Levin and Anna

Right. So I was meant to be outlining the purpose of this blog. Can I just say quickly how much I hate that word? It is almost up there with 'choccie biccies' in terms of words that make my skin crawl. Brrr.
From now on I shall refer to the context of these musings as an o.j. - online journal.

actually, I've just thought about that and it conjures up disturbing connotations with the crazed OJ Simpson. cyber musings? screw it, I'll think about it later.

Sooo... Anna Arkadeyvna Karenina. The main protagonist in the Tolstoy epic, aptly named 'Anna Karenina.' The book, as some would lead us to believe, is a love story - Anna falls for the dashing (if balding) Alexei Vronsky, and, as love dies away *MASSIVE SPOILER AHEAD*





throws herself under a train, as she realizes she has lost everything - her place in society, her child, Seriozha, and her lover. However, being a subjective reader, I really feel the novel should have been re-titled 'Levin'. Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin is the novel's other main protagonist, and his idelogical struggle, for me, makes up the entirety of the book. This is not a love story - it is a social commentary about Russia and its relationship to the Westernized Europe in the late 1800's, and more importantly, an ideological struggle in one man's brain. I leave you for tonight with a quote from the man himself, as his attraction to the physical intensifies. To set the scene: Levin, to his brother's horror, decides to join the peasants workming the fields on his farm, in a distinctly Marxist move. more tommorow.

'Levin kept between them. In the very heat of the day the mowing did not seem such hard work to him. The perspiration with which he was drenched cooled him, while the sun, that burned his back, his head, and his arms, bare to the elbow, gave a vigor and dogged energy to his labor; and more and more often now came those moments of unconsciousness, when it was possible not to think what one was doing. The scythe cut of itself. These were happy moments. Still more delightful were the moments when they reached the stream where the rows ended, and the old man rubbed his scythe with the wet, thick grass, rinsed its blade in the fresh water of the stream, ladled out a little in a tin dipper, and offered Levin a drink.

"What do you say to my home-brew, eh? Good, eh?" said he, winking.

And truly Levin had never drunk any liquor so good as this warm water with green bits floating in it, and a taste of rust from the tin dipper. And immediately after this came the delicious, slow saunter, with his hand on the scythe, during which he could wipe away the streaming sweat, take deep breaths of air, and look about at the long string of mowers and at what was happening around in the forest and the country.

The longer Levin mowed, the oftener he felt the moments of unconsciousness in which it seemed not his hands that swung the scythe, but the scythe mowing of itself, a body full of life and consciousness of its own, and as though by magic, without thinking of it, the work turned out regular and well-finished of itself. These were the most blissful moments.

It was only hard work when he had to break off the motion, which had become unconscious, and to think; when he had to mow round a hillock or a tuft of sorrel. The old man did this easily. When a hillock came he changed his action, and at one time with the heel, and at another with the tip of his scythe, clipped the hillock round both sides with short strokes. And while he did this he kept looking about and watching what came into his view: at one moment he picked a wild berry and ate it or offered it to Levin, then he flung away a twig with the blade of the scythe, then he looked at a quail's nest, from which the bird flew just under the scythe, or caught a snake that crossed his path, and lifting it on the scythe as though on a fork showed it to Levin and threw it away.