: Anna Karenina Parts 6, 7, 8 by Leo Tolstoy - Book Summary, Analysis, Review

First of all, congratulations on finishing one of the most popular and celebrated books of all time. A moment of applause for all of you guys out there. Golf clap. Golf clap. Today we are talking about just parts six through eight, aka the ending of the book. We're assuming that you've read it and, okay, we hit the spoilers, I'm telling you. And man, I just want to say we are so good at this. It's almost like we know what we're doing. We got a couple things right, we got a couple things wrong. Yeah, fair enough. So let's talk about what happened in part six first. So Kitty and Levin apparently live in a fraternity and sorority house. Like literally everyone's come to visit them, everyone's staying with them. It is literally a party. We got the Levoves, Varenka, Dali and her family, Krosnichev. And I think this really reinforces the idea that literary fiction is just a genre where a bunch of people go to each other's houses. And party. Now, Varenka and Krosnichev go out to pick mushrooms. They flirt a little, but that's about it. Oblonsky arrives with Vasenka Veslovsky, Vasenka, who flirts with Kitty and Levin throws him out due to his jealousy. Dali goes on a day trip to visit Anna at the Vronsky's estate, where there seems to be a lot of people and still Veslovsky. And at first, at first things seem grand. But when she sees that some things aren't what they seem, she realizes that her life isn't that bad, really. After all, Vronsky wants to solidify his union with Anna, but Anna refuses because that would separate her from her boys or Yosha. She also whispers that she will not get pregnant again to Dali as she believes Vronsky would no longer find her attractive. Anna takes little interest in her child with Vronsky, Annie, and is even neglectful, begins taking morphine. So things are going great, definitely on the upswing for Anna here. Negative. Oh, boy. Vronsky heads to Moscow, good old Moscow, for nobility elections, as do the Levin's for the final months of Kitty's pregnancy. Good things happen in Moscow, that's for sure. And Vronsky revels in the elections while Levin languishes. Vronsky rushes back home upon receiving a letter about Annie being sick upon returning. He learns that it was a farce and beginning to feel trapped. Masculine independence ain't working out so well in this relationship. Anna finally agrees to get a divorce and they move to Moscow. Let's talk about six. So first of all, Krosnichev and Varenka, is this a side plot? Or what do you think about this section? For me, I felt like was Tolstoy trying to give us a glimpse into these types of situations don't just happen in the rich and famous? Is this something that is commonplace for everybody? And I think that he's trying to paint this realism across all lives in Russia, or all time, maybe, for that matter. I also really like this quote, I've always loved you. And when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be. And I think that's to your earlier point about Tolstoy being a master. We have so many people we know in our lives where we have the project. There are significant others just a wreck in terms of not caring for them, not caring for themselves sometimes. And for some reason, our friends, our family, they take on these people because they see the potential in them. They don't necessarily love them just as they are, but they see how much better they could be. And it's almost like there's like this kick we get from trying to improve or make people be just a little bit different. And I love how this novel speaks to that too, about how you have to love the person for who they are. Yeah, and we see in the story even where he uses the ellipses because he doesn't describe what's going on here. We don't see that meaning in there, because I think that might be he's trying to tell us what love is, what does it mean to them, their relationship. How do we describe that? Do these two people probably don't really know what it is to love another person because they probably don't love themselves at this point in the novel? There's something to be said about the nonverbal communication, right? The way that some characters can just get other characters and the way that the characters that are trying to build projects out of other characters in a sense too, they don't necessarily just get the other person. They have to use their words or letters and trick them into coming home with letters about sick children because they're trying to mold and change the other person instead of seeing and trying to relate to them. I feel like Anna's like that character that's trying to get other people to see her, right? We'll see it in the next chapter with what she does with Levin and such, but she's trying to get all this attention rather than care about what Vronsky wants. She just assumes he's after other women instead of actually really seeing him and understanding the nonverbal cues that Vronsky does care for her, right? He does have those immediate concerns for her at various points in this, but she doesn't see that. All she sees is her own insecurities. I think nowadays we would call that projection, right? She's the one that cheated and stepped out and she's the one that is a little bit insecure, and now she's projecting those things onto Vronsky and that she thinks