Levin is a turbo nerd who runs away from social awkwardness to theorise on agrarian economics or whatever. Sound like anyone you know??
Anyway he finally touches grass and gets the girl.
Meanwhile we are falling out of love with Anna. It feels like something bad is gonna happen? The foreshadowing is very subtle, only experts in Media Literacy will be able to catch it.
On Levin’s journey away from intellectualism: Is the peasant life really that appealing? Does doing good need to come from the heart, not from the mind? Rich gets mad about Tolstoy basically shitting on effective altruism; Benny offers a partial defence.
Nikolai’s gruesome death: Kitty steps up and shows her worth. Is she meant to be the paragon a good Christian, or a good woman? Rich is now terrified of dying and wants to be euthanised.
Anna & Vronsky’s empty self-gratification: Tolstoy literally accuses Vronsky of jerking himself off with the whole ‘amateur artist in Italy’ pose. Anna gives in to passion, abandoning her 8yo child in the process. Seems bad. We notice we are falling out of love with Anna.
Karenin’s emotional repression cracks: First he gets big mad and is on the verge of joining the manosphere. Then he has a proper Christian moment and forgives both Anna and Vronsky; a move so powerful that Vronsky attempts to kill himself in shame. Then he backslides a little but it’s progress. We are warming up this cold fish.
This discussion covers parts 3, 4, and 5 of the book.
Tune in next week for the finale. Can’t wait to see how this ends.
yes I’m mad
Cam: I actually wondered if the book was badly named, because I think it’s potentially inadvertently done as like memory-holing Levin’s arc. You know, he’s arguably the main character, or at least the dual main character. At one point I was getting a really mild reader’s block and wasn’t doing my readings, and then because I’m also somewhat autistic I decided to put some numbers on it and I made a spreadsheet of essentially all the chapters and whose arc it was. So I mean, did you guys have a feel of who comes up more or less?
Rich: I would just sort of vaguely guess halfway split between Levin and Kitty, and between Anna and Vronsky-Alexei or Anna-Alexei-Alexei.
Benny: Yeah, are you counting Alexei’s storylines as part of Anna?
Cam: Well, I counted both, so yeah, I mean Rich is right — so far it’s about 50/50, the Anna arc and the Levin arc.
Rich: Hold on, so you did all this analysis Cam, and your big juicy conclusion is yeah, it splits about 50/50 in exactly the manner that you’d expect.
Cam: Well, but also Anna’s less right, so I mean in Levin’s section he’s always in it, so Anna’s arc broadly defined is half of it, but herself she’s in about a third of them.
Rich: I’m reading Lord of the Rings and being mad that not every chapter is about Sauron, the Dark Lord.
Cam: No, but I mean I think one criticism I’ve heard of the adaptations is they’re all just about Anna — they totally neglect the Levin. I mean of course he’s in it, but it’s just this romance about Anna. To me the point of the book is that they’re foils, and the comparison between them is what the book’s about, rather than the book being about Anna and her arc. Literally half, like if you hadn’t read it you wouldn’t expect maybe half the book is about this other character, and arguably even more so.
Rich: Like, what do you mean the book’s name is a character and the character’s not every single scene? That’s completely normal. What would you want it called?
Cam: My—
Rich: You arguing that you want it to be called Constantine Levin?
Cam: I’m arguing— I mean, well, the other thing is—
Rich: I want it to be called Frou-Frou.
Cam: I don’t know if you’re intentionally missing the point, but my argument’s not so much that it should be different, but the impacts of it being called what it is means the popular consensus or culture consensus is that Levin isn’t equally the most important part of this book. The comparison and contrast between both arcs is what the book’s about, really, rather than the book being about Anna and her arc.
Rich: You’re attacking some conception that says it’s all about Anna. Is that the general takeaway or something?
Cam: I’m surprised you guys didn’t know the arc of the book, just in terms of a pop osmosis thing.
Rich: I’m mad, by the way, because you almost spoiled me on this book last week. I only realized because someone else spoiled me — I knew nothing about Anna Karenina. No idea what the plot is, no idea what happens. And then I saw this post on Reddit that was like, “oh, way to spoil a classic book jarringly,” and it was like a three-paragraph thing, and I read it before I could even think about it, and in the last sentence it spoiled Anna Karenina. Don’t say what happens, because Benny still is pure, but you fucking almost did the exact same thing last week.
Cam: Did I do it? What did I do?
Rich: Yeah, you said “well, I can’t say it without ruining it for Benny,” but luckily my psychological defense mechanism or my stupidity meant I just didn’t process what you said at the time. But then when I read this Reddit post I was like, oh Cam, you fucker, you actually practically gave it away. We’re in the very first section of the book — because you know the ending, right?
Cam: Yeah, but I really listened as well, I don’t think I—
Rich: You said a certain thing was foreshadowing and I was like, hmm.
Cam: No, I answered Benny’s question. Benny’s like — I thought Benny was trying to throw it out there. Benny’s like, this seems to be a— no, this is what Benny said.
Benny: Oh, wait, wait, don’t stop.
Rich: No, you’re spoiling it.
Benny: Yeah, but it’s one thing for it to be still a conjecture in my head. But then if you’re like, well, you’ve already said it and affirm that something I’m saying doesn’t in fact happen—
Cam: Well, now it’s kind of meta. No, I’m defending — I’m defending my honor.
Rich: Oh, wait a second. So Benny actually said that, not you, Cam.
Cam: Benny raised it and I thought Benny was hinting at it, and then I was going to make a joke like, I’ll Google what omen means — she explicitly thinks it’s a bad omen — I’ll Google what omen means. I think it does mean foreshadowing, but I’ll double-check it.
Rich: Oh, okay. Well, fuck you guys. Fuck. I don’t like Anna anymore. I don’t like Reddit. Fuck Tolstoy as well.
Benny: Oh, fuck. Okay, I think now I know what I would have said, maybe. Damn it.
Cam: To keep it more abstract — you just said this seems to be foreshadowing something bad.
Benny: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I’m sure I know what that event was, and now I’m sure I can guess what—
Rich: Yeah, it was Frou-Frou’s death, you’re right. Sorry.
Levin’s journey from cerebral dork to touching grass
Benny: Okay, so let’s dive into our boiler bin here, who we left off loving at the end of last episode. So yeah, Levin, as we said at the end of the last time, absolutely devastated that Kitty said no, goes back to the farm, starts working hard. And then we get to this, what I thought was an extremely fascinating part of the book. And we get to what Cam thought was an extremely boring part of the book. So I’m excited for Rich to step in here and decide this. So Sergei comes to visit and it becomes clear that Levin’s been developing certain philosophical or economic ideas about the economics of having the muzhiks work on farms that they don’t own, and the Zemstvos and things like this. I think what those ideas are aren’t extremely important — I think there’s some relationship to skin in the game and stuff and we can maybe go in that direction — but I think the explicitness of the ideas isn’t super important. What is important is it more comes out of his lived experience, quote unquote, and he has trouble articulating what the exact ideas are. So I don’t know, I found some interesting differences between him and his brother about how they explore the world of ideas. Rich, I’m wondering if you picked up on similar vibes there, and what your overall thought was of his brother coming to visit him and then them arguing about farming and economics.
