Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Isn't this just some long-winded Russian book about adultery and divorce? Why are there legends about Tolstoy and about Anna Karenina?

One of the first stories I heard about Anna Karenina was from Teddy Roosevelt. He was rudely interrupted from hunting mountain lions in the Dakotas when some common cattle-killing horse-thieves ran off with his boat in the night. Roosevelt built a raft, chased them down through the still-icy river and captured them. Rather than hanging them where he caught them as was the custom, he decided to march them 300 miles to the sheriff of the nearest town while he read Anna Karenina.

Then there was Tolstoy's personal correspondence with Gandhi, who called Tolstoy "the greatest apostle of non-violence the present age has produced."

Then there was social activist Jane Addam's journey to Russia to seek Tolstoy's spiritual counsel, which began next to the peasants in the hayfields, with Tolstoy laying down his scythe and "pulling out one of the big sleeves of her fashionable traveling gown, saying it contained enough fabric to make a smock for a little girl." This biographical blurb about Jane Addams continues with: "Tolerating this and other discrediting jibes during the encounter, Addams returned to her demanding schedule at Hull-House, concluding that strict adherence to Tolstoy's philosophy would be counterproductive and 'utterly preposterous.'"

Other contemporaries like William James wrote about Tolstoy's philosophy, saying "he makes his love of the peasant so exclusive, and hardens his heart toward the educated."

Those last anecdotes are the most revealing about what's in a Tolstoy novel.

Why is there so much myth and divisiveness surrounding the man who wrote about adultery in Anna Karenina and love triangles in War and Peace? After seeing the scope of Anna Karenina, I understand. Teddy Roosevelt wasn't really reading a soap opera about a sexually-awakened housewife as he marched thieves across the Badlands. He was reading a sprawling novel about Russian upper class life from the one other aristocrat who would famously prefer to tromp through the country with whichever men he encountered rather than attend to high society.

Anna Karenina is a 346,000-word effort of empathy from one helplessly offputting man. Okay, maybe it's more like a 100,000-word effort, interrupted by 246,000 words of personal politics and contempt, but that's altogether a more thorough effort to respect more varieties of people than I've made in my life. Tolstoy was a social conservative trying to accept why a woman might reasonably leave her family for lust. To mirror Anna's struggles, he added an co-protagonist modelled after himself in his final bachelor years, who intermittently reads like a self-mocking apology to everybody who has had to interact with Tolstoy and particularly to those who had to love him.

Tolstoy does showcase his divisiveness throughout the novel, the divisiveness that drew Jane Addams first towards then away from him. I don't think he's actually more offensive than any other partisan writing to their ingroup about an outgroup. The difference is that for Tolstoy, the outgroup is virtually everybody who has the time or pretense to read books rather than eternally struggle with the land for a meagre existence. So it's a testament to Tolstoy's intermittent empathy that anybody likes the novel.

II.

First, about that adultery. How do these 19th century moralists write the sex? The author of Lolita described Russian literature as "altogether the most chaste of novels." In the Puritan novel, The Scarlet Letter, the sex happens before page 1. Tolstoy can't do that with Anna Karenina, because he wants to show her descent into sin. Here's her passionate tryst in full graphic detail:

That which for Anna had been an impossible, horrible, but all the more enchanting dream of happiness--this desire had been satisfied.

Anna's tryst is the reversible beginning of her fall from grace. What ruins her in Russian high society is she stops hiding her affair; she becomes not only gossiped about but also seen in closer relations with her lover than her husband. In the second half of the book, we hear very infrequently from Anna herself, but more of how other people deal with her and think of her. She's miserable, and her defiant existence makes everyone uncomfortable, including I confess myself. It was a sorry relief to me when one 100 page section offered more point-of-view sentences to Levin's hunting dog than to Anna Karenina.

You can read a lot about Anna from other sources, so I'm going to focus on some other parts of the book.

III.

There are no villians. Because the book has an average of 100 pages per POV character, I didn't keep the same opinions of them throughout the story. Sometimes they are easy to hate (just like the author), but other times they are endearing, and then shortly afterwards bear an uncomfortable resemblance to myself.

In a later Russian book (The Gulag Archipelago), the phrase "the line between good and evil cuts through every human heart" The Russians are great at stopping and making you look uncomfortably into yourself, but that only happens after you read them for a while and jump past the offensive attitudes.

