another night. As for the talk on adultery, it's fairly predictable when you think about where they're both coming from, but it's fun to read. There are some great lines and moments in this chapter, and this is already getting long, so I'm going to cut this thing short.

I really like the moment when Levin is talking about how pure love should be, but all of a sudden he realizes that he is not so pure and becomes confused: "However, perhaps you're right. Yes, perhaps you are. ... But I don't know. I really don't know." This is the culmination of Levin's being pulled between the two versions of his love all day long, masterfully depicted by Tolstoy. Oblonsky has a great line in response: "You want the activity of every single man always to have an aim, and love and family life always to be one and the same thing. But that doesn't happen either. All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade."

Finally done! Hopefully the next installment won't take so long to get out.



* The reference is to the Transfiguration, a story in the Gospels where Jesus takes John, Peter, and James up on a peak, where they see him transformed and conversing with Moses and Elijah. (Incidentally, Wikipedia informs me that the Orthodox, Catholic, and Anglican churches celebrate this event on August 6, a day I have always firmly associated with the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima.)

I had a mountaintop experience in the summer of 2000, when I spent several weeks in South Lake Tahoe with Campus Crusade for Christ among adults in ministry and 80 like-minded students on a mission. I don't regret the weeks. They rank with some of the best I've ever had, and that's where I met Sarah Conrad from Utah. There was even a literal, yet symbolic mountain to climb where you could see for miles into the blue, Mount Tallac. I picked wildflowers to give to Sarah. I had a two-liter bottle full of them before Matt Stumbaugh educated me about zero-impact principles.

It was a perfect environment for living as a Christian and being close to God. There are all kinds of things I could say from here, like "too perfect...?" and "for that reason, to be mistrusted" but they're not quite true. The mountain is real, and the valley and the flatland are real too. What you learn on the mountain is for the rest of your life, but it requires a bit of translation to the rest of your life first.

AK: (I.7-8) Sergey my brother, you are older than me

I'm reading for chunks. Maybe two or three chapters will turn out to be more appropriate than four or five.

Meet Kozneyshev. Yes, yes, every single heading I've used so far has said "Meet X". It's like there's a party in my book, and everyone's invited. Things are going to start happening soon, I promise.

For some reason now unfathomable to me, after the better part of a decade reading this book, I never picked up on the fact that these chapters with Levin's brother are a flashback, which occur in the morning before Levin goes to see Oblonsky. At the end of the Chapter 5, Levin bounded off to find Kitty at the skating rink. Along with Chapter 6, the backstory on Levin and Kitty, these chapters interrupt the action to characterize Levin and his brother Koznyshev, and to introduce Levin's other brother, Nikolai.

This kind of interruption would be a no-no on the airport rack. The exciting narrative is put on hold for these expository lumps. The fact that I didn't notice for years probably means it's no big deal. Maybe it also shows that the exposition is interesting enough in its own right.

Levin's brother Sergey is renowned as a thinker, a member of the intelligentsia who enjoys nothing more than seeing around all sides of an issue and arguing articulately about it. I understand why; just this was my favorite thing for a long time.

When I was in high school, I was a policy debater. It's an intellectual game where the object is to score points in an argument game. A resolution, chosen at the beginning of the year (actually, before the summer break preceding), delineates the sides of the debate. One team, the Affirmative, must argue in favor of the resolution (e.g., "The US should change its foreign policy towards Iraq"), and they essentially set the ground for the hour of debate that follows; the other team, the Negative, explains why the Affirmative is totally wrong, even if the Affirmative plan is to give everyone a pony and live happily ever after. In the course of a typical tournament, you might take the Affirmative 3 times and the Negative 3 times. You might say things that you don't believe, or further, things that contradict the statements you made to win the last debate.

For me, the system started breaking down in my senior year. People started making philosophical arguments about the way people talked in the debates, essentially playing the Race card or the Class card or the Patriarchy card or the Sins of the State card. Environmental debates lend themselves to this kind of indictment of how you speak rather than what you're saying, owing to the variety of philosophical takes on the environment. All of a sudden, you're a misogynist who wants to oppress people because you're interested in funding the ethanol industry. The debates could get pretty ugly. Once, a team brought up suicide during a critique of Western morality. Not in a good way. It was me and Geraldine, and we were both friends of Chris. That one was ugly.

