Anna Karenina Review: Anna's Story Provides the Drama, Levin's Journey Provides the Meaning.

Upon retiring 18 months ago I entered my "Russian Literature Stage," starting with The Brothers Karamazov (amazing) and, after a needed mental break, deciding to next read Anna Karenina as "Tolstoy training wheels" before tackling War and Peace. As with all foreign literature, I did a lot of research on the best translation and settled on the Bartlett translation from Oxford World Classics, which has excellent footnotes. I also used my favorite AI during the reading as a study guide for Russian history, nineteenth-century culture, and even as a sounding board whenever I ran into surprising plot twists or shocking dialogue I just had to share, sort of a digital book club companion.

Now I had certainly heard of the book and knew it regularly appeared on lists of the greatest novels ever written, but I knew absolutely nothing about the plot. I went in completely blind, so I had no clue what to expect. After wading through over 100 pages without the title character even appearing, I was quickly pulled into the primary storyline, a love triangle with all the spiciness of a telenovela.

The novel is psychologically extraordinary. Tolstoy's greatest gift is making me sympathize with people I often disagreed with. I found myself feeling sorry for the jilted husband Karenin despite his coldness, understanding Anna despite increasingly disagreeing with her choices, recognizing her lover Vronsky's growing sense of entrapment, and ultimately admiring the secondary protagonist Levin's earnest search for meaning. Very few novels have left me feeling compassion for nearly everyone while also acknowledging that each contributed to the tragedy.

What surprised me most, however, was not the affair but the structure. I expected a novel called Anna Karenina to center on the title character from beginning to end. Instead, she doesn't appear for over 100 pages, and after she departs the novel, Tolstoy spends roughly another 100 pages without any of the love triangle participants at all. At first this felt strange, but I suspect it reflects Tolstoy's larger point: individual tragedy does not stop the world, the world simply moves on.

The secondary protagonist Levin ultimately became the character I related to most. His tendency to enjoy life while living it, but despair when trying to intellectually deconstruct it, felt remarkably familiar. His struggles with mortality, faith, and meaning resonated deeply, particularly following my own experiences with a near-fatal accident, the sudden death of my brother, and more recently waiting for medical test results.

Anna's mental decline was equally impressive. Rather than presenting madness as a sudden break, Tolstoy shows an intelligent mind gradually becoming trapped within its own interpretations. Her stream of consciousness near the end felt strikingly modern, anticipating the literary style of James Joyce by more than half a century.

My one criticism of the book is the frequent "side quests" Tolstoy takes into subjects that clearly interested him and probably his readers at a time when there wasn't an endless stream of entertainment competing for their attention. There are long passages on farming, hunting, Russian politics, and current events such as a conflict involving the Ottoman Empire, all of which became eye-glazing. While many of these sections enriched my understanding of nineteenth-century Russia and ultimately served larger thematic purposes, I often found myself wishing for a firmer editorial hand.

Comparing it with The Brothers Karamazov, I found Dostoevsky's novel the more compelling reading experience. Dostoevsky openly wrestles with philosophy and religion through dramatic confrontation. Tolstoy embeds those same questions within everyday life. Anna Karenina often resembles a domestic drama or nineteenth-century soap opera on the surface while quietly exploring profound questions underneath. I admired that subtlety, though I responded more immediately to Dostoevsky's directness.

Overall, I understand why Anna Karenina is considered one of the greatest novels ever written, although I would currently rank it below any Dostoevsky I've read (including Crime and Punishment). We'll see where Tolstoy ultimately lands after I finish War and Peace. Anna Karenina is less interested in telling a story than in recreating an entire world and exploring how ordinary lives contain extraordinary moral and psychological depth.

Ironically, the novel's central love triangle was what kept me reading. I kept guessing where the drama was headed and never got it right. But it was Levin's quiet spiritual awakening that stayed with me after I closed the book. In other words, Anna's story provides the drama, while Levin's journey provides the meaning.

After My Brother's Funeral

My younger, only brother dropped dead of a massive stroke at only 56.  He had high blood pressure, was way overweight, and ignored going to the doctor. "I’ll be fine”.  He wasn’t, and many who knew him are as much angry as sad as this was likely preventable.  He left a wife of 30 years and three kids, two in college, one who will be a senior in high school.