Rich: Yeah, I think I’m maybe going to disappoint you here, because there was some interesting stuff in there I wanted to talk about, but it was absolutely not the agrarian theory of land management stuff that went on and on and on. And in fact, that stuff was so boring that that’s when I started getting down on this book and on Tolstoy. Because I think we all kind of raved or were very happy about the first two sections of the book, and in my mind it was like, oh, this is a cosmopolitan timeless work. It doesn’t matter that it’s set in Russia, it doesn’t matter that it’s in the 19th century, it’s so timeless. And in this section I was like, oh no, now we’re getting very mired down in incredibly parochial theories of the day, which were no doubt super important and interesting in the context of post-serfdom Russia, but I found incredibly boring and I had to skim the hell out of it.
But yeah, you can salvage it by going meta on why Levin is throwing himself into all that stuff, and I think you are meant to be thinking about that. It’s not just about the object level. He’s such a boffin. Whenever he embarrasses himself in the social world, he just wants to bury himself. He’s got all these highfalutin ways of escaping from his problems. And some of them are intellectual like this, and some of them are literal physical labor. And he sort of glamorizes and fetishizes the peasant lifestyle in this section as well. So we could talk about that if that’s of interest, or skip to the philosophical argument he’s having with his brother about do-gooders and motivations of people, where their motivations come from to do good in the world.
Cam: I think his attitude towards work, I suppose it comes from his philosophy somewhat — or maybe there’s a development in his perspective. Ben, you said I didn’t like it, but I actually — well, I agree with Rich, the arguments over the Zemstvos and stuff was boring.
Rich: Can you say what that word is that you guys both said, by the way? What’s the Zemstvo again?
Benny: Zemstvo.
Cam: I’m not sure I can say it, because it’s got 10 consonants in it. But it was set up by Alexander II, who abolished the serfs. I think they’re essentially the city councils.
Rich: Oh, okay, yep.
Cam: And Levin was meant to work on them, and his brother’s saying, why are you not working on them? And his argument’s kind of like, because he doesn’t like it. It seems to boil down to that.
Benny: Yeah, because it doesn’t touch him directly is what he says, and it’s just more bureaucracy. So he’s got this part of it where we’re probably sympathetic to where it’s just more red tape, more bureaucracy, it’s gonna be hard to get things done. But then he does have this weird selfishness almost where he says, like, this doesn’t affect me, I don’t think it’s actually gonna affect the peasant, so why would I work on this? And I guess why I’m interested in his arguments in this section is, yeah, there’s a contrast between him and his brother in terms of how they arrive at decisions and reason about things. His brother’s much more on the intellectual bookish side, where he arrives at all his conclusions by reason and rationality, quote unquote. And Levin’s much more feeling-oriented, right? He goes and works on the farms and his opinions about things all come from him working directly with his hands, having experienced something firsthand.
What I find interesting is it’s not clear that Tolstoy is taking a side, in the sense that you don’t get the sense that Levin is completely right — or at least I didn’t get that sense. He loses in arguments to his brother all the time, who’s the more intellectual of the pair, especially regarding the actual Zemstvos. So I don’t think you come away from that exchange thinking Levin’s definitely right about this. You come away almost thinking, dude, you’re being kind of selfish. Just saying that it doesn’t affect you directly is not a good reason to not be invested in something. But on the other hand, it does let him see what other people can’t see about some of the problems with what at that point was the modern farming system. So I couldn’t quite tell which style of thinking Tolstoy was actually bashing on here. So Rich, maybe you want to flesh out what I mean by his brother’s style of thinking and why it’s sort of more, as we might call it, like EA style.
Cam: Well, could I — I just wanted to make a quick comment around your first thing.
Rich: Yeah, go for it.
Cam: I think it’s right to set up the contrast between this cerebral style and feeling instinctual style, but I actually think Levin — he’s kind of going on this journey from that cerebral style to this instinctual feeling style. You can see it with religion, like he’s got strong doubt. And the scene now where he’s scything or mowing the field with his peasants, I think that was an important scene in his development, realizing what it’s like to be in flow state and be in touch with his body and this instinctual side. And we later actually — he views it in Kitty in other instances where Kitty’s in touch with that, and I think he’s growing to appreciate that but also struggling, having this kind of internal intellectual struggle as well. So I don’t think he starts in that feeling instinctual phase. And his brother’s definitely more extreme on the intellectual side.
Rich: Yeah, let’s get some quotes on the table. So Levin observes 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 chest problems or the ingenious construction of a new machine.” Whereas Levin considers “to do good is to be led by an impulse of the heart rather than reason from intellectual considerations.” So yeah, I think you’re right, Cam, that he does have that intellectualism in him, and then he’s making these forays into being led by the impulse of his heart. But I think they are the wrong impulses, or they’re sort of dead ends.
So he loves working with his hands and he waxes lyrical about the power of good honest toil, and he has that scene where he works all day scything the field and then I think he falls asleep in a haystack and has this really kind of spiritual or mystical experience. He’s so bone tired, and he’s drinking and hanging out with the peasants. And he later fantasizes about, I could walk away from society and just marry a peasant girl and just live this very simple life where you don’t have to think beyond your immediate duties — like the field needs mowing, so we mow it, and you don’t have to theorize about how the profits should be divided or what the best way of managing the land is, because you’re just so in the moment. And then later he has a dream where he’s horrified at this idea that he might marry the peasant girl. So yeah, I think that’s a kind of escapism for him where he wants to blank out his place in society and his place in the world.
But whether or not Tolstoy thinks this — and I kind of think he does, because I think Levin is sort of his author-insert character — isn’t that what you reckon, Cam?
Cam: Yeah. Yeah, I think roughly speaking.
Leave effective altruism alone!
Rich: Yeah, so this observation he has about, you can only really do good if it comes authentically from the heart rather than being a reasoned intellectual thing, is basically shitting on effective altruism — type argument that lots of people would make. I just think it is a really bad argument, because you can do both. You can be impassioned about something and you can try and think carefully about how you could have a good impact on the world, and come up with ways to get better leverage on whatever your impassioned heart desires.
And firstly, it seems backwards. It’s much harder to reason yourself into something carefully than it is to just merely follow whatever the passion of your heart is. So if we’re awarding points for who’s more virtuous or whatever, it’s actually the person who doesn’t follow their impulses but does restrain himself and try and think it through clearly. And secondly, you can have both, or you can come at it from the opposite direction where you can intellectualize yourself into an idea. This is something that’s happened with me with animal welfare. You can agree with good arguments about whether or not animals are moral patients in the world, and then the feelings can come afterwards. So I feel bad about factory farming and I feel that in quite a visceral way, and I didn’t feel that before. But what came first wasn’t some pang of the heart, it was the philosophy, like the Peter Singer stuff in particular, and thinking about it clearly. So I just want to take a moment to say, I hate this argument, and if Tolstoy believes this sincerely, then yeah, I think it sucks, basically.