the worst of him because she thinks the worst of herself. And maybe even just if we're going to go there, we're going to bring up show, don't tell, right? Tolstoy is not telling you what these characters think per se or how you should think about these characters, I should say. He's showing you these characters. Instead of being a caring wife, he's showing how Anna is being neurotic. She's causing harm to herself, masochistic even to an extent. And I think that's one of the beauties of Tolstoy's story here is that it is the epitome of characters living out emotions and feelings instead of telling you about the emotions and feelings. It's brilliant writing. All right, so I got a question for you. Let's get back to our boy, Levin. What did you think about how his character is evolving here with the honest versus dishonest work and how he's trying to feel out his kind of religious vibes? Oh yeah, that throws us back to the Tolstoy Triggered Project when we go through his short stories, right? Remember how we'd write about usury? So the idea that you shouldn't lend money to, like lending money should be a gift to friends and such. And you shouldn't abuse it to the point where it harms or hurts others. Like you should be thinking about the other person to our points that we were just kind of discussing. It's obviously much more complex, but he writes about it in a very distrustful way. So here's Levin, Vesenka, and Oblonsky, and they're all having this debate over what does it mean in our society. So it's like he shifts from like the personal relationships into more of the political agenda that he has. And here's where he's talking about kind of lending money, basically, the bank's role. And typical Tolstoy, right? You have that quote where Levin's talking about how a superior shouldn't be paid more, but no less for the work. That's dishonest, right? That's everyday, buddy. Tolstoy would not have fit in well, but he doesn't view the roles of management well. He thinks you need to be connected to the work, connected to the land. We saw all of that, the prose in chapter, or part three, I should say, about being connected to the land. And it's very beautifully written, the way that the farming is exalted. And it kind of comes to a culmination here of this is what gives value to, he thinks gives value to the people, or at least it's a discussion. I think Tolstoy's clearly got his opinion on what's right. For sure. I think that Tolstoy would struggle today with what we call middle management, where somebody isn't producing anything, isn't really doing anything, but just managing people. And of course, that feels like, kind of an overlord over the serfs, and he's not gonna be all about that at all. Yeah, that's a good point, that it is maybe a product of its time having just abolished serfdom. All these enslaved people are now free, that it could kind of resemble that. That's a good point, that that is a product of its time. But I do think he is very intelligent on this point, because he'll have this quote where he says, it's just this, my dear boy, one must do one of two things, either admit that the existing order of society is just, and then stick up for one's rights in it, or acknowledge that you are enjoying unjust privileges, as I do, and then enjoy them and be satisfied. And I think that's actually quite smart, where it's like, look, you need to make a decision on where you are and move on, because that seems to be Levin's deal. He's a waffler. Levin waffles left and right when it comes to making decisions, does he not? No, for sure. I think that what I kind of took away from the quote is that you need to own up to your mistakes, and that Levin needs to own up, or I don't know, maybe a little bit, you know, man up and do what needs to be done, so to speak, or just make choices and stick with them, and it's okay if you make mistakes, as long as you understand those mistakes and try to be better for it. Yeah, let's move into part seven. We get a lot of Kitty and Levin snapshots, man. We see them together awaiting an overdue baby. Levin works on his book. They dislike Vronsky, but reconcile with him, and he drinks a little bit too much in the city. Oh, he does work on the book? I can't write the book. So here's what's interesting. You pointed this out to me in our pre-planning discussion here. This is the first time Levin and Anna meet, is it not? Like 600 pages in. A book with two main plots, right? You've got the Anna Karenina who is choosing immoralistic decisions and maybe making her life worse, and then Levin, the boy that makes these moralistic, honest choices and honest hard work, and his life continually gets better for family and other moral reasons as well. Boom. Finally, here in chapter seven, we collide. So Levin meets Anna and is stunned by her beauty and wonderful painting, and Anna is upset as her charms can't seem to help her relationships with Vronsky, and it worsens. Meanwhile, Kitty is late for her pregnancy, but finally goes into labor. Levin is panicked and finds himself praying with no explanation as to why, but it all works out. Baby Mitcha is born. And elsewhere, Vronsky, shocker, short on cash. He's the guy that you don't go to Las Vegas with because he's going to lose all your money. Oh, I left my wallet in the truck. Heads to stuffy Moscow. Have you noticed how all the bad stuff happens