Although less than two years apart, we were never very close.  After fighting like cats and dogs as kids, we basically kept our own lives from adolescence since we were so temperamentally different.  I was the brainy introspective kid, he the partying social animal.  I drove myself through college and launched a corporate career.  He wandered through two colleges, did a bit of this and that after graduating, and in his 30s finally got a vision and became a criminal lawyer of all things.  He was no bleeding heart - he would say he never had an innocent client, but many overcharged ones - but it was the fun, excitement and the game in the courtroom.  He’d be at a jail and two different courtrooms on the same day.

But while never that close he’d be there at the end of the phone and at holidays.  We’d pick up conversations where we left off after three months like it was three days.  We had a historical shorthand for our deceased parents, family lore, that crazy family vacation to Disneyland in 1977.  And we had each other's back because that’s what brothers do.  

But "I just got back from my brother’s funeral" was not a sentence I was expecting to be saying any time soon, potentially never for a younger brother.  He joins a growing list of dead family members that include my parents, nearly all my aunts and uncles (two left at 90), several cousins.  Like I wrote before, those pictures of family gatherings from not that long ago now have few living people in them, and in many of them I am the only one left in a big group.

The thing about a sibling is that they are one of the few people who remember your opening chapters. Friends arrive later. Spouses arrive later. Even your own children only know an adult, curated version of you. But a brother remembers the house, the parents, the fights, the vacations, the embarrassments, and the family myths that nobody else quite understands, which is why this loss will be different from anyone else.

Proust "In Search of Lost Time", Book 1 ("Swann's Way") Review

Following is an AI generated review of the first book (of 7) of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", considered one of the greatest pieces of literature ever written.  I used the AI as a study guide asking questions, digging into subjects, getting clarification or historical background, then at the end told it to generate a review based on our conversation. 

Note: Translation version is important.  If interested read the Davis one pictured.

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Reading Proust was unlike reading almost anything else. The prose is often beautiful, poetic, and packed with insight, but it can also wander for pages at a time. I found that trying to follow every sentence analytically was exhausting. The better approach was often to let the prose wash over me and allow the accumulation of impressions, observations, and images to build into something larger.

What stayed with me most was not the famous madeleine scene, but Proust's observations about memory, desire, and the symbols we create in our minds. Again and again he shows how people, places, music, and objects become invested with meanings far beyond their reality. The sections on Swann's obsession, jealousy, and eventual disillusionment were particularly powerful, at times feeling surprisingly modern in their understanding of rumination, uncertainty, projection, and self-deception.

Perhaps most remarkable were Proust's psychological insights. Writing before many modern psychological concepts had entered popular consciousness, he describes patterns of thought that feel strikingly contemporary. At various points I found myself recognizing what we might now call rumination, pathological doubt, obsessive thinking, idealization, and the tendency to construct elaborate inner worlds around people and possibilities. More than once I had the feeling that he was describing mental experiences with a precision that would not seem out of place in a modern psychology text.

I was less captivated by some of the lengthy social and aristocratic maneuvering, and there were stretches that required patience. But just when I felt Proust had drifted too far afield, he would produce a paragraph so perceptive that I had to stop and reread it.

More than a novel of events, this is a novel of consciousness. It reminded me how memory reshapes people and places, how we turn others into symbols, and how much of life is spent inhabiting worlds created by our own minds. Proust's greatest subject may not be memory itself, but the distance between reality and the meanings we attach to it. 

Challenging at times, but ultimately a rewarding read and full of insights that linger long after the book is finished.

An 8-Year-Old's Reflections of WWII

 

For Memorial day I thought I would share the following from my mother (1937-2022, in the front of the picture) of her memories as a child during WWII.  Her brother, cousin and two future brothers-in-law came back from WWII (photo is family celebration of her cousin’s return), but she mentions the “gold stars” in her neighborhood who didn’t, and I didn’t realize this tradition  - started in WWI - is where the term came from.

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For any American, indeed almost anyone alive anywhere during WWII, it is “The War”.  The atmosphere in the whole country was completely different that it has been during any other conflict I have lived through since.

Everyone was involved, and every aspect of life was affected.  Most families had someone in the Armed Services.  The draft was in effect, and men from eighteen to forty were eligible to be inducted.  Rationing was in force for gasoline, leather, sugar, rubber, nylon and meat. Every person, regardless of age, received a ration book, which consisted of pages of stamps which were used when a rationed item was purchased.  I remember that I had my own book.

