Anna Karenina

n  If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.n

At long last I can put another notch in my literary belt. It has been a long time coming. For whatever reason the thought of reading Tolstoy has always intimidated me. Perhaps I was worried that I would not, well in truth, not so much like it really as understand it. Phftttt that was never really an issue and surprise, surprise I enjoyed this story even if I did find parts of it excruciatingly tedious.

At its core Anna Karenina is a love story. It centers about the lives of seven people and if you are thinking that is an odd number for a love story then it behooves me to remind you that odd numbers and love do drama make. And there is drama to be found here. I am not a historian or a polymath but for me the real genius in Tolstoy’s writing lay in his characterization. Like them or not, love them or hate them, Tolstoy certainly was successful in making me care about every one of these people. I believe he achieved this in no small part by allowing me access to their inner most thoughts and feelings. This is a story about so much more than love, it is also about friendship, betrayal and pride and anger and life’s tedious little rituals whose roots are oft tended by societies outrageous expectations. But it is also about farming, hunting, politics and faith. In other words, life, and I cannot help but believe that Leo Tolstoy loved and had a great passion for life.

A very strange thing happened to me as I read this. It was like an out of body experience that involved two passages in particular. One was about mowing or scything the fields. Levin took it upon himself to spend a day with his labourers achieving this task and he invited me along. Tolstoy described this process, and Levin’s as well as the workers passion and energy for the task, so well that I was completely transported and embodied Levin as he perfected his technique and muscles burning found his rhythm. Seriously mowing the grass! The second scene, even more alarming to me to admit was about hunting great snipe. Trust me when I tell you that I have zero interest in hunting or the loss of life for beast, fish or fowl associated with this activity. Clearly I neglected to tell Tolstoy because he took me there to those marshes as Levin set his dog to flush them out and rifle in hand, cast his eyes skyward. If anyone had ever suggested to me that either one of these activities would hold me spellbound for pages, no doubt I would have felt their face for the flush of a raging fever. Colour me humbled then by the skill of a great writer.

Based on the title of this book I was initially surprised how many words and pages were spent on Konstantin Levin but as I continued to read a pattern seemed to emerge. And as sad and tragic as it was and even though I could see the shadows on the wall, I could not tear my eyes away. I liked Anna as it happens and the course her life took resonated deeply within me. I wanted more for her and Vronsky as well. As the story opens Anna is a well respected and a much sought after member of society whereas Levin is socially awkward, stiff, difficult and lacking in self esteem. Each of these characters goes about their day to day lives and makes choices within their own realms of experience and in keeping with their own moral compass. I must stop myself from saying more as I have no wish to spoil this story for would be readers but…..  Anna’s trajectory is a downward spiral whereas Levin is lifted up to the gates of domestic bliss and contentedness and as a reader my views on each of them mirrored that reversal in trajectory.

This is a classic and a tome. It is wordy and parts of it can be tedious. These Russian writers are indeed loquacious. It is also worthy. Your time and effort will be richly rewarded.

***Spoiler alert. If you have read this book, please proceed. If you are never going to read this novel (be honest with yourself), then please proceed. If you may read this novel, but it may be decades in the future, then please proceed. Trust me, you are not going to remember, no matter how compelling a review I have written. If you need Tolstoy talking points for your next cocktail party or soiree with those literary, black wearing, pseudo intellectual friends of yours, then this review will come in handy. If they pin you to the board like a bug over some major plot twist, that will be because I have not shared any of those. If this happens, do not despair; refer them to my review. I’ll take the heat for you. If they don’t know who I am, then they are, frankly, not worth knowing. Exchange them for other more enlightened intellectual friends.***

“He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.”

Anna Arkadyevna married Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, a man twenty years her senior. She dutifully produced a son for him and settled into a life of social events and extravagant clothes and enjoyed a freedom from financial worries. Maybe this life would have continued for her if she had never met Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky, but more than likely, her midlife crisis, her awareness of the passage of time, would have compelled her to seek something more.

”They say he’s a religious, moral, honest, intelligent man; but they don’t see what I’ve seen. They don’t know how he has been stifling my life for eight years, stifling everything that was alive in me, but he never once even thought that I was a living woman who needed love. They don’t know how he insulted me at every step and remained pleased with himself. Didn’t I try as hard as I could to find a justification for my life? Didn’t I try to love him… But the time has come, I’ve realized that I can no longer deceive myself, that I am alive, that I am not to blame if God has made me so that I must love and live. And what now? If he killed me, if he killed him, I could bear it all, I could forgive it all, but no, he….”

