46. Anna Karenina FINALE: Revenge of the Reddit Atheists

What an absolutely dogshit ending to an otherwise incredible book. We made it through 800 pages for this?? I still love you Tolstoy but seriously wtf bro.

This discussion covers parts 6, 7, and 8 of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.

Anna’s unhappy ending: Look how they massacred my girl. Is this a tale of a wanton harlot who got what was coming to her, or a good woman driven mad by society’s strictures? What is it exactly that Tolstoy disapproves of about Anna’s actions? How much would he hate her revival as a feminist icon? Is Aella the modern Anna K?

Levin’s leap of faith: Is there any way this isn’t totally unredeemable bullshit that ruins the end of the book? Sadly, no. Nevertheless we explore Levin’s ‘undefined but significant ideas’. Should we turn our brains off, and disregard reason and philosophy in favour of tradition? Is Christianity the final word in moral progress? Cam is more sympathetic to the leap of faith: if we replace religion, what do we replace it with?

Final thoughts: Jordan Peterson has a line about Dostoevsky being the great psychologist of the 20th century and Tolstoy being the great sociologist. Is he right? Where do we land on this book overall? Would we recommend it wholeheartedly? What are our favourite things about Tolstoy? Do we have to read War and Peace now?

…and, if you can believe it, more

hot takes

Rich: I’m going to drop a bomb right out the gates here, boys. I was so in love with Anna, and I was so in love with this book. And now that we finally reached the end, I was at the point where I was ready to push her onto the train tracks if she didn’t have the nerve to hurt herself.

Rich: I don’t like how this book ended and I feel like Tolstoy seduced me and sucked me in with these wonderful, luminescent characters in this great setup. And I feel like he has tricked me and used me to deliver some moralizing Christian mysticism. Yeah, not happy with the ending. Excited to talk about it, though.

Rich: Before I rant and rave, Cam, how’d you go with the end of this book? Your first Tolstoy after completing 800 pages?

Cam: Yeah, a sense of relief. I remember one of the first bookstores I went to, the store clerk had just read Anna Karenina after like six months of reading it. And I felt a bit like what I saw on her face, that sense of release. I mean, I reread the Anna ending. I liked it. I thought it was kind of funny. It’s like the most famous thing about it. And Rich gets to me like, no, this book’s not for me.

Cam: I was imagining you as the immutable force or something that Anna feels — because Anna has a moment of hesitancy, and there’s this kind of immutable force, and that’s just Rich forcing the will of the reader there.

Cam: I did think you two would both have some sort of new atheist take on Levin’s arc being annoying. So maybe we’ll get into that later. How about you, Benny?

Benny: Yeah, so I didn’t find Anna’s arc as irritating as Rich. I found her character irritating, but I thought Tolstoy wrote it very well. So I was actually having a good time reading about her character, because her descent into irritation and madness was an enjoyable reading experience, I thought. What I’m extremely annoyed by is Levin’s arc, and I’m even more annoyed by the fact that I knew Rich was going to have the exact reaction he was having. As I was reading it, I knew what was going through Rich’s mind. And I’m doubly annoyed by the fact that I can’t disagree with him.

Benny: When it came to Dostoevsky, I had similar gripes and I was ready to defend our boy Dosto, because I think there was something deeper under the surface there going on, and I was ready to give him some benefit of the doubt. But with Tolstoy, I’ve sort of tried my best to dig further into the reading, but I think the message that I found is just the obvious message that’s shoved in your face as the reader in the last 30 pages of the book. At least that’s how I’m reading it. And like Rich, I hate that message. I’m annoyed by the whole thing. Now I feel totally betrayed by him. I feel like it’s just this boring religious conservativeness.

Rich: Anti-progress, like explicitly anti-progress, anti-intellectualism, anti-reason.

Benny: And anti-reason. Yeah, just like don’t think about things. Just subscribe to faith and follow rules. And as soon as you start thinking and doubting, then that leads you into error. So anyway, we’ll get more into that, but I totally agree with Rich on this one. I’m so fucking annoyed, because, again, I loved it. Up to page 700, I was in love. And then the last hundred pages, I was like, no, Levin, don’t. Don’t do it. Don’t give in.

Rich: I was feeling bad after last week, because I kind of lost my temper a little bit and I was ranting about how annoyed I am that everyone these days shits on effective altruism and says that it’s silly, and you should just — it’s common sense to know what’s good, like, shrimps, obviously caring about shrimps is obviously stupid, all this kind of thing. And I was feeling bad and I wish I hadn’t said anything. And then I read this last bit and I was like, no way, I’m doubling down on this. I’m tripling down on this. This is so backwards and unhelpful. I mean, to be clear, I really love a lot of this book, but we’ll leave it there for now. And I see Cam’s skeptical face, so I know that hopefully Cam will stand up for Christian mysticism and Christian morality.

Cam: Or we just bite the bullet and go full hog on being a Reddit atheist book club. The problem is, it’s kind of a hard case to make. I’m less aggravated than you two on the arc, I think.

Rich: Cool. Yeah, I mean, I’m dying to talk about it, but we should go somewhat in order. So let’s talk about Anna first. We’re reading parts six, seven, and eight of the book. And in this back half, she’s just on the downward spiral. Benny, do you want to talk us through some of the spot events and what happens to her?

Cam: Yeah, let’s talk about the good stuff in the book — you know, Levin’s redemption and salvation. Let’s talk about Anna and her downward spiral and clinginess.

Rich: Yeah. A scarlet woman getting her comeuppance. The only thing that I like.

Anna’s unhappy ending

Benny: So I think where we ended last time was at a place of disrepair between Anna and Vronsky, is that right? I think by the end of last time they were already starting to show some annoyance with each other and Anna wasn’t fully satisfied with the life she had chosen, and that arc basically continues and just gets more and more severe. So her and Vronsky start fighting more often. They’re both extremely irritable with each other — I’m going to pause while this ambulance goes by me. Can you guys hear that? Yeah, okay, sorry.

Rich: Yeah, I heard that. I was wondering who threw themselves on the tracks this time.

Benny: So yeah, her and Vronsky continue to fight. They both become very irritable and irritated with each other. They have that classic toxic relationship energy where they’re looking to bicker at every instance. They can forgive each other for at most 10 minutes and then someone will say something that sets the other one off. And it’s well written, I think, by Tolstoy. But it’s hard to read because it’s obviously such an unhealthy and toxic relationship.

Benny: And I think it’s asymmetric. I think Vronsky probably does say some things to Anna that are unwarranted, but I think it’s mostly coming from Anna’s end. She just becomes paranoid about Vronsky ever leaving the house without her. She becomes convinced that he’s having affairs, seeing other women, that he wants to leave her, that he thinks she’s ruined his life because now he’s lost all his social standing in Moscow, etc. So she’s uncomfortable with herself, uncomfortable with the situation. She’s lost all her friends. She’s blaming him, but also obviously blames herself. And she starts taking a bunch of morphine in order to sleep. And she basically just goes nuts. She descends into badness and is totally insecure.

Rich: She describes herself as insanely jealous, which is a turn of phrase I didn’t expect to hear in a late 19th century novel.

Cam: Might be the translation, huh?

Benny: So were you guys feeling sympathetic with her at all? Or were you just as annoyed with her as I was?

Cam: I’m just thinking, just on that, Rich — when Vronsky was like, bitches be crazy, it felt a bit modern.

Rich: Anachronistic, dude. Vronsky showed so much restraint here. He’s a better man than I am. I think I had low-key PTSD from this, because I dated a girl once who went through a similar arc of insane jealousy, like verging on paranoid delusion type jealousy, that anytime I would talk to someone it would be because I was chatting them up or whatever. And it ended our relationship. I tried to be patient — not as patient as Vronsky — but ultimately, like, her delusions, and they were delusions, like nothing was happening, completely destroyed the relationship. So maybe that’s why I found this especially hard to read, because it’s hard to be in that position, but also it just goes on and on and on.

Rich: I was almost having a bit of a Raskolnikov moment where I’m like, okay, I get the point. I don’t need to be trapped in this head for too much longer. And in some sense, it is a relief when Anna finally takes the exit option. Again, maybe that’s on purpose. It could be the same way that it reminded me of when Nikolai finally dies and he’s been suffering so much. Everyone acknowledges that it’s actually a relief to be at an end to it.