No autos, non-military trucks or appliances were produced – all factory production was directed to war materiel.  Clothing was scarce as the factories were producing uniforms and boots for the troops.  There were no nylon stockings as it was all being used for parachutes.

Travel was very difficult.  The trains and railroad tracks were mostly used to move troops and equipment.  Even if you could get on a train, if a troop or equipment train needed to get by, the passenger train was diverted onto a siding for however long it took.  The passenger trains that did run were standing room only because men on leave and wives were going wherever they had to.  If you went anywhere near a railroad track you would see long olive-colored trains filled with men in uniform, or flatcars full of tanks and guns draped in tarps.  Everyone would get out of their cars to wave to the troops.  The one time I got on a train to see my father working in the munitions factory at Red River Arsenal, just outside Texarkana, we passed a troop train and there was a lot of waving and yelling going on between the trains.

Not everyone had a car, but highway travel was almost impossible anyway because of the shortages of gas and tires.  Also there were long military convoys of large trucks carrying troops and equipment that always had the right-of way.

There were regular air raid drills, and air raid wardens would come by your door if you were showing any light at all.

Most houses displayed a small stars-and-stripes banner in the front window.  They were about six inches by eight, and most had a blue star, as ours did, to indicate that someone in that household was serving.  There were several with gold stars in our neighborhood, which meant a person from that house was not coming back.

One thing that stands out to me were people coming and going at all times of the night and day.  When recruits were still training in the States they were given short passes to come home.  With transportation so uncertain there was little advance notice they were coming.  My brother in the Army Air Corps would appear it seemed always at night, and we all got up, and often he would show up with other boys from the area, who would sometime sleep over until they could get to their own homes the next morning.

All correspondence from anyone that was “overseas” had to be on thin blue paper that folded into an envelope, and would be censored by a heavy black pen.  The men were not allowed to disclose exactly where they were – “Europe” or “Pacific” was about all the info the folks back home could get, perhaps what ship, but not where it was located.  There were of course no phone calls, and most of the men were gone three or four years.

In April of 1945 when I was in third grade the students from the three schools (all were on one campus) were called into the horseshoe drive in front of the main building, where the flag was lowered to half-staff, and they announced that President Roosevelt had died.  It was a blow to everyone; he was the only president most of us could remember, and we heard him many times on the radio during the War.

The War ended in 1945.  The men came home and everything started to return to normal. 

It was, indeed, another time and place.

Like Sand in an Hourglass…40 Years, 11 Gone

My high school class graduated in the mid-1980s, when the future was so bright we had to wear shades. I haven’t kept up with many classmates directly, but I still go to the reunions. They feel a bit like family gatherings in that even after five or ten years since we last met the conversations pick up with a familiar rhythm, as if we had just seen each other at the last holiday.

The other reason I go is that a high school class is an exclusive club that never admits new members, and over time its membership only declines. Showing up is a way of keeping track not just of people but of time itself.

The 40th reunion invite listed eleven of us who have passed. For a group of 300 American, college-educated professionals nearing 60, that’s right in line with actuarial expectations saying roughly 10–16 of us should be gone by now. And since I was very nearly number 12 on the list from a near-fatal bike accident just six months ago, I was more than happy to volunteer to make the “In Memoriam” poster that has our deceased classmates’ pictures and names, to be with us in spirit during the reunion.

Looking at those eighteen-year-olds (the poster uses the pictures from the yearbook), it’s hard not to pause and wonder… what happened?

The causes follow familiar patterns. A cluster of car accidents, mostly years ago. A few “died suddenly” in midlife, which usually means an undiagnosed heart condition or other health problem. One suicide. A couple of early aggressive cancers.

I didn’t know most of them well in school, but I remember one from the 20th reunion in 2006 when she was photographed smiling right next to me. She died in 2019 and will just be a picture on a poster this time.

The numbers suggest we’ll lose another ten or so by the 50th reunion. That’s how the curve works. And eventually, much further out, there will be no one left to keep the list. The tables suggest one or two of us might make it past 100, so the class won’t fully disappear until sometime around 2070, long enough that the world we shared at 18 will feel even more distant than it already does.

For now, we gather. Fewer each time, but still enough to recognize one another, to fall into old patterns, to share fragments of a common past that no one else quite understands.

And to look at the slowly growing poster to quietly note who is no longer in the room.