kind of like in Petersburg and Moscow is kind of like the more modern? Everything's great there. Yeah, yeah. Definitely Tolstoy had some issues there in St. Petersburg. I would love to reread this book with that in mind because I started paying attention to it here recently and I'm like, you know what? He's doing something here because if you remember, Moscow and Petersburg are the, or were, one's an old capital, one's the new capital of Russia. Yeah, exactly. I wonder if you could take pieces out and kind of split it off in almost two novels and like all of the one storyline here and all the one storyline there and how they are paralleled like these characters are. God, Moscow would be so boring. You need crappy stuff to happen to be interesting in a book. Indeed. So Oblonsky talks with Karenin to advance his situation and also tries to convince Karenin to get a divorce from Anna. Kind of upsets him, upsets Suryosha, obviously, who's trying to forget his mother awkwardly. Oblonsky returns to slimy Petersburg where he feels much more comfortable. Karenin sees a mystic that talks in his sleep. I don't know. It's kind of a weird situation. We'll have to talk about that. Landau. Alright, Anna continues to accuse Vronsky of infidelity and they quarrel. More and more. Things are going great there. When Vronsky takes off, Anna spirals into despair. She's delirious and thinks the world despises her. Or maybe that's just what your life is when you make all these deceitful or immoral decisions. You think the world's out to get you. I've seen it. I've seen it and I can totally understand that. But Anna eventually walks onto the train track, sees the vision of the old peasant that we saw the dreams earlier and looks up, sees the peasants in her dreams and it kind of cuts. Like you get the idea that she's throwing herself at the train and it's not described in detail the same way to your point earlier that her lovemaking with Vronsky is just an ellipsis. Her decision to choose death in a sense of the contraception and not having babies with Vronsky just skips right over. There's something about how Tolstoy doesn't use words. He only likes to show action to learn who these characters really are because sometimes it's all about show, don't tell. Yeah, less is definitely more here. You let your imagination fill it in and it makes it oh so much worse or better, depending on your view, I guess. So something clicked with me here. I was getting frustrated with Anna in part six. I'm like, girl, come on. You need to think about Vronsky. Vronsky needs to think about you. You need to stop driving into yourselves. And that's when I realized, in my opinion, my take on this is that Tolstoy got me. He got me and I think he got a lot out of people who read this who maybe feel for these characters and might be frustrated with some of the decisions that they're making. In this whole book, the idea of public and private life, private even being internal to us, like what I really want and what I say I want, is he's tricking us, I think, to becoming a member of Russian society. We're starting to judge Anna. We're starting to judge these characters the same way the rest of Russia is, which makes us complicit almost in the torture that is being put upon Anna, which is part of the brilliance of why I think this novel works so well. I think seven is the most important chapter. Obviously, we have the climax of the story with Anna committing suicide via train, mind you. So I called it those trains were going to come back to haunt us. Tolstoy was very anti-train for some reason, and he used it as the death device here for poor Anna. And for me, this chapter may be the most important chapter besides just that point to bring it back to the beginning of the chapter. It's a structural point in the novel where we see these two parallel stories of Anna and Levin finally collide, and nothing really comes about of it. They meet and they discuss, but when they discuss, when they talk, what do we notice about their conversation? They understand one another. Levin understands where she's coming from. He gets her, quote, truth. And I think that there is more than just this social connection between them. There is this kind of spiritual idea. And we know that Tolstoy was a very spiritual, religious person at certain times of his life. I think that it's showing that there are these different perspectives of how people will seek truth in their lives. And we finally see that these two people, while understanding one another, are going to have very different routes to seek those truths. And in the end, Levin is going to, quote, get the happily ever after. And Anna gets maybe her happily ever after because that's what she wanted was a release, I think, from all of this because she didn't know how to truly be happy. But it's sad in our point of view, probably because, you know, she doesn't get the happily ever after with her family. She has to die to achieve her happily ever after, which is just heartbreaking. Well, isn't that part of the timelessness of this novel? You know, I'm speaking from a modern day, looking at people who lived hundreds of years ago. So so, you know, we're going to have to go through some games of telephone of things that have changed. But something that hasn't changed is how ostracized Anna feels from society. The way that society pushed