Rich: But I didn’t find Anna sympathetic at all. In fact, I think part of the reason I wasn’t wild about this is it felt like it stretched the bounds of realism a little bit, just in that the Anna who we fell in love with at the start of the book is unrecognizable in this section, because she’s so well-composed and thoughtful and sensitive and so on, and I didn’t see any remnant of that left in her. It felt like almost a different character. Again, I’m not sure if that’s on purpose or not, but yeah, one of the things that slightly stretches the realism — I think it’s more like a moral fable being shoehorned into a character, which previously I would have thought Tolstoy wouldn’t do. Whereas Dostoevsky obviously has no problem doing things like that. But yeah, Cam, what did you think about Anna’s arc?

Cam: Well, I thought as well of, yeah, just how likely is this decline to happen? Did we have enough explaining it?

Benny: Some magical realism by Tolstoy.

Cam: Yeah, it reminded me exactly of my five ex-girlfriends, but —

Rich: Yeah, it’s crazy that this happened so many times.

Cam: It’s definitely coming from her, and it’s definitely delusions. I remember at one point, she invents words. He leaves her a bit, and she starts remembering all the, quote, cruel words that he said. And she invents some, the same stuff, like, you probably don’t want the divorce from your husband anyway. And she’s just inventing these. I think she mishears him at one point — when she’s saying we don’t need a divorce, we’re just in passion, he said, well, I thought you needed one for you and the kids. And she’s like, so you only care about the kids. And the godlike narrator reminds us that Vronsky did say “you” as well.

Rich: The thing about being mad for imagined things is another quite apt bit of psychologizing, though. Like, you know when you have a dream and someone wrongs you in a dream and you’re mad about them when you wake up, and you have to take a moment to remind yourself that they haven’t actually done anything wrong? But once you’ve imagined it, it takes on a life of its own and it’s hard to back out to reality. So even in her delusions, there’s some quite neat little observations.

Cam: Yeah. And that other bit when she gives a note to the governess or the maid in the house — it says for when Vronsky returns, not to come and visit her. Gives a note, and then Vronsky sees the note and doesn’t come visit her, and she’s like fuming. She’s like, what, he was meant to come visit me. Which is kind of a classic. And even the thing where at one point she views him as a womanizer as part of his nature — like, if he’s not fully in love with me, it feels like there must be someone else involved. And then when he’s ever acting slightly cold or distant because of her actions, at one point she rationalizes this must be because there’s another woman, the only way that will explain this behavior. Which is kind of a real behavior of distancing, but not reflecting and viewing her actions as the cause of it. And then it’s the self-fulfilling thing where she keeps pushing him away and thinking, well, he’s been pushed away, this is evidence of being in love with someone else.

Cam: She also has a go at the mother. He’s like, please don’t disrespect my mother.

Rich: He doesn’t even like his own mother, by the way, so that’s how —

Cam: Yeah. I mean, I feel like Anna had a slight point with this. I think it’s mostly delusion and bitch be crazy, but he is going off to the mother, the mother hates her because she’s this other woman and they’re not married, and the mother views it as disastrous, it’s fated to be bad. And there’s this other woman, the princess something, that the mother wants Vronsky to be with, and Vronsky’s going to visit. I could imagine that would set off a little bit of jealousy, or unfairness — that Vronsky seems to be going out and still accepted by his family, and there’s this other woman they even would want to marry him. I don’t think he’s interested in her and I don’t think he’s having affairs, but —

Benny: I feel like he should, though. I feel like he should be interested in someone else. Imagine coming home to Anna every day. Oh my god. What a nightmare.

Rich: Yeah, I really do think it’s one-sided, because Vronsky’s agitating for her to get a divorce. He wants to marry her. He wants to have kids with her. Another little example of how nuts she is: when he’s talking about how he wants to have children with her, she mangles that and distorts it to say, oh, well, that’s proof that he doesn’t prize my beauty, because he wants to ruin my body with children, or something. It’s like, this is a man who, even if he was a philanderer or a bit of a playboy, he’s settling down. He loves her. He’s showing her at every opportunity. And it’s just never ever enough, and it can’t be enough. She wants some unattainable perfection of love and attention and devotion. I don’t think Vronsky — no man could live up to that. Whoever’s out there being like, I could save her — I don’t know if you could.

Benny: I think that’s roughly right. I mean, I think there are things Vronsky could have done, though. Like, in that situation, you should just be honest with the person about wanting your own space sometimes. So some of the tension is that Vronsky feels like there’s certain things he should still do with the boys, in other words. Right, like being engaged in politics and, I don’t know, horse racing or whatever. And he feels like he can’t tell her that explicitly for some unknown reason that I still haven’t figured out. And I think that causes a lot of tension. So I think he could have just tried to be like, here’s the deal, here’s how I’m feeling, I want this time, I want some time by myself, I want some independence, et cetera. But he never says that. And obviously that’s making her uncomfortable. So there are things — I agree that she’s far enough off the deep end that he couldn’t have totally remedied the situation, but I think there are things he could have done to at least try and mitigate some of her insanity.

Cam: Yeah, that’s right. But it’s not a normal relationship as well. It’s not just like, hey, you’ve got this crazy girlfriend that’s not giving you any time because they want all of it — like, she is doing that, but she has been totally rejected by everybody because she kind of sacrificed everything for this guy. And it’s asymmetric — she’s the one suffering the consequences. There’s this argument of, is that valid? Is that justified to have these consequences? Or maybe it’s a matter of extent, or is it completely unjustified? Vronsky’s not suffering those. I mean, I still think it’s like 90 percent coming from her, but it’s not simply her being crazy and jealous in a vacuum. The jealousy is maybe different — it’s potentially like projection, right, as she’s the one who cheated on her husband and left her husband and then doesn’t feel fully committed and secure.

Cam: And the other problem seems to be that they’re not married. This is partly her attitude towards it of just passion should be enough. But I mean, Tolstoy seems to be telling us that marriage — certainly back then — adds this security.

Rich: Do we want to get into what Tolstoy is trying to say here, or should we talk about the culmination of all of this?

Cam: Yeah, let’s do the death and then let’s talk about what Tolstoy’s trying to say. So it’s after five or six chapters of her absolute downward spiral. Vronsky leaves to the country estate and is in total breakdown mode, as we’ve discussed. And I think she actually sends a telegram or a letter for him to return, but there’s potential slight miscommunication. And so she decides, I’m going to go see him. I’m going to leave the house at least. And she’s totally sparring at this point. She’s disgusted at all the strangers she sees, and views them as ugly and filled with hate, and that life is filled with hate. And she sees a dirty peasant on the train, or at the train station, that reminds her of these recurring dreams she’s been having, which are all this kind of bad omen. And she’s generally a bit dissociated as well.

Cam: When she sees these trains coming in and out of the station, she thinks of, back in book one or book two, the peasant that she saw who was killed by the train. And she thought that was a bad omen. Spoilers.

Benny: As did we.

Cam: Yeah, as we called that.

Rich: Are you guys going to apologise for that, by the way? I listened back to it and I think what you said was fine, it was innocuous. But to the redditor who spoiled it to me — fuck that guy. That’s where my blame should be directed.

Benny: I mean, the funniest thing from my perspective is, it couldn’t have been a spoiler because I didn’t know the ending. Actually, the culture had not spoiled Anna K. for me. I don’t know how I managed to dodge that bullet for so long, but I did. So when I was remarking on that, that was an odd scene — that was completely truthful on my part.

Rich: That was just your incredible media literacy at work.

Cam: Yeah. So she thinks of this peasant and then she realizes this is her only way out. And if she didn’t have Rich there to push her off, she had to do it herself. It takes her a couple of goes — she sees the first carriage and she’s got a handbag and it’s sort of in the way, and then she jumps in front of it. It has this kind of life-before-her-eyes sort of moment, and even a flash of light, perhaps metaphorically. And then she’s gone. And this is the end of book seven. So we still have another part that we’re going to talk about later, which focuses on Levin.

Rich: RIP. Pour one out for Anna.

Cam: So anything to add off of that?

Rich: I want to talk about what Tolstoy’s intentions are with this character. It’s pretty clear that this isn’t like a Victorian moralistic thing where he’s judging her for being an evil sinner, for being an adulteress and cheating on her husband. Because she’s too three-dimensional a character for that, and she’s too sympathetic a character, and it doesn’t seem like his style. But I think we are meant to be judging her — not in a prudish way, but that everything she’s doing is the wrong path, that’s taking her away from the good life, the meaningful spiritual life. It’s not the prudish thing so much as that she is deviating from traditional Christian morality and gender roles.