Words do matter. They can kill and heal, build up and tear down, just like in the poem. They cut you, you bleed. They lift you, you fly. But Koznyshev doesn't treat words like that anymore. He refuses to take them seriously. That's why it says in the first paragraph of Chapter 7, first, that the professor came to talk about "a very important philosophical question", and second, that their discussion is a "fashionable question." These two opposed views brought me up short. Is it more irony? Is there just irony on every page of this book now that I am 26? Am I ironic?

Here's another explanation. For Koznyshev, there has long ceased to be a distinction between what is very important and what is fashionable. He doesn't take a position because he has no positions. He understands everything except for himself. Levin, on the other hand, feels forced by a kind of innate honesty or maybe courage, to take stands that he must later retract. He is interested in questions as Koznyshev never can be, because he sees the mystery of himself at the heart of all of life's questions.

This is why Kozneyshev and the professor dance around questions of sensation, being, and death. It takes a man who looks like a barge hauler, like the man who sings "Old Man River", to bring them face to face with the very real implications of the ideas they toss around like coins. They are good at the debate game, but no one gets good at death. Koznyshev is a great debater, and saves the game by pointing out that there is no data beyond death; only theory remains.

The next chapter has more of the same, as Koznyshev dispassionately chats about things that he has no personal stake in. Even the news that his brother Nikolai is back in town does not sway him. When Koznyshev pays a debt for Nikolai and sends him the receipt, Nikolai responds with a sarcastic note asking to be left alone. Then Koznyshev makes a very telling statement: "'He obviously wants to insult me,' Koznyshev went on, 'but he can't do that.'" That's because Koznyshev isn't enough of a person to be insulted. He doesn't take any stands worth fighting about, or even worth some mild indignation. Nikolai can't hurt what he can't touch. Nikolai, can, however, inspire Koznyshev to soar to new heights of personal moral rectitude by his example. In theory, Koznyshev is a towering intellect, a respected moralist and thinker; in reality, he is a ghost.

One thing to keep in mind as you read about Nikolai, Levin, and Sergey is to remember that they are brothers, and in some way may represent a kind of continuum. Sergey and Nikolai are estranged, and Levin travels between them. Sergey is well-respected, Nikolai is reviled, and again Levin is about halfway between. I'll revisit this idea when we meet Nikolai.

Levin decides that letters and paid-off IOUs aren't enough, even for a wastrel like Nikolai, and wants to go see his brother. He is tempted to blow it off because his mind is full of Kitty and his plans to propose, but he still decides to go that evening. The flashback ends as Levin sets out for Oblonsky's office.

These two chapters aren't very far out of order, so why do it as a flashback at all? Consider where Tolstoy had to begin the novel. The precipitating event for all the action that follows, one way or another, is the Oblonsky crisis. Levin is also introduced from Oblonsky's point of view, rather than appearing first waiting around in his brother's office. Instead our first impression of Levin is as an impulsive man of action. The Oblonsky crisis is more interesting, and provides some unresolved tension to carry us through the first chapters of the book. It also drops the name of the main character, Anna, who we don't see for a while yet.

Why have the two chapters at all? We could just go straight from Oblonsky's office to the rink. I think it was important to get Nikolai into the backstory quickly, and perhaps to characterize Koznyshev. These things set up the promised scenes with Nikolai in the evening.

AK: (I.4-6) Making introductions

Side note. My son Alexander turned two on Saturday. He is a wonderful boy. We took him to the doctor today for a scheduled checkup. He's growing well and all. Our pediatrician noticed my battered copy of Anna Karenina, and asked me how far I was into it. I explained that I was reading it once again, and he said he recognized it because of the front cover, which is a painting called "The Spinet". Spinet means upright piano, as opposed to grand piano, and the picture shows a lady playing the piano. (Spinet is also a term for harpsichord-like keyboard instruments (presumably popular in the 19th century) that pluck strings rather than hammering them like the piano does.) Anyhow, the doctor too has the Magarshack.

Meet Dolly. Chapter 4 introduces Oblonsky's wife, Dolly. She was once beautiful, but the strains of seven pregnancies in nine years, raising five children, and running a house on nothing while Oblonsky fritters away his living and her fortune have aged her prematurely. When she discovered Oblonsky's betrayal, it probably should have been the final straw. As the chapter opens, we hear Dolly's indecision as she tries to pack up the children's things. She has been on the verge of leaving Oblonsky for days, but can't quite cross the threshold.

