Chapters 6-11: Love and Lunch

50 pages in, there is still no Anna K. (The fictional one, obviously.) If I didn't know through common knowledge osmosis that this is a book about a woman who has an extramarital affair, I'd be suspicious of a Waiting for Godot deal where the person in the title never actually appears in the story. I'm okay with that for now, though, because ohmygosh Levin. Constantin Levin is not merely the overbearing symbol of the values of rural life that  the first few chapters seemed to promise. He's an awkward dude with an inferiority complex and humble food preferences. Think an older version of Michael Cera in Juno.

With cabbage soup and porridge instead of orange Tic-Tacs.

After a series of unsuccessful crushes on approximately every female in Dolly's family, Lovin' Levin has become smitten with her youngest sister Kitty in a way that would be more squicky (she's 18, he's 32) if he weren't so adorably unsophisticated and bashful. At one point, everything is perfectly aligned for him to ask for her hand in marriage - they're on an ice-skating semi-date, holding hands, with her dropping little one-liners like "You do everything with passion" - and he can't work up the nerve because he's sure that she's out of his league.

An ugly, good-natured man, as he considered himself, might, he supposed, be liked as a friend; but to be loved with such a love as that with which he loved Kitty, one would need to be handsome and, still more, a distinguished man.

 D'awww! It's comforting to know that dead Russian novelists understood the hell that is the friendzone. Poor Levin also has to put up with his famous writer brother Sergei, who in one conversation shoots down a) his attempt to join in a philosophical discussion, b) his lack of involvement in local politics, and c) his wish to make peace with their brother Nikolai, the black sheep of the family. See how the pesky cosmopolitan urbanite is trying to demoralize the wide-eyed young nonconformist? Either Tolstoy is making a point, or he's just venting the anger that must have come with being the fourth of five kids.

That explains why he looks like a surly Scotty McCreery in this picture.

These chapters are about two things: love and lunch. (Not to be confused with my favorite Improv Anywhere skit, "I Love Lunch!", although a scene like that would have certainly lightened the tension of Levin's romantic woes.) Anyone who says that food porn was born from bored yuppies with Instagram accounts needs to read through the catalog of fancy cuisine that Stepan and Levin chow through on their dinner date. Even as they dish on their respective woman problems, they're shoveling down jellied oysters - though Levin, bless his heart, secretly prefers "white bread and cheese."

Don't we all? (Even vegans like this writer.)

While no great secrets are revealed, their table talk is entertaining because their personalities clash in a Will Turner and Jack Sparrow way. Levin is torn between fretting that he's too corrupted for the fair Kitty and being desperate to marry her. Stepan is brushing off adultery as an uncontrollable tragedy of life and bemoaning the boredom of married life:

[T]he future is yours, and the present is mine, and the present - well, it's only fair to middling.

After a charming game of Which Thing Makes The Best Metaphor For A Loose Woman (Stepan votes bread and Levin votes vermin - not either one's best moment) the waiter brings the check and I can finally abandon this fictional meal for the real one that awaits me in the kitchen. Maybe next time I'll try the Official Lit Dish I picked for this post: berry compote, which is the tastier-sounding name for the "stewed fruit" that Stepan orders. I bet it's good on toast, especially with a side of internal strife over whether you should text your crush or stick to Facebook stalking him/her and avoid any chance of rejection.