Where Has the Time Gone?: My Summer Alone on an Island of Perspective

"When I doubted, it was hard for me, but easier than now. When I doubted, there was hope; but now there is no hope and even so I doubt everything."

- Alexei Karenin (IV.xii)

Anna K Day Count: 43

Anna K Page Count: 405 
Total Tolstoy Day Count: 192

Total Tolstoy Page Count: 1629

(The title of this blog is dedicated with a nod and a wink to my good friend and brother-in-literacy, David Trujillo.)

Two months after finishing War and Peace. A month and some days since I started Anna Karenina. Life continues to charge steadily onward. As it turns out, there is life after War and Peace and not only is it busy, it is filled with all manner of responsibilities, demands, obligations, and diversions. I am still reading Anna Karenina, though I feel I've read far less of it at this point than I had really intended to. In honesty, I'm about halfway through the novel when, according to my lofty hopes posited at the beginning of reading, I expected to be done (or darn close to it) by this point.

Here are some things that are keeping me from that goal:

• Summer is one of the few times in my life where I get 'me-time' - that is to say, time for Stephen to do the things he desperately enjoys and wants to do. While this certainly does include reading Tolstoy (nerd that I am), it also includes being a part of theatrical productions. Before the school year had even ended, I got a chance to be a part of a great two-man show called Greater Tuna at Spotlight Players, a local community theater. The show was very well-received (read a review of it from a local community theatre goer/reviewer/actor/director here) and may be one of the best productions I've ever been a part of to date. After that show wrapped, I headed down south of Indy to Martinsville, IN to do the third part of a trilogy (I had been involved in the other two parts as well and wanted to complete my character's arc). That show will wrap after school is already started, so - needless to say - my summer has been theatre-packed.
• Summer is also a time where I try to supplement my income by picking up a part-time job. Before I taught, I worked as a head cashier at a local Barnes & Noble, and over the last couple of years, they've been kind enough to let me come back and take on the role of a bookseller during those long summer months. It's a good gig and I love the people I work with, but it is often time-consuming when you're working four-to-five days a week.
• A [now] former co-worker's interest in the new Battlestar Galactica prompted me to start rewatching the series. This just in: It is [still] pretty awesome!
• Not that this has been especially time-consuming, but many of you contacted me after my last post, so I thought it would be worth a mention - I found a new job teaching here in Indy! God has been good and I'm glad to be able to do what I feel He's called me to do.

All that being said, I've still managed to get about halfway through Anna K. I realized early on that my projected hope of getting through fifteen pages everyday was an unrealistic pipe dream, but I read when I could and noticed a few similarities and differences between War and Peace and Anna K.

To start, it took me longer to engage with Anna Karenina than it did with War and Peace. W&P drops you right into the middle of a crowded party, enabling you to meet several characters at once and see how they interact within society as a whole, giving you instant insight into their various characters. With Anna K, we are dropped into the middle of some action - the impending division of the Oblonsky family due to infidelity - but we are not introduced to multiple characters all at once. Rather, we are slowly introduced to the various characters one by one: first Stephan Oblonsky, then his wife Dolly, then his friend Levin, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, nearly a hundred pages (or so it seems - it's actually just a page or two over sixty) have gone by before we are even introduced to the titular character.

And speaking of Anna's introduction - allow me to take a sidebar to say that it is, quite possibly, one of the best character introductions that I have ever read in all of literature. Tolstoy draws us into the lure of Anna Karenina through the eyes of the young Count Alexei Vronsky, who is captivated by her instantly. His captivation is ours as Tolstoy begins to describe the most alluring, enchanting woman. So enthralled are we (and Vronsky) by her that it is only after a page of description of this sort (which I absolutely devoured, by the way) that we realize that we don't even know who this woman is! Tolstoy has yet to tell us her name; in fact, so ensconced in her beauty and presence are we that it is only when Tolstoy tells us that this woman - yes, she - is the titular character we have been waiting for the entire novel thus far. That realization, I daresay, captivates us all the more. From that moment, we - like Vronsky - are flies in her web, pawns in her chess game.

One device that kept War and Peace consistently interesting and engaging was Tolstoy's constant jumping around between his various characters and plot points. One minute we would be in a salon at a society party hosted by Helene Bezukhov or Anna Pavlovna, the next we would be whisked off to some battlefield alongside Andrei Bolkonsky or Nikolai Rostov. After that, we might be taken out of the narrative altogether and treated to a dissertation by Tolstoy on his theory of history or war. Not knowing what was coming was part of the fun - we were on our toes and ready for anything.

Anna K follows a similar track in some ways as Tolstoy is constantly leaping between his characters - most notably Anna, Vronsky, Karenin, and Levin. However, unlike War and Peace, Tolstoy does not leave the narrative to wax philosophical. Rather, he places his own words, thoughts, and rather obvious attacks on the intelligentsia of his time into the words of his characters. Most of the time (if not all the time), this happens with Konstantin Levin, a character many scholars believe to be the closest character Tolstoy ever wrote to himself. (Levin does, even to the casual observer, share much in common with War and Peace's Pierre Bezukhov - a character that many scholars view as the closest character to Tolstoy in that book.) While these philosophic and politic 'breaks' are written into the narrative, it often becomes tiresome (at least, it does to this reader) in that they take away from the action of the narrative and, in many cases, can bring it to a grinding halt. While, yes, they do serve to tell us something of certain characters (most notably Levin, Oblonsky, or Karenin), they seem to do very little for the overall story.

One of the things about Anna K that struck me very early on was the similarity between many of the characters there and in War and Peace. Indeed, in his introduction, Richard Pevear takes note that many of the characters in Anna K (with the exception of Vronsky and Anna) were based on people that Tolstoy himself knew (he, of course, was Levin while his wife, Sophia, was Kitty). Still, I found some interesting connections between characters in War and Peace and in Anna K:

• Konstantin Levin (Anna K) = Pierre Bezukhov (W&P)
• Kitty Shcherbatskaya (Anna K) = Lize Bolkonskaya + Natasha Rostova (both W&P)
• Prince Alexander Shcherbatsky (Anna K) = Count Ilya Rostov (W&P)
• Alexei Karenin (Anna K) = Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky (W&P)
• Alexei Vronsky (Anna K) = Anatole Karagin + Nikolai Rostov + Boris Drubretskoy (all W&P)
• Stepan Oblonsky (Anna K) = Vassily Denisov (W&P)
• Dolly Oblonsky + Varenka (both Anna K) = Marya Bolkonskaya (W&P)
• Betsy Tverskaya (Anna K) = Helene Bezukhov (W&P)
• Yashvin (Anna K) = Fyodor Dolokhov (W&P)
• Nikolai Levin (Anna K) = Platon Karataev (W&P)

It stands to reason that a writer writes what he knows. It makes sense that if Tolstoy were looking for interesting characters, he wouldn't look much further than the ones right around him. And it makes sense that if his base characters are the same, there are bound to be similarities. I'm not saying that these characters are by any means identical. Far from it. But there are certain similarities of habit and character that I find too glaring (at least in my mind) to overlook.

Of course, these are only my observations from having read the first half of the book. There is certainly more coming that may do much to change my perceptions of these characters and they may end up being very different people by the end. Who's to say? (At this point, not me.) I just thought the similarities between these characters were interesting.

That being said, the Anna K reading group (which has withered down to only a few of the mighty group who started out) is planning to meet within the next couple of weeks. I'll let you know how it goes (I hope).

Until next time, true believers...