Cam: What I take you to be saying — not so much, well, I suppose you hate the argument if it’s one or the other, but it sounds like you’re okay with the argument if it’s in conjunction. I don’t view it as just going out and following your passions willy-nilly — it’s often stuff that’s hard to do. I view it more as a kind of, I suppose, Jordan Peterson type, clean your room, be nice to your neighbours, that’s important to do, and to truly love doing and to grow to enjoy it. And I know people that aren’t good at that style of thing but they may be activists in a global sense.
Rich: I think the charitable read of it is, he’s condemning moral posturing, which I’m sure was a big problem and remains a big problem, right? Where people pretend to care about things because it’s trendy, or because they want to have some kind of identity like that, but they don’t actually care about the thing. And that’s what happens with Kitty initially, when she’s at the German spa, where she really wants to be like her friend Varenka. And then she realizes after a while that she actually just can’t handle all of the sickness and death, and she more wanted to have the image of being a very giving and selfless person rather than she wanted to actually live that daily existence. And then she pretty much runs away back to Russia again because she feels like a hypocrite or something like that. So yeah, that’s like the milder read of it, in which case fine. And we can talk more about that later because Kitty has very good character development in this section later on.
Benny: Okay, so let me try and defend Tolstoy for a second here. I think in theory what you’re saying, Rich, is true, but I think often goes awry in practice. So back to the book — Levin has this experience where he actually goes into the field, works alongside the peasants, realizes he really likes it, and importantly, realizes that he cares because, you know, it is his land. He has a stake in things actually going well. And in the first half of the book, he kept getting annoyed by the peasants because they weren’t working that hard or didn’t know how to do things well. And he found he always had to supervise them and make sure they were not cutting corners in their work in order to ensure everything was done correctly, and he kept getting annoyed. And other characters weren’t getting annoyed with peasants because this is just what they expected them to do — this is the state of affairs, this is the status quo.
And at first, Levin’s annoyance comes across as almost some sort of heartlessness. Like, look, these people, you’re paying them almost nothing, of course they’re going to shirk their responsibilities. But then after he comes back from working with them, he has this idea of, wait, maybe we should give them a stake in the land — or at least that’s what I think one of his ideas is. There’s a bit of an asterisk here because like you guys said, he sort of spills out this massive monologue of how things should change. But I think one of his key insights was, right now they don’t have a stake in things going well in the land, and so we should distribute the land such that they actually own little parts of it themselves. And if things go well, they’re going to make more money. And this is a super good idea, and is known as exactly what we do now, right? Like, if you’re working on land, you own some parts of your own products of your labor.
And it was impossible for his brother to cook up this scheme — or at least his brother didn’t cook up this scheme, because the idea would have seemed extremely foreign to him. And so, of course, in theory you can always say it’s never bad to intellectualize something, and whatever is accessible to you by direct experience is also accessible to you by just thinking and reasoning about it. But I think in practice, it’s the people who are actually outworking and that have skin in the game that realize what could be better.
And so to just make this more provocative maybe, and bring it to modern day — you know, we have a growing movement of people, and maybe I’m just wrong about all this, but a growing movement of people who I think just see morality as bean counting and util maximization. And a good chunk of those people now are super focused on shrimp welfare. So at this point there’s many thousands of dollars, many people writing many articles about shrimp welfare. And my guess is history is not going to judge them extremely kindly. But I think they’re engaged in this sort of morality as a game type of thing, and extremely far removed from the actual suffering on the ground of either the shrimp or the humans. And I think someone like Levin wouldn’t let himself be caught by that trap, if you actually agree that is a trap.
Rich: Yeah, I mean, I couldn’t disagree more with everything you said, but we’re just going to go on a huge unrelated tangent to the book. A lot of the shrimp welfare stuff is actually a wonderful example, because it sounds absurd, and then you look at the kind of things they’re suggesting, and there’s perfectly good reason to think that it is in fact the problem they probably have visited — they probably know vastly more about shrimp farming than you do, right? So you’re the one who’ll be judged poorly by history would be my guess, not them. And that goes for anyone who just likes to shit on EA from some great height while knowing less about the actual subject than the people who are in fact working on the coalface.
And to pick up on your example of Levin — it’s funny that you chose that example, because either Tolstoy doesn’t agree with you, or you have to imagine something else happening in the future. Because when he gives the peasants their land, they don’t understand the concept and it doesn’t work at all. They keep coming to him for wages and saying they don’t want to be — they don’t even get the concept of ownership. It doesn’t make the land more fertile. His scheme fails. And so this is, if anything, part of him being too romantic and too lulled by his personal aesthetic experiences in the world where he is fantasizing about things. And so that piece of evidence I think cuts the opposite of what you’re saying.
Cam: Yeah, I think we should probably put a pin on it. I think part of it maybe presupposes how much you trust EA to be getting at the right answers, and then how much are they not getting at the right answers, and what are the reasons for that. Levin seems to be somewhat — I think reactionary is a strong wrong word, but yeah, certainly someone that’s rejecting modernism and stuff. If you guys don’t mind, maybe we can move on to other Levin stuff, or should we keep —
Benny: Sure, yeah, we don’t have to fight about EA, that’s fine. But I mean, that was also a meta question I had — like, how unrelated is it? Is Tolstoy just trying to give us a peek into his personality? If you didn’t know he had engaged in all these thought experiments around farming and economics, and you didn’t know he was writing this book, then would this actually affect the plot at all? The only really meaningful way I see it affecting the plot is maybe that he gets annoyed in his first few months of marriage with Kitty, which we’re about to get into, that he can’t work as much as he’d like. So is that the only thing going on here?
Cam: Well, I think as we said, it’s a very important part of his character — not necessarily the ins and outs of “should we try and get this kind of profit motive thing going,” but more so, he wants to go and touch grass and get into flow states and do work and love work.
Rich: Yeah, it’s definitely an open question that will hopefully get some more intel about, like, what we’re to think of these diversions down various paths. Because we also have his ascetic fasting phase, where — I think it’s prior to getting married — he stays up all night, he stays up for like 48 hours and eats nothing and transcends material life and is floating around in a rapture, basically. And he thinks that he realizes some greater truths about the universe. And then I think that’s also meant to be not the correct thing to do, or that is also illusory. And then the third one is when he really tries hard to embrace the way of being in the village councils. He goes along with his brother and tries to do his duty, tries to see it from a different angle. But that ultimately doesn’t work for him either, because he can’t maintain that level of tolerance for the bureaucracy and the game-playing and that kind of thing. So I guess these are all rejected paths rather than the true path, but I’m not totally sure about that. So we should keep an eye on it.
Benny: So Levin’s trying to distract himself with thoughts from Kitty, but happens to actually glimpse her in a carriage going by as she’s coming to visit the countryside, sort of realizes he’s still having feelings for her. And then good old trusty Oblonsky, who is the master of setting people up and coordinating social affairs in this book, invites them both to a dinner party, and Levin and Kitty end up reconciling in an extremely impractical, somewhat magical way, where they’re writing acronyms back and forth to each other during dinner so that no one else can figure out what they’re talking about. But they’re basically reconciling in that way. And Levin basically proposes to Kitty in that way. But the length of these acronyms gets totally out of hand — they’re writing multiple sentences to each other in one go and have like 15 acronyms in a row. So how the hell they knew what each other were talking about is totally beyond me. But Cam, do you have any examples of those acronyms in front of you?