Her husband was enamored with her, but then so was everyone who met her, male or female. Maybe he was too contented with their life together and, therefore, took their relationship for granted. He was two decades older, so the passions of romance didn’t burn with as hot a flame. She wanted passion from him even if it was to murder her lover and herself. Even if it was something tragic, she wanted something to happen, something that would make her feel... something.

I couldn’t help thinking early on that the problem wasn’t with her husband, certainly nothing that a new lover could fix for very long. The same face was always going to greet her in the mirror. The same thoughts were always going to swim their way back to the surface. We can not mask the problems within ourselves by changing lovers. The mask will eventually slip, and all will be revealed.

Ugly can be very pretty.

Is there such a thing as being too beautiful? Can being so beautiful make someone cold, disdainful, and unable to really feel empathy or even connected to those around them? Her type of beauty is a shield that insulates her even as her insecurities swing the sword that stabs the hearts of those who despise her and those who love her.

”She was enchanting in her simple black dress, enchanting were her full arms with the bracelets on them, enchanting her firm neck with its string of pearls, enchanting her curly hair in disarray, enchanting the graceful, light movements of her small feet and hands, enchanting that beautiful face in its animation; but there was something terrible and cruel in her enchantment.”

My favorite character in this epic was Konstantin (Kostya) Dmitrich Levin. He was a well meaning, wealthy landowner who, unusually for the times, went out and worked the land himself. He got his hands dirty enough that one could actually call him a farmer. He was led to believe by his friends and even the Shcherbatsky family that their youngest daughter, Kitty, would be an affable match for him. Kitty’s older sister Dolly was married to Stepan (Stiva) Arkadyich Oblonsky, who was the brother to Anna Karenina.

Stiva was recently caught and forgiven for having a dalliance with a household staff, but no sooner was he out of that boiling water of that affair before he was having liaisons with a ballerina. This did lead me to believe that life would never be satisfying for either Stiva or his sister Anna because there was always going to be pretty butterflies to chase as the attractiveness of the one they had began to fade.

Before Vronsky became gobsmacked by Anna, he was leisurely chasing after Kitty and leading her on just long enough for Kitty to turn Levin’s marriage proposal down flat. That was like catching a molotok (hammer) right between the eyes as a serp (sickle) swept Kostya off his feet. Interestingly enough, later in the book Levin met Anna Karenina, after he has married Kitty (you’ll have to read the book to discover how this comes about), and he was captivated by Anna.

It was almost enough for me start chain smoking Turkish cigarettes or biting my nails down to the quick while I waited for the outcome. Substitute Anna for Jolene, and you’ll know what I was humming.

”She had unconsciously done everything she could to arouse a feeling of love for her in Levin, and though she knew that she had succeeded in it, as far as one could with regard to an honest, married man in one evening, and though she liked him very much, as soon as he left the room, she stopped thinking about him.”

If she was irritated with Vronsky, one day maybe she would just seduce Levin for entertainment... because she could.

I must say that I didn’t think much of Vronsky at the beginning of the novel, but as the plot progressed I started to sympathize with him. Tolstoy was brilliant at rounding out characters so our preconceived notions or the projections of ourselves that we place upon them are forced to be modified as we discover more about them.

Levin had his own problems. He had been reading the great philosophers, looking for answers. He found more questions than answers in religion. He abandoned every lifeboat he climbed into and swam for the next one. ”Without knowing what I am and why I’m here, it is impossible for me to live. And I cannot know that, therefore I cannot live.”

The problem that every reasonably intelligent person wrestles with is that no matter how successful we are, no matter how wonderful a life we build, or how well we take care of ourselves, we are going to die. It is irrefutable. Cemeteries don’t lie. Well, there is a lot of eternal lying down going on, but no duplicity. None of us are going to escape the reaper. No one is ascending on a cloud or going to the crossroads to make a deal with the Devil. We all have to come face to face with death, and we can’t take any of our bobbles, accolades, or power with us. So the question that Levin ended up asking himself, the Biggest question even beyond, why am I here? is:

Why do anything?

Without immortality, everything we attempt to do can seem futile. Some would make the case that we live on in our kids and grandkids. I say bugger to that. I want more time!

