Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is tied with Proust’s In Search of Lost Time for my favourite novel of all time.
Anna Karenina is endlessly re-readable and teachable. The length and depth of the series of lectures over at the Hardcore Literature Book Club is testament to the depth of Tolstoy’s grand novel.
Tolstoy’s characters endure. We will love Levin, Kitty, Dolly, Stiva, Anna, and even Vronsky and Alexei until the end of time. They are all psychologically complex characters who deal with the most painful and pressing questions of human existence: fate, free-will, consciousness, love, hate, vengeance, God, and the meaning of life.
The Anna Karenina Podcast with Hardcore Literature
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Timestamps (with my favourite parts bolded):
- 0:00 why Anna Karenina is my favourite novel
- 1:00 looking back on 2020 and the Year of Teaching Tolstoy
- 2:40 what makes a Great Book?
- 4:00 how to collaborate with Tolstoy and befriend his characters
- 6:40 the history of how Tolstoy came to write Anna Karenina
- 6:50 War and Peace, In Search of Lost Time, Clarissa, Les Misérables
- 7:20 Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as influence
- 7:40 Levin as hero of the novel (and Tolstoy’s first draft without him)
- 8:20 Tolstoy’s religious writings and bleak suicidcal despair
- 9:00 Vronsky as Tolstoy and every other peripheral character
- 9:30 was Tolstoy a feminist or a misogynist?
- 11:20 what happens when you reread Anna Karenina (Dolly and Stiva)
- 12:00 Tolstoy’s art of the interior – flesh to spirit
- 12:15 Tolstoy vs Dostoyevsky
- 12:20 recommended translation (Pevear and Volokhonsky)
- 13:00 the publication and translation history of Anna Karenina
- 14:00 what’s the next step for those who fall in love with Russian Literature
- 14:30 the art of the digression
- 14:50 the rise of the novel in Russia
- 15:30 Tolstoy’s theory of art
- 16:30 what makes Tolstoy’s characters so psychologically complex?
- 16:55 why I recommend the Rosamund Bartlett translation to non-readers
- 17:20 one of the most romantic parts of Anna Karenina
- 18:30 how Tolstoy creates a sense of realism
- 18:50 “All unhappy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
- 19:20 Tolstoy, Trollope, Austen, and the Art of the English Novel
- 20:00 “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.”
- 20:30 how we change over the course of reading Anna Karenina
- 21:00 the interior monologue of Laska the dog
- 21:20 inside the child birthing room
- 21:40 who do you judge in Anna Karenina?
- 22:00 the art of the dual narrative
- 22:20 the first draft of Anna Karenina
- 23:00 Tolstoy’s art of the binary, rise and fall, energy transfers
- 23:15 the most electrifying scene in Anna Karenina
- 23:40 why the boring parts of the novel become the most fascinating upon rereading
- 24:00 is Tolstoy pessimistic or optimistic?
- 25:00 Anna is defined by her absence
- 25:00 Auerbach’s Mimesis, Homer’s Odyssey, and not creating suspense
- 26:00 Tolstoy’s rendering of time
- 26:40 why Russians talk about the characters as old friends
- 26:58 Tolstoy and Proust (“Our social personalities”)
- 28:50 Anna’s operatic refrain is “understand”
- 29:19 the art of the double (Karenin and Vronsky)
- 30:00 why reading Anna Karenina is akin to becoming God
- 31:30 the neuroscience of free will
- 32:50 “between stimulus and response there is a space”
- 33:30 the double standards of society and Anna’s tragedy of vitalism
- 34:20 the end of Anna Karenina
- 43:30 the Hardcore Literature Book Club