her out, it was when we entered her mind to this point, the stream of consciousness, that the the idea of people who are who don't feel like they fit in. Maybe they feel depressed. Maybe you look at teenagers. You know, you're a teacher. These students are coming up in the world. They don't know how to fit into this world. And while I'm frustrated with Anna at first, it's the stream of consciousness right here before her death where I finally am like, I was not listening to her. I did not care enough about her. And that kind of hit me. That hit me pretty hard because it meant that I was no better than all these dang Russian aristocrats that are ostracizing her and making her feel like a terrible person. And isn't that the point of literature to look at yourself and say, where can I be a better person? What are the truths about society? Here's something written 200 years ago that we still experience today. And I think that's one of the universality of Anna is her choices were her choices. And as a result, society outcast her. And it left her with nothing to the point of despair and feeling like suicide was the only option. And I think that's just part of the saddest part, I think, about this book. I got one for you here. Let's go down this rabbit hole. So Anna, we're finally seeing kind of the unstableness of her mindset because of choices she's made because of the choices that have been made for her. But also think of this as I think Tolstoy, in my opinion, is projecting a little bit here, right? Because who is the other side of Anna's coin is Levin. And we know that Levin is Tolstoy's namesake in the story and represents a little bit of him. And I think that that Tolstoy is kind of struggling with these things as well. And I don't know exactly what was going on in his life, but we've read him extensively and we know what happens to him later in his life with, you know, kind of his existential crisis. And I think that he's saying all these things of social life and political life. These are things that people are going to going to struggle with. And your mental capacity is something that is going to be a problem. And I think that this is really Tolstoy kind of embedding himself in the story a little bit more than we think through Anna because she is the other half of Levin. Sure, sure. Now let's talk about the trains. All right. So we're finally at the big moment. I guess I finally understand what we said. Hop aboard the Anna Karenina train, I think, in our TBR. And someone commented like, well, there's some irony. And I didn't understand. I see the irony now. Hop under the train, not on the train. She hopped under the train, unfortunately. Yeah, I mean, I hate to jest about it, but yeah, we did kind of nail that one. And I just I wonder because of the industrial revolutions that are taking place in Europe and Russia, the United States and across the world, if Tolstoy is seeing this progression of modern society as a negative thing that is going to impact his countrymen in a negative fashion. And he's using this technology as something that is going to be the death of Russia or the detriment to Russian society. It just it feels like every time the trains come up, something bad seems to happen. And then we tie that back to your point you made several times about the horses, right? Yeah, well, I think there's just I don't know. Tolstoy had to have done this on purpose, right? Like this book reads so smoothly. But let's think about this, right? If we're going to talk about westernization, right? Obviously, there's the parts in part three where Levin was talking about we need to do farming the Russian way, right? Like, I think everybody gets that. But there's those little subtle moments, too, like Ana and her demise here at the end. She was teaching, what was it, English? Yeah, I think so. It was the English family, right? We had the French, right? The language of the aristocrats when people were trying to project rather than try to relate the Russian way. I wonder how much, you know, we see in this moment of, you know, Ana representing the old way, the old capital, even if we're talking about Moscow and Petersburg earlier. And we see the decline. Yeah, I didn't think about that. We think of the decline of their aristocracy and aristocracy. We have westernization represented by this train coming and destroying that which is the old way of life. So when we think of this book and you think of Ana and Vronsky and Dali and Levin and Kitty, they're trying to live their best lives. So how do you live your best life? Well, clearly Tolstoy is not like, hey, everybody should just join Russian orthodoxy, right? Like that's why he left when he was 18. But I think we see him even mocking with Landau and even Karenin to an extent how you can't just let your religion, I should say this differently, you can't just let your church guide you to what's right, right? You have to let your faith, your internal moral compass guide you. And you can't pull in a Blonsky and just say what I want to do is what I do, because that's going to lead you down to ruin as well. Ruination, all the characters that just let imperfect morals or knew that they were doing wrong, lies. They all just went downhill in this novel. If there's one thing to take away from this novel is you can see how these characters made all of these choices to go down. And