Part III, Chapters 1-6: Country Matters

One of the only things that people seem to like more than watching movies and TV shows is complaining about their various inaccuracies. I'd love to have a pint of vanilla almond bark Tofutti for every time I heard some variation of "It's unfathomable that a fat slob like him could snag Katherine Heigl." Or, "How can they spend that much time by the water cooler but not ever have to pee?" Or, "If it was really that easy to learn martial arts, everyone would be karate chopping their onions and those people who sell knife sets would go out of business."

And the Fruit Ninja app would be irrelevant.

The truth, as we all know deep down, is that we aren't searching for reality in Hollywood or the media. Why bother? If I want to see guys who don't look like perfection incarnate, all I have to do is be anywhere besides a screening of Magic Mike. In fact, any latent desire to experience the unglamorous aspects of life - bad breath, fatigue, a lingering sense of gloom and regret - was more than satisfied on the first day of my 8 AM class. This is why I'd like to offer a suggestion to the next person who thinks about criticizing The Newsroom for being overly dramatized: read one of Anna Karenina's painstakingly detailed descriptions of farm labor. Then tell me what makes the daily grind so much better than Olivia Munn delivering Sorkinisms.

It definitely doesn't lend itself to GIFs.

Levin disagrees. Unlike his brother, who likes to limit his experience with country life to speaking about it in idyllic terms, Levin just loves to rough it. He'll grab a scythe and start cutting grass at the drop of a streaker's pants in Davis Library during exam week (that's "with minimal motivation," for those of you unfamiliar with UNC campus life). I get that Tolstoy was trying to show that Levin was the total opposite of all those pampered aristocrats we encountered earlier, but the whole thing seems more than a tad forced. I mean, the laborers in his team don't just get excited over finding bugs and snacking on soggy bread. They get excited about working overtime with no compensation, because they just love to strain their backs under the hot sun. This portrayal seems suspiciously like an attempt to justify Levin's earlier claim that educating peasants is a waste of money:

"...why should I worry myself about establishing dispensaries which I shall never make use of, and schools to which I shall never send my children, to which even the peasants don't want to send their children, and to which I've no very firm faith that they ought to send them?"

If you're like me, then a small part of your soul died after reading that.

Levin, you're breaking my heart!

Really, how much more patronizing can a guy be without straight up morphing into an Apple commercial? Levin's attitude toward the common folk reminds me of how the white Southern ladies treated their maids in The Help - that is, being all buddy-buddy with them until the possibility of actual societal advancement comes up. While his hands-on approach is more genuine than his brother's armchair philosophizing, Levin has a long way to go when it comes to defying the Russian caste system. No matter how cute it is when he freaks out about forgetting to check up on his decrepit housekeeper after she sprains her wrist.

As previously mentioned, one of the most unbelievable parts of the farming sequence for me was the delight Levin and the other men took in their humble meal of "sop," or bread soaked in kvass (an alcoholic drink similar to beer) and salted. While this sounds even less appetizing than the mayonnaise-smeared salad I saw on an anonymous plate in the dining hall yesterday, today's Official Lit Dish of Russian black bread has potential to be my new favorite sandwich securer. Why build your PB&J with that weirdly spongy Wonder Bread when you can be chowing down on a symbol of lower-class humility and simplicity instead?

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.