When people ask me about it

Why it's great

Francine Prose, author of Blue Angel and My New American Life

• Anna Karenina is probably my favourite novel. More than any other book, it persuades me that there is such a thing as human nature, and that some part of that nature remains fundamentally unaffected by history and culture.
• I try to re-read it every few years. Each time, perhaps because I'm older and have experienced more, I find things I never noticed before. Not only is it a great source of pleasure, but I inevitably feel as if I'm getting a sort of pep talk from Tolstoy: Go deeper. Try harder. Aim higher. Pay closer attention to the world.
• It's orchestral, symphonic, full of distinctive melodies, parallels and variations that keep reappearing, some of which we notice, none of which we need to notice in order for them to operate on our subconscious.
• There are so many virtuosic set pieces (the skating party, the ball, the mushroom-picking expedition, and, my God, the race during which Vronsky breaks his horse's neck) but also small, powerful, resonant moments: I've always loved the scene in which Anna, having met the charming Vronksy, returns home to her husband and is struck by how unattractive his ears are. How could something like that not stand up to, and transcend, the so-called test of time?

Stoic vision of marriage

• That men and woman have societal roles
• That men's value only increases as time progresses whereas woman's only decreases

Society

Government

Intellectualization of what is good for the people

• The better he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergey Ivanovitch, and many other people who worked for the public welfare, were not led by an impulse of the heart to care for the public good, but reasoned from intellectual considerations that it was a right thing to take interest in public affairs, and consequently took interest in them. Levin was confirmed in this generalization by observing that his brother did not take questions affecting the public welfare or the question of the immortality of the soul a bit more to heart than he did chess problems, or the ingenious construction of a new machine.
• • [MYTAKE] This is a very interesting statement, because I see that in my day today in the left. A lot of left wing leaders care too much about topics that the public don't care too much. Such as minorities rights. Turns out Levin is thinking about the root cause of that, the RCA, because basically this is happenning because civil servants don't have any tangible feedbacks from reality/people, but self imposed goals, there is no mechanism that incentivize them to actually produce good for the people

Policies

• Social Darwinism / Paternalism

• Paternalism
• • “No, you can ask anyone you like,” Konstantin Levin answered with decision, “the man that can read and write is much inferior as a workman. And mending the highroads is an impossibility; and as soon as they put up bridges they’re stolen.”

Urban vs Rural

In Urban settings the aesthitics always comes before the content

• The sensation produced by Princess Myakaya’s speeches was always unique,

and the secret of the sensation she produced lay in the fact that though she spoke not always appropriately, as now, she said simple things with some sense in them. In the society in which she lived such plain statements produced the effect of the wittiest epigram. Princess Myakaya could never see why it had that effect, but she knew it had, and took advantage of it.

In rural settings the content comes before the aesthethics

• With her indeed he not infrequently fell

into discussion upon physics, the theory of agriculture, and especially philosophy; philosophy was Agafea Mihalovna’s favorite subject.

• “Oh, well, the higher power of Ryabinin can. Not a single merchant ever buys

a forest without counting the trees, unless they get it given them for nothing, as you’re doing now. I know your forest. I go there every year shooting, and your forest’s worth a hundred and fifty roubles and acre paid down, while he’s giving you sixty by installments. So that in fact you’re making him a present of thirty thousand.”

Education

• “But how are we to educate the people?”. “To educate the people three things are needed: schools, and schools, and schools.”. “But you said yourself the people are at such a low stage of material development: what help are schools for that?”
• • [MYTAKE] Isn't it funny that keep having the same discussions every year, every century, and the same problem keeps happening. Because nobody is addressing the same root cause, similar to Gabriel Garcia Marquez used to say in the past

Rules

Courtship

• He was very well aware that he ran no risk of being ridiculous in the eyes of

Betsy or any other fashionable people. He was very well aware that in their eyes the position of an unsuccessful lover of a girl, or of any woman free to marry, might be ridiculous. But the position of a man pursuing a married woman, and, regardless of everything, staking his life on drawing her into adultery, has something fine and grand about it, and can never be ridiculous; and so it was with a proud and gay smile under his mustaches that he lowered the opera glass and looked at his cousin.

Conversation

• The conversation began amiably, but just because it was too amiable, it came

to a stop again. They had to have recourse to the sure, never-failing topic—gossip.

Customs

Style

• Her bare shoulders

and arms gave Kitty a sense of chill marble, a feeling she particularly liked. Her eyes sparkled, and her rosy lips could not keep from smiling from the consciousness of her own attractiveness.

Social role of money

• Anna had at first avoided as far as she could Princess Tverskaya’s world, because it necessitated an expenditure beyond her means, and besides in her heart

she preferred the first circle. But since her visit to Moscow she had done quite the contrary. She avoided her serious-minded friends, and went out into the fashionable world. There she met Vronsky, and experienced an agitating joy at those meetings.

Burgeousie customs

• "The highest Petersburg society is essentially one: in it every one knows every one else, every one even visits every one else. but this great set has its

subdivisions. Anna Arkadyevna Karenina had friends and close ties in three different circles of this highest society."