Tolstoy makes me question what other people think of me; Dostoyevsky makes me question what God thinks of me. Not exactly God, as an atheist, but that's the most succinct way to put it, just whenever the reasons I tell myself for doing something sound more noble than why I might really be doing it. And "what other people think of me" is not necessarily the best metric of whether I'm fooling myself.

Anna's brother is a schmooze, but he has his time to shine when he hosts a dinner party. His ambition, other than chasing skirts, is to curate social situations where everybody delights in each other's company and any uncomfortable hatreds are swept away. This sets him up to be what another reviewer described as the Master of Ceremonies of the novel. His betrayed wife says of him "I love him, but I do not respect him," and I feel the same way. In one scene, he is making house calls in preparation for a dinner party in which he wants to, in addition to the usual things, play matchmaker between his sister-in-law and his childhood friend, and persuade his brother-in-law to stay with his sister. In between dinner party planning (and remember there are servants to take care of the less-important parts like cooking and cleaning), he stops for a three-hour lunch with his new uptight boss, whom he loosens up for the benefit of himself and all his coworkers, while making a point to wear the Russian aristocracy equivalent of a t-shirt.

Anna's husband...might not get much sympathy with we SSC crowd. He's more concerned with politics than anything else, but then becomes a devout Orthodox Christian just in time to be maximally cruel to everybody around him. Christianity was a bigger deal in the high-society circles back then. But he becomes more sympathetic when you substitute "Christian morals" with [any other morality system], where when you decide how to treat somebody you are balancing whatever are their desires with any other moral guidance for what you think is best for them.

There were two moments where I noticed Karenin's humanity and sympathy: his discomfort with tears, and his response to his son's pride that he won some political award.

You can look at Anna's husband with contempt the whole way through the novel, as some Christian oaf, but I also began to sympathize with him and also his son and wife who can't stand him. He looks at dashing young cavalry officers and political awards and thinks they're dumb, occasionally wondering what his wife and son see in them. You also see how he behaves at the horse races, immediately finding some other intellectuals to argue with rather than attending to the race itself, saying things like "the love of such spectacles is the surest sign of low development in the spectators." I have this vision of meeting modern-day Karenin at a Super Bowl party, spending the whole time nasally nattering about how football is stupid and a Bad Influence on society, with the degenerative brain disease, the cheerleaders, the light beer, the vitriol between the two tribes of fans, and did you know how many anti-malarial bed nets you can buy for the cost of one Super Bowl commercial, while everybody else says "shut up, we know it's dumb, but we like it and you're stifling us!" Anna's complaint of her husband was that living with him was stifling, and she used the word "magnaminious" as a slur in describing him. The original 1870s Russia Karenin's moral awakening was to Orthodox Catholocism, but the 21st century American Karenin (who would live outside DC) would probably find a different moral code.

For some of the main characters, this book spans the window of their lives where they are showing personal initiative, making decisions that will influence their relationship to Russian society.

Vronksy: is Anna's lover. Essentially no readers like him, and the only characters that do either think he's hot or fun company in the clubs. He's a young cavalry officer, and one of the first things we hear about him from a minor elderly character are:

"This little fop from Petersburg, they're made by machine, they're all the same sort, they're trash."

Russia has a lot of border disputes in securing its empire, and needs expendable alpha males to manage its army regiments. And Vronsky's regiment does look up to him, and he does purposefully follow the moral code that the culture trained into him--until he decides to make his affair with Anna public.

Vronsky's life was especially fortunate in that he had a code of rules which unquestionably defined everything that ought and ought not to be done...his present relations with Anna and her husband were simple and clear. [They were clearly and precisely defined in the code of rules]...but recently there had appeared new, inner relations between himself and Anna that frightened him with their indefiniteness. [Just yesterday she had announced to him that she was pregnant. And he felt that this news and what she expected of him called for something not wholly defined by his guiding code of rules.]

This frightening indefinite relationship with Anna causes Vronsky, for the first time, to take some actions that the Petersburg rearing did not design him to do. Sex drive is the noise term in Russian aristocracy, which so much of Russian cultural norms work to curate and minimize, but sex drive still produces unwanted surprises in rare individuals like Anna and Vronsky.

I also hated Vronsky at first, but began to feel an uncomfortable kinship with him later in the novel. My rearing has curated me into an intellectual, not an alpha soldier. And Vronksy shifts into a disconcertingly sympathetic character to me.

Here's the narration of Vronsky's troubled solitary thoughts

'Of course,' he said to himself, as if a logical, continuous and clear train of thought had brought him to an unquestionable conclusion. In fact, this 'of course' that he found so convincing was only the consequence of a repetition of exactly the same round of memories and notions that he had already gone through a dozen times within the hour.

