Read-along – Anna Karenina (4 of 14)
Part Two, Chapters 30-35, Part Three, Chapters 1-12 – and the Mowing Scene
Dear Anna Karenina readers,
We’ve finished April’s instalment! Here’s what I made of it:
Please do share your thoughts and quotations in the comments below.
In the journal Russian Literature (Volume 40, Issue 4, November 1996), there is a short article by Anna Primrose Bendiksen called ‘The Swishing of the Scythes: The Mowing Scene in Anna Karenina’. You can read the full article here (though beware of spoilers).
Bendiksen asks the question:
What, then, are we to do with the mowing chapters? What are we to make of the fact that Levin’s voice and consciousness, so carefully nourished and sustained by Tolstoy, here grow quiet, even vanish for a moment? How can we explain this phenomenon: that these powerfully written chapters tend to make an impression on the reader that is perhaps a bit out of proportion to their actual relationship to the plot?
I think her answer is very astute: she concludes that the synchronised rhythm of the mowers represents the rhythm of happy family life in the novel. She writes:
To link the work rhythm of the mowers with the work involved in maintaining a happy family brings one to the question of what, then, it means to be ‘unhappy in one’s own way’. If Kitty and Dolly are concerned with daily order, Anna, Karenin, and Vronsky are characterized by a falling out of sync. . . . In other words, the movement of the scythes on Levin’s field suggests that deep in the novel’s structure is a sense of organic pace, the measure of which is Kitty and the enemy of which is Anna herself, who in her separation from it is indeed ‘unhappy in her own way’.
I like the idea of a deep sense of ‘organic pace’. Let’s see if it bears out as we continue to read.
Incidentally, if you’re feeling the urge to pick up a scythe and lose yourself like Levin, you’re not alone: scything has become increasingly popular in the UK over recent years.
The Scythe Association was founded in 2011 – with a mission to ‘promote the use of the scythe’ and with the motto ‘real work, done well’. If you’re based in the UK, check out their website for local scything lessons or plan to attend the annual Green Scythe Fair in Somerset on Sunday 8 June.
The author and Substacker Paul Kingsnorth has become an ‘aficianado of the scythe’. In 2012 he wrote an excellent article about scything and neo-environmentalism for Orion Magazine, in which he quotes Anna Karenina.
And if you want buy your own scythe, look no further than the Scythe Shop in Devon, which imports scythes from an Austrian workshop where they’ve been made since 1540. Their website, of course, features a quotation from Anna Karenina.
I hope you enjoy the next instalment. On 30th May we will discuss Part Three, Chapters 13-32. These chapters formed the fifth instalment of Anna Karenina, first published in the Russian Messenger in January 1876.
For reference, here are links to our previous Anna Karenina posts:
The Schedule (18 December 2024)
Leo Tolstoy (3 January 2025)
0. Introductions (10 January)
1. Part One, Chapters 1-23 – and Nabokov on Time (31 January)
2. Part One, Chapters 24-34, Part Two, Chapters 1-11 – and John Sutherland on Anna’s English novel (28 February)
3. Part Two, Chapters 12-29 – and Sergei Eisenstein at the races (28 March)
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I look forward to my daily reading of this book the same way I anticipate a delicious dessert! Visiting the spa with Kitty felt so familiar that I half expected Hans Castorp from The Magic Mountain to enter the scene. Did anyone else think that Thomas Mann must have been a reader of Anna Karenina?
I must say that Levin’s conversation with his brother about his lack of interest in using his position in the zemstvo to provide medical care and schools for the peasants gave much food for thought. On the one hand his brother is right, it would improve their lives. On the other hand, in Levin’s back to the land view, interference in the peasants’ way of life would not be welcome nor an improvement. Age old dilemma of governance and the rich and poor.
My favorite quote from this installment: “Hard as Stepan Arkadyich tried to be a solicitous father and husband, he never could remember that he had a wife and children.”
The section at the spa made me think about how often in books a visit to somewhere new changes people - Anne Elliot going to Bath, Lucy Honeychurch in Florence and many others. Kitty doesn't feel as if she's returned to be as she was, but she becomes someone different. I liked that she was still capable of a tantrum - a reminder that none of us is perfect.
The social comedy - Madame Stahl's snobbery and the Prince's response - is a totally different tone to what we've had before. But then we get Varenka's backstroke which changes things again. If Varenka seems too perfect, we then realise how vulnerable her position is.
The countryside section is magnificent. I was taken with the line, "words for him removed the beauty of what he was seeing". A brave description for someone who deals in words.
The conversations between the two half-brothers were interesting. Although may appear not concerned about the local people, he does have a connection. It was also noticeable that Dolly seemed at ease with the locals as well.
And then Levin seeing Kitty. It almost mirrored Anna and Vronsky - but instead of a train, Kitty is in a carriage. But there's still that flash of something.
I'm now having to toy with the idea of going to Chichester to see the new play there - but I'm not sure about watching a version that can't cover everything in the book. Oh, well...