• “I don’t believe it,” Sviazhsky replied quite seriously; “all I see is that we don’t know how to cultivate the land, and that our system of agriculture in the serf days was by no means too high, but too low. We have no machines, no good stock, no efficient supervision; we don’t even know how to keep accounts. Ask any landowner; he won’t be able to tell you what crop’s profitable, and what’s not.”
• • [MYTAKE] This is a very crazy reflection from this book, because the upper class is not even looking for a better standard of living for them, all they want is to keep things in the same way

How social connections are formed

• Her connection with this circle was kept up through Princess Betsy Tverskaya,

her cousin’s wife, who had an income of a hundred and twenty thousand roubles, and who had taken a great fancy to Anna ever since she first came out, showed her much attention, and drew her into her set, making fun of Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s coterie.

Class struggle

• "To Konstantin the peasant was simply the chief partner in their common labor, and in spite of all the respect and the love, almost like that of kinship, he had for the peasant—sucked in probably, as he said himself, with the milk of his peasant nurse—still as a fellow-worker with him, while sometimes enthusiastic over the vigor, gentleness, and justice of these men, he was very often, when their common labors called for other qualities, exasperated with the peasant for his carelessness, lack of method, drunkenness, and lying."
• "Take the reforms of Peter, of Catherine, of Alexander. Take European history. And progress in agriculture more than anything else—the potato, for instance, that was introduced among us by force. The wooden plough too wasn’t always used. It was introduced maybe in the days before the Empire, but it was probably brought in by force. Now, in our own day, we landowners in the serf times used various improvements in our husbandry: drying machines and thrashing machines, and carting manure and all the modern implements—all that we brought into use by our authority, and the peasants opposed it at first, and ended by imitating us. Now, by the abolition of serfdom we have been deprived of our authority; and so our husbandry, where it had been raised to a high level, is bound to sink to the most savage primitive condition. That’s how I see it.”
• • [MYTAKE] No worries you can trust when the burgousie say capitalism is necessary

Family

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in it's own way

Marriage

Lack of compability of woman and man

• Every person in the house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought toegether by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and hosehould of the oblonsky's
• • Tolstoy brings a stoic and sad perspective on marriage, relying on the fact that man and woman oftenly don't have a lot in common, and therefore when the love/sex is dissipated, there isn't much left that bonds them, outside of the children that have been produced decades ago.

He had even supposed that she, a worn-out woman no longer young or good-looking, and in no way remarkable or interesting, merely a good mother, ought from a sense of fainess to take an indulgent view. It had turned out quite the other way.

• Tolstoy is bringing two stoic facts, one that people will not judge you based on your efforts, for example Dolly put so much effort into this marriage, nonetheless Oblonsky doesn't give a fuck. He simply cares that she is not good looking anymore.
• Another stoic fact is that woman's value to a woman is extremely proportional to its beauty.
• Another stoic fact is that woman's value (beauty) decreases through time, and thus men looses its interest.

She still continued to tell herself that she should leave him, but she was conscious that this was impossible; it was impossible because she could not get out of the habit of regarding him as her husband and loving him.

• Tolstoy brings another stoic fact in a perfect sentence, that woman love pathetically, whereas man are more interested in sex.

“It’s very well for you to talk like that; it’s very much like that gentleman in Dickens who used to fling all difficult questions over his right shoulder. But to deny the facts is no answer. What’s to be done—you tell me that, what’s to be done? Your wife gets older, while you’re full of life. Before you’ve time to look round, you feel that you can’t love your wife with love, however much you may esteem her. And then all at once love turns up, and you’re done for, done for,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said with weary despair.

• Tolstoy is brilliant in his stoicism. Stiva is right, reality may be ugly, but it doesn't change the fact that it is real. Woman condition has always been so complicated.
• Once again, this is an example that we should marry a woman that we like as a person.

Axiomatic philosophy

• He was reading a book, and thinking of what he was

reading, and stopping to listen to Agafea Mihalovna, who gossiped away without flagging, and yet with all that, all sorts of pictures of family life and work in the future rose disconnectedly before his imagination. He felt that in the depth of his soul something had been put in its place, settled down, and laid to rest.

• • I feel the same way. I love Levin.

Adultery

THAT which for Vronsky had been almost a whole year the one absorbing desire of his life, replacing all his old desires; that which for Anna had been an impossible, terrible, and even for that reason more entrancing dream of bliss, that desire had been fulfilled. He stood before her, pale, his lower jaw quivering, and besought her to be calm, not knowing how or why. “Anna! Anna!” he said with a choking voice, “Anna, for pity’s sake!. . . ” But the louder he spoke, the lower she dropped her once proud and gay, now shame-stricken head, and she bowed down and sank from the sofa where she was sitting, down on the floor, at his feed; she would have fallen on the carpet if he had not held her. “My God! Forgive me!” she said, sobbing, pressing his hands to her bosom.

• Even adultery is better for men than woman lol. It's crazy.

Feminism

“Anna Arkadyevna,” the countess said in explanation to her son, “has a little son eight years old, I believe, and she has never been parted from him before, and she keeps fretting over leaving him.”