Rich: Most notably, I think, she rejects maternity and motherhood multiple times. She has the opportunity to take back her son who she ostensibly loves, if she’s willing to admit fault in the divorce, but she won’t do that. She has this new kid with Vronsky who she also rejects and spends like no time with, and basically lets the governess and the nurses look after the kid. And then she also does a shocking thing where she takes control of her sexuality and her reproduction, where someone says like, oh, what about when you have another kid? And she says, well, I won’t, if I don’t want to. And that’s an incredibly shocking statement, which in our world would be like a bold “yes queen” reclaiming of your sexuality and your reproductive rights, but in this world is like, no, no, no, no, this is really bad. And I think Tolstoy thinks that’s bad. She is rejecting the traditional role.

Rich: And you see that especially starkly when you contrast it with Kitty — Kitty and Levin in parallel, which we’ll probably get to later. But at every point, she’s isolating herself and distancing herself from all of the useful constraints of society that tie you down to community and work and family and relationships and God and so on. She’s just cut herself untethered from all of that. So that’s my read on it: it’s not like this prudish Victorian looking down on this immoral woman, so much as it’s like, this could be any of us as a product of modernity getting isolated from the traditional structures that keep us grounded.

Cam: Yeah, I mean, I 50 percent agree with you. I think that’s right. I think it’s partly a condemnation of her moral actions in terms of infidelity as well. But it’s certainly not just that, and probably not mainly that. I think you’re right pointing out it’s the isolation that I think is the main thing he’s condemning — away from community, away from family, away from society. Because as we know, half of the high-class society are all having affairs and stuff, like her brother is having these affairs. As long as it’s kept in the proper manner, not getting a divorce, kept as an open secret or whatever, you know what her husband Karenin was offering her — and it’s more this rejection of society completely, and of family and community and stuff, that’s part of her moral failure.

Benny: I mean, to be honest, yeah, I think we should just dive into the parallels between her and Levin here.

Rich: Can I just ask one question on this before we do that, Benny? So one of you, I forget who, said in an earlier episode that it’s as if Tolstoy is a god, and he feels some tenderness for or love for all of his creations no matter how flawed they are. And I thought that was a really good observation. And I’m no longer sure if that’s true. Like, do you think Tolstoy feels tenderness to Anna by the end? Because for me, it felt like he massacred her. I wasn’t sure if I felt that same sympathy that you feel for all these flawed characters, for the Stepans of the world and the Dollys, you know, for everyone else. What do you think?

Cam: Yeah, I mean, at first I think it’s generally true. If we think who are the people that potentially are meant to be the rivals or the villains or the people we don’t like, someone like Vronsky — there’s a lot of positive things about him, and Stepan and Anna herself. So I suppose the point you’re making is in the second half of the book we lose the tenderness. But Anna — I could imagine reading a SparkNotes of this book before going into it: a certain type of reading is, here is just this stupid whore who gets her comeuppance.

Rich: So Andrew Tate SparkNotes? Run through how it gets run over.

Cam: Yeah, that would be a good punny title for us. That’s just not true. She is described as intelligent and beautiful and well-liked, and you feel that, and you feel that the narrator views that of her. And then she has this decline.

the feminist reading of Anna vs society

Cam: I suppose the big question is what does Tolstoy think about the decline. I agree, I think he condemns it. Well, I think part of it rests on how much you view it as society impinging on Anna versus her moral failings and decisions. There’s this other reading of Anna Karenina where it’s kind of a feminist reading, and I’ve even seen it described before as this book and Tolstoy is an example of someone who set out to do one thing and it has the opposite effect. He’s potentially written this feminist icon or book that a lot of people relate to. And I think you can maybe go too far with that and forget the parallels with that — Anna and Levin.

Cam: So there’s this question of society impinging on it. Like she has fallen in love with someone else and she’s been totally rejected, and that’s why she spirals and goes down. And that’s unfair — whether it’s gender roles or just marriage expectations or norms. And if you could just tweak those — I mean, it even reminded me of the internet rationalist — well, I’m not sure about rationalist, but Aella, girl, sex worker, polyamorous. She had a bit of a meltdown a few weeks ago, but I’ve heard her talk about before as well — she views all her decisions as fine and good and defensible, and then it’s society’s expectations of her that’s unfair and potentially causes a downward spiral. And like if you’re going to fix those, that would fix the problem.

Cam: I think the answer is somewhere in between. It’s kind of like a half answer, but because you could go ad absurdum — I’m not sure if even Aella’s certain with us — but like, I should just be able to sleep with 100 people, like the OnlyFans model to that. And as long as society just accepted that, like, I’d be fine. But if society doesn’t accept that, like these are my consequences, and it’s tragic, and part of me does want some sort of consequences and expectations and stuff like that. The question, I think, Tolstoy — sorry, I’ve gone on a bit long here, but I think Tolstoy does view some of Anna’s decisions as a moral failing rather than — but the way he’s written it, he’s been honest about, well, this is — I mean, society has caused this as well.

Rich: I love the death of the author angle here that I hadn’t thought of. Maybe modern audiences read this as a feminist book, because for the reason you mentioned of, actually it’s society that’s wrong. And it is, in fact, by our standards, at least for some of these things — but not for all of them. And from Tolstoy’s point of view — I’ve been reading up, I was intrigued by the end to get a handle on who this guy is. I’ve been reading up on his ethics and morality, and he is not a feminist, let me tell you that. Like, I wouldn’t say he’s hostile towards women, but he’s very much a traditionalist. He thinks sexuality is something bad, and especially women’s sexuality, is in favor of chastity, definitely against infidelity or this kind of thing. So it’s fascinating that people could read that differently.

Rich: On the other thing — I just want to say that I agree with you that it has to be somewhere in the middle. But when people say, I’ve done nothing wrong, it’s society that’s wrong, it always seems to me such an arrogant point of view, because the whole point of social norms is that they are constructed socially. You don’t get to unilaterally decide what everyone else should censure or not censure. Sure, you can make the case for why we should change a social norm in one direction or whatever, but you don’t get to be upset or mad when, in your very public, very loud, very attention-grabbing publicizing of your particular behaviors and lifestyle choices, you are explicitly or implicitly saying that these should be okay — it’s okay for me, it should be okay for other people. I think it’s totally fine to be criticized for having those views, and you don’t get to just say I’m right and everyone else is wrong because you’re making a case to try and change the norms. The norms are not made by you. They’re made by everyone collectively. Anyway, sorry, that’s a bit of a tangent. Benny, you were going to draw some parallels between the Anna-Vronsky pairing and the Kitty-Levin pairing.

Parallels with the Kitty/Levin arc

Benny: Yeah, and more specifically just Levin and Anna themselves. So I think it’s an excellent point that if you just look at Anna’s arc, you could take it in one of two ways, like Cam said. The first reaction is to say, well, society is wrong, it drove Anna to do this, and so it’s society’s fault. The second reaction is to say, Anna flaunted these norms. We have rules about how to live a good life, and she discarded all of that wisdom and went her own way, and she got what came to her. And I agree that if you just look at her arc in isolation, it’s unclear which direction Tolstoy’s leaning. But I think if then you step back and also look at Levin’s arc, that summons evidence on one side of this debate — and in particular, it summons evidence on the side of thinking Anna has done something wrong by flaunting the traditional rules of society. Because Levin comes out at the end looking good for having just adopted, basically, conservative religiosity and not thinking too much about it. And Kitty too.

Benny: Kitty’s just following the paths that society’s basically laid down for her. She’s not questioning anything, and they come out of it as like the happiest couple in the book by the end.

Cam: I like — for every other happy family, in the same way that every other one is happy.

Rich: Every other God-fearing traditional family who has Christ in their heart.

Benny: So I know Cam has thoughts on like how all of this relates to duty, and I think that is a good lens to have on Anna versus Levin — about, like, one of them is flaunting duty, and the other one’s not. So Cam, you want to walk us through that thesis?

Cam: Yeah, so I suppose the implicit question is, how is Anna and Vronsky’s relationship different to Levin and Kitty’s? I mean, even before we get into that — isn’t this one of the few books just looking at two different relationships side by side as a comparison? I think Goethe’s Elective Affinities is another one of that theme. I kind of liked that as a conceit, because there are some parallels between the two relationships. They both have struggles, they both have jealousy as we’ve covered. Tolstoy is quite good at writing jealousy, and Levin gets super jealous. There’s that random other guy who they go hunting with, and it turns out the guy was flirting with her and was keen on her. And Levin’s got this baggage around Kitty choosing Vronsky in the first place.