Here are a few interesting verbal coincidences that explain why, at least to me. At the end of Chapter 3, Oblonsky says, "it can't be left as it is," then marches into Dolly's bedroom to have it out. A mirror image at the beginning of Chapter 4 reads, "[Dolly] kept saying to herself that it could not go on like that, that she had to do something to punish and humiliate him." Notice how Oblonsky thinks the status quo is too harsh, but Dolly thinks that the pain hasn't even begun to touch him. But it's essentially the same language, the same phrase. Another one says that Dolly "could not break herself of the habit of looking upon him as a husband and loving him." Compare to the first three chapters, which repeat almost obnoxiously that Oblonsky is a creature of habit. Finally, there's the last line in the chapter, which explains how Dolly's reflection on the tragic state of her marriage is interrupted by another household crisis: "And Dolly, absorbed in her daily cares, drowned her grief in them for a while." This reminded me very strongly of the "dream of life" image used for Oblonsky. Again, the mirror: life is what happens to Oblonsky while he's waiting for his dreams of decanter girls and sybaritic pleasures to start up again, but Dolly uses life as a soporific against her deep sense of despair for her family and her situation. Oblonsky escapes from life, Dolly escapes to life.

Why are husband and wife described with such similar language? I started to get the feeling that Oblonsky and Dolly fit together, or deserve each other somehow. They float along on the sea of their quotidian arrangement. She bails water and he fiddles. Neither one of them is willing to make a real break, a big change. They've been doing it for so long that they forget why they're doing it.

The quarrel scene is quite tragic to me. Oblonsky is not moved, in the end, by Dolly's hatred. She says, "I loathe you. I hate you. You're a stranger to me, yes, a perfect stranger!" He says, "And the maids may have heard! Terribly unladylike, terribly." But the most tragic thing of all is that Dolly still loves this boob.

Ellipsis is used to hint at things the characters don't want to say out loud. In one of the first chapters, Oblonsky almost says that the situation has gone from bad to worse because he's gotten his mistress pregnant. In this chapter, Dolly says last, "How I loved! And don't I love him even now? Don't I love him even more than ever now? What's so dreadful is that..." I think the end of this sentence is that Oblonsky doesn't love her anymore. Dolly can't say it out loud. The very idea deprives her of oxygen.

Meet Levin. Konstantin Levin is a mass of contradictions, like most of the characters in this novel. Levin runs onto the stage as a strong, broad-shouldered man climbing the steps to Oblonsky's office "swiftly and lightly". He feels out of place and shy in Oblonsky's office, but also feels contempt for Oblonsky's meaningless sinecure and government jobs in general. He detests the town and he detests the rural council, but he especially hates Grinyevich's well-manicured fingers.

Levin and Oblonsky are unlikely friends. "Each believed that the life he himself led was the only real life and the life led by his friends was nothing but an illusion." Oblonsky is the ambassador of the world, reflexive smile firmly and involuntarily in place, stranger to none and making no distinctions of place or status. Levin, on the other hand, is a man of ideas, popping up with a frown and "some totally new and unexpected views on things in general."

That is, Oblonsky and Levin reflect another great division, between what you might call the physical life and the spiritual life. Levin thinks that Oblonsky's hedonism, for lack of a better word, is worthless, and ignores questions of meaning. Oblonsky thinks that big ideas are a big waste of time, and that a world beyond the material doesn't even exist.

Along this line, here's a short passage from Kierkegaard's The Single Individual (from a page of Kierkegaard commentaries and translations):

There is a view of life which holds that where the crowd is, the truth is also, that it is a need in truth itself, that it must have the crowd on its side. There is another view of life; which holds that wherever the crowd is, there is untruth, so that, for a moment to carry the matter out to its farthest conclusion, even if every individual possessed the truth in private, yet if they came together into a crowd (so that "the crowd" received any decisive, voting, noisy, audible importance), untruth would at once be let in.

"Oblonsky, doing the same things as everyone else, laughed confidently and good-humoredly, whereas Levin laughed not so confidently and sometimes angrily." Levin is the great individual, but he often stands alone, unsupported by his culture or even universal ethical principles. His ideas are always earnest, but are not always grounded and consistent, as is evident when Levin and Oblonsky talk about the rural council. Oblonsky needles Levin, "I can see that you've now entered a new phase, a conservative one this time." Levin blushes at this kind of talk like a schoolboy. He knows that Oblonsky thinks he's naive and that he looks like a wild man to the worldly set, but he can't bring himself to give up his quixotic quest for meaning.