Well, there are ways to be immortal, and one of them is to write a masterpiece like Anna Karenina that will live forever.

By the end, I am ready to throttle Anna until her pretty eyes bug out of her head and her cheeks turn a vibrant pink, but at the same time, she seemed to be suffering from a host of mental disorders. She was so cut off from everyone and so disdainful of everyone. ”It was impossible not to hate such pathetically ugly people.” The “friends” she had had been ostracized from her by her own actions. I had to believe her loathing of people was a projection of how she felt about herself. She needed some time on Carl Jung’s couch, but he was a wee tot when this book was published. She needed to find some satisfaction in the ordinary and quit believing that a change in geography or in lovers was ever going to fix what was wrong with herself.

She had such a destructive personality. One man tried to kill himself from her actions and another contemplated the act. She was maliciously vengeful when someone didn’t do something she wanted them to do; and yet, I couldn’t quite condemn her completely. Her feelings of being stifled were perfectly natural. We all feel that way at points in our lives. We feel trapped by the circumstances of our life. Her attempt to break free in the 1870s in Russian society was brave/foolish. She sacrificed everything to chase a dream.

The dream ate her.

This book is a masterpiece, not just a Russian masterpiece but a true gift to the world of literature.

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Tolstoy can bring a scene so close to the eye it's as vividly and comprehensively alive as a memory in one's own mind.

Look it seems to be a favorite novel among so many great novelists - Nabokov, Faulkner, Kundra, Joyce even Dostoevsky but I happen to be more in agreement with Rebecca West when she says, "And plainly Anna Karenina was written simply to convince Tolstoy that there was nothing in this expensive and troublesome business of adultery"

If you read novels to be somewhere and sometime else (and don't mind that place to be boring) this will work for you. It is a perfect chronicle of its times. The trouble is I happened to be a very sensual reader. You see I am a book-izer and date a lot of books at the same time, and take different books to dinner and bed on the same day. Whenever I see a book anywhere I start imagining myself in bed with it and can't help running my hand on its body. And above all, there must be very good reasons if the relationship is to last more than a few days. Unfortunately, this one happens to feel like a long, stale marriage.

Marriage! I guess that is the real theme of the book rather than adultery. The subject has occupied minds of people for so long that there aren't too many new jokes I can make about it, I mean the best ones like how in case of a murder, the victim's spouse is the foremost suspect are already taken. Moreover, I don't fully understand the concept of marriage - this once I was about to congratulate this newlywed couple but I was just trying to imagine their life after marriage before the chance to do so occurred and ended up saying "condolences". That because "May your souls rest in peace" seemed like hoping for too much. The reason being that I think of 'being alive' to mean to let you feel all sorts of things. Now once a person gets married, (S)he is expected not to feel attracted, fall in love, etc outside marriage. And so to that extent the person is dead. And of course, there are all the sacrifices you are supposed to make for your children, etc (a lot of people are into that too!) which won't let a person enjoy his/her life fully.

Now, it is just the kind of thing that if it wasn't for the sake of habit, people would have given up long ago. I still think they will do so someday. If you trust a person, you don't need to bound them, right? With love, my understanding is far worse - I mean if someone loves his/her spouse and wants the later to be happy, shouldn't they be more like "Go on, darling, have some fun!" instead of jealously guarding them? That, by the way, is Levin's (Anna's antagonist) method - to ask his wife not to meet men with whom she happened to laugh.

n  
"Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls...
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music."
- Kahlil Gibran.
n

Still, because of some sort of barbaric instinct the heart wants to hold on to the person, it is invested in, to possess them like objects so as to be sure of their presence in one's life. It seeks promises, unbreakable oaths, until-death-or-divorce-do-us-aparts, more and more bounds - anything to save one from the fear of losing beloved. And where this need for security over each other's possession is mutual, a marriage takes place. Except, of course, all such promises are useless, no one can control his/her feelings by choice, and so no one should ask the other or promise such a thing. In fact, everything people do to gain security (or whatever form) only feeds the feeling of insecurity.

Only insecure and untrusting people seek promises and

"We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Where you presume on security is where you set yourself to fail. All things given in love are gifts and no prices should be asked in return. Karein, Anna's husband realizes this at some point in the story and is able to fight back the famous agony of a cheated husband at least for a while. (If only I was to have a cookie for each book with adultery and jealous spouses in it I have read, I would have .... you know, diabetes. There should be some kind of restriction on each, like the no-mention-of-Hitler-in-debates rule, like a book with adultery in it doesn't win Nobel prizes or something .... but then Marquez wouldn't have won his prize, you know what, scratch that.)