Tolstoy is great at making fun of people for thinking they are being courageous or wise when they are really just following everybody else. It's funny until I see myself in his examples, and then I get uncomfortable and less self-assured.

And then, in my first weeks of COVID social distancing, I read about all the ways Anna and Vronsky are passing the time in exile from Russian society.

In between sessions of amateur piano-playing from what I learned in school and lessons, I read how Vronsky has taken up painting:

He had an ability to understand art and to imitate it faithfully, and thought he had precisely what was needed for an artist. After some hesitation over what kind of painting he would choose--religious, historical, genre, or realistic--he started to paint. He understood all kinds and could be inspired by one or another; but he could not imagine that one could be utterly ignorant of all the kinds of painting and be inspired directly by what was in one's soul, unconcerned whether what one painted belonged to any particular kind. Since he did not know that, and was inspired not directly by life but indirectly by life already embodied in art, he became inspired very quickly and easily, and arrived as quickly and easily at making what he painted look very much like the kind of art he wanted to imitate.

And as I'm considering possible career shifts to things I consider more altruistic, I read how awkward another character felt as Vronsky was proudly throwing his inherited wealth into the construction of a provincial hospital. Meanwhile Anna was patronizing and tutoring some foreign-born orphan, but these were only the causes of later fights, as Vronsky later calls them "unnatural concerns."

And as missing the days of playing sports with friends, I read how a same-generation mother felt about Vronsky playing doubles tennis:

She did not like that general unnaturalness of grown-ups when they play at a children's game by themselves, without children.

All of these quotations made me squirm, and some made me angrily shut the book for a couple weeks.

I'm really troubled by Vronsky, because I can't reassure myself by any rigorous method that he is more shallow than the other characters. Sure, other characters think little of him, but he is a jock (his greatest passion is being a horse jockey), so popular opinion will tend to confirm the stereotype. He does demonstrate independent thought, although he doesn't go through long stretches of self-doubt like some other characters. Maybe time-away-from-self-assuredness is the best metric for shallowness, in which case Vronsky and Karenin are more shallow than Anna and Levin...

At this point, I should mention what you already suspect, that I am a young bachelor. I connected the most with Tolstoy's young bachelors, and least with his women. I feel bad about this, but vis. above there are several ways this novel made me feel worse. I've seen many online reviews, mostly by reviewers with female names, who felt Anna was the star of the show and also loved Kitty. In comparison to what you can find elsewhere, I don't have much worth sharing about the three female leads.

Kitty is the young maiden trying to find her way as an adult, mostly but not exclusively with regard to her romantic relationships. Unlike most romance novels, the "she got married and lived happily ever after" happens halfway through the book and much of her story arc is about that "ever after."

Anna's sister in law...is the one character where I don't think Tolstoy challenged himself. She is the social conservative mother of the house who has regrets, but ultimately decides that raising children is more fulfilling than fighting society's expectations as Anna does.

IV.

This book is about Russian aristocratic life in the 1870s. Nabakov says as you follow the characters you get an immersive experience of the passage of time as the characters perceive it. One of the ways Tolstoy does this is spend a lot of time with their moment-to-moment thoughts, which involves lots of details of their politics, personal finances, diet, leisure reading, planning for workday and social itineraries. So much of the book is a contrast of how two characters respond to analogous situations. Because this book is such a detailed account of life 150 years ago, it invites comparison from their time to ours. Here are some of the aspects I found the most surprising:

On the day of the horse races, Vronsky came earlier than usual to eat his beefsteak in the common room of the regimental mess. He did not need to maintain himself too strictly, because his weight was exactly the regulation 160lbs; but he also had not to gain any weight, and so he avoided starches and sweets.

Wait, I thought the low-carb beefsteak breakfasts was a new 2018 diet. This translation is from 2000, during the low-fat diet fad. Tolstoy does keep mentioning how Vronsky had great teeth.

Also, 160lb seems like a low regulation weight for a cavalry officer who has to be strong and is generally a copious drinker. It is the median accepted weight for a 5'11" male in present-day United States Army. (see US Army enlistment weight requirements) How tall were 1870s Russians? We know the better-fed aristocrats were taller than the commoners. Barbara Tuchman blamed malnutrition when citing how 1900 England lowered their minimum military height requirement from 5'0" to 4'10".

