Tolstoy = genius
Brad, I'm going to have to thank you from the absolute bottom of my heart for suggesting Anna Karenina. At first it was kind of tough going, but it's SO interesting.
For the rest of you, if you don't like to read and it's a chore for you to do so, Anna Karenina MAY seem boring and pointless. Russian literature takes some refining to get used to. Books like this truly are an acquired taste.
Just today I read in the part of the book where Constantine Levin's older brother comes to visit him at his farm, and Levin realizes just how sick his brother is and that he will probably die very soon. This gets him off to thinking about his own plans (because at this point in the book has began to undertake some apparently amazing theory of how to make a farm much more productive by involving the labour - lots of socialist and political economy talk) and starts moping about how in the end we all face death so what is the point of starting anything? If we all die then what is the point of doing anything? But he then picks up and says but while we are alive we cannot do nothing, so he clings to this idea of his that he is formulating with all his might in the hopes that it will at least guide him until that final moment of death arrives.
But then a few chapters later (by which I can only divine is a few months later... Tolstoy is so bad at conveying the passage of time) he meets up again with the women that he proposed to and was rejected by, and finds that she is suddenly now interested in him. This suddenly lifts him to the heights of heavenliness (as I'm sure it would me if I were suddenly noticed by a women that I loved).
The point of this long shpeel is that I find myself acting a lot like Levin. When a sudden depressing thought hits me, I let it get me down even though there isn't anything that I can do about it. Then when a glorious moment approaches, my mood swings back up into high mountain top head in the clouds, until the next sobering thing brings me crashing down into the deepest valley. (Do NOT tell me what happens to Levin and Kitty if you have read this book)
There is a counterpoint to all this, though. Ever since I was in high school, I have been working on my erratic mood swings, and I realized that I don't let myself get SO excited about things anymore, and so at the same time when things go wrong, I don't swing down as much. I don't know which is better, whether to be completely elated and completely down at the dumps in intervals, or to just fluctuate between weak emotional states here and there.
It's quite a befuddling conundrum now that I think of it.
2 Comments:
Jon, you're just getting started. It gets better and better as you continue.
I too, as well as others I've spoken to, identify greatly with Levin. I think it was intended that way. I'm pretty sure Tolstoy modelled him after himself. Without a shred of exaggeration, Levin is by far my favourite fictional character of all time (though he's so well realised that when reading, I often forgot that he wasn't real.)
As for your comment about marking the passage of time, I never really noticed that before. I think, though, that it's not really a problem, because time doesn't have much to do with the novel -- the book is not at all about events and plot, it's about the characters. The events of the story come out of the characters acting as real people would. It's a total masterpiece.
Interesting tidbit: After Anna Karenina, Tolstoy never wrote another novel. He said he put all he had into it, and had nothing left.
man...I know I read this book but it's almost like I have no recollection of it...that is so nuts. How can you spend that much time on something to have 0 memory of it just a year later. I mean I vaguely remember the characters...but yeah...maybe I should read it again (but that would be a huge time commitment!!!)
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