Benny: And he’s even tempted by Anna at one point — we should say, like, he goes to visit Anna with Stepan, and Anna puts on the charm, 110 percent full charm mode, and Levin can’t handle it. He’s this naive country boy, he can’t handle this sophisticated city woman who’s putting on the charm for him, and he’s head over heels before he can even stop himself, and has to run away to the country.

Cam: Yeah, he has like a wandering eye, right?

Rich: Yeah, his hands are shaking, he’s blushing. So Kitty gets jealous of Levin, and Levin gets jealous of Kitty. They go through the same mini arc, except they resolve theirs in a way more sensible way. They work through it successfully and they’re not consumed by it.

Cam: But speaking of duty — part of Levin’s reaction is, he had the wandering eye with Anna a little bit, and this is one of the examples of Anna still being described in quite flattering terms later in the book, even though she’s starting to spiral. And Levin, I think, commits to not seeing Anna much at all. As we were saying before around these rules and stuff — but there’s rules for Anna and Vronsky. One response to that might be, oh, that’s unfair, Kitty should just get over it. And I think there’s truth there. You don’t want to be too controlling, but —

Rich: It reminds me of the “men can’t have female friends” discourse, where it’s like, it’s absurd on the face of it, but there’s a little grain of truth there that everyone’s aware of, and that you should be slightly cautious of if your man is really close with some unattached woman, or vice versa.

Cam: Yeah, and same as if your wife is getting Brazilian jiu-jitsu lessons with some Vronsky chad. I mean, oh shit, she left me two years later. There’s this truth to it of, you know, there’s reasonable areas where you have it, but if you’re going on your run with your running partner, you know, every other day, and she says something like “running turns me on” or something — I saw a tweet where someone said they probably stopped running with her.

Cam: So that’s one Levin difference: he has this view that’s part of marriage, this part of the commitment. But also the fact they are married is the big difference. And again, it’s a little bit hard how much to blame this on society versus Anna. But it does seem to be setting up this — Anna is about the passion of relation. I think at one point she explicitly says this is all that a relationship needs. Who cares about divorce, who cares about — we have the passion, you just need to show me passion. And I think Tolstoy is saying we also need this form of duty, which is given to us by the institutions such as marriage.

Rich: It’s so naive to think that passion can sustain a relationship anyway. Like, if you’ve ever been in a long-term relationship, you know that’s just not how it works. The passion tracks down over time, and then you’re like, long-term, deep, abiding love and affection builds up and sort of helps compensate. But you’re not going to be passionately in love for 20, 30, 40 years. It’s just not going to happen. So even a totally secular critique of that position, without invoking duty to God or any other institution — it’s just not a relationship — it’s not good relationship advice. She’s putting too much on Vronsky’s shoulders.

Cam: But I think Tolstoy is also saying you need some sort of — I’m not sure if passion is the right word, but, like, we saw Alexei Karenin, who is as committed as anyone to propriety and duty, his job and his marriage. And that was demonstrated in a way that seemed like it was missing something as well. Like, we were somewhat sympathetic to Anna’s head turning. So Levin and Kitty seem to have struck this balance where you have love and this kind of sense of responsibility and duty, which Anna just did not want any of the latter.

Rich: Yeah, that’s a good point I hadn’t thought of, which sort of slightly softens my critique, I think, that Alexei Karenin is exaggerated in the other direction of being too enchanted by his duty and his work, and he loses that spark.

Cam: But perhaps on net, Tolstoy is maybe saying, well, that’s better — at least you have that. And Karenin allowed her to have the side.

Rich: I guess for Alexei Karenin also, it’s not that he exactly cares about the greatness of the Russian state or doing his job really well. He is very much in it for himself. He’s very concerned about his social image and his social standing. So perhaps that’s the reconciliation — that even his passion is misplaced or misguided. Because, you know, the Christian morality is to do good for others and to do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. And anything that impugns your motives is taking you away from correct action in the world.

Benny: Yeah, I think that’s right. If you double-click on who he felt duty to and who he was really loyal to, it was sort of the wrong people, right? It was to himself, and then to abstract political bodies. But I think part of Tolstoy’s message is there’s a certain duty one ought to have towards their families and the ones closest to you. And he certainly did not have any true sort of loyalty towards Anna. It felt like from his perspective, he could have swapped her out with any wife and his life would have been basically the same. He never really took care to ask how she was or to make sure she was comfortable, to figure out what she was missing in life, what she liked, etc. She was just some sort of figurehead that he could use to host parties, basically. And so his duty was sort of a fake one, or at least misguided and misdirected towards the wrong things.

Cam: One thing — you go, Rich.

Rich: Actually, just for a minute, Cam — can you drop your shield, because you’re kind of Wilsoning from Home Improvement. I just want to — you could just drop the shield rather than the mic, so we can see your mouth and beautiful face. Thank you. The strong teeth.

Cam: My big ears.

Benny: You gotta see that rugged jawline, dude. Strong teeth.

Vronsky’s teeth discourse

Cam: Well, I did want to talk about teeth and ears, actually. What were you saying there, Benny, made me think — I did wonder if Anna and Karenin were happy earlier, like before she met Vronsky. We’re not really given that. It’s probably implied it was a bit of a loveless marriage, but I think there’s maybe a little bit of textual evidence against that. Anna’s just this amazing person, she seems to be going right. But then, just around the ears, to remind the listeners — just after she’s met Vronsky on the train and there’s this immediate spark, Karenin is waiting for her and she sees him and she notices his kind of big sticky-out ears. And the way it’s described is like this is a new realization — it’s like she suddenly seems to have this ick about these ears, but like in comparison to Vronsky, to what she’s been missing. Like suddenly it’s like, oh, well, yeah, those ears suck and this marriage sucks. Maybe it’s this new thing where she is unhappy now, now she’s met Vronsky.

Rich: I read it as a more new thing. I didn’t read it as her having been dissatisfied for eight years, but we probably don’t have enough textual evidence to know. Just my impression of it was like a wife beginning to stray and beginning to be dissatisfied with her husband, not like having been in that state since they got married. And also, she’s such a catch, and she’s so competent and so thoughtful, that I find it unlikely that she would have just been like this naive young girl who got bamboozled into marrying some person that she hates. I feel like she would have found a way out of that.

Cam: Yeah, I mean, I suppose part of marriage pairing is around families deciding what they think is good and bad, and there’s a bit of a lottery.

Cam: Before we move on to Levin, a couple other things I wanted to mention. One thing I noticed around Anna’s death — sort of leading up to it, it felt like there’s a little bit of stream of consciousness style. And it made me think, maybe this was the first instance of that. This is the late 1870s, and then of course, 30, 40 years later, we get Joyce going full hog with that and making it famous, and Woolf, which is often contrasted with Tolstoy’s realism. But I have some quotes when she’s at the train station and she’s kind of thinking to herself and she’s all frazzled — “I begged him to forgive me. I submitted to him. I acknowledged myself guilty. Why? I can’t live without him.” But then she also starts having like external observations and she’s like, “how proud and pleased he’ll be when he gets my note, but I’ll prove to him,” and then she goes, “how bad this paint smells, why are they always painting in the building,” and so on. So I thought that was an interesting point.

Cam: And also it made me think, I don’t think this suicide was pre-planned. I mean, maybe this argument it was partly pre-planned subconsciously, but it’s almost like when she got there — and that’s kind of why I use this technique of stream of consciousness, to show that the decision kind of came for her when she was there. She’s going to the train station to see Vronsky, or originally to see Dolly and Kitty as well, and then it kind of takes her. Earlier on, when she’s taking the opium, she’s thinking, “I want to punish Vronsky” — she even says, “I want to punish Vronsky.” So there’s kind of evidence against that, but —

Rich: She definitely has that fantasy that I assume everyone has, where you think, I’ll kill myself and I’ll make them all sorry, and, you know —

Cam: Oh yeah, another keen psychological insight from Tolstoy. Yeah, yeah, that would show them.

Benny: They’ll be so sorry they made me do all the editing for the podcast. Never expressed their gratitude. Don’t realize how fucking hard it is.

Cam: Yeah, yeah.

Benny: We see you, Rich. Don’t worry.

Rich: Dude, there’s no trains anymore, sadly.

