‘The sort of farming he was carrying on was nothing but a cruel and stubborn struggle between him and the laborers,’— ‘Anna Karenina’

<!– @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>

In spite of the magnificent harvest, never had there been, or, at least, never it seemed to him, had there been so many hindrances and so many quarrels between him and the peasants as that year, and the origin of these failures and this hostility was now perfectly comprehensible to him. The delight he had experienced in the work itself, and the consequent greater intimacy with the peasants, the envy he felt of them, of their life, the desire to adopt that life, which had been to him that night not a dream but an intention, the execution of which he had thought out in detail—all this had so transformed his view of the farming of the land as he had managed it, that he could not take his former interest in it, and could not help seeing that unpleasant relation between him and the workspeople which was the foundation of it all.…But he saw clearly now…that the sort of farming he was carrying on was nothing but a cruel and stubborn struggle between him and the laborers, in which there was on one side—his side—a continual intense effort to change everything to a pattern he considered better; on the other side, the natural order of things. And in the struggle he saw that with immense expenditure of force on his side, and with no effort or even intention on the other side, all that was attained was that the work did not go to the liking of either side, and that splendid tools, splendid cattle and land were spoiled with no good to anyone. Worst of all, the energy expended on this work was not simply wasted.…It was for his interests that every laborer should work as hard as possible, and that while doing so he should keep his wits about him, so as to try not to break the winnowing machines, the horse rakes, the thrashing mashines, that he should attend to what he was doing. What the laborer wanted was to work as pleasantly as possible, with rests, and above all, carelessly and heedlessly, without thinking.

Anna Karenina, Chapter 24, Part III

The passage goes on in details about the different ways the peasants jack up the workflow at Levin’s farm. I read the whole thing to my boss yesterday evening, as we sat around in the tent grumbling about our ungrateful workers and their inability to follow directions. Our sense of having achieved only half measures during our season at the secret city, and the concomitant frustration, is naturally eased by finding apropos quotes in great world literature.

 

She repeated continually, ‘My God! my God!’ But neither ‘God’ nor ‘my’ had any meaning to her. –Anna Karenina

“She repeated continually, ‘My God! my God!’ But neither
‘God’ nor ‘my’ had any meaning to her. The idea of seeking help in her
difficulty in religion was as remote from her as seeking help from
Alexey Alexandrovitch [her husband] himself, although she had never
had doubts of the faith in which she had been brought up. She knew
that the support of religion was possible only upon condition of
renouncing what made up for her the whole meaning of life. She was not
simply miserable, she began to feel alarm at the new spiritual
condition, never experienced before, in which she found
herself.”

Anna here is confronting her plight. She has confessed to her lover
Vronsky that she is pregnant and to her husband that she is having an
affair. Now what to do?

 This is where I as a reader sit up and drop my jaw in awe at Tolstoy’s
creation. He neatly fillets the earthly love of which Anna has been
protagonist for the last 700 pages or so from the religious concept of
love, in three sentences. If Anna’s doomed love affair with Vronsky
was the kind of love affair that religion could indeed salve, why
would it hold our attention so tightly? As I learned from the late
Arnold Weinstein, extravagance is truth. We readers live vicariously
through Anna’s story because it is such an incredible, extravagant
adventure, full of intricate and delicately realized gestures, words
and emotions. It’s the extravagance that resonates with our own lives:
how many breaths have you taken during which love—earthy, Earthly
love—composed the entire meaning of your life?

‘There was nothing in the sky in the least like a shell,’ Anna Karenina Part III: Levin sees Kitty again

“He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like
those in the world. There was only one creature in the world that
could concentrate for him all the brightness and the meaning of life.
It was she.…And everything that had been stirring Levin during that
sleepless night, all the resolutions he had made, all vanished at
once. He recalled with horror his dreams of marrying a peasant
girl.…He glanced at the sky, expecting to find there the cloud shell
he had been admiring and taking as the symbol of the ideas and
feelings of that night. There was nothing in the sky in the least like
a shell.”

Anna Karenina, Part III, Chapter 12

 Kostya Levin has been delighting in melding his scientific approach to
farming with the earthy pleasures of working the land, culminating in
a day spent mowing the hay with a scythe. He has spent the last
hundred pages recovering from his rejection at Kitty’s hands through a
diligent program of agricultural improvements and monastic solitude
down on his farm. All good intentions, however, come to nothing in the
presence of a young woman rattling down the road in a carriage.