Oblonsky's last word on the subject reminds me of Re-Neducation, and of course of the last line of 1984: "But even you will come over to us in the end." One of us! One of us!

Meet Levin's Kitty. Kitty Shcherbatsky (not a typo) is Dolly's sister. We meet her in Chapter 6 as the object of Levin's affection. The Shcherbatskys were a surrogate family for Levin, his father and mother being dead and his only sister older than him. He idealized the women: "he imagined... the most elevated sentiments and every conceivable perfection." Shopping, piano, French literature, dancing lessons, might very well seem mysterious and opaque to Levin. There's nothing mysterious, though, about why Levin admires Kitty's legs in their tight red stockings. Meow. The paragraph concludes, "it was with this aura of mystery that he was in love." Along with the obvious reasons, Levin is a man searching for meaning, and that makes him a mystery-lover.

The paragraph on how Levin fell in love with Dolly and Natalie, the older sisters, before Kitty is quite funny. I've mentioned before that my love-dar was quite unmanageable in high school, but this reminded me of another pertinent high school memory, one of those poetic coincidences that explains everything, but goes unnoticed at the time you're living it.

I was in drama for a while. I wasn't very good at it, I think, because I never thought of how I appeared to the audience, or even about being a character instead of just a version of myself saying some words. Anyway, we played this drama game for most of a year, improvising scenes in an elevator as delightfully wacky characters. Eventually, the drama advisor (Tristan and Jessica Devin's mom, Lynne Devin-Smith (spelled right?)) wrote up our scenes into a play called Ups and Downs. It was me, Heather Moon, Nate Todd, Deanna Gauthier, and Amber Anderson.

Here's Heather, Amber, and Deanna, as a runner, deaf girl, and bug lady respectively, encountering me in the elevator (slightly changed my name in the script to keep alive the surprise, and a few stage directions for clarity):

BUG LADY enters elevator, searching for bugs. RUNNER enters jogging, and sees BUG LADY catching bugs [perhaps nonexistent]. DAN enters from SR, gets on elevator, notices RUNNER. He gradually moves next to her.

DAN: Hi!

RUNNER: Hello...

DAN: You know, you might think this is a bit... well, odd, but I think... well, I have the feeling that we know each other.

RUNNER: ... uh... I don't think so - no, you don't look familiar...

DAN: Well, I have a very strong feeling about you... I think... well, I think we're probably soul mates...

RUNNER: Excuse me?

DAN: I think we're destined for each other - destined to be together.

BANKER [Nate] gets on. RUNNER jogs off. DEAF GIRL gets on.

DAN [to DEAF GIRL]: You know, you might think this is a bit... well, odd, but I think... well, I have the feeling that we know each other.

DEAF GIRL [signing]: Excuse me?

DAN: I have a very strong feeling about you... I think... well, I think we're probably soul mates...

DEAF GIRL [signing]: I don't think so...

DAN: I think we're destined for each other - destined to be together.

DEAF GIRL [signing and exiting]: This guy is really off his rocker...

DAN notices BUG LADY.

DAN: You know, you might think this is a bit... well, odd, but I think... well, I have the feeling that we know each other.

BUG LADY doesn't acknowledge him, but finds a bug on his jacket. ...

Pretty much says it all, huh? I invented "everyone's soul mate" and didn't even realize it was me. I can laugh about it now.

That's why Levin is so funny here: "He seemed to feel that he had to fall in love with one of the sisters, only he could not make up his mind with which." He falls in love with Dolly, but she marries Oblonsky; then he falls in love with Natalie, but she marries Lvov. Levin doesn't see them for a while, but after visiting them again, "he realized which of the three sisters he was really destined to fall in love with." And of course, it was the one who wasn't married yet. Of course. I feel like I'm noticing the irony more on this read through.

Levin's been shy about popping the question, though. One reason, that he was worried about what people would think of him, a landowner without a profession, dovetails with the stuff above where he is embarrassed by his individuality and his difference from the crowd, like a schoolboy. But the more intriguing reason is that he sees himself as flawed and dirty, but if he were the girl, he would only pick someone handsome and remarkable. Levin judges by himself, and what he's looking for is perfection. Not just in love, but in his search for the answers to life's persistent questions, he isn't going to settle. Feels like a setup for a rude awakening, doesn't it?