Benny: He says sadly.

Cam: All right. Should we get on to your guys’ anti-religious takes? Have you heard Bertrand Russell’s teapot argument?

Benny: Yeah, the last thing possibly to get there — before we get there, rather, is, Vronsky. Does anyone have any hot takes on how Vronsky reacts after Anna’s death? You think that’s significant?

Cam: The teeth.

Cam: I mean, one of the few details we had of Vronsky was his strong teeth. I’ll get the exact quote if I have it.

Rich: I got it. “He could hardly speak for the throbbing ache in his strong teeth that were like rows of ivory in his mouth.”

Cam: Yeah, I had another quote earlier on the book — it’s a solid row of strong teeth. I suppose we don’t get a lot of details about physical appearance, and that’s one of the few ones we do. And I think there’s maybe a symbology of like him just being a general chad. You know, we see memes now of like trust-fund six-five blue-eyed finance, and nice teeth adds to that. And in the first episode, we were talking about how Dolly seems to have hit the wall at like 28 or something — that’s before everyone’s constantly drinking water and stuff. Have you guys seen that, man? I won’t get into that. Everyone looks young because we’re always drinking water all the time. But, you know, before Turkish hair transplants and facelifts and stuff, and teeth — I imagine was a very strong signal of much, much more than it is now.

Cam: And then we get this text that he’s had this toothache. And the toothache is interesting because this is kind of post-Anna’s death, where Vronsky is having his own downward spiral, and he’s not eating and he’s not talking to people, and maybe that’s what set it off. But the thing with the toothache — maybe it happened earlier, and it is this thing that’s kind of hidden. It’s like decay is literally what’s happening, and something like Vronsky — his appearance is the strong teeth, and it fooled Kitty and it potentially fooled Anna. I mean, I know we’re not blaming Vronsky too much, but actually there’s kind of this rot and decay deep down in this relationship.

Rich: All along. Yeah, I caught that too. I thought it was a good little nod. There’s a few things in here like that which I think are nice examples of Tolstoy’s craft, where he doesn’t belabor it but the connection is there. I wrote down a quote for when Anna gets on the train, and it says, “she stepped up on the high step and sat down in a carriage by herself on a dirty seat that had been white.” So it’s like evocative of her loss of purity, her becoming dirtied.

Cam: And as we mentioned earlier, Rich’s first love, Frou-Frou the horse, seems to be a symbol of Vronsky breaking Anna.

Rich: Yeah. I felt more moved by Frou-Frou’s death than Anna’s, and I know I’ve been joking about this all along, but I’m not kidding.

Cam: The problem with rationalism, mate. The problem of reason, mate.

Rich: How many Frou-Frous is a life worth?

Cam: Technically the horse crash was more tragic — the four horses that died.

Benny: No, that’s pure emotionality.

Rich: We should probably get into it, right, because we don’t have that much time left.

Cam: One little quick snippet on Vronsky. I’ll be really quick, because he’s also going off to the war, the Serbian-Ottoman war, which is happening around the same time. It’s the Slavic question. I found a little nugget — this is one thing that Dostoevsky didn’t like about Tolstoy, was on this question.

Rich: What is the Slavic question?

Cam: Well, Russians are Slavs.

Benny: There was a rebellion by the Turks, I think, right?

Cam: So are Serbs. I mean, Ottoman colonized like the Balkans, and around this time the Serbs are fighting back, and then there’s this big question of, should the Russians go and defend Serbians against — I think in the book against the “yoke of the Ottomans”? Because they’re also Slavs.

Rich: Because they’re also Slavs, like the same ethnic group?

Cam: Yeah, should we be their protectors? This is what they’re talking about quite a bit in the text in book eight. And Vronsky goes to do it, and it’s kind of viewed as, I suppose, a noble thing. I think even his mom says it’s like the only thing he could do. It’s kind of like that was worth his life. But Levin is more ambivalent of it and doesn’t think you do it. I’ll just get the quote up from Dostoevsky. So this is coming from Joseph Frank’s famous four-part biography of Dostoevsky, and apparently Dostoevsky was outraged at Levin’s — that he himself possessed, quote, no immediate feeling of the oppression of the Slavs. And he’s livid. You can imagine Dostoevsky having all these newspaper snippets of the Turkish atrocities. In the book, I think even one of those was used as an example of the problem of evil — like, children tossed in the air and caught in the bayonet. And then Dostoevsky views Levin’s seeming humaneness, which is recoiling at getting involved, as really a callousness, and indifference to everything except for his own personal interests and narrowly egoistic concerns. So I just thought that was a fun bit of Dostoevsky-Tolstoy crossover. They never met, and there’s not a lot of —

Levin’s depression and rejection of reason

Rich: Yeah, add this to the list of Tolstoy’s philosophical failings, is that he was a major pacifist. He inspired Gandhi, and he thought that there’s like no cause that would justify intervention, which I think is an incredibly naive take. But anyway, we got to get to this final section of the book. We got to talk about our boy Levin.

Rich: So we get a time jump of several months after Anna’s death before we return to the Levin-Kitty household. And we find out that Levin has fallen into a really deep depression, even though he’s happily married with his young wife and he’s got his firstborn son. Life still feels meaningless. And he does what anyone would do in that situation, and goes and reads a whole bunch of philosophy to try and figure out what the answer is. So he reads both materialist and non-materialist answers to what the meaning of life should be, including all the big names, but he finds no comfort in their snare of words. “Whenever he stops reading, all of this artificial edifice fell to pieces at once, like a house of cards.” He’s so down about this that he’s actually on the brink of committing suicide, which is wild. Like, this guy is such a man of ideas.

Cam: He doesn’t want a gun in the house.

Rich: He made a noose, or am I imagining that?

Benny: No, it’s that he put the noose somewhere where he couldn’t easily access it when he was at home, because he was worried that if it was easily — if he could easily find it, if it was within reach, then he would use it to kill himself. And I think similarly with his gun or something, so he basically had to stash them away.

Rich: He’s hiding all the rope.

Benny: And increase the friction. Yeah, exactly. He buried the rope somewhere in his backyard.

Cam: Speaking of realism and suspensions of disbelief, did you guys feel a bit around this, like it just sounded a bit full-on for what we’ve had from Levin so far — that he was suddenly in this deep depression, hiding ropes from himself?

Rich: I have so many problems with this section that that doesn’t even register.

Benny: Yeah, I felt it was a bit out of character for Levin. I actually disagree with you guys that it was out of character for Anna. I think her arc sort of makes sense and is actually quite realistic. I could see someone like — what do you think it looks like when someone does actually commit suicide? Like, they weren’t always miserable, presumably. There is some downward spiral there. So her case actually I thought was pretty well written and pretty realistic. But I agree with Levin — especially because he doesn’t build it up at all. And especially because after he had his kid, we’re sort of exposed to a quite happy Levin. At the beginning, he is a bit bewildered and taken aback by this new creature that’s entered his life. But then he has these moments of sort of bliss where he realizes, wow, there’s now just this thing I have to take care of. And there’s now a significant demarcation between pre-baby life and post-baby life. And this seems to give him some sort of meaning in that moment. And then the next thing we hear from him, he’s suicidal and four months into his child’s life. So that does feel like a pretty unrealistic jump.

Cam: Which apparently Tolstoy was a little bit like this as well. So maybe it’s just this insert.

Rich: Yeah, it’s also just glossed because we don’t build through this. We kind of get told about it in retrospect, where from Kitty’s point of view, he says, oh, Levin had it was kind of sad and gloomy this winter, and then later on we find out that he actually was on the brink of suicide. But we don’t get Levin during that. We only get his reflection on it when he has his epiphany, which I will now describe.

Rich: So he doesn’t kill himself. What saves him is his epiphany, which is catalyzed by a conversation he has with a very simple peasant named Fyodor. They’re talking about some guy who lived a good life, and Fyodor says, “he lived rightly,” meaning morally and simply, in accordance with his good conscience. And that phrase, that he lived rightly, just strikes Levin like a thunderbolt. So it says, “at the peasant’s words that Fokanich lived for his soul and truth and God’s way, undefined but significant ideas seemed to burst out.” Which the wording of that is quite funny and indicative, I think — undefined but significant ideas, which is what basically what follows.

