The title of this book should be Kostya Levin. He’s such a perfectly drawn character that I can’t think of any other character in literature who equals him; except maybe for Pierre in War and Peace.

After all his discomfort with society, with politicians, with the clergy, and with art; discovering that the meaning of life was in none of those things but is just in the fact of being alive is so beautiful.

When I compared Anna’s life to being a glorious train wreck I didn’t realize how literal that analogy was going to turn out.

Anna’s end is a bit too tidy (no pun intended) for me. That dream she had her whole life, while beautifully vivid, is too convenient. And we already had the same thing happen when she first arrived in Moscow.

She died a very literary death, but not a very real one. Still sad, however.

I’ll buy a train, very nice and stylish train with first-class amenities, posh decor, brass everythings, and run it along the finest, straightest track money can buy.

This track I’ll lay along smooth, flat ground through beautiful scenery. On a crisp winters morning, I’ll start up the train and let it run all the way down the line and off the cliff waiting at the end.

Then maybe I’ll understand Anna.

We, as the reader, spend all our time trying to learn more about the characters in the book while Levin keeps leaving the room to talk to the waiters.

It’s a wonderful way to keep everything in perspective.

The novel seems to have shifted in style somewhat, and for the better too. I like that Tolstoy is leaving things unexplained, such as the lame, country horses. He trusts the reader by this point.

The one thing I’m not fond of with older literature is the author’s propensity to ‘tell’ a story rather than ‘show’ one.

On the one had this makes reading Tolstoy pretty easy since he’s telling you what you should think about everything, however it’s also why I prefer Hemingway, Carver, and Ford.

Yet the scene where nobody can truthfully explain how a house is built is an example of the joy between the lines

Kitty and Levin are the most manic-depressive couple in the history of literature.

She I can at least understand since she’s so young and is still learning about herself but he’s filled with self-doubt one moment followed by confidence the next; he’s introspective in the morning but then by night his philosophy is ‘it can’t be helped’.

He reminds me of myself a little too much.

I need to find a Kitty.

The games that are played in society, the manners and everything that’s ‘expected’ of the very ‘best people’ – it’s no wonder the rest of Russia, the peasants, were beginning to grumble.

While most Russians were digging away in the dirt, the characters here worry themselves with how to make jam, picking mushrooms, and most important, the luxury of living just for love.

A revolution seemed almost inevitable.

Count Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin is to self analysis as Hamlet is to indecision.

He really is a tragic figure. He’s so imprisoned by decorum and what’s expected of a man of his position that I find myself rooting for him to get free, though usually in the way I rooted for Hamlet to kill his uncle already.

Nobody can kill a character off in more pages, with more prolonged suffering and with deeper observation of the absolute torment that a dying man and his family can go through than Tolstoy.

And then with just one sentence, get another pregnant.

I always get such satisfaction when I read how people act so similar from one era to our own. It’s so easy to assume people even just 100 years ago were so grave and were never amused by the things that amuse us. Yet people are people and have always been the same and that’s comforting to me somehow.

The scene where Levin and Kitty write to each other in code is so wonderful. There is such a childish innocence to their love in that game but also they way Tolstoy handles how to speak that which is difficult to express.

Then the next day as he stays up all night, catches sight of the people on the street, the loaves of bread … and then her! My god, so beautiful.

I’m not going to apologize for laughing out loud during some of the very funny scenes in the novel.

Nor will I apologize for getting all tense and a little moist in the eye when Levin meets Kitty again at the dinner. Damn, what a scene. My heart was pounding too.

This book is amazing.

I love how Tolstoy handles the passage of time in his stories. He’s able to make it seem as if the events you’re reading are playing out in real-time right before you. It’s almost eerie.

But just when you think you’ve got his clock figured out, he manages to stretch out the afternoon steeplechase sequence over 4 different characters. It’s like getting to watch a reply of every tragic rider one-by-one.

The genius of this novel really lays in how we are introduced to the characters. It’s very easy to condemn nearly everyone in the story, Anna and Alexei especially – but that’s only because we don’t know then at the beginning.

How easy it is to judge someone we don’t know, whose shoes we haven’t walked in. How important it is we see Levin cut the grass with the peasants to show us how to see the rest of the cast.

Tolstoy’s love of the peasantry and of farming runs so much deeper than just being a romanticism of it. He truly loves the hard work, the simplicity and the trouble of it all.

He also understands that a gentleman such as himself (and his characters) can really get in the way of hard working simple-folk and that there can arise resentments because of it.

I wonder if he felt bad being born to a higher class?

If you own a horse named Frou-Frou and you enter a steeplechase race against a horse named Gladiator, well … you won’t need an English degree to figure out what the hell is going to happen.

I’m going to admit that I do feel more sympathy for that horse than I do pretty much any character in the novel so far. Everyone is so damn selfish – even if they have every right to be.

“No one is satisfied with his fortune and everyone is satisfied with his wit.”

Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina would have saved everyone a whole lot of trouble if they would have picked up a hobby other than adultery.

Actually, that advice applies to pretty much everyone.

Konstantin Levin’s inner monologues can hit a little too close to home.

Tolstoy’s genius isn’t in his beautiful descriptions or his rich characterizations, but rather in his ability to put into words the thoughts and doubts we’ve all felt but were unable to put into words ourselves.

Reading Tolstoy is like reading something very, very true. Sometimes it’s even a little painful, but you’re glad you did it.

Tolstoy does not use description of place the way he did in War and Peace. Here scenes play out in rooms that are hardly described with only the ice skating park given a clear description.

The cinematic quality is something I loved about War and Peace and so I do sort of miss it here, however, Anna Karenin more than makes up for it with depth of emotion and he does much less telling and more showing too.

Having just finished War and Peace, I thought it would be fun to stay with Tolstoy and jump right into his other masterpiece.

Already I enjoy the characters as they are more real than in War and Peace. Here they are more drawn from the emotional side of the author’s brain whereas in War and Peace the characters were drawn more from the intellectual.

As usual, Tolstoy’s eye for detail is as sharp as ever.