Anyways, Tolstoy's argument against infidelity doesn't seem true to me. Anna didn't suffer because she cheated on her husband. She suffered because of three different reasons at different points.

First, because she had a conscience which is always a burden. How can feeling guilty about anything that can ever serve a purpose is beyond me. Guilt is a monster that like that Greek vulture which constantly fed on the heart (of Prometheus) without ever improving the victim's lot, and conscience is nothing except a set up to create a feeling of guilt among people. And to think there are people who feed this concept to their children! Terrorists never felt guilty of their actions, pregnant teenagers often do. A better world could be created if people teach compassion to their children.

Secondly, people, she is surrounded by. Many would say those were wrong times, times are not wrong, people are. Vronsky wants her, other people think of her as fallen women, the stupid divorce law ... you get the picture.

Thirdly, in the last parts, when she feels jealous lover Vronsky. It is not a self-induced fear of being cheated as often seen in people who cheat themselves - like Macbeth's fear who being usurper himself constantly fears being usurped, but rather the same old insecurity we just talked about. She has given away her son for him. We tax our loved ones for sacrifices we make them for them. It was too great a sacrifice for Vronsky to redeem in any way except by becoming a homely for her which he couldn't.

The novel has a misnomer. It should have been better named Levin, the author stand-in gets more attention than Anna Karenina. We read several boring chapters in which he gives his theories for agriculture, peasant education, etc which, though it might make the book more realistic, also makes it much larger and boring than it need be (something similar to what deviations and jokes do to this review). There are several beautiful moments in this novel but they are lost in the sea of monotonous realism, a combination that doesn't work with a sensual reader like me. The third star is almost entirely due to the last chapters of Anna's life. If it wasn't for that, I would have thought that it is Stockholm syndrome associated with large books that make people love this one.

What is the most important thing about Anna Karenina? Is it the first line, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"? This sounds so true but it isn't really.

Is it that Anna experiences much more intolerance for her unfaithfulness and leaving her husband than does her brother who screws around like a dog? Is it Konstantin Levin's attempts to marry into the aristocracy and his problem with religion? Or is the entire story just Tolstoy's way of seducing the reader into reading the political nub of the story, the feudalism that was at the heart of all politics, morality and social position.

I enjoyed the book when I read it, but I have to say I skimmed over a lot of the politics and did wonder which in Tolstoy's heart is the story he wanted to tell, love stories or political ones?

How I came to read Anna Karenina, appendicitis and an air hostess ending with a rotten tomato. I read this book when I was 13. I had a test on it in two days and hadn't even opened it so I said I had stomach ache and went to the school sick room. This was a tall, narrow room with a tiny window about 8' up and painted with shades of olive green and aubergine (eggplant). If you weren't sick going in.. those colours.... But I was away in Russia with Anna, her husband Alexei and Count Vronsky whom I swooned over. In the early hours of the morning, I really had stomach ache. At 4 a.m. I had an emergency appendectomy in a nursing home with an operating theatre. I was very sick indeed and in bed for weeks. Had I brought it on myself?

Never mind. Next day three things happened, one bad and one good and one fantastic. My period came on for the first time. I was a Woman! Yes! I told my mother and my grandmother leaned over from the visitor chair and slapped my face very hard, "That's to take the shock of the blood away." She said.

Then the good. My mother said I had been waiting for this day and she really let loose at my grandmother. They had a very fierce row. It was wonderful. My mother didn't love me and she never ever defended me or involved herself with me in any way. Memories of being slapped herself I suppose. My mother was very pretty and was the first of her family to be married. On her wedding day, her mother slapped her face as she put the veil on her. "Ruth should have been married first, not you." Ruth was her much less attractive and zealously-religious older sister. (She mellowed).

Everyone else in the nursing home was old except for an air hostess of 21. She didn't have a private room and didn't like being with the old people so would wander into mine to sit and read and eat all my chocolates, of which I had endless boxes. She brought her books - Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell and Zola. So for nearly three weeks my days were filled with reading, talking about books with my new friend and eating chocolates all day long.