Cam: Well, it’s kind of funny that Tolstoy is held up as a sort of paragon of realist writing, and then this instance felt quite surreal, or it was a level of suspension of disbelief. As you said, he proposes by writing — his first message was like W-Y-A-M-T-C-B-D-I-M-N-O-T, which means “when you answered me that, cannot be, did it mean never or then?” In the previous section when he asked her out. Did it mean never or then? And then she points at the N or something, and then he’s like, like never? And then he kind of throws something else around, like is it still never? I think so. She writes at one point T-Y-C-F-A-F-W-H, and this means “that you could forgive and forget what happened.” And then Levin sort of picks up on it.
It’s funny, I just thought this morning — I thought this was obviously so surreal and silly, but then I thought this morning of, like, Rich’s proposal, I think had — not quite this, but had that kind of element to it. You know, “female sheep, fresh prince of Bel-Air, will you” sort of thing going on.
Rich: Oh, the crypt — the crossword. Well, I mean, my clue resolved in the actual words “will you marry me.”
Cam: Yeah, mate.
Rich: And in this thing, like, maybe “wymm” question mark would be fair enough, you know? That’s not too much of a stretch. But yeah, it’s so funny — I was thinking, you could do a good sketch where each of them is translating the letters completely wrongly, like Kitty’s delighted but she thinks he’s asked her to go out, you know, eat a certain type of food or whatever. It’s like, do you want nachos or sushi? And they’re both completely miscommunicating because they’re just making up words that happen to fit the letters. Yeah, that was strange. Maybe it works better in Russian somehow, but I don’t see how it could.
Cam: That’s a good point. Well, I did read actually, apparently Tolstoy did something similar to his wife. So maybe.
Rich: And just to give the obvious thing — it’s meant to be, they’re so closely in tune that they can practically read each other’s thoughts, sort of thing. Like only people who are on the same wavelength could possibly communicate like that.
Cam: Yep. The other thing in this scene, I suppose, was setting up — it was reminiscent of where Anna and Vronsky are at a different sort of dinner party, and they start talking to each other, having their own separate conversation. And Levin and Kitty start doing that as well, surrounded by a bunch of friends, but they’re solely focused on each other. And then they start getting out the letters.
Rich: We should have tried to do this whole podcast just using the first letter of each word of what we wanted to say. I mean, W-S-D-T-P.
Cam: You’ve lost me already.
Trouble in paradise for the newlyweds
Benny: Do you want to talk a bit about their family life, Rich? So after he successfully proposes, they get married pretty quickly. And then how do things go for them?
Rich: Oh, trouble in paradise. Yeah.
Cam: Ups and downs, ups and downs.
Rich: Yep. Not the smoothest start to marriage. So Kitty moves out to his country estate right away. I think he wants to go on a honeymoon somewhere, and she’s like, no, I’d rather go get myself installed on the farm. And, you know, starts messing with all his cool bachelor furniture and putting up prints on the walls and giving the place the female touch, which causes some tension. And they’re at odds with each other in a way that I think they both are surprised by, but which is not that surprising if you’ve ever moved in with someone. It’s a very different way of being versus when you’re dating someone.
But I think the most important part of this scene is when they get called to the deathbed of Levin’s brother Nikolai, who has tuberculosis. Levin doesn’t want Kitty to come with him — he wants to be able to be there for his brother and not have to consider her or her feelings or her disgust or anything like that, especially because Nikolai is kind of a gross dude in the first place. Kitty’s already met him at the German spa and she really didn’t particularly like him — although at that point in time she didn’t want to be anywhere near anyone with the name Levin. But it’s a very powerful scene.
I’ll maybe talk about Kitty’s character development now. Basically she really proves her worth and proves how much she’s developed from the spa, where she was trying to just be good because she found it aesthetically pleasing, or it would be a cool identity, or an escape from the duties of normal life. And here she’s just constantly tending to Nikolai. She’s not worried about how disgusting the whole thing is, and she’s just outpouring love for him, supporting Levin and giving Levin a better sense of how to handle the situation as well. Basically being a very good Christian. She’s not worried about herself, she’s handling the situation really nicely. And that’s the moment that sort of fuses their relationship and their marriage, over this absolutely ghastly event — which I want to talk about more. But before we talk about the death, do you guys want to weigh in on that element of it at all?
Cam: Oh, just to add to it really, yeah, I think Levin’s hella impressed by Kitty but also learning from her. Touching on what we were saying before, the cerebral nature being impressed by a more instinctual kind of feeling. I think you’re right that she’s kind of — Tolstoy’s describing her, well, showing her as a good Christian, maybe even as a good woman. Some of this is a little bit gendered. I’ll just quote one thing: “and pity in her womanly heart did not arouse at all that feeling of horror and loathing that it aroused in her husband, but a desire to act, to find out all the details of his state and to remedy him.”
So I think Tolstoy somewhat acknowledges maybe a difference between men and women here, and this masculine minds like Tolstoy himself and like Levin perhaps, who ponder things like death abstractly and religion, but don’t know, quote, “a hundredth part of what his wife knows about it” and what he’s witnessing. So maybe somewhat getting into this — I think was it Nietzsche, Camille Paglia had this distinction of the masculine and the feminine. I’m not sure that totally captures female versus male, but where this Napoleon masculine, cold, rational approach to things — perhaps pointing out the flaws or the limitations of that. And then a sort of bonding experience of them being a unit.
Nikolai’s gruesome death as an argument for euthanasia
Rich: Yeah. And just to give a sense of how meaningful this scene was — it’s a really awful protracted death. First of all, Nikolai is absolutely desperate to cling on to life. He’s like a real stubborn motherfucker. Everyone else knows that he’s dying and he’s got no hope, but he just refuses to go and keeps saying that the doctors aren’t good enough and he wants to try this and that treatment. And the other characters feel bad because they know in their heart of hearts that it would be better if he just died as quickly as possible for everyone, but they have to pretend otherwise. And that’s one of the things that really upsets Levin, I think, because he hates hypocrisy and he hates this being two-faced about things. And of course because he loves his brother.
But maybe the worst bit of all is that even Nikolai, who is stubbornly clinging to life, is suffering so much — and the description of suffering here is quite vivid — that he eventually ends up absolutely begging for death. “There was evidently coming over him that revulsion that would make him look upon death as the goal of his desires, as happiness. Now no physical craving or suffering received relief, and the effort to relieve them only caused fresh suffering, and so all desires were merged in one, the desire to be rid of all his sufferings in their source, the body.”
And this part was so grotesque that I think it’s awoken a new fear in me, which is actually the fear of dying, as opposed to the fear of death itself, which I was already scared of. But now, like, the process of dying is also — I just, I guess I just haven’t read that many accounts of it. And, man, yeah, I want to be euthanized.
Cam: I can’t remember when we landed on that white noise episode, whether you were scared of death, or if I was.
Rich: I was scared of death already, but this is now — now I’m scared of dying as well. I wasn’t scared of dying. I was scared of not existing, of non-existence. And now I think I’m scared of both. So thanks.