• Historically speaking the condition of the woman has been greatly attatched to their kids.
• How many bad marriages have existed simply for the sake of social constraints.

“She’s young, you see, she’s pretty,” she went on. “Do you know, Anna, my youth and my beauty are gone, taken by whom? By him and his children. I have worked for him, and all I had has gone in his service, and now of course any fresh, vulgar creature has more charm for him. No doubt they talked of me together, or, worse still, they were silent. Do you understand?”

• This is completely infurating. Like you literally invest your whole life to a guy, and in the end he lives you as if you were garbage. That's so depressing.

Philosophy

Marx

• Another row, and yet another row, followed—long rows and short rows, with good grass and with poor grass. Levin lost all sense of time, and could not have told whether it was late or early now. A change began to come over his work, which gave him immense satisfaction. In the midst of his toil there were moments during which he forgot what he was doing, and it came all easy to him, and at those same moments his row was almost as smooth and well cut as Tit’s.

Kierkegaard

• [MYTAKE] I see a big relationship between this book and the philosophy of Kierkegaard. In fact, Levin is the only that does self realization and therefore faces his self, and run towards it, and redrwans itself from a a state of consciouss despair

Hedonism

• "This was the class of old-fashioned and ridiculous people. But there

was another class of people, the real people. To this class they all belonged, and in it the great thing was to be elegant, generous, plucky, gay, to abandon oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything else."

• "Levin listened in silence, and in spite of all the efforts he made, he could not

in the least enter into the feeling of his friend and understand his sentiments and the charm of studying such women.

• different philosophies of life cannot understand each other
• "The business of the

forest was over, the money in his pocket; their shooting had been excellent, and Stepan Arkadyevitch was in the happiest frame of mind, and so he felt specially anxious to dissipate the ill-humor that had come upon Levin. He wanted to finish the day at supper as pleasantly as it had been begun."

• • [MYTAKE] He doesn't even want to reflect on the mistake he did. What a hedonistic.

Non hedonistic ethics

Value tradition

• "The house was big and old-fashioned, and Levin, though he lived alone, had

the whole house heated and used. He knew that this was stupid, he knew that it was positively not right, and contrary to his present new plans, but this house was a whole world to Levin. It was the world in which his father and mother had lived and died. They had lived just the life that to Levin seemed the ideal of perfection, and that he had dreamed of beginning with his wife, his family."

Value tradition

• "He was so far from conceiving of love for woman apart from marriage that

he positively pictured to himself first the family, and only secondarily the woman who would give him a family. His ideas of marriage were, consequently, quite unlike those of the great majority of his acquaintances, for whom getting married was one of the numerous facts of social life. For Levin it was the chief affair of life, on which its whole happiness turned. And now he had to give up that."

Knowledge as an axiom

• "He took up his book again. “Very good, electricity and heat are the same thing;

but is it possible to substitute the one quantity for the other in the equation for the solution of any problem? No. Well, then what of it? The connection between all the forces of nature is felt instinctively. . . It’s particularly nice if Pava’s daughter should be a red-spotted cow, and all the herd will take after her, and the other three, too! Splendid!"

Marriage as an axiom

• "But three months had passed and he had not left off minding about it; and it

was as painful for him to think of it as it had been those first days. He could not be at peace because after dreaming so long of family life, and feeling himself so ripe for it, he was still not married, and was further than ever from marriage. He was painfully conscious himself, as were all about him, that at his years it is not well for man to be alone."

Simple Life

• "The sop was so good that Levin gave up the idea of going home. He dined with the old man, and talked to him about his family affairs, taking the keenest interest in them, and told him about his own affairs and all the circumstances that could be of interest to the old man. He felt much nearer to him than to his brother, and could not help smiling at the affection he felt for this man. When the old man got up again, said his prayer, and lay down under a bush, putting some grass under his head for a pillow, Levin did the same, and in spite of the clinging flies that were so persistent in the sunshine, and the midges that tickled his hot face and body, he fell asleep at once and only waked when the sun had passed to the other side of the bush and reached him. The old man had been awake a long while, and was sitting up whetting the scythes of the younger lads."
• “Maybe. But still it’s queer to me, just as at this moment it seems queer to me

that we country folks try to get our meals over as soon as we can, so as to be ready for our work, while here are we trying to drag out our meal as long as possible, and with that object eating oysters. . . ” “Why, of course,” objected Stepan Arkadyevitch. “But that’s just the aim of civilization—to make everything a source of enjoyment.” “Well, if that’s its aim, I’d rather be a savage.”

• • [MYTAKE] We can see that a clear definition of urban values as hedonistic, whereas the rural ones are christian ethics, or even perhaps working ethics.

Rationality brings unhappiness

• "Often Levin had admired this life, often he had a sense of envy of the men who led this life; but today for the first time, especially under the influence of what he had seen in the attitude of Ivan Parmenov to his young wife, the idea presented itself definitely to his mind that it was in his power to exchange the dreary, artificial, idle, and individualistic life he was leading for this laborious, pure, and socially delightful life."
• [MYTAKE] This can be seen as a prelude of Hal Incandenza