moral ineptitude for sure. Yeah, yeah. And it's not like one of those novels that like, you know, glorifies how beautiful, you know, and perfect marriages are. And, you know, marriages are work. Marriages have rough spots. They have fights. And you see Levin and Kitty have those fights, but they get through those fights by their own moral compass of caring about the other person. Levin will put aside himself. Kitty will put aside herself for what's right for the other person. And by taking care of each other, that's when you have a true union, as opposed to Vronsky and Anna, to a earlier point of how you compare and contrast these characters. They only care about themselves. They torture themselves by only caring about themselves, and they are divided further and further apart to the point where they're ultimately split by Anna's choice here. You know, for a guy that probably was at his typewriter a lot and maybe struggled with his own relationships, Tolstoy got relationships. He knew how complex they were. He knew how they worked, how they didn't work, how they wouldn't or wouldn't work. And what you had to put in them to get something out of them, or if you didn't, you know, that was kind of the problem of this selfish relationship. It's incredible that he's able to do this, and it's still relevant so many hundred years later. And I think we see the choices and the morality that we have to have to make it through this life. The choices we make that get us there. And I think when it comes to choices, let's not remind the people out there watching, you guys have made an amazing choice of hanging out with us this whole time. Reading this amazing book with us. And I just want to say, congratulations to you. And since you know, you're the real heroes, let us know who your favorite character was in this book in the comments below. So that way I know who are the real heroes out there. Let's move into chapter eight and wrap this book up, this masterpiece, if you will. So for Plot, an eight Kuznachev publishes his book on theories of government, and it's a flop. Well, that's a heck of a transition from Anna's death. Goodness. Yay to a state of positive here. Goodness. Vronsky is upset and lists for the war. And upon hearing Anna's death, Karenin takes Vronsky's daughter. The Levins are mostly happy. Constantine Levin goes through an existential crisis of sorts. Levin realizes he's already living a religious life. I forgot to mention that he started to kind of pray when their baby was born in the last chapter. He believes without reason, doesn't need philosophy. He just believes, follows his moral compass heart, if you will. There's talk of war, people enlisting, not because they believe in the war, but to escape their situation. And I think that's also a metaphor for people and the words that we say to escape situations rather than what we actually believe. Returns, Levin returns home. Thunderstorm breaks out and he learns that Kitty and his son are out in the woods, rushes out to get them. Boom, lightning bolt, barely misses him in the forest. And Levin has this faith to carry him home. Levin ponders how we, you know, must trust in God because we can't know everything. We can't know all the details. Hint, hint, AKA the politics in this book. And I think he knows that he's got goodness inside of him. I think, I think this was a very, did we find a Russian book with a positive ending? Yeah, well, I think that's the question here, right? Is many people are thinking to themselves the book is Anna's story or it, you know, the book has her name as its title and she's killed in the penultimate part. And you're like, okay, so where does it go for all the part eight? I have, you know, 100 pages left and there is this kind of hard shift towards, all right, we're going to get the rest of Levin's story. And I think that's the part that we're supposed to end with hope and that this isn't just a retelling of some Shakespearean love tragedy, that there is some, the good in the world, if you make those right choices, those moral choices. Well, for sure we had a lot of death, right? We had Nikolai passing away and that impacted Levin. I think that's why we maybe shift to Krosnichev real quick. I don't know. He's a person that also just experienced death and he's trying to reinvent himself. But I think that's how I read part eight was this was Levin's rebirth, his reinvention of himself. And I don't think, I think without this part, I don't know if Levin's story makes sense. I obviously made that claim in the last one with the Kierkegaard comparison. And luckily that came true where, you know, we spent all that time on the atheism. It didn't make sense unless Levin found a way to find rebirth for himself. And that's exactly what we find in these chapters, right? Ana chooses death with the contraception and not having any more children. Levin chooses life. He's the one that has the baby and loves the baby, right? And Ana has the baby with Vronsky, but she doesn't love her. She neglects her. She even outsources to a wet nurse to care for this baby. And here's Kitty just gushing milk. Obviously representing the rebirth and the choice of life. And I think this is kind of, this is Tolstoy's culmination of what he's been working for. 800, 1000 pages, depending on your print, that the choices that we make matter and being honest with