Twice in the last paragraph in Chapter 6, this love is linked ominously with death. He realizes that "he could not live without having settled the question whether or not she would be his wife," and "he could not imagine what would become of him if she were to refuse him." Without getting too far ahead of the story, the meaning of life and the meaning of death bring continual pressure on Levin's self-image. So we might ask ourselves, is Levin planning to propose out of love, out of fear, out of his personal quest for answers? We don't actually know fact two about Kitty (fact one: Meow) because Levin idealizes her so completely. She could be anyone once you get her down from the pedestal, out of the heavenly lighting. So who does Levin think he's marrying, anyway?

AK: (I.1-3) Welcome to the Russian Novel

[Note: Yesterday, I really should have given a quick shout-out to Mount Rainier High School's Class of 1998 IB English 12 class, where I first read this novel, to Mr. Mac Willems who taught the class and led the reading, and to all my classmates who loved or hated it along with me. This live reading of Anna Karenina is dedicated to all of you.]



Congratulations. You're the proud reader of an immense 19th century Russian novel. Here are a few things to be prepared for as you read.

Omniscient Point of View. Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina as an all-knowing storyteller. This is in marked contrast to the modern airport bookstore thriller, which generally uses what you might call a chase camera focused on one character at a time, reporting events from their viewpoint only. Tolstoy feels free to editorialize about the action, comment on characters with a God's eye view, use more than one perspective in a scene, and even tell you his own judgments of the characters rather than show you the characters and imply what he thinks of them.

For Joe Author, this is a really difficult trick to pull off. It breaks a cardinal rule of modern storytelling: "Show, don't tell." The idea is that actions speak louder than words, or that really great details speak for themselves. Tolstoy doesn't go this way. Instead, think of the narrator in AK as another character, a very observant character with a particular slant on life.

You can see this quite clearly in the opening two paragraphs of the novel:

All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonsky household. The wife had found out that the husband had had an affair with their French governess and had told him that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This situation had now gone on for three days and was felt acutely by the husband and wife themselves, by all the members of the family, and by their servants. ...

Interesting information, but it's telling, not showing.

Wordiness. Just as the narrator's judgment is explicit, a lot more of the action and motivation is explicit in AK than your modern novel. There's a lot of repetition of concepts that are redundant in context, a lot of explanations where a few words would suffice. Or would they? Well, here's the next part of the second paragraph:

... All the members of the family and the servants felt that there was no sense in their living together under the same roof and that people who happened to meet at any country inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the Oblonsky family and their servants.

What I find is that when I'm looking for the wordiness, it's everywhere, but I don't really notice it when I'm not.

Detailed Observation. In the modern novel, the depth and detail of the writing is often determined by the importance of the scene. For instance, one sentence can be used to describe a trip from Los Angeles to Boston, but a whole chapter can focus intently on fifteen minutes of story-changing dialogue in a kitchen. These can give the action in the story some ebb and flow, a chance for the reader to calm down after a particularly harrowing scene, or reflect on the future course of the story.

For Tolstoy, it is all details, all the time. That's an exaggeration, but even in a low-key, unimportant scene, the action is described carefully. Here's a bit of the fourth paragraph.

[Oblonsky] turned his plump, well-cared-for body on the well-sprung sofa, as though intending to go to sleep for a long time, hugged the pillow on the other side, and pressed his cheek against it; suddenly he jumped up, sat down on the sofa, and opened his eyes.

If you think that's detailed, wait until something actually happens. Here's the sixth and seventh paragraphs, after Oblonsky has woken up and recalled his dream. There's a very long chain of cause and effect, and the details are very specific.

Oblonsky's eyes sparkled gaily and he smiled as he sank into thought. "Yes, it was nice, very nice. There was a lot that was excellent there, but it can't be put into words, or expressed in thoughts, now that I am awake." Then, noticing the shaft of light coming through the side of one of the holland blinds, he briskly thrust his feet down from the sofa to feel for the slippers his wife had given him as a birthday present the year before and which she had worked in gold morocco and, as had been his custom during the last nine years, stretched out his hand without getting up for the place where his dressing gown hung in the bedroom. It was then that he suddenly remembered how and why it was that he was sleeping not in his wife's bedroom but in his own study. The smile vanished from his face and he wrinkled his forehead.

"Dear, oh dear!" he groaned, remembering what had happened. And in his mind's eye he saw again all the details of the quarrel with his wife; he realized the utter hopelessness of his position and, most tormenting fact of all, that it was all his own fault.

