Anna Karenina

Review

2nd read (Dec 2024): I was surprised by how much less I enjoyed the story the second time around… I should never have strayed from Pevear and Volokhonsky.

The more he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergei Ivanovich and many other workers for the common good had not been brought to this love of the common good by the heart, but had reasoned in their minds that it was good to be concerned with it and were concerned with it only because of that. And Levin was confirmed in this surmise by observing that his brother took questions about the common good and the immortality of the soul no closer to heart than those about a game of chess or the clever construction of a new machine.

1st read (Dec 2023): Come for the spicy affair drama, stay for the meditations on the meaning of life.

Understanding clearly then for the first time that for every man and for himself nothing lay ahead but suffering, death and eternal oblivion, he decided that it was impossible to live that way, that he had either to explain his life so that it did not look like the wicked mockery of some devil, or shoot himself. But he had done neither the one nor the other, and had gone on living, thinking and feeling, and had even married at that same time and experienced much joy, and was happy whenever he did not think about the meaning of his life. What did it mean? It meant that his life was good, but his thinking was bad.