Cam: One — I remember I had that similar experience reading that Scott Alexander essay, “Who By Slow Decay,” referencing the Leonard Cohen lyric, just referencing all how horrible dying is, which is, I think — I haven’t read it, but one of the themes of “Death of Ivan Ilyich” also by Tolstoy. And like a lot of doctors who are close to it and see it, they want to do everything to avoid it and get euthanized, because yeah, just how yuck — fluids and suffering and all that. It’s just easy, so I don’t want to go there.
Rich: Yeah, the bit that got me is just this idea that nothing can give you any relief anymore. Any tiny thing like a fan blowing, or a sip of water, or someone clasping your hand that previously gave you this tiny little lifeline — you eventually reach a point where every single little thing just does nothing or makes it worse. There’s no relief. There’s no relief except death. And I’ve never really managed to internalize that before, that you could be in a position like that. It’s just incredibly haunting.
Yeah, I mean, it just sets up how well Kitty does her duty and rises to the occasion, I think. And as you say, Cam, it’s important that she teaches him something, I think. Because she’s just this young girl. She’s what, 18 or 17 or something.
Benny: Yeah, she was 18 at the beginning of the novel.
Rich: And he’s an older man. So there’s the age gap, there’s the gender gap.
Cam: 18, I think, yeah. Levin’s about 30. I don’t know — even related to it directly, I remember having this sort of experience with my partner where my second cousin, or cousin once removed — I never remember which one — but my second cousin, who’s a similar age, passed away. And at the same time, my great auntie, his grandmother, was ill. And when all the news broke out and it all happened, yeah, my partner just — it was instinctual in terms of the care shown in both instances. And I remember even feeling this kind of respect and looking at myself of, yeah, I suppose a floor, or a room for development of — well, I didn’t have, you know, I could talk about the ethics of it all day, but I didn’t have that natural — and then thanks for actually that Kitty has.
Rich: You’re perfect just the way you are.
Benny: Yeah, Tolstoy does a good job of capturing, just in a relationship, those superficial annoyances that you have, and does a good job of separating those from deeper, more underlying problems that will actually cause issues down the road. So he’s not starry-eyed in terms of thinking that an early relationship is going to be perfect. He recognizes there’s going to be a period of annoyances, you’re going to argue, you’re going to fight about various things. But the tone of the fight, how long it lasts, what it’s actually over — he does an extremely good job of separating the minutia of that, and what those dynamics will look like in a healthy relationship from what they look like in a relationship that’s a bit more doomed or is going to have to put a lot more effort into overcoming them. The kinds of fights and the kinds of reconciliations that happen between Levin and Kitty is quite different from the kinds of dynamics that we start seeing pop up in Anna and Vronsky’s case.
Cam: Yeah, you’re right, I think it’s setting up that they — it’s not all rosy and perfect, is important. Because I think one of the central tensions of the novel is getting at this idea of duty to family or to marriage versus, I don’t know, pleasure or passion, and where that trade-off fits. So even in Levin’s case where it’s looking like a seeming to be in this ascent towards a good marriage — yeah, there’s ups and downs.
Rich: Do you want to talk about the Anna arc, Cam, just to make sure our ratio stays close to the 50/50?
Cam: We’d have to call this episode Levin and Anna.
Rich: Yep.
Karenin finally gets in touch with his emotions
Cam: Yeah, so, well, actually, in part 4, Karenin — Alexei Karenin — is very central to it. We even get a demonstration of, I think maybe his first emotion, which was a memorable scene where Vronsky comes over sort of unannounced. Alexei Karenin sees him and it’s just awkward, as you’d expect. But I think that kind of instigates something in him. And a few chapters later, Karenin storms in and he rips the letters off Vronsky — because he has this one rule, like, not in the house. Do anything you want, just not in the house. And he goes, “where are the letters of the lover?” And he’s angry. And Anna even says, “I didn’t know you had this cruelty on him.”
And at one point Karenin, I think, misspeaks — he stumbles over his words. In the PMV translation he says “experiments.” In other translations I think he said “smuffering” or something like that, “stuffering,” talking about his suffering, but he can’t even get it out. He’s so emotional. And he goes back to her and he says he’s onto not being cruel — “calling a thief a thief is just the establishment of facts,” unquote. So yeah, I think one of our criticisms of Karenin in the past, which is still true, is he has this cold approach to everything and he’s so concerned about propriety, which still is. Yeah, but we do—
Rich: As you said, which I hadn’t picked up on, but that’s important maybe — to crack the shell and to go through the correct process rather than jumping straight to beneficent forgiveness.
Cam: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rich: But there was a really funny quote in there. Well, no, it wasn’t that funny, but it said at one point that “feeling had been replaced by another, the desire, not merely that she should not be triumphant, but that she should get due punishment for her crime.” It reminded me of, you know, that yearbook quote that does the rounds where it’s like, it’s not enough for me to succeed, I also need others to fail, or something like that.
Cam: I haven’t seen that, but that’s a good one. So oh, sorry Benny, do you want to jump in?
Benny: Yeah, I think the anger towards Anna is actually an important part of his transformation towards someone who actually cares about the situation. Because at the beginning, when he realized that this was a problem, he was sort of one step removed from the whole thing, and he really only cared what other people thought about it. He didn’t seem that emotionally invested in it. He was just worried about his actual image in society. And he figured, okay, if he can just get Anna to stop this, then they can go back to the way things were, and he can just forget about Vronsky. And he wasn’t actually emotionally impacted by the fact that Anna has developed feelings for another guy, which presumably, as someone’s husband, should concern you. But then when he started to actually get angry — with himself and with Anna — then you could recognize this is a much more human-like response to this actual scenario. And so I think it represents the beginning of him really dealing with the situation as it is. And so it was almost refreshing — humanized him as a character, because you could recognize this sort of response. Now he’s having the kind of response that you would probably have where your wife cheating on you. And so I think he goes through a bit of a redemptive arc, which we’ll talk about. And I think this was an important initiation of the arc, because it represented him actually being emotionally connected with the situation for the first time.
Cam: Yeah, I just want to pick on one thing you said there around the word that gets used a lot — he gets considered impropriety, impropriety — and I think we’ve characterized this mainly as he cares what others think of himself, that’s kind of all he cares about. Which is somewhat true, but I think there’s maybe more weight to this idea of impropriety, where it’s like he kind of thinks it’s his moral duty. Like, that’s how one should act. It’s not just that he’ll lower status — he does care about that and how people view him — but I think he also views it as this kind of failing somewhat of, we’re not acting proper. The proper way to act is not just to fit in, but it’s to act in the right way, normatively.
But yeah, so I’ll move on with the plot. So Karenin kind of goes away for a little bit and comes back, and he receives a letter from Anna which says she’s dying — which, you know, was foreshadowed, spoilers, foreshadowed a little bit, where she had a dream, a mirror dream with Vronsky, which I don’t know too much about. The dream is like dreaming of some decrepit peasant with a beard or something that spoke French for some reason. But Anna’s feeling after it is that she thought she was going to die in childbirth. She kept saying that, “I’m going to die of childbirth, die of childbirth.” I mean, we’re halfway through the book and she’s given birth, so we kind of think, well, it probably won’t die, especially given the title of the book.