There's also societal declines attributed to recent technology, like how the "fear of missing out" makes people flaky even after they arrive at some other event. You see some adolescent staring at their phone, and then they say "gotta go". This has to be a new thing, right, because how do you leave an event that doesn't have the people you wanted to see if you can't text the people you do want to see? 19th century aristocrats had the footman. There's a scene where Anna's at her socialite friend's house, and sneaks her own postscript into her hostess's letter to the footman so she can meet Vronsky.

The descriptions that make it most clear this novel is of an earlier time are regarding medicine. Of the three point-of-view women characters, two have near-death childbirth experiences that shock the men around them into character development. The other woman has already had her five children, and we read how in her early 30s her youth and beauty are behind her. Death in childbirth seems a common literary trope. In that era, mothers had at least 0.5% chance of dying in any one childbirth, but now Russia overall has a 0.02% mortality rate. The characters are of the upper class, who burn through money away from home so the women can have the best city doctors during childbirth, so I'm sure the characters would have less than a 0.01% mortality rate today. During the years Tolstoy wrote the novel, three of his children died in infancy.

Then there's the autobiographical sequence of Levin's brother slowly and pathetically dying of tuberculosis. We see him in a German spa, with another character who was diagnosed as potentially tubercolic.

And the famous doctor presented his plan of treatment by Soden waters, the main aim in the prescription of which evidently being that they could do no harm.

We later see him slowly dying in a provincial hotel. His brother and sister-in-law stay with him for 10 days, waiting for him to die, during which time he is alternatively at peace with impending death or miserably suffering from bedsores and anxious to recover, while sometimes "a desire for his death was felt by everyone who saw him." Because he's so provocative, I suspect Tolstoy would have opined on physician-assisted suicide if it existed in any form at that time. These four chapters read a lot like (SSC post) Who By Very Slow Decay, so the medical dramas are not completely different today.

This novel took place after the invention of tuberculosis sanatoriums, but shortly before Robert Koch discovered the bacterium that caused the disease, and a lifetime before any effective vaccinations or cures. People still die of tuberculosis, but famous authors and their siblings stopped dying of tuberculosis halfway between Anna Karenina and the present day.

VI.

I have to write about the peasants.

Levin's heart is in the country estate, in peasant farming and hunting, but he goes to the city twice on account of a woman: first to court her, second so she can go through childbirth with the best city doctors.

You hear a lot about money in this book, about other character's debts, but also about Levin's spending in the city and country.

The first time he goes to some fancy restaurant to see his friend and learn about his friend's sister-in-law he wants to marry. They eat seafood with a fancy sauce even though Levin would rather eat something simple, and the fancy-sauce meal costs 14 roubles. When he returns to his farm, you learn about the peasants in the course of hearing his springtime dreams for the farm. Levin asks his steward in increasing exasperation why all the work is behind schedule, and the steward says

'We need to hire more workers, but they don't come. There were some today, but they asked 70 roubles each for the summer.'

Levin kept silent. Again this force opposed him...he could not help fighting even so. He replied 'send to [farther villages] if they don't come. We must look.'

At this point we had already heard Levin's first response to his pathetic, consumptive brother's proposal of Marxism.

[Levin's brother] pointed to some small iron bars tied with string. 'That's the beginning of a new manufacturing association we're undertaking.'

Levin was almost not listening. [...] His brother continued, "you know that capital oppresses the worker, [...] and so we're organizing an association in which all production and profit will be common property."

"Where will this association be located?" Levin asked.

"In the village of V__"

"Why have a metal-working association in a village? I think there's enough to do in the villages without that."

Levin eventually tries this shared-property idea with his farm, and it doesn't work well. But we know from Tolstoy's life that he will eventually forsake the concept of private property and continue to obsess about peasant farm labor until his death. What's striking about this early exchange is Levin's assumption that small-town Russia had particularly more demand for work than supply of workers. This situation is totally flipped 150 years later, where politicians particularly speak of protecting jobs in small-town America and some economists question whether many rural towns should continue to exist. I want to share one of Tolstoy's points in the novel to speculate on part of why that flip happened.

Later in the novel Levin is married, and his in-laws persuade him to take his pregnant wife to Moscow so she doesn't die in childbirth at the hands of some less-competent country doctor.

There's a page about Levin's spending in Moscow, how the money starts to fall away from him, and he knows how much the rouble is worth on his underfunded estate but somehow spends so much more in the city.