‘Anna Karenina’ and the anti-Valentine

The anti-Valentine is always more persuasive and more appealing than
the Valentine. Reading about a romantic train wreck satisfies the
jilted’s urge for amorous schadenfreude and the committed’s urge for
amorous self-aggrandizement. What Tolstoy gets right in Anna
Karenina
is that the vessel of every relationship, even the most
apparently secure, is taking on water and listing hard to port.

 I was in Group Process class a couple years back and this one
participant, I’ll call her Monika, explained the secret to her happy
marriage: she and her spouse had agreed that they would reserve all
talk of complaints and dissatisfactions with each other for each
other. They would be each other’s closest confidants. No more spilling
the beans on marital troubles to Mom or best friend. What was most
admirable about this was not the idea in itself, which seemed either
completely essential or completely impossible, but Monika’s commitment
to that ideal. She would have the perfect marriage, damn it! Nobody
would know the pain she was enduring except her very torturer, her
husband.

 (The end of the story, of course, as you have guessed is that I’ve
fallen out of touch with Monika. Like the antiheroine of some baroque
Mafia saga, she had apparently found it easier to eliminate all
witnesses to her oath than to cleave to the oath itself.)

 As I approach Chapter 9 of Part Two of Anna Karenina, Anna’s
husband, Alexey Alexandrovitch, has decided to put the spotlight on
Anna’s apparent flirtation with Vronsky. Being an enlightened sort of
husband, he feels that the base emotion of jealousy is beneath him and
he therefore couches his argument for Anna to desist in her attentions
to Vronsky in terms of propriety: it doesn’t look right to others.

 Tolstoy quickly limns the snare through which Alexey Alexandrovitch
falls: although “he saw that the inmost recesses of her soul, that had
always hitherto lain open before him, were closed against him,” he
chooses to complain instead that “through thoughtlessness and lack of
caution you may cause yourself to be talked about in society.” She
then perceives this reasoned approach as further evidence of his
passionless feeling for her (“Love? Can he love? If he hadn’t heard
there was such a thing as love, he would never have used the word.”),
and when Alexey Alexandrovitch starts to mewl about his true feelings
(“But if you are conscious yourself of even the smallest foundation
for them [his earlier words of reproach], then I beg you to think a
little, and if your heart prompts you, to speak out to me…”) he finds
himself, as Tolstoy drily notes, “unconsciously saying something
utterly unlike what he had prepared.”

 I couldn’t help thinking of Monika and her perfect hermetic marriage
as I read this. This is the kind of trouble we get into when we
petition our faithless lovers for pardon, or convict them for their
obvious trespasses. All the best arguments prove themselves
insufficient and we fall back on the once-reliable appeal to the
emotions. Of course, as in the Karenins’ case, the lover’s soul has
now closed against us and our entreaties mean nothing.

The exact sentence where ‘Anna Karenina’ becomes impossible to put down

You and I both know what happens: Anna meets Vronsky, falls in love,
is scorned, and jumps under the train. Reading the novel itself is the
most straightforward way to learn a little more about this classic of
world literature, but she takes her time getting started, circling
around the main characters and only introducing Anna after about 18
chapters.

 But as I reached Chapter 22, all of a sudden it’s as if the Taj Mahal
has sprung up from once-barren ground. “The ball was only just
beginning as Kitty and her mother walked up the great staircase,
flooded with light, and lined with flowers and footmen in powder and
red coats.” Tolstoy takes such care to describe the ball, to describe
Kitty’s dress, to describe her feelings about that dress, to describe
Anna’s dress, Kitty’s reactions to it, and then, in the penultimate
paragraph of the chapter, he lets rip this cannonball of a
sentence:

“Kitty looked into his face, which was so close
to her own, and long afterwards—for several years after—that look
[her look!], full of love, to which he made no response, cut
her to the heart with an agony of shame.”

That is the kind
of sentence that deserves its own novel; that is the kind of sentence
that keeps me plowing through this particular novel, because as soon
as I read it, I became certain that Anna Karenina would
be that novel.