Here’s a weird hack for surviving the stress of our doomsday news cycles: Read Anna Karenina instead. At 860 pages, the only way to finish it would be to skip all the news about how we’re really sticking it to those nasty Canadians and finally giving some tax relief to America's trillionaires. But that’s not the hack.
The hack is that it will reassure you. If you slow down and let it, this masterpiece can remind you of the fragile, complicated, fascinating intricacies of being human, of being in a family, and of love. The novel is about so much more than just Anna and Vronsky, those crazy lovebirds. In fact, I kind of feel like the melodic title Anna Karenina was forced on Tolstoy by his management team. Possible more accurate working titles of the manuscript: Levin the Sad Sack Gentleman Farmer Or Levin, Russia’s Most Socially Awkward Overthinker. Just joking—of course Tolstoy named it. He’s the man behind War and Peace, after all. Or maybe that was also his management team.
The first time I read the book, years ago, I skimmed over the sections that weren’t specifically about Anna and Vronsky, which is a shame because Tolstoy has so much more to say in this book than the dangers of train stations when you’re feeling down. (Spoiler alert?) It’s about Anna’s self-indulgent brother and his wife; it’s about Anna’s uptight husband; it’s about the love affair of Levin and Kitty; it’s about society’s mores, the double standards for men and women, and the lengths we all go to for the sake of “appearances” or status. It’s about Russia, where ludicrously wealthy counts and princesses with lives of comical luxury are center stage, but always just offstage and very much acknowledged by Tolstoy are Russia’s millions of impoverished peasants. The menfolk often discuss the harrowing state of Russian socioeconomics, maybe whilst slurping oysters or lounging beside a pond after a morning of hunting snipe. They wrangle with what they owe their former serfs. Do these fantastically wealthy aristocrats have a duty to help create a just society? Opinions differ, and most of the time, they agree to disagree before toodling off to their next fancy dress ball. Dance away, rich folks. As we all know, the Bolshevik Revolution is waiting in the wings. (Spoiler alert?)
Jeesh, billionaires exploiting labor and condescendingly deciding what to do with millions of people who don’t seem to have much say in the matter. Sound familiar? Let’s hope Anna Karenina does not serve as a possible blueprint for how all this brokenness1 can play out in the USA. Reading it did, however, make me feel like, “Welp, the world has seen all this before, and somehow humanity has survived.” I don’t know how that’s in any way a comfort, considering many millions of Russians died in the 20th Century under Stalin, but there ya go.
I think it worked for me because of Leo Tolstoy. It was the comforting sensation of being in the confident hands of a genius. Tolstoy’s hyperawareness was like the literary version of an IV–the book got in my veins. I committed to its 800,000 pages, and my reward was that I inhabited their opulent world, experienced their emotions, and understood their motivations. Oblonsky’s self-indulgence, Anna’s passion, Karenin’s rigid misery, and Levin’s doofy earnestness might be their calling cards, but Tolstoy gives you every dimension of their humanity. No one is all good, or all bad. Or all doofy.
Levin’s story in particular knocked me out, even though it was maybe sort of boring—so much reaping of wheat. The passages where Tolstoy describes how Levin is moved to tears to see Kitty tenderly caring for his dying brother or his epiphanies when out in nature with the farm’s peasant labor are transcendent.
I also appreciate how unconflicted Tolstoy was about the omniscient voice. We buzz like one of Levin’s bees from person to person–existing inside their racing minds. And it doesn’t feel gimmicky or show-offy. It’s just Tolstoy Tolstoying. At one point, while a few of the men (all seemingly named Alexei) go hunting, Tolstoy even gives us a few pages inside the mind of Levin’s dog.
When Oblonsky’s wife Dolly takes a carriage ride to visit Anna at Vronsky’s sumptuous estate, we go deep inside her wandering mind. She frets about Anna’s complicated social status, then envies her freedom; she wonders at how this solo getaway is her first since marriage, and lets herself imagine alternate lives for herself. As she mulled over the exhaustions and deprivations of young motherhood, she could have been a suburban mom taking NJ transit into NYC to visit her wealthy friend with a fantastic high-power career and no kids to tend.
Added bonus for anyone who ever struggles with keeping character names straight: It’s so absolutely hopeless with this novel you need not bother. Just give up, I did. Everyone seems to go by 56 different monikers, but then again are also maybe all named Alexei. I just accepted that I did not know who was speaking 65% of the time. If you feel like that pathetic level of comprehension disqualifies me as a person who can write about the novel, so be it.
As devoted readers of The Pithy know, I'm a huge fan of reading purely for escape. This novel didn’t offer escape. It offered me a kind of peace. The peace I got from Anna Karenina was seeing myself and all of us in these people living in Russia in 1874. The same petty impulses and halting insecurities, the same contradictory and complicated inner lives, the same clout chasing, the same reprehensible chasm between rich and poor, the same fallible humanity. I suppose it’s also heartbreaking to see that here we are in 2025 and in so many ways little has changed. Maybe we’ll never learn. But to be alive now and to read this novel written so long ago and feel so connected to these people, well. That’s something. I think they call it art?2
On brokenness: Please read or listen to this article from the New York Times, titled “She’s a Foot Soldier in America’s Losing War with Chronic Disease.” It’s about a nurse/hero who drives potholed roads every day to visit her patients in their homes. We’re getting breaking news alerts every 7 minutes about the clowns in DC crowing about fixing what’s broken while they clear the path for rampant grift, and this story is a devastating reminder that this country is indeed gravely broken. We have gigantic problems and no one is offering viable solutions.
Humming Dumb Ways to Die is a really callous way to think about Anna’s tragic death. You’re heartless.
I LOVED Anna Karenina when I read it for the first time 50 million years ago before having children. Thanks to you, I'll read it again, because I don't remember a thing.
Babushkas off to the Russian writers!