This is the image Levin provides of inequalities of the time. On the one hand, you see the peasant wages in contrast to the aristocratic spending which is a hot topic today. But there's another economic inequality going on, not of the money to the rich vs the poor, but the money going to the city vs the country. The aristocrats have the money, the dreams, and the agency to craft some part of the world as they want. Levin wants his farm to thrive more than he cares about what the city has to offer in the way of art, cuisine, and all the other things aristocrats purchase to look aristocratic, yet he finds himself spending all his slack/money on these city things in order to keep up appearances. All the money he saved from not paying for enough peasant labor to make his farm as he desires goes into spending side-effects of his desire for his wife to have the best doctor in her childbirth. One person for two reasons at two times pushes Levin to support the economic forces of the time even as his broader values regret it. Now Levin/Tolstoy is a character of anomalous curmudgeonly intensity, so it's hard to say how scalable this idea is.

Now, 100 pages earlier, Anna's lover was boasting of how he was building a first-class hospital in the country, one day's carriage-ride away from Levin's estate. It's hard to say how Tolstoy feels about this, because everything Anna and her lover do in social exile is "unnatural."

In case you were considering the utilitarian extreme of charity, the one Jane Addams rejected, this is what and how you should be eating:

The old man crumbled some bread into a bowl, kneaded it with a spoon handle, poured in some water from his whetsone box, cut more bread, sprinkled it with salt, and turned eastward to pray. 'Here master, try a bit of my mash,' he said, squatting down in front of the bowl.

Levin has some of the mash and finds it surprisingly delicious and filling. When he comes home that night he tells his housekeeper and brother he's already eaten dinner and isn't hungry, but they eventually get him to sit down with them, calling upon his responsibilities as a host (is all of Levin's economic consumption about reluctantly keeping up appearances?), and remark about how ravenously he is eating.

VII.

Levin is very much the intellectual ancestor of Taleb and Peterson. When he's feeling down, he lifts weights or swings a scythe. He has this intellectual relationship with his half-brother academic which reads eerily like Taleb's discussions about Nero.

Taleb writes this in Antifragile:

Nero was the victim of an aesthetic ailment that brings revulsion, even phobia, toward: people wearing flip-flops, bankers, politicians...

And this from Levin's opening scene:

Levin was silent, glancing at the unfamiliar faces of his friend's two colleagues and especially at one clerk's hands, with such long white fingers, such long yellow nails curving at the tips, and such huge glittering cuff links on his sleeves, that these hands absorbed all his attention and did not allow him any freedom of thought...Levin looked with hatred at those hands.

Here's Taleb again, about scholarship:

Nero had been spending all his adult life writing a philosophical-technical book. His tendency was to abandon the project every two years and take it up again two years later. He felt that the concept of probability as used was too narrow and incomplete to express the true nature of decisions in the ecology of the real world.

And here's Levin about his book which variously consumes him throughout the novel.

Levin had begun to write a work on farming, the basis of which was that the character of the worker had to be taken as an absolute given in farming, and that consequently, all propositions in the science of farming ought to be deduced not from the givens of soil and climate alone, but also from the known, immutable character of the worker...

[100 pages later] Levin read the politico-economic books...which gave not even the slightest hint of what, he, Levin, and all Russian peasants and landowners were to do with their millions of hands and acres so that they would be most productive for the common good.

[100 pages later] "Oh, I've given up on that book. It's just theory, what's the point?"

[100 pages later] "I'm actually writing a book on agriculture..."

My point in comparing to Taleb is that Tolstoy's Russian peasant obsessions are a case study of more universal questions, namely 1) how to utilize the labor of the masses in a changing economy, 2) how to deal with the mess when theory meets practice, and 3) whether any of these larger questions are more important than one's love life. Tolstoy's answers are 1) this is the most important question a society can ask, 2) this is really hard and he's tried things but hasn't figured it out yet, and 3) no, and if you find yourself wondering about this that's a sign that you are in love and should be doing more about it. The general answers are cliche, but the specifics are interesting.

The strange part about Levin/Tolstoy is that Tolstoy became a prophet of the progressives (Ghandi, Jane Addams, MLK...), and yet Tolstoy was frequently a social conservative who wrote Anna Karenina as an argument against the progressive social trends of the day, and Tolstoy the character has the strongest resemblance to Taleb/Peterson. Also, Tolstoy is a strange prophet, because he was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox church.

VII.

This novel shows a lot of resentment for Tolstoy's on aristocratic class, and it gets more intense in the second half of the novel.

