Anna Karenina - Day 1

Up to page 83.

Let me begin by saying, I did not know what to expect really. I knew that I would probably enjoy Anna Karenina if I could get into it because I enjoy most classics once I take on the ordeal of reading them. I don't think that I expected to be captured by the narrative in the first 12 pages, but there is something enchanting about Tolstoy's writing (and Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation too.)

It's the characters that are drawing me in. I haven't met them all yet but I already consider Prince Stepan Arkadyich Oblonsky one of those useless people that irritate me at parties. All smiles and two-faced agreeableness and no real substance. They always agree because they haven't spent time really thinking about anything.  His wife, Princess Darya Alexandrovna (Dolly), I feel really sorry for. Oblonsky is a cad and a cheat and she has every right to be angry with him. The whole book begins with Oblonsky being distressed because he got caught in an affair with his children's french governess, except he's not really distressed. He knows he ought to be, but he's infuriatingly unaffected by it in any real way. He reminds me of the puppy who gets scolded for chewing on shoes but keeps trying to continue chewing on them while crying for being scolded. It makes me want to smack him with a rolled up newspaper.

Then there's Konstantin Dmitrich Levin. I find myself wondering about poor Levin. He's practically Oblonsky's foil. If Oblonsky doesn't really care or think about things in a meaningful way, Levin goes off the other end and cares/thinks way too much. He's perfectly infatuated with this girl Kitty, or Princess Ekaterina Alexandrovna, but keeps convincing himself that he is unworthy of her, then changing his mind, then getting discouraged and giving up again.

Kitty on the other hand is a complete idiot, but I forgive her...I think she is just really very young and more than a little silly. She's infatuated with Count Vronsky who is younger and handsomer than poor Levin. I'm really hopeful that Kitty will get her head screwed on right and reconsider Levin, but that seems unlikely. Vronsky, by the way, is a jerk. So far he seems like an analog for the all-American football star/prom king, who takes female attention as a kind of God given right in appreciation of his splendid testosterone prettiness.

Notice that the title character hasn't even shown up yet. Anna Karenina shows up, finally, on page 61 in my edition. Within 20 pages she has fixed, at least temporarily, Oblonsky's marriage, become a sensation in Moscow society, and caused Vronsky to ditch Kitty at a ball. So she's like a bizarre Russian Mary Poppins - a catalyst that turns everything upside down and who everyone falls in love with. I don't know what I think of her yet, but I'm itching to get back to it so I can find out.