But she sends Karenin a letter saying, “I’m dying, please come help.” And then Karenin is kind of conflicted about this. Part of him hopes she does die, that it’ll make things a lot easier. But he goes to see her, and he comes in and he sees like a military coat hanging out — he’s already here — but he comes in and he just has this, I don’t know, divine inspiration of some sorts, where he decides to forgive them both, and you know, he truly means it, in maybe a way he didn’t earlier when he was paying lip service to that. And Vronsky feels so ashamed by this that, maybe, I don’t know, he’s a lesser man of some sort, that Karenin has been so magnanimous. And he’s kind of got his face in his hands, and Karenin even sort of gets him to raise his hand and look at him, and is very fond of him in this case. And she kind of accepts the forgiveness and has the baby and doesn’t die. And then they go back together, and then a few weeks later—
Rich: He gets cucked again.
Cam: She’s having second thoughts. “I’m not dying now.” And she starts missing Vronsky.
Rich: That was brutal — when he’s at the bedside and she’s so happy, like, my husband’s calm because she wasn’t sure if he’d come, and she really thinks she’s dying, so it feels important for her to get absolution or his blessing or something. It’s really affectionate and moving. And then yeah, she just almost immediately just starts hating on him again. This is also the point where I started losing my initial love for Anna, I think, because I’ve come to sympathize a lot more with Alexei for other reasons that we can talk about later.
Cam: I think it shows how important that initial love — and it was, because it’s not just, you know, that you have this woman that is bad and cheats. She’s an amazing woman when she’s introduced, and she does somewhat fight her temptations, and she has true feelings for others. And I was going to say this later but I’ll just put this out there as well — I heard a quote that Tolstoy writes about his characters in a way from a God’s-eye view, but a God who loves you, or a God who loves his characters. Which I thought was nice and apt. And even Vronsky at points, who you know is kind of set up as someone that maybe we don’t trust — even he’s written sympathetically sometimes. And certainly Anna when she’s introduced, and Karenin who was this cold fish at the start, and now we’re seeing very positive aspects to him. I thought it was a nice phrasing.
Rich: Yeah, it’s interesting. I do feel tenderness, like some kind of tenderness, for almost all of these characters, or some kind of affection. It might wax and wane.
Cam: There’s no obvious villain.
Rich: And obviously nothing gets as high as Frou-Frou, but they’re all on there somewhere.
Benny: I was going to say, I think Tolstoy has mastered what Robert Wright likes to call cognitive empathy, where you really understand the world from their perspective. And so even if there’s a bit of an emotional disconnect, like there was, say, with Alexei early on, you can still understand where he’s coming from. And so I think that evokes a kind of tenderness where you can’t help but understand how they’re viewing the world and then sympathize with that, which is a pretty great skill as a writer, I think.
Rich: A related question for you guys is, did you buy Alexei’s full come-to-Jesus moment? Like, did it feel compelling and realist to you, or did it also feel somewhat surreal?
Benny: Oh, interesting. I thought you were going to ask if we bought it in the sense of, do we think he’s being genuine? Or do you think he’s sort of convincing himself of that? Because I think there is a bit of an open question there. Because later on when he’s talking with — who’s the countess, the woman who sort of has designs on Alexei?
Cam: Lydia, is it?
Benny: What’s her name?
Cam: Countess Lydia, I think. The one that crushes on him a bit.
Benny: Yeah, Countess Lydia. So when they’re discussing later, and then when — jumping ahead a bit, but eventually there’s some contact with Anna and stuff — Alexei seems to be back a bit to his formal self, where he’s playing some social games and wants to view himself in the best light possible, and is sort of struggling with how far his forgiveness extends and then where it ends with respect to his social status and what he wants for himself. And so that was the first time I was like, maybe this forgiveness actually wasn’t as genuine as we first thought.
But I actually didn’t struggle with the surrealness of the initial forgiveness. I thought it’s quite powerful to see someone you’ve been with for many years and have a child with, in this case, in bed dying. And I think that can have pretty powerful effects on your psychology. Like if you’ve ever gone through a serious breakup, think how differently you see the world in the following few days and weeks. That can transform your worldview pretty quickly and just how you interact with people in the world. So I don’t doubt that seeing someone that you’ve spent a lot of your life with in bed and being convinced that they’re dying would have a similar effect.
Rich: Yeah, true. I didn’t struggle with it either, to be clear. I was just curious how it struck you guys, because it’s such a close to a 180 in his character. But I like it even better now that, Cam, you pointed out how the anger sort of breaks the shell and begins this process. It works well. But before we get to where Alexei maybe backslides a little bit — do we want to talk about — are we ready to go on? You say, Cam.
Cam: No, yeah, I think we were going. I mean, there was Vronsky’s reaction to this whole scene. He felt — I forgot the exact word used, but essentially ashamed of it all. And shamed himself so much that he attempted to kill himself by shooting himself in the chest. Turns out he’s not a great shot, so maybe Karenin should have gone for that duel — all over in the first place.
Rich: Is it a cry for help? It’s like the old-timey version of cutting. Like, well, you could have shot yourself in the head if you actually—
Benny: You couldn’t have meant it that much.
Rich: Did Colonel Aureliano shoot himself in the chest and miss as well?
Benny: Yeah, he also wasn’t able to kill himself. That’s funny.
Cam: Well, I just had a question — I mean, do you guys, just to help clarify for me, why Vronsky felt so ashamed and so bad? Is it just that Karenin was so great and magnanimous?
Benny: There’s an interesting parallel between Vronsky and the reader here, I think. As the reader, you go through this arc where Alexei basically seems like the bad guy and Anna and Vronsky seem like star-crossed lovers, and it’s hard not to root for them at the beginning. But then you see Alexei go through this transformation and your sympathies shift quite quickly, as we discussed. And I view Vronsky as basically going through the same transformation, whereas he views Alexei as this abstract force that’s not handling the situation well, and it’s easy for him to not care about Alexei’s feelings and just want to be with Anna. But then he, in the same way the reader is, is just exposed to the magnanimity of Alexei, and then can’t help but feel that his self-image is almost shattered immediately. Because now he really has to play the role of the villain in stealing, in quotes, Anna away from this man who he now can’t help but have respect for. And so I feel like it’s just the same arc that the reader went through. And once you feel this self-disgust, especially in a more honor-bound culture — I mean, I think there is a certain type of honor culture, maybe not the same one — it’s not like the American South type of honor culture, but social standing is a big part of Russian aristocracy. Maybe trying to shoot yourself is not totally out of the blue if you feel ashamed like this.
Rich: Yeah, I can imagine him feeling like his place is threatened and being heartbroken, and you know, as a reflection of his continued passion and love for Anna and thinking that now he’s the one getting cucked, right? Yeah, I also bought that. I didn’t find that too out of character for Vronsky. I mean, he’s a fairly flamboyant guy too.