Anna and Vronsky run away with each other, and essentially try to purchase and hobby their way to happiness, and it doesn't work.

Meanwhile, Levin marries Kitty, and then his story reads a lot like an unsuccessful play of the Oregon Trail computer game where you waste all your ammunition shooting squirrels in Nebraska, and then one of your children drinks from the Platte river and dies of dysentery.

In fact Levin goes hunting with a couple buddies after Great Snipe, a tiny bird of the Russian swamp. Hunting snipe seems to be the one non-scything-and-childraising activity that Tolstoy gives a pass in the second half of the novel.

And the three gentlemen who go out on a days-long expedition end up eating through all the other food Kitty packed for them and eat all of the snipe in one night. So it's a net-negative caloric activity, even ignoring Levin's hunting dog who ends up getting more point-of-view sentences than Anna in a 100-page stretch. Then Levin and Kitty go off to the provincial hospital to watch his brother die of TB.

I enjoy reading contrarian essays, but usually the author's surety is off-putting. When Tolstoy writes of his convictions in essays, I usually want to hit him. But I'm more tolerant when he sprinkles his opinions through an autobiographical character in his novel. You see how Levin feels about issues, but simultaneously see when he struggles to articulate his views or is unsure of himself. And you also see how he's an awkward outcast who has spent half of his life alone on a farm because he could not manage to charm any women of his own age and class.

You can start to see how Tolstoy feels about the poor and the wealthy, and how he was perceiving just about everything the wealthy, educated class held dear as pretense, which helps to explain how he became so committed to living like a peasant in his later years.

Shortly after finishing the novel, Tolstoy had a spiritual rebirth and decided that writing novels was a waste of time, and spent the second half of his life writing preachy essays. The second half of this novel in particular shows the seeds of this radicalization. I see Tolstoy the man as a cautionary tale. Don't be too intense, taking ascetic ideas more seriously than anybody around you, or you'll end up a helplessly bitter, difficult man like him.

VIII.

This is a realistic fiction novel with semi-autobiographical elements, so we can summarize the next 150 years of Western society to be an epilogue.

Divorce laws have changed, and there's less stigma than 150 years ago. Maybe Anna Karenina would have survived if she was born to a later culture.

Tolstoy really hates on opera-house music throughout the novel--ideas he develops later in "What is Art," where he claims that the only true music is the stuff peasants sing. This idea makes me angry and uncomfortable. And yet, it's hard to dispute that the most influential music of the century after Tolstoy (the blues, inspiring jazz and rock and more) came out of the farmfields.

At the end of the novel, the characters speak of some Serbian revolt, and share some attitude they've read in the papers that the Russians have a duty to free their fellow Slavs from the yoke of foreign powers. And now the 2010s issue of the annexation of Crimea and the Russian fighting in Ukraine has some broader context. I remember reading several years ago that the Russian TV says they are helping the Ukrainians who identify as Russian, and thinking that was ridiculous, but now seeing that attitude as part of a centuries-long myth in Russian culture.

And we can follow the story of Levin and Kitty by reading the biography of Tolstoy and his wife. They stayed married, but it wasn't happy at the end. Tolstoy wanted to renounce his novels and spread all his inheritance to the peasants. His wife disagreed about this. It's hard to say what role jealousy played here. Tolstoy fathered a child with a peasant, as he recorded in a diary he gave to his fiance the night before the wedding, and he never kicked the mother or bastard child off the land. I can imagine the conversation: "The inheritance should go to all the peasants." "Oh, did you have any particular ones in mind?"

Then seven years after Tolstoy's death came the Bolshevik Revolution, and his family fled to Sweden :)

P.S.

Most of you will understandably choose to never read Tolstoy. If you are suddenly feeling inspired to read everything I've left out, I should mention a couple things. If you are reading any remotely literary foreign book for enjoyment, the translator matters, and Pevear-Volokhonsky are the best Russian-to-English translators. This is popular opinion. I used to think opinions about translators was pretension, then I read two Dostoyevsky books by two different translators. I preferred the plot and characters of the first book, but enjoyed the writing style and conversations in the second one more. Then the thoughts and conversations of this Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina felt even more natural and helped me to empathize with the characters. The original author is still a confounder in my n=3 experience, but I hadn't heard the opinion about Pevear-Volokhonsky until after I started reading their translation. Pevear-Volokhonsky write about how extensively Tolstoy brought nuance and irony with his use of Russian and how that makes him difficult to translate, which makes it mystifying why Tolstoy championed Esperanto.