ourselves and caring about other people will ultimately is going to leave us to have better lives while we're here on this short time we have on earth. For me, I don't think I ever felt Levin's life was in danger or in jeopardy, but I definitely think that he has finally come to a place where he understands his own personal happiness and that is through his family and that to satisfy one's desires, you have to live for someone else's happiness. And I think that that is a beautiful message that Tolstoy is giving us that if you want something out of a relationship, don't do it for yourself. Do it for the other person, right? And I think that's, I mean, come on, let's slow clap. Tolstoy on that one. Whether that comes from your own internal moral compass, whether it comes from the joy, I think you legitimately get joy from helping others and caring about others. Or even if you just did it because that's what your organized religion told you to do. We end up at the place though of caring and compassion and finding happiness in others while it might be boring and maybe you were bored during some of Levin's section and I won't say shame on you, but I think that was shame on you, Una. That was Tolstoy's opening line. All happy families are the same. And boy, isn't that boring. That's why we got to have our old blonskies to spice up our fiction, right? But I mean, what did you think of the novel as a whole? Because for me, I felt like Tolstoy was really doing something that was unique, not only timeless, but unique for the time as well. He makes a almost feminist book for the time period that really didn't exist yet. In many countries around the world, women couldn't even vote yet. And he's doing something here that I think was special, that he was taking women's issues and putting at the forefront of how important they could be and how important they were to politics and society and moral compasses and all of it. And it was masterfully done. And we just, I mean, we can't say enough positive things about it, but that's kind of what I took overall for the point of the book for me, besides the relationships. So reflecting on this, usually when we do these in-depth one of us will have read it. We can guide it. We can kind of know when's the right time to talk about things. And I think that was the hardest thing about doing this with you guys in the read along here, because there's lots of things that we didn't really go into enough depth. And I don't really feel like going back to it. Like when we were at the ball, there was the whole color of their dresses and what colors they thought they were going to wear. I obviously think that that talks about expectations and stuff, but it felt weird to kind of bring it up again. And the colors never really popped up, obviously, to me again. So I think that there's a pro to that, but I think also, or a con to that, but I think a pro is that it allowed us to make these guesses of what makes these character stories complete. Like, you know, you talked about with the train and about what would Ana's end be with these types of decisions? What would Levin's end be with these types of decisions? How does he come to that decision? I think there's pros and strengths to any way you decide to read this book. For me, reading this book just kind of enriches all aspects of my life, whether it be religious or relationships. Being enriched through these characters is amazing. And when I come to the end of the novel, the compassion that Tolstoy put into these characters, you can feel it, and you feel for these characters. And I'm sure that somebody out there shed a tear, you know, that name starts with a K, or a U, maybe, I don't know, because it hits you where it feels. And that's important. And that's the legacy of a masterpiece. And for me, I think this is, you know, top three, maybe push it to top five, depending on my mood of novels that you have to read at some point in your life. And I think at different points in your life, this novel is going to mean different things. I don't know if I could go back to this one within a year or two. I want my feelings to settle a little bit. I want to have more life experiences. I want to have more relationships and then be able to come back to this one and reflect upon it again and see, you know, how I feel with Anna and how I feel with Levin and Dolly and Kitty and my boy Corinnon, because at the beginning, I was I was so negative on him. And as it progressed, I realized that this guy was just put in a bad situation and he had foster parents and he was just trying to hold on to his family so much because it meant so much to him because he never had a family and then taking in someone else's child. I mean, that's got to be the mark of the most compassionate, caring, wonderful person in the world, right? And like I was down on this guy in the beginning. And that reflection is wonderful to be able to go through that journey. All right, guys, we appreciate you spending some time with us on this one. We've got plenty of other Tolstoy talks in a Tolstoy playlist that we will leave down below. Guys, hit that like and subscribe button because it helps us. These videos get seen more and YouTube might think that you guys like us. I don't know. You guys like us? Please like us. Come on. You gotta like us, right? Like and subscribe. All right, guys. Una out. Peace.