Anna and Vronsky empty self-gratification spiral
But yeah, so they do end up back together. They sort of run away to Italy for a spell, so that Anna and Vronsky can bring up the baby and just get away from it all, get away from the gossip — because obviously all of this stuff is incredible grist for the gossip mill amongst the aristocratic Russian elite. But the Italian sojourn is a fail. So Vronsky has to quit the military for one thing, where he was on a track to be advancing well. He grows his hair out and he takes up painting as an amateur painter. A really funny little scene where Tolstoy compares his amateur attempts at painting to masturbation, basically. Where he says, okay, it’s one thing for an amateur to do it, but to pretend that it’s anything like what a professional is doing is very insulting when you’re not a true artist — you’re just doing some kind of self-gratifying escapism, which is 100% true of Vronsky.
And I think this is actually his own observation. It’s in the voice of Vronsky, which is that Tolstoy literally says, you couldn’t stop a man from making a sex doll, basically. He says, like, making a big wax doll and kissing it. But if the man were to come with the doll and sit before a man in love and begin caressing his doll as the lover caressed the woman he loved, it would be distasteful to the lover. So he’s like, without saying the word masturbation, he’s basically just saying, yeah, this is not the real thing. You’re just joking yourself off.
Cam: 100% true of Vronsky, and maybe 70% true of us doing a literary analysis every week.
Rich: Yeah. So it doesn’t work. And the one of the main things that pulls Anna back into society is of course her eight-year-old son, who she absolutely loves and really wants to see. And this is my second point of falling out of love with Anna — I don’t know if I’ll be — I’ll be interested to hear what you guys say. Because for me as a parent, it’s not unforgivable, but it’s extremely bad to put your own interests ahead of your children’s interests. And that is 100% what she’s done in this situation. Yes, she was stuck in a marriage that she wasn’t happy with, but she didn’t put great thought and consideration into how to deal with that situation. She was just swept off her feet and embarked on this journey of what she had ample points to stop and turn around and resolve. And even her husband was incredibly accommodating, and yet she kept doing it. And this jeopardized her supposedly beloved child’s fate in all kinds of ways, not least of which is her being sort of barred from his life and not being able to be a part of his life. So yeah, I find that pretty icky, to be completely honest, tempered somewhat by the fact that she is very keen to get back and see him.
Cam: Yeah, no, I think that’s right. I think it’s hard to defend deserting your child even if it is true love. And it was kind of an impulsive decision, because Vronsky was going to go away because he’s so ashamed of himself, to leave. And then Betsy — that’s sort of the fiddler of society — she’s wanting them to see each other. But I think at that point Karenin even was going to give them a divorce — or I think he didn’t want to because he thought it would not be good for her and him. But then Vronsky comes and visits, and impulsively, she leaves and deserts the son.
Benny: Yeah, and also perhaps goes against a bit what I was saying earlier about Alexei’s decision not being genuine early on — to forgive them. Because he does do this quite selfless thing of not wanting to divorce Anna, because he knows this will basically lower her station in society. So at this point, divorces are quite asymmetric affairs and are going to be much worse for the woman than the man in terms of their social image. And especially the fact that she would have taken up with Vronsky after this would basically destroy her social reputation. And so Alexei doesn’t want to divorce her for this reason, because he actually seems to care about how she’s perceived in society. But then her and Vronsky do this thing where they just up and leave, abandon their son. And then eventually he’s convinced that divorce is probably the only option here.
Cam: Stepan Oblonsky kind of convinced him. He’s like, yo, you got to get divorced. And Karenin is not — I don’t think Karenin is fully convinced, but he comes around. He says, okay, I think — he’s even willing to like say it’s his fault that he had the affair and he’ll still do it. And then maybe before they have that conversation, I think Anna runs with Vronsky. I’m not sure, I might be getting that slightly wrong.
Benny: Okay, interesting. Yeah, maybe I have the chronology backwards here. But yeah, I agree with Rich that we’re losing sympathy with Anna as the reader over time here, basically.
Cam: Yeah. And I think deserting the son is an important part, because I think part of the reason this book is so famous and loved — it can be somewhat thought of as a scissor, you know, from that Scott Alexander essay — sorry, short story — of scissor statements. I’m not sure if scissor is the right thing, but people see different lenses on it. And it can probably be roughly broken down by the left and the right views. But there’s this view of seeing — we’re starting to see Anna’s decline and having a negative aspect to her. And is that purely because of the social society standards at the time? That essentially the sort of patriarchy that is unfair towards women, and towards married women who are unhappy, and that’s the reason why Anna’s struggling so much? Or there’s this other view of, like, well no, actually these choices Anna’s making, this moral failing on her part — and she should be responsible for any consequences, negative outcomes towards herself. And you can have those two different lenses. I think it’s a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B, myself. But deserting the son — I mean, that’s a hard one to reconcile with. That’s actually just a kind of a bad thing to do, to follow her own passion.
Rich: And that would be bad if a man did it too, right? Even in this society, if a man ran away from his wife with his new mistress and abandoned his child, I think people would roughly feel the same way about it. But the actual counterpoint we get in the book is Stepan and Dolly, who does cheat on her but reconciles. But then again, he works to reconcile the relationship. It’s not clear how much he actually repents or how much work he puts in.
Cam: He’s flirting with everybody.
Rich: Yeah, at least he doesn’t run away with the mistress. That’s something.
Benny: So why don’t we think Vronsky is happy when they run away to Italy together?
Cam: Well, yeah, that’s the other thing we haven’t mentioned — that during this trip Vronsky seems to start getting second thoughts, right? Like Anna’s acting a little bit differently, a little bit weird at points, a little bit of jealousy sneaking in.
Rich: This is the cheater’s curse, right? Like, if you shack up with the cheater, you’re always going to be wondering, like, they did it to their husband, why couldn’t they do it to me? You know, has to be on your mind.
Benny: Yeah, but that doesn’t seem to be the point of Vronsky’s issues here. In fact, Anna seems extremely devoted to him.
Rich: Anna is jealous of him, though.
Benny: Yeah, exactly. It sort of goes in the other way — Anna seems to be completely in love with him, especially at the beginning of their trip in Italy, line, etc., etc. But it seems like Vronsky is getting restless. Yeah, he doesn’t—
Cam: He’s got nice teeth, apparently.
Rich: It must be such an asset to have good teeth in this day and age, and that man does. Yeah.
Benny: Have anything to do — oh, seriously, seriously, yeah.
Cam: Yeah, back then, exactly.
Rich: My read is that Anna starts to realize how much she does like the social set, which she’s previously disparaged a little bit or acted a little bit aloof from. And Vronsky as well. But I think the sign of that is when she goes back to Petersburg and tries to go to the opera and sit in her normal box and dolls herself up in all her finery. And Vronsky’s like, what are you doing? You can’t be seen like this, kind of thing. You’re going to be humiliated. And that’s exactly what happens, and she finds that incredibly dispiriting even though it was totally predictable. But the fact that she went there — one way you could read it is, she’s a tough crusader who wants to change the norms around, she’s owning her actions and she’s not ashamed or whatever. And another is that she kind of wants that life back, or in some way enjoys parts of that life and realizes what she’s walked away from. And the same with Vronsky, who’s quit the military. He’s not exactly a super ambitious guy, but he has slight FOMO when he meets his old colleague who’s been promoted higher above him. And he doesn’t take the choice lightly.