Rich: So he goes on to lay out how we should reject reason and philosophy, that it is all an edifice and a house of cards, and just do what is right in accordance with what one already knows in one’s heart. And he claims that this is something that all men actually already know deep down, and not only that, but that men have done so since time immemorial. “I and all men have only one firm, incontestable, clear knowledge, and that knowledge cannot be explained by reason. It is outside it. It has no causes and can have no effects.” Specifically, this knowledge comes from Christianity. So Levin is the atheist who suddenly realizes that he has been blessed with being brought up in a spiritual tradition — with the idea of God my whole life, filled with the spiritual blessings Christianity has given me. That is the thing that he has spurned, and that’s the thing that he returns towards: that if you live within the Christian society and you’ve been brought up with spiritual Christian teachings, you don’t need to overthink anything. You already have a conscience that you can consult, and you just simply do what is good and don’t do what is bad.

Rich: And then he does this slightly bullshit hand wave of the problem of what about other people from other faiths who don’t have the same teachings. And he says, well, it’s sort of non-doctrinal — that all people who have a shared moral knowledge, presuming that you’ve been brought up in a tradition, I guess that’s in some way similar to Christianity or converges upon the same things, but otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense at all.

Rich: Anyway, I think, needless to say, I found this incredibly unsatisfying, and like a very disappointing, fetishizing-one’s-own-ignorance sort of stance to take. And it was just a real bum note to end the book on, because there’s so much to recommend this book, but Tolstoy as a thinker, as a philosopher or anti-philosopher I suppose, because he says that philosophy is useless — is very disappointing, and I just didn’t expect that. I’ve got a bunch of criticisms, but I’ll let — maybe I’ll do one criticism, and then hand over to Benny, and then maybe Cam can argue with us.

Rich: So I think the obvious criticism of his epiphany is that, don’t think about it, just do what you already know is good, begs the question of how do you know what is good? Because you’re circularly defining it as that which is laid out by the Christian faith. But if you think about Christianity, which has lots of wonderful features to it, Christ himself is a moral entrepreneur who broke with the tradition of the time, who came with the flaming sword and kicked the lenders out of the temple, and got crucified for his troubles. He absolutely tore up what was thought to be good at that point in time. That’s how we get progress. That’s how we get new and better moral explanations. And so it’s very unsatisfying to say that you already know what’s good because we’ve got these teachings. It’s like, well, where did those teachings come from? Where are the next set of teachings going to come from? And this is stuff that I think is pretty obvious to us as —

Cam: From God, from God, bro.

Rich: — good Popperians and Deutsch followers. But yeah, anyway, I’ve got more to say, but if you guys have something to add or want to react to that.

Benny: Yeah, I mean, I don’t really want to try and pick apart the logic, because I think by today’s standards it’s pretty clear that you don’t want to go through life — or perhaps I should say, today’s secular standards — it’s pretty clear that you don’t want to go through life disbelieving in your own ability to solve problems and reason about various situations, and just hand over all of your faculties to an old book. You know, that seems pretty indefensible.

Benny: For me, it was just disappointing because Dostoevsky is also clearly a cultural conservative, but I was ready to defend him because I thought his work is just quite an elaborate defense of the value of tradition. And I think tradition is important, but I think that you can still think critically about tradition and evaluate it — so a tradition isn’t above reason, and you shouldn’t just succumb to tradition because it takes on some magical place in society or has some magical power to be right that you can’t explain. It still falls prey to the power of reason. But Dostoevsky did a good job of exploring that boundary, both sociologically but especially psychologically.

Benny: And then I was expecting — so I think there was clear intonations of some sort of cultural conservatism by Tolstoy throughout the book, but I wasn’t ready for him to just be so naive in the conclusion at the end. I think that’s what I find so disappointing. Like, it’s just swallow the pill of: distrust yourself. You’re going to have moments of disbelief and of skepticism, but don’t let those blind you to what is this revelation right in front of you. And it’s just like pure religious dogmatism in just a very uninteresting way.

Benny: Perhaps these questions were more live when Tolstoy was actually writing, but from reading it from today, I just thought there was just no nuance. Levin makes every mistake in the rationality playbook that one can make. And so it was just a little heartbreaking, like you said, Rich, to sort of fall in love with many of these characters and the storyline itself for 700 pages, and then slowly start to realize as you’re reading the last 20 pages of Levin’s thought process — I was on the edge of my seat reading the pages like, no, no, no. Don’t let this be going where I think this is going right now. Please, for the love of God, don’t let this happen. Literally for the love of God in this case. But God smote me on the mountainside and it went exactly how I didn’t want it to go.

Cam: What would you have preferred for Levin? Is it just that he becomes religious and takes a leap of faith? Because even before this epiphany, we have him — he somewhat rejects modernity. He certainly doesn’t like city life. He wants to be out on his farm, he wants family there, he views marriage as vital for happiness. And there’s kind of a — I’m not sure if reactionary, but there’s certainly a tradness there. I get a sense maybe Rich was rejecting more of that, and maybe Benny’s just focusing on the leap of faith stuff. If you were to fix him somewhat, would it just be —

Benny: Yeah, even in last episode I was ready to defend some of Levin’s predilections to be suspicious of a certain sort of pie-in-the-sky reasoning by people who aren’t involved in the issues themselves. I know Rich and I disagreed over that, but I was ready to give Levin the benefit of the doubt that there was something to his way of working directly with these farmers and trying to engage directly in their problems, and that he was always a little suspicious of his brother’s very abstract reasoning. There is a time and a place for that sort of skepticism. So it’s not that I hold against him. It’s that he goes full hog on this by the end of the book and just casts reason aside altogether.

Benny: And like, you know, Rich mentioned that this moment where he’s, I don’t know, filled by the spirit of the Lord or whatever — he’s like, I just need to listen to these Christian revelations and I’ll be happy and they hold all the secrets to my success. And then he has this moment, and a very reasonable thought, where he says, wait a second, this doesn’t logically make sense, because there’s many religions in the world — should I expect that my religion alone got all the answers right and everyone else is wrong? As an aside, he calls Muslims “Muhammadans,” which I thought was hilarious, and I’m wondering if that was the actual term at that time, just like followers of Muhammad. So yeah, I should look that up at some point.

Cam: I think I’ve potentially seen it in Voltaire as well. But carry on.

Benny: So then he just basically says, ah, you can’t think those thoughts, these are questions that mere mortals can’t answer, and if God wanted people to have my revelations then he would have given that to him. He doesn’t permit himself to question. So it’s just vanilla religious dogmatism, where you have these words on the page in front of you and you don’t allow yourself to question them. It’s just like a boring religiosity.

Rich: This is like the quintessential anti-rationalist meme, right? It’s like a guy seeding himself and building up the strength of an anti-rationalist meme that will take over his faculties to ever remove it, and saying that that is the good thing.

Rich: And in response to your question, Cam, I want to highlight that I don’t have a problem with Christian morality. In fact, the big thing that I got out of us reading Dostoevsky, and in part from your arguments about it, is realizing how load-bearing Christian morality has been for the West, and I think there are many excellent parts to it. And especially we see, like, there are parts of Levin’s actions that I really like — of the local and the particular and treating people in your life well, and how other characters’ failure to do that means that their grander schemes also come undone. I don’t have a problem with that exactly.

Rich: The thing that I find deeply offensive is this mysticism and this explicit turning away from reason and thought about things. And especially because it’s presented as a transcendent experience, like almost a Gnostic kind of a thing. But in my mind, it’s actually abdicating responsibility. It’s the very opposite of the thing which it claims to be. In my mind, to get moral clarity and to be a good moral thinker is an active pursuit that you work at and develop, if not at the level of an individual, certainly at the level of a society and a culture. If you think it is received, or like some kind of Gnostic insight that can only be directly experienced, that’s just not going to get you anywhere in the long run. So this kind of a thing, maybe it works fine in a totally static society where nothing ever changes, and you want your particular set of norms and ethical codes to be valid forever.

Rich: But this is not what Christ did. This is not what any moral entrepreneur does. This is not how we get progress. The thing that really irked me is him explicitly rejecting thinking and reason and rationality. And doubly so when it’s so didactic — when we just get this as like a big rant at the end of the book. So that’s why I had this feeling of, I’ve been seduced by this wonderful writer. He sucked me in. The first part of the book is so good. And then it feels like it leads up to delivering a payload of his particular ideological fervor, which is annoying in the first place, doubly annoying because it’s bad philosophy. It’s bad ideas. And so leaves a sour taste in the mouth. But I’m not going to go on about it any more than that, because I’d love to actually get to a few things of praise for the book and things that I loved about it. But yeah, if you guys have any further thoughts on that, go for it.