I was actually thrown out of the nursing home. The food there was terrible. One lunchtime there was something forgettable and salad. The tomato was perfect-looking but mushy, almost liquid so I threw it out of the window and it landed on one of the nuns who was beside herself with anger. I didn't care, my friend had left a few days before, left her books for me too in exchange for some fancy ribbon-bowed boxes of chocolates.

We wrote for a bit, were penpals, but eventually that died. The age gap and where we were in our lives was too far apart. But I will always remember her and the fabulous books she introduced me too. Thank you Helen.

I will never forget Anna Karenina, apart from Tolstoy's political rants and plight of the peasants etc, the book was a pure gold, convoluted love affair. It was like all the best books are, total immersion in another world populated by real people whose lives outside of those described you could easily imagine, not just "well-drawn characters". Austen, Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell and Zola were just as good, all of them worlds I lived in when I read their books.

Review 1/2020 Rewritten 15th Jan 2020 to include more about the book.

In the beginning, reading Anna Karenin can feel a little like visiting Paris for the first time. You’ve heard a lot about the place before you go. Much of what you see from the bus you recognize from pictures and movies and books. You can’t help but think of the great writers and artists who have been here before you. You expect to like it. You want to like it. But you don’t want to feel like you have to like it. You worry a little that you won’t. But after a few days, you settle in, and you feel the immensity of the place opening up all around you. You keep having this experience of turning a corner and finding something beautiful that you hadn’t been told to expect or catching sight of something familiar from a surprising angle. You start to trust the abundance of the place, and your anxieties that someone else will have eaten everything up before your arrival relax. (Maybe that simile reveals more about me than I’d like.)

My favorite discovery was the three or four chapters (out of the book’s 239) devoted to, of all things, scythe mowing—chapters that become a celebratory meditation on physical labor. When I read those chapters, I felt temporarily cured of the need to have something “happen” and became as absorbed in the reading as the mowers are absorbed in their work. Of course, the book is about Anna and Vronsky and Levin and Kitty and Dolly and poor, stupid Stepan Arkadyich. It’s about their love and courtship and friendship and pride and shame and jealousy and betrayal and forgiveness and about the instable variety of happiness and unhappiness. But it’s also about mowing the grass and arguing politics and hunting and working as a bureaucrat and raising children and dealing politely with tedious company. To put it more accurately, it’s about the way that the human mind—or, as Tolstoy sometimes says, the human soul—engages each of these experiences and tries to understand itself, the world around it, and the other souls that inhabit that world. This book is not afraid to take up any part of human life because it believes that human beings are infinitely interesting and infinitely worthy of compassion. And, what I found stirring, the book’s fearlessness extends to matters of religion. Tolstoy takes his characters seriously enough to acknowledge that they have spiritual lives that are as nuanced and mysterious as their intellectual lives and their romantic lives. I knew to expect this dimension of the book, but I could not have known how encouraging it would be to dwell in it for so long.

In the end, this is a book about life, written by a man who is profoundly in love with life. Reading it makes me want to live.

In front of me a glittering pond of rough oceanic waters protesting in silence in apparent stillness. Only the gentle swaying of casual waves crackling with the briny droplets of condensed breeze preludes the forthcoming storm. For below the surface, swirling undercurrents swell like lungs breathing in air of confusion and exhale the sea-secrets of the human soul.
Things are not what they seem and Anna Karenina is not only the doomed love story of a woman trapped in her own mind whose life is enslaved by social chauvinism. The Tolstoyan whirlpools of labyrinthine connections defy boundaries of pure fiction and transcend genre, presenting a series of events so naturally told that the novel seems to unfold as plotlessly and accidentally as life itself.
If “War and Peace” was a chronicle about the power of individual free will and the effect of dormant forces brought about by people in the outcome of history, Anna Karenina arises in substance as a double edged tragedy nestled in family life where suffering and unhappiness are presented as intrinsic traits of mankind, which finds itself in continuous conflict with the moral equilibrium epitomized by the harmony of the natural world.

