Anna Karenina
Finally I am 80 pages from completing the masterpiece of Tolstoy. I have been nudging and nibbling through it all this lockdown and the so called unlock days of human existence. It is a fairly big novel and as with others of Tolstoy like War and Peace, a lot of Russian names to wrap your head around.
Sample this, Oblonsky, Vronsky, Levin, Karenin, Kitty scherbatsky, the main characters around which the plot revolves with Anna at the center. Tolstoy generally goes very deep into the heads of his characters. It is like you are witnessing every minute detail of thought that is going through them. Many a time, you can pass over them. But some of them are so intense, you are sure to be choked, get tearful or be wonderstruck at the way they all can be painted in words without feeling artificial about them.
Even after a century it can make you live in Petersburg and Moscow. Travel along the country side of Russia and savor the wine and bread with the peasants. Tolstoy’s characters are placed in some intense moments throughout the novel.
A mother seeing her son after separating from the husband and sneaking into the house she was living, the artificial ball room conversations, the romance of a serving officer for a married woman, the worries of a mother on how to bring up her children with the husband freely roaming around, a brother witnessing his diseased brother go through the pangs of death as it happens slowly, the predicament of a young married woman having to tell her older husband that she wants to separate, a bunch of relatives going hunting in the bushes, the torment a husband goes through for his loving wife when she is delivering a child, the grand ball rooms, the restaurants, the country estates, horse races and all of these moments brought out poignantly that the reader will have many moments of reflection into his own life leading into a self-analysis of sorts.
You may ask, what one gets out of reading such novels?
Without a doubt, good novels are like time capsules. They are portals that lead you into a different world of space and time and make you see and feel the moments that unfold there. It is far different from a good movie in that it gets into you very deeply and may even interfere with the way you look at the world. If you have not been appreciative of women around you, you may begin to look at them with awe and respect when you read about the pain they go through in the process of delivering a child and bringing them up or even separating from them. If you have not been seeing men around you beyond the fact that they are superfluous, merry making, carefree people, you may get to see more serious, sensitive and caring men who exist and who are willing to share the burden of living with their women. If you never had questions about dying, you will suddenly be shocked to find yourself introspecting on them.
Our lives are filled with a lot of insignificant events. They overwhelm you, they bore you, they make you question this existence. Not that by reading such novels you have ready made answers for your life. The vagaries of life and the tricky situations you can find yourself in often throws you out of your harness. Novels like these make you more sensitive to the world and people around you and less hostile to the situation you are in. It increases the acceptance of yourself as a being and increases the chances of living this life the way it unfolds, without remorse and fear.