What follows after this is Oblonsky's memory of the quarrel (not a scene, just a moment from a scene). A little shaft of light got the ball rolling. The first real dialogue isn't until Chapter 2.

Last warning: everything in the reading is fair game for me to write about. I won't cheat by talking about future action (say, the thing in a later chapter that may have something to do with the current chapter), but I will mention events and my personal judgments as I go. If you want to read these little thoughts without spoilers, stay four chapters ahead of me.

Meet Oblonsky. Prince Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky (Oblonsky to us, Stiva to his friends) is the quintessential inertial man; I wrote about this a while back. That is, he tends to remain as he is unless acted upon by an outside force, and act the forces do, blowing him around like a weathervane. Although Oblonsky is an aristocrat and has more freedom of action than most people in his country, he abdicates his power in favor of the whims of the crowd. This is clear in the section of I.3 describing Oblonsky's newspaper: he belongs to a certain worldview not because it is right, but "because it corresponded more closely to his way of life."

Because Oblonsky has given up his free will, he has trouble accepting that anything is his responsibility. It's obvious throughout I.1, where Oblonsky says, tellingly, "It is my own fault and yet I'm not to blame. That's the tragedy of it." When Dolly, his wife, discovers the affair, Oblonsky's involuntary "reflexes of the brain" cause him to smile foolishly. "It's all the fault of that stupid smile," he decides. Of course, it is his smile, and his affair, and his callousness masquerading as bonhomie.

[Digression: you might make an interesting comparison between Oblonsky and Angel, a character on Buffy the Vampire Slayer who eventually spawned his own spin-off series. Angel is a vampire who murdered his way around the world for hundreds of years. In the early 20th century, he killed a Romany girl. The gypsies cursed him by returning his human soul to his vampire body. He acquired a conscience and became deeply remorseful for his limitless cruelty, perversion, and wickedness. In a way, Angel is at fault, but not to blame.]

Another aspect of Oblonsky's inertia is his default to routine behavior. These opening chapters contain numerous references to Oblonsky's behavior as customary: "woke up at his usual time"; "as had been his custom during the last nine years"; "smiled its usual kind and, for that reason, rather foolish smile". In fact, this is why Oblonsky gets up out of bed at all: "There was no answer except the usual answer life gives to the most complicated and insoluble questions. This answer is: carry on with your everyday affairs, that is to say, put it out of your mind." It should be clear, though, that just because this is the usual answer or Oblonsky's answer, that doesn't make it the right answer.

Matvey is the Evil Jeeves to Oblonsky's Evil Wooster. Instead of caring for Oblonsky and getting him out of jams in ways that reflect good will for the innocent parties, Matvey is Oblonsky's partner in crime. By turns sympathetic and sly, Matvey is entertained by the spectacle of Oblonsky's family trouble, but not interested in doing the right thing. "Don't worry, sir," he says. "It'll all come right." Oblonsky, though, has cause for his worry and even regret, and Matvey is his enabler when he tells Oblonsky to do nothing until the situation sorts itself out.

Oblonsky's attitude toward his marriage can be called the way of the world: marriage is when two people fall in love, have kids, tire of each other, and begin to commit adultery. This happens to the "handsome and susceptible" man when the woman gets used up and unattractive. The woman should see it coming and accept it as inevitable. Oblonsky internalizes this attitude so deeply that "It was clear that he had never thought the matter out..." After nine years of marriage and seven kids (two dead!), Oblonsky is an absentee husband, making sure not to interfere with his wife, as he puts it. In fact, he wants nothing more than to be out of the house, away from the kids. It is ironic that Oblonsky, who stuck Dolly with all the child-rearing responsibility, should betray Dolly with the person he hired to help her out, the governess.

Finally, is Oblonsky deluded, but otherwise honest? A couple of passages speak to this. In the first, a deeply ironic section on his opinions and liberalism, Oblonsky agrees that marriage is an obsolete institution because "family life gave Oblonsky very little pleasure and forced him to tell lies and dissemble, which was so contrary to his nature." Again, Oblonsky doesn't own up to his actions, but feels oppressed by his marriage vow. In the second, Oblonsky feels like he can't put their relationship right because he can't make Dolly beautiful or overcome his desire for passionate affairs with beautiful women: "Nothing could come of it now except lies and hypocrisy; and lies and hypocrisy were contrary to his nature." After these first three chapters, you have to wonder if Oblonsky is anything but lies and hypocrisy. But you could also say Oblonsky has no depth. He isn't able to see himself from a neutral position. He only sees himself from the point of view of the various masks he puts on to work, to play, to make love to a woman. He never recognizes what he's doing, never examines his life. From that point of view, Oblonsky is worthless, as "the unexamined life is not worth living", but not exactly malevolent.