Cam: Yeah, I think part of Vronsky’s second thoughts are these — he’s been the other guy, and it’s been so passionate and great, and then like now there’s a kid, which was just significant. The pregnancy changes a lot, and now he has obligations. This is sort of an ersatz honeymoon in a way, and he’s kind of the husband now. Maybe, you know, we know Vronsky is this charming bachelor and he kind of fucks Kitty around a little bit, and I think perhaps he’s just getting second thoughts for those external reasons. Like, well, this is what I’m in for now.
Rich: Yeah, you’ve got your neurotic wife who’s increasingly becoming kind of annoying to deal with. You’ve got this very young child, which is a stressful time, even though they obviously have maids and governesses and all this kind of thing following them around doing most of their actual work. But yeah, it’s so different to his old life.
Cam: A quick comment on when they go to the opera and Petersburg society rejects mainly Anna, a little both of them, but mainly Anna. Betsy, who is Vronsky’s cousin or sister, she’s the one who’s been kind of scheming all this stuff and been a confidant to Anna — but she even somewhat rejects Anna now as well, because of, originally she asked, “have you got a divorce? I’m happy for you, you’ve got a divorce.” And she hasn’t. And that’s important to Betsy, and then Betsy kind of shuns her. When we were talking before about a lot of the characters we have positive feelings towards, I think Betsy’s probably one of the ones for me that I don’t have a lot of positive feelings towards. I don’t trust her.
Rich: Yeah, that’s true. But if Tolstoy gave us more substance on Betsy, I bet you he could make her slightly sympathetic if we could delve into her mind a bit deeper.
Benny: Okay, nice. And then part 6 ends with Vronsky and Anna returning, I guess, to the country, right? Because they’ve been humiliated in Petersburg society. And so they leave, and TBD what happens in the last three parts.
Rich: Yeah, who could possibly say what’s going to happen? We have no idea. Yeah, I have a feeling it’s going to be like a train wreck of an ending.
Benny: I hate all of you.
Rich: Sorry to throw you under the bus. Cool, let’s tune in next time. Quick bit of read-amount, you guys got time for that?
Cam: Yeah, if our listeners are still with us. At least Slow Loris.
Listener mail: Dawkins on Kafka redux
Rich: Slow Loris is slowly getting there. I just pulled this comment off of YouTube. Also a good opportunity to remind anyone who is listening — or just tell anyone who is listening — that we’re doing an experiment with YouTube so you can see our beautiful faces as we talk.
Cam: Great teeth. Funny ears.
Rich: Yeah, bald patch. Vronsky’s got a bald patch. Very humanizing. Yeah, so you can check out YouTube. I have no idea why a market exists for watching podcasts. It’s completely unfathomable to me, but I’m trying to accept that other people have different ideas about the world than I do.
Anyway, I like this comment by Slow Loris. He was talking about Metamorphosis by Kafka, which we opened up by reading this very funny tweet from Richard Dawkins, just totally missing the point on why Metamorphosis is considered a great work of fiction. And so Slow Loris says, “I think this is the type of book that wears well with life experience, and any purely intrinsic assessment will fall short of appreciating its qualities. Puzzled by Dawkins’ hot take to the point I have secondhand embarrassment for him. It indicates either a deficiency of life experience, he’s from an extraordinarily privileged background, empathy or media literacy. The substance of his criticism is laughable — asking whether it’s sci-fi, asking if it’s an allegory of what. It’s exactly what an edgy 13-year-old would say, not a university professor with many books to his name.”
The reason that I just wanted to share that comment with you guys is because I love Dawkins, I’m a big Dawkins fan, and I think where Dawkins is in that tweet is definitely where we started out from and where we somewhat maybe still are. Just sort of affirming to this journey that we’re on of, like, this is what we’re trying to get away from. It’s incredible that you can have this whole facet of experience that’s undeveloped. So yeah, just wanted to pick you guys off a little bit and say this is why we’re doing this. And I think we’re making a bit of progress. We’re undergoing our own metamorphosis, if you will.
Benny: Nice. So if Dawkins is an edgy 13-year-old, what does that make us? Edgy like 15-year-old, 16-year-olds?
Rich: Yeah. What’s the post-Dawkins phase? Is Sam Harris the next evolution, or is that just the same tier?
Cam: It’s gonna be like one of those Good Will Hunting memes where he’s predicting all the—
Rich: Yeah.
Cam: One of the funniest criticisms I heard of neo-atheism or new atheism is just like, who would have thought you could just put Reddit in front of the word atheist, and it just makes it all so dumb and stupid. Just call someone a Reddit atheist. I mean, Richard Dawkins is also known, I think, for even back then making gaffes around philosophy and stuff. I can imagine someone making a kind of midwit meme type defense of someone like Dawkins. If your view was Metamorphosis is not good — but I’m not there.
Benny: Yeah, I mean, actually, I think the next stage would be someone who is so — I’m not sure what the right word is here — not invested in the text, but pretends to see more in the text than is actually there. Engages with them at this sort of phony, pseudo-intellectual level, where any drivel they come across, they can find meaning in it. Any short story, no matter how absurd, how poorly written, if it’s from a big name, say, will always pretend to find it extraordinarily profound. And I feel like that’s actually the next step. So you go from total cynicism to just like — almost like sybaritic sort of fascination with texts, right? Where you’re just indulgent in your own intellectual ability, seeing things that aren’t there. Like someone who would never actually criticize a work of art that is supposed to be good.
Cam: The worst example of that is like Rap Genius, of a Kendrick Lamar lyric or something. You just get all these commenters, I mean like, man, there’s four double entendres going on there, and it’s just like some fucking simple line. And it’s like, yeah — anyway, not to say there’s nothing there in a verse, but—
Rich: I bought a mahogany squatty potty. Yeah, but it’s lucky that we’ve jumped straight to the perfect synthesis where we don’t hold anything with too much reverence. But yeah, we also don’t make those surface-level Dawkins criticisms. Well done, perfectly hitting the sweet spot.
Cam: Yeah, well, there also are those people that come from the humanities side — you know, this is kind of CP Snow’s Two Cultures thing — and don’t have any science background either. They can say things that sound as silly and hollow as Dawkins trying to understand the sci-fi of Kafka. So hopefully there’s a blend.
Rich: Yeah, we should do that for book club, right? Because I haven’t read it.
Cam: Non-fiction?
Rich: Yeah, but just, you know, we can have a little treat. We deserve a little treat.
Cam: One rule: no man in the house.
Rich: Maybe after Anna Karenina.
Cam: No non-fiction.
Benny: Yeah, that’d be fun to do.
Rich: All right, keep an eye out for that. And if you want to write in to us, we’d love to hear what you think. Our email address is douevenlit@gmail.com — just the letter U not the word “you” — d-o-u even lit at gmail.com. Complaints, questions, feedback, criticism, anything goes. And otherwise we’ll see you next week for the finale of Anna Karenina and Levin and Kitty and Frou-Frou.