Cam makes the case for the leap of faith

Cam: I feel like I’ll say something for religion perhaps. I mean, I’m not sure if I like Tolstoy’s particular brand of Christianity. I’m not sure if I understand it enough as well. But I sympathize with Levin’s path because — the thing is, Levin is as skeptical as — that’s the other thing you learn from reading Tolstoy and Dosto. It’s like, these guys were making the same skeptical arguments that, you know, neo-atheism is not this new thing, which I remember was the criticism of it at the time — just became super popular and finally won the culture. But, you know, in Dosto we got the problem of evil, and Levin is a skeptic. And then it’s this “fuck it” mentality. And that’s what the leap of faith is.

Cam: I’m in conflict about it, because as was one of the themes in Infinite Jest — some of the characters view it as nonsensical and absurd, like how can you accept it? And they’re like, well, it just works, you just do it, and you’ve just got to do it and just trust it. And that is one of the only ways that people get through things like AA and NA. I don’t know, it’s hard to articulate, and it’s hard, I think, to make the case for, but there’s a part of me that is sympathetic to this idea that that kind of rationalism doesn’t stop, like, maybe — sorry, maybe I’ve got like a belief in belief. I think Dennett coined this “belief in belief.” But my problem is, it’s very hard to make the leap of faith that I think Kierkegaard said we should. And then Levin just makes this leap.

Cam: I think the decline in religion in society is, well, I think probably is negative. You guys might have different instincts. I mean, I’m not sure about that. There’s a lot of implicit knowledge tied up in religion. And there’s that whole thing of, we have the religious impulse anyway, whether we replace God with the god of egalitarianism or the god of the environment, the god of whatever. And potentially traditional religions are more robust or anti-fragile — I’m not sure if anti-fragile is the right word — but more robust at achieving worship of something bigger outside yourself rather than it coming back into ego.

Cam: But I’m very sympathetic to you guys’ arguments as well that, one, rejecting reason is hard to do, and two, it’s probably not the right thing to do. But I could imagine myself even raising my kids attending church, and I’m not sure about that. I’ve had this kind of evolution over the last few years, that Levin was having himself, and it’s hard to defend. And I take my hands to the same bucket, right? That’s kind of what the leap of faith is. So I’m not giving a good defense.

Rich: Yeah, I don’t think I understand what your position is just in general on morality and ethics and religiosity, but it might — because I remember feeling a bit confused about it during Dosto as well. Just because we have this common heritage of being Reddit atheists, and then onto the Deutsch stuff, and the basically that the foundation of our culture, the bit that makes it so good, is the ability to criticize bad ideas and replace them with better ones. That’s the thing that I feel most strident about, which gets me headed up the most. And it’s interesting that it seems like you don’t have the same primacy for that, even though you’re steeped in the same tradition that I am, and are sort of more willing to let people or encourage people to believe incorrect things, or to have more anti-rational memes floating around or something like that.

Cam: Well, yeah, I mean, as you said, I’m from that same tradition as you guys are. I think it’s just seeing that a lot of the irreligious atheist people are potentially less happy, and yeah, kind of in a practical sense, that this stuff is maybe the way to go. Don’t have much more of a defense of it than that, really.

Benny: I mean, I think that’s where a lot of the energy for sort of this new religiosity is coming from. And by that I mean people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, maybe Jordan Peterson — you can maybe put him in this camp — but people who were back in the day atheists, I would have said, but then sort of gravitate back towards some sort of cultural religiosity. And my sense is it’s because they’ve looked at what they perceive to be the downstream consequences of an increasingly secular society, and they think that’s bad. And specifically, I think they’re looking at things just like lack of cohesion in culture, and they’re pinpointing those problems.

Cam: Atomization, loneliness, etc.

Benny: Yeah. And then I think they’re making the argument that this is coming from not having some sort of faith-based common core that everyone can appeal to — some sort of national myth, etc., in these societies. And religion can take that place and can be that thing that sort of binds cultures together. And there’s no doubt that’s true. I think it’s just insufficient to say, well, we have these very incomplete, wrong ideas, you know, they have a certain power. Like, they do some job of binding people together — I think they don’t do this super effectively, but no doubt they do it somewhat effectively. But I just don’t understand why we don’t look for better solutions to that problem than old-school religions.

Cam: Well, that’s the big sticking point though — like, can you substitute it with something that is as good, with the benefits and stuff? And I do wonder if that’s more of a Dostoevsky take on the defense of religion as well — that society will go to the dogs. And Tolstoy is more dealing with, maybe in a personal sense, of how does one do good.

Benny: Like your soul and stuff.

Cam: Yeah. Anyway, we’ve been going on a bit.

Dostoevsky vs Tolstoy: who’s the better psychologist?

Rich: Yeah, let’s leave that there. But yeah, I’d like to do some comparisons to Dostoevsky now that we’ve got them both under our belt. So who had that quote? Benny, can you read out that quote?

Cam: Speaking of Jordan Peterson, put on the Voicebrenner.

Rich: You’ve got Canadian accents. You have to do it.

Benny: Which — sorry, I don’t actually know what you’re talking about. Which quote?

Cam: Jordan Peterson has a little short online where I think he’s doing a lecture, and he talks about —

Benny: Oh, this is the sociology versus psychology. Right. Okay, that’s funny — good thing that you reminded me this came from Jordan Peterson, because I was trying to remember who had said this and I couldn’t. But I think he has this bit online as part of one of his lectures, I believe, on literature. But he basically says that Tolstoy is the great sociologist, I guess, of the 19th century, and Dostoevsky is the great psychologist. I’m curious if you guys think that’s true.

Cam: It’s kind of hard to answer without having read War and Peace, which seems to be probably the great sociological work within novels and is probably mainly what he’s referring to. That said, there’s sociology in Anna K — no, I was just making the point that from what I understand —

Rich: I think we can answer that having read 800 pages of his work. Come on.

Benny: Yeah, you’re allowed. You’re allowed to have an opinion.

Rich: Jesus Christ.

Cam: And War and Peace seems to be more sociological probably than AK.

Rich: All right, well, keeping it to the monstrous book that we have read — yeah, at first I wanted to say the opposite, because Tolstoy is definitely the more realist writer, and I was really struck by all of his psychological insights, but they’re more like micro insights, where you read a line and you think, yeah, that is how it feels in that moment, or that is how someone would react to that. I highlighted so many of them throughout this book, like probably a hundred little micro insights where I was like, man, this guy has such keen psychological insight.

Rich: And so I was kind of confused. I wasn’t sure if I had the quote backwards, that it was Dostoevsky who was the psychologist, because Dostoevsky’s characters are not real. They are like cartoon, grotesque characters, or they’re stand-ins for ideas. They’re symbological or cardboard cutouts or whatever. But on further reflection, I think Dostoevsky goes way deeper, and he presents these absurd creations so that you can really engage with the level of individuals who are going through crazy amounts of stress, or who are being fractured and broken up into pieces. And Tolstoy’s lighter touch, more realistic touch, means he can’t quite do that to the same extent. And he definitely gets the win on society — like, you know, Anna is shaped very much by the society in which she exists. It’s like a big story of how she’s responding to that, and the same with Levin. And so much of this book is actually like kind of info dumps really, where Tolstoy is giving his opinions on agrarian economics and on the war and on issues of the day, as well as showing how they’re affecting the characters.

Rich: So yeah, I think that’s a good distinction, but I would say that Tolstoy is the better writer, in my opinion, by far — just in terms of the clarity of his writing, not just the realism, because that’s more probably a matter of taste, but his dialogue is so much better. And yeah, I think he’s a wonderful writer, even though Dostoevsky’s crazy fever dreams are maybe more interesting, or more fertile ground to really get into somebody’s head.

Benny: Yeah, I think that’s right. I’m going to stop saying this, or at least I’m going to start disagreeing with people who say this. Because, as you said, Rich, I think Tolstoy is clearly both a talented psychologist and sociologist. Like you said, there’s so many times in this book where he’s capturing exactly how jealousy influences your thought process, or exactly the sort of dynamics that arise between a couple that’s fighting. And there’s tons of instances where you can recognize those sorts of emotions from your own life. He’s both very talented at recognizing the dynamics between groups, but also in people’s own heads as they relate to those dynamics.