Here are some random highlights from the first three chapters, the leftovers. "... he therefore had to put it out of his mind by the dream of life" is an especially poignant and well-turned line. Watch the trains closely; Oblonsky's kids are playing with one in I.3. And why did Oblonsky have a good dream after three days of estrangement, anyway?

Anna Karenina goes blogospherical

Next obsession. There are 239 chapters in my edition of Anna Karenina. Here it is on Amazon. For at least sentimental reasons, I'm sticking with the David Magarshack translation.

You might consider "A favorite book" a short introduction to the power and relevance of this book. Let me just add a few bullet points about its significance. It's written in fulsome, astounding detail, with great realism. The main characters are a kind of cross-section of the Russian upper class of the time, and their relationships are complex. The plot has dizzying continuity (the book is 800 pages in paperback, or even 960 if you followed that link above). The meaning of life, death, marriage, and family are tackled in all their human squishiness. It also "provides a key to understanding the Russian revolution" in the early 20th century by exposing the inward rot of the aristocratic social system.

I'm going to read the whole thing and write about it here. If you want to follow along, buy the book. It's cheap and you can get it anywhere. At four chapters a day, five days a week, it'd take about three months to read it. I don't know what pace I'll be able to keep, but I plan to write something about every chunk of the story. Whether that means a close reading or a reflection spawned by a single line will just have to be up to me.

Feel free to contribute your own comments. Disagree with me, bring up something I don't talk about, write about a moment that touches you. It's a huge book, full of material for reflection. I hope you enjoy it as much as I undoubtedly will.

I'm going to label these posts "AK: ", so those who don't want to read about this great old book don't have to.

A favorite book

Laura wonders idly whether the love of Anna Karenina (trans. David Magarshack, other translations are inferior and not really useful) is, well, reality-based, or whether those of us who call it a favorite have no deeper reasons than the love of Mr. Willems and IB English. I'm not going to recapitulate everything she wrote, but that's the gist of it.

My short answer is that it's really that good. It's held up through several rereadings. Did I ever reread Hard Times? Ummm, no.

(Digression: on my shelf are a couple of other translations by the same guy: The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, by Dostoyevsky. So you might try those. I too feel lost when trying to choose one out of several translations of a foreign author.)

As I glance at my favorite books (in the profile; when I moved to Utah, I brought my top 100), I notice a couple of newer ones that I've only read once, by Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke. All the rest are things I've picked up again and again over the years. I haven't read Anna Karenina for a couple of years, but I picked it up again the other day and it seemed really fresh to me, a cut above even the great stuff I've been reading lately. I have ten library books to read, and then I'll do it. That's a broad clue, this great staying power over almost a decade.

Anna Karenina affected me a lot personally. In 1995, when Chris Tyni killed himself, life got very weird for me. I mean, in one sense I forgot quickly, or submerged my grief beneath school and activities and instantly falling in love with every girl I met (and that particular compass swung around so much, you would've thought I was at the North Pole). In another sense it was time to be an adolescent and feel out of place. But it was also time to go home at night and stay up late writing unhappily, to lose my religion, to really bang my head against life and death and "Vanity of vanities and all is vanity."

Those are basically Levin's questions, too: "He saw death and the approach of death in everything." We read a lot of great stuff in that IB English class, but this was the one that really spoke to me: a white guy whining about how life has no meaning. I wrote confused essays about how Anna lived in a deterministic universe and she couldn't move outside the box of her inclinations because the author was controlling her (obviously, way off). I projected all of my outside concerns into that sprawling novel, and it was big enough to hold them.

I didn't understand exactly why Levin changed, why he became satisfied in Part VIII. I felt like his last epiphany was not good enough. The meaning of life was inculcated from childhood and he might as well continue in what he'd heard first? "He lived (without realizing it) by those spiritual truths that he had imbibed with his mother's milk... Now it was clear to him that he could live only thanks to the beliefs in which he had been brought up." I call BS on this total cop-out. But I think I did come to understand that these questions were worth wrestling down, and I understood with Levin that I shouldn't just give up on them.