“They have no conception of what happiness is, and they do not know that without love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us, for there would be no life.” (p.181)

Tolstoy crowns the first chapter of the novel with the epigram “Vengeance is mine, I will repay”, empathizing the fallibility of the human condition to make moral judgements and find the required spiritual stability to achieve the pinnacle of happiness. The quest is an arduous one and three unhappy families embody Tolstoy’s colliding thoughts on controversial issues such as the already decaying bourgeois class, the foundations of dogmatic religion or the political and historical events of the time, spicing it up with a long list of secondary characters that complements the vivid mosaic of the 19thC Russia.
Through brief dramatic chapters, which combine narrative, description and a nuanced internal monologue of the characters, Tolstoy makes of the reader a participant rather than a distanced observer of his story and introduces the keystone familiar units and love triangles that will serve as allegories to transmit his macro views on the world.

Anna’s universe turns around her beloved son Serezha until she crosses paths with Captain Vronsky and an ensuing obsessive and irrepressible passion blinds logic and reason, propelling her to elope with the man she loves with feverish abandon and to forsake her son and a respected position as wife of Alexei Karenin, a highly respected government minister. Anna’s remorse and Karenin’s magnanimity in forgiving the unforgivable with his generous benevolence crushes her mercilessly, provoking a moral breakdown and a spiritual duality that Anna disguises with addictive love for a man who fails to understand her needs and prioritizes his social status and career over her distorted devotion. “But there is another one in me as well, and I am afraid of her. She fell in love with the other one, and I wished to hate you but could not forget her who has before. ” (p.406)

Constantine Levin, an agnostic nobleman who struggles against his inner contradictions to find equality and efficiency in the farming business, is ensnared by the idea of marriage, which for him is “the chief thing in life, on which the whole happiness of life depends.” (p.93) . Levin projects his idealized aspirations of a dignified country life on Kitty, a virginal and naïve young girl with unfaltering faith who proves to be the guiding star of Levin’s firmament which titillates unevenly with his existential doubts, after a first unpromising encounter with Captain Vronsky that nearly ruins their only chance to secure happiness.

Anna’s brother Steve Oblonsky, appears as the perfect counterpoint to Levin’s solemnity and soberness. Full of social charm and of cheerful disposition, Oblonsky is a self-indulgent urbanite who relishes the pleasures of the restaurant, of the gambling tables and of the bedroom. Married to Dolly, Kitty’s older sister and a strong willed and highly perceptive woman, Oblonsky claims his manly independence by committing sustained and inconsequential infidelities and is liked by everybody yet respected by no one.

The reader is plunged not just into the actions of these characters, but into the almost mystical overlapping of their inner feelings and the dialectic of their hearts in which Anna and Levin, who encapsulate Tolstoy's almost androgynous alter ego in perfect depiction of both his male and female grounding, become the two leading voices singing in alternating moral chorus that continually resonates in each other’s sections, creating a rich canvas painted in meticulous brushstrokes and symbolic glaze.
Vronsky’s inability to control his faithful mare in a vertiginous racehorse echoes both Anna’s vulnerable position in an adulterous affair in the 19thC Russian society and Vronsky’s failed attempt to dominate such a delicate situation, triggering fatal events that will lead to inescapable tragedy.
Colors impregnate the text enhancing significance; purple and dark denote sensuality and temptation while white and fair are related to purity and righteousness. A kaleidoscopic exultation of shades and tinges come vibrantly to life in the descriptions of the natural world, where Tolstoy unleashes his most lyrical yet unflourishing writing style, which presents a powerful contrast to the double morale of the Russian society and the artificiality of the city life that Tolstoy so much despises.

“The moon had lost all her brilliancy and gleamed like a little cloud in the sky. Not a single star was any longer visible. The marsh grass that had glittered like silver in the dew was now golden. The rusty patches were like amber. The bluish grasses had turned yellowish green.” (p. 588)

Trains and iron railways, which are pregnant with Tolstoy’s negative connotations about economic progress, arise as bad omens linked to the expansion of the railroad and industry as opposed to his views on agricultural philosophy which elevate farming to the ultimate honest lifestyle to attain spiritual fulfillment and justice.
Trains also portrayed as metaphorical transportations in which Anna and Levin are carried away in a spiraling downfall, where life becomes a flurry of blurred images in the suffocating cabins of their minds until they reach the last station of death, which brings either hollow unease or disturbing calmness, depending on their spiritual strength to overcome the constant clashing between abstraction and reality.
Two characters, one soul.
A parallel journey, diverging fates.
Life and Death, a two way mirror.

The storm has disquieted the waters which roar in furious thunderdarkness and contort in high sloped waves crowned by foamy curls, but below the surface there is now a perdurable and serene happiness that beats with bold love and firm conviction.

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