Benny: And then I think Dostoevsky is incredibly good at a very specific sort of psychology, and it’s the psychology of torment, basically — and obsession, and following an idea to its ending and losing yourself in it and sort of losing your grasp of reality because you become so obsessed with a certain idea or a certain set of ideas. And he does that masterfully, but that’s a very specific psychological disorder almost that he’s capturing. And he captures that for 400 pages in a row, such that you can really feel the character’s torment. But it’s almost like the psychology of someone who’s wrapped up in their own mind to such an extent that they’re not even receiving signals from the outside world. Like, Raskolnikov is this guy who’s caught in his own head basically, and he’s not even almost taking in input from the outside, and so he’s not responding to sociological cues like Tolstoy’s characters are. So it’s more that Tolstoy’s amazing at both, and Dostoevsky is amazing at a very specific psychological problem, I think.

Cam: Yeah, I was going to say there’s almost two types of psychology. There’s one kind of like everyday normal things that people relate to and go, oh, that’s a keen insight, that is capturing human nature, which Tolstoy has demonstrated. And the more kind of like, here’s a case study of someone losing his mind, which is true, but it’s less kind of this quotidian everyday psychological insight, which, I mean, Tolstoy’s got a little bit of that as well, with the extent of Anna’s downward spiral. And as we said with the sociology, a big part of the book — and maybe potentially the main reading for a lot of people — was how society’s expectations have impinged on people.

Rich: Interesting. Also, I did find that — so just in terms of the who influenced who, Dostoevsky was a huge Tolstoy fan, because Tolstoy predated him. He was like a Titan in the industry already. But it didn’t go the other way. They never met, like you said, Cam, but Tolstoy was not a fan. He called Dostoevsky’s style overwrought and melodramatic, which is exactly what I thought put it as well. And he said that The Brothers Karamazov was unpleasant and far-fetched, which is pretty funny. But reading this has weirdly made me fonder of Dosto, I think, because it’s very fun to explore those weird edge cases of human psychology. I think that’s the distinction you got at, Cam — it’s like the quotidian versus the edge cases. And the edge cases just are more exciting and more interesting.

Benny: And now I respect Dostoevsky’s philosophy more, I think, than Tolstoy’s, which makes it easier to read.

Rich: They’re both kind of doing the same thing, like, philosophically, aren’t they? Like, return to tradition.

Benny: This is what we disagree about, I think. I still have more respect for Dostoevsky’s now.

Cam: Yeah, I think they both have brands of return. They do feel different though as well.

Benny: All right, fellas.

Cam: We did it.

Rich: We knocked it off.

Cam: We fucking did it, holy shit.

Benny: Nice. Big book of the summer.

Rich: Feels good. It’s a big book.

Benny: It does feel good.

Rich: So would we read War and Peace? I guess is a logical — well, I mean, he has other novels too.

Cam: Can definitely answer that sociology question if we do that, mate.

Benny: I would read it, I think. Not right away, but I would read it.

Rich: I never thought I’d say this, but I think I’d rather read another Dosto before going back.

Cam: I think at some point you have to do War and Peace, right? I mean, if enough people are calling it the best novel of all time —

Would we recommend this book?

Rich: I just somewhat downgrade people’s opinions after having finished this, because it was great, but to be honest, I don’t know if I would recommend this book. I like — actually, I wouldn’t, because Phoebe asked if she should read it and I said no. Even though I really loved the first two parts I loved and I was so excited by it, but I can’t, hand on heart, recommend this book. Can you?

Benny: I can, I think. I think I would.

Rich: Okay.

Benny: But part of the recommendation is that I know that it’s nice to have read the book because it’s a classic. And it’s an easy classic to read, right? Like, of all the big 800-page classics — yeah, so part of it, I’d be recommending it for the fact of having read Tolstoy. But I think it also is a pretty delightful read for the first time.

Rich: That seems like a horrible reason to recommend something. Isn’t that just buying into this whole idea of checking boxes and doing something to show off about having done it, rather than the intrinsic experience?

Cam: It’s part of the culture, mate. It’s part of joining the cultural conversation.

Benny: I don’t know, I mean, I think, yeah, I think there’s something to that. Like, I mean, why did we read it? Like, did it have nothing to do at all with the fact that it’s a classic? Did we just think this was the next best book content-wise that we were going to read?

Rich: No, that’s why we picked it. But I thought you were saying you should read it just to say that you’ve — there’s something of value to have said that you’ve read it, kind of thing, independent of whether or not you —

Benny: Well, I think it’s valuable to understand why people like Tolstoy, where he sits and compares with other great writers of that generation, and to know if you like Tolstoy as much as he’s revered in the canon — that is useful, I think.

Rich: Yeah, but I think that’s my point, right? It’s, I’m once again finding myself surprised that such a celebrated writer has such non-inspired, passive, maybe even regressive worldviews. And so I’m like, it’s impossible to miss that given how didactic that last section is, and yet it feels like my responsibility to say, hey, I don’t know about this book, like — yeah, it’s got some really great elements — but to kind of cut back against the reverence for it. When you think, have people actually liked what — I don’t know.

Benny: Oh, but will you — sorry, like, will you only recommend a book if you agree with the message? Like, for me, it’s like there’s clearly — like we were saying, it’s great sociology, it’s a delight to read for the first 750 pages. I disagree with Levin’s arc and what happens to him, but the arc is interesting and it captured my attention the whole time. I thought the characters are written really well. I’m a bit confused — it’s not as if there’s lots of books I don’t agree with the message but I think they’re well-written books and would still recommend them.

Rich: No, it’s not that. It’s the overall enjoyment. I mean, it’s good to grapple with these ideas, right? But I think it’s, yeah, it’s like the structure of it, where it starts so well and ends so poorly. And also maybe I just didn’t enjoy it as much as you guys did. Like, I skipped and glazed over a lot of boring stuff around the elections, around land management, around Levin’s intellectual discussions.

Cam: Yeah, what about part seven, what about Anna’s decline, did you —

Rich: Even part seven I didn’t love, just because I didn’t love being around Anna. I honestly felt like Corleone. I was like, look how they massacred my girl, kind of thing. I felt like it wasn’t true to the Anna that we’d been introduced to. And I was sort of not mad about that, but I was like surprised, or like not fully brought along. So I think there were large chunks of this book that I didn’t enjoy. And you know that feeling of, you get this big setup and then you don’t get the payoff, and you feel like something is lacking — and even though the setup was really great, like you watch the first episode of a TV show, awesome, and then it just kind of like peters out. That’s kind of my overall vibe with this book. Kind of feel like I got jepped a little bit.

Cam: It’s interesting. I wonder how much is it that you went and got spoiled on Reddit, like —

Rich: Reason number 642 to get off Reddit.

Cam: Like part-fucking-three. I wonder how the journey would have been otherwise.

Rich: Yeah, I don’t know. I’ll never know. But, I don’t know, it was foreshadowed heavily, she mentioned suicide herself multiple times within that spiral. So I don’t think it would have been the hugest shock, to be honest.

Cam: So, Benny, I think when you were reading it, you were like, what did I have realised at this point, and then like a page later, like is this when I would have realized it?

Benny: Yeah, exactly. Kept asking myself counterfactually, would I have guessed this is coming?

Benny: All right, so what are we doing next?

Cam: I like the idea of a short story palate cleanser after 800 pages of religious doctrine, I think. Get some sci-fi — no, I think short story is a great idea.

Benny: But should we also release the next book? In case people want to get a head start on the read.

Rich: Yeah, good idea.

Cam: Yeah, we can. I’m often an indecisive person, but it is kind of flipping the coin.

Benny: Or have you not decided? Okay. Let’s flip the coin now.

Rich: Not sure if Christianity good or bad.

Cam: Yeah. C.S. Lewis. I was keen to read another of John Williams’s books — the author of Stoner. He’s only got two other books, so the one I’m choosing is Butcher’s Crossing, which is a kind of neo-western. I think choosing it pretty much on the back of Stoner being a great book, checking out the rest of his work. And this one’s only about, I think, 300 or 350 pages, so a bit easier to get through.

Rich: All right. Thank you very much. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have any thoughts or comments, feedback on Anna Karenina — what we got wrong, what we got right, or any of the other books we have read — please get in touch. We’d love to hear your feedback and we will read it out on the air. Our email is douevenlit at gmail dot com — D-O-U, just the letter U, evenlit at gmail dot com. And until then, we’ll see you next time. Bye, everybody.

Cam: See ya.