I also think the book grows as you grow. Like I said, the story's big enough for a teenage boy, but it becomes a behemoth in the hands of an awake, adult reader. To take a bald-faced example, I haven't reread it as a married father of one. All that life has given me a whole new perspective on the Oblonsky crisis that begins the book, on the sacrifices and compromises anyone makes for the sake of a marriage. And what I saw fresh in those first ten chapters or so was Tolstoy nailing it, over and over.

Anyway, I say read it again.

Recent reading reviews

I finished the Ender's Shadow quadrilogy, the companion novels to Ender's Game. I was underwhelmed by the end of it. It all seemed very anticlimactic to me. I didn't buy the love story, didn't enjoy the geopolitical maneuvering (boring), didn't connect with the themes. But maybe it's just me. Anyhow, I won't be rereading these, with the outside exception of Ender's Shadow.

I read the first chapter of Anna Karenina again today, and I was surprised by how fresh and original it still seemed. I bring it up because I reread it once a year for a while, unlike these Ender books which will probably never get reread. I think I've read it four or five times, but I've had a break from it for the last couple of years. I bet I'll be sucked in again, though. As I grow up, I find it has more and more to say to me, especially as on this reading, for the first time I have a child of my own. I still haven't gotten to War and Peace, but I will one of these years.

I'm having a why-am-I-reading-this relationship with the second of Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld novels. The Riverworld is sort of like the Ringworld, large enough to house billions of people, but mysterious in its purposes and origins. In the Riverworld, everyone who ever lived on Earth is resurrected along the banks of a million-mile river which lacks most animal life, and all vestiges of culture and civilization. Historical figures mix and mingle. Book 1, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, is about Sir Richard Burton, and Book 2, The Fabulous Riverboat, is about Mark Twain. The high concept is interesting, but the action is organized around tedious summaries rather than scenes. Still I read.

I read two great novels by John Scalzi. The first, Old Man's War, was up for Best First Novel and Best Novel Hugo Awards, and the second, The Ghost Brigades, was its sequel. It posits an Earth society colonizing the nearby stellar neighborhood, hanging on for dear life in an endless war against alien races trying to colonize the same valuable planets. The recruits for this endless war are 75-year-olds. How this works and why it's so cool are left as an exercise for the reader. I don't want to spoil the surprise, so I have to leave it there. The award nominations were well-deserved. The implications of the science are well thought-out, at least to the extent that the characters, given all that is happening to them, still seem true-to-life. It's military science fiction, but I'd recommend it solidly for people who are not fans of this particular sub-genre.

I finished Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. It is about the family of the trickster spider god, Anansi (last seen in human guise under the name Mr. Nancy near Miami), and what happens to them, and what they happen to, after his untimely demise. Everyone in America should read this funny, heartwarming, twisted, poignant book. I could not put it down. For what it is, it's absolutely perfect. I actually laughed out loud while I was reading it, it was just too much. Sarah asked me one of the times what was so funny. After a little thought, I came up with, "Violent flamingos."

I also have Gaiman's Stardust to get to; it's beautifully illustrated by comics artist Charles Vess, who also worked on some of the phenomenal Sandman comics by Gaiman. I recently reread that 10-book (80 or so issues) postmodern meta-story graphic novel collection, and I recommend it highly, for adults only. Consider this a nudity, violence, language, disturbing image, and adult theme warning; this might also eliminate some of you adults out there. But I hope not. I don't want to scare anyone away. It's a profound and deeply affecting story, creative in the extreme, with amazing writing and art. One of the issues won a World Fantasy Award, and the next day they changed the rules so comics couldn't win the World Fantasy Award.

Gaiman also wrote a Marvel comics series called 1602 that took some of the iconic characters in the Marvel universe (the X-Men, Daredevil, Fantastic Four, etc.) and transplanted them into late-Elizabethan Europe, with arresting results. I just finished it, along with the X-Men Ultimates books (vols. 1-5). If you like underwear pervert comics (did you hear that Marvel and DC are trying to trademark the word "Superhero"?), you'll like these. The Gaiman series is a bit deeper than the others and has more to chew on, but you might not like it much if you aren't familiar with the source material.

Just a side note; I seem to be reading and seeing a lot of fiction lately about the replacement of the human race by the next step in human evolution. The X-Men books are quite properly suffused with the theme, but it also came up in the Ender series, the Scalzi books, and the season premiere of The 4400 this evening.

And there's still Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle trilogy to get to. But 3000 pages worth of hardback is a daunting swallow when I can just snap up all these little fish instead.

God knows I need a book group.