finally the intelligent conversation has died down so I can cut in
Finished reading Anna Karenina finally. I don’t have anything smart to say about the political or social commentary presented in the book, but I’ll just say the whole thing at least provoked thought in me and I liked it very much (so maybe I’m already wrong lol).
Don’t want to get all dramatic and confessional but some of the book’s appeal for me is personal. I was in a relationship for a long time which for varying reasons (some good and understandable, some retrospectively stupid, some contemporaneously stupid) underwent periods of stress which had the two of us acting like latter-half-of-the-book Anna and Vronsky toward each other.* Maybe that’s not special or interesting—the book is popular in the first place in part because it describes, sometimes in granular detail, common emotions and relationship situations. Not that it has to be special—I felt satisfied (and of course also disturbed, repulsed, reminded) reading this testament to the kind of negative behavior patterns two people who otherwise love each other can fall into given a specific set of psychological and social circumstances (the awful and truthful specificity of which I can’t begin to do justice in writing a short forum post).
Formally speaking I was struck, during the final chapters of Part 7 (which ends in Anna’s suicide), by the way the mostly distant third-person narration becomes more frantic, more personal, somehow emulating Anna’s interiority while maintaining a certain distance between her and the reader. You know exactly how she feels but you are not inhabiting her—in a first-person version of this story you might at least feel like the « conversation » you’re in with the character would be cathartic on their end, like they’re at the very least able to confess their feelings to someone. As it is here it’s like you’re just trapped in a glass box watching Anna burn up in front of you. It’s sickening.
Another big takeaway is from right after Levin and Kitty get married. At this point a few chapters are taken just to describe the happiness Levin and Kitty feel, in all its dimensions and its manifestations during their day-to-day. I was reminded of Le Guin’s Omelas story (thanks Gaagaagiins), in which she expresses that stories describing sadness, frustration, anger, etc outnumber those describing happiness (ironic of course given what the story itself goes on to be about). These chapters in Anna Karenina are ironic in their own right given the opening line about happy families being alike. Although it proves Le Guin’s hypothesis given just how much more of Karenina is about relationship issues.
Near the end Levin has a realization which I’ll quote here (from the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation):
Formerly (it had begun almost from childhood and kept growing till full maturity), whenever he [Levin] had tried to do something that would be good for everyone, for mankind, for Russia, for the district, for the whole village, he had noticed that thinking about it was pleasant, but the doing itself was always awkward, there was no full assurance that the thing was absolutely necessary, and the doing itself, which at the start had seemed so big, kept diminishing and diminishing, dwindling to nothing; while now, after his marriage, when he began to limit himself more and more to living for himself, though he no longer experienced any joy at the thought of what he was doing, he felt certain that his work was necessary, saw that it turned out much better than before and that it was expanding more and more.
I think it’s wrong to argue against the purposeful attempt to do big, good things for one’s community (for the whole village, mankind, Russia, etc etc), but there’s a truth here about becoming discouraged in trying to do those big good things which I, being still young and naïve (maybe naïveté is my only excuse), benefitted from having had articulated like this, or maybe benefitted from being reminded of. Sometimes I fall to thinking about my job and what I’m doing with my life in a broad sociological context and usually that just makes me feel depressed, like who cares, I’m not doing something essential or something big or something broadly meaningful. But of course like the second part of this quotation describes, when I focus more narrowly on what I’m doing, one day at a time, I feel better, I feel like what I’m doing matters to somebody. This is obvious to people who already know this.
I could say more but it would surely devolve into quoting passages and saying how « this is like so true man!!! » Spent a while thinking about the epigraph, « Vengeance is mine; I will repay. » It’s a distinct epigraph. I like a good epigraph. What are others’ favorite epigraphs?