Chapters 18-20: Everybody Loves Anna

Hey there, Other Anna! It's nice to meet you after 70 pages of exposition about your brother and his friends, during which you were mentioned a smidgen more frequently than the latest Kidz Bop CD on Pitchfork's Best New Albums page. From the moment you descended from that train carriage, I was almost as captivated as Vronsky by your gray eyes and dark hair and pale complexion and - hold on, we have all that and a name in common? Talk about discovering your literary doppelganger. Although I doubt that the impressions I inspire at public transportation centers could be described with the words "elegance and modest grace."

This is the only picture I could find of myself in a train station.

Okay, one-way conversation with a fictional character is now over. The reality is, while it's nice that Anna's appearance catalyzes all that exposition into a solid storyline, I find the number of characters who fangirl their hearts out over her to be alarming. Just like everybody hates Levin, everybody adores Anna. Especially other women. Vronsky's crusty old mother, who sat with her on the train, adores her.

"Good-bye, my love," answered the Countess. "Let me kiss your pretty face. I speak plainly, at my age, and I tell you simply that I've lost my heart to you."

If that strikes you as the least bit suggestive, then Kitty's reaction to her later on in the story ought to hit you like one of Wile E. Coyote's anvils.

[B]efore Kitty knew where she was she found herself not merely under Anna's sway, but in love with her, as young girls do fall in love with older and married women.

Whether or not Leo Tolstoy had homosexual attractions himself (his autobiographical work Childhood has some pretty strong implications that he did) that trickled into his portrayal of the female opinion of Anna, he makes it easy for us jaded modern readers to draw slashfic-spawning conclusions. After all, we live in a world where people speculate that a Disney princess is a lesbian because she likes archery and doesn't have a boyfriend. Ultimately, it's best left up to each reader as to whether Anna is the subject of romantic or platonic admiration among her gal pals.

Either way, she's no plain Jane.

After Anna gets off the train and endures some gawking by Vronsky (which spurs his mom to drop references to Anna's husband and son, with all the subtlety of Lady Gaga at an awards show), there's a brief interlude due to a gruesome murder. Yup, a man gets sliced in half after he wanders onto the train track. If this were a Dan Brown novel, the incident would launch a clandestine investigation...but since it's a literary masterpiece well known for being tragic, I'm going to hazard a guess that it's foreshadowing instead. I do know one thing, and that's that there's no way a stinker like Vronsky gave a pile of money to the dead man's widow out of Christian sympathy. This guy is trying to win over Anna through one of the oldest tricks ever.

The kaffeeklatsch that Anna and Dolly have later is disappointing if you held hopes that Stepan would have to suffer a little more for his wrongdoings (guilty as charged).  While Dolly gets her Sylvia Plath-meets-The Hours on for a few exciting moments ("What have I to strive and toil for? Why to have children? What's so awful is that all at once my heart's turned, and I have nothing but hatred for him...") her sister-in-law ultimately convinces her to forgive and forget, because those menfolk just can't help themselves, dontcha know.

I would've made her sit through my Girl Power Ballad playlist.

Chapter 20 concludes with the promise of a ball, where there will have to be at least one realization of passionate love, as ordained by the Laws of Balls in Literature. I have a hunch that, based on the sparks already flying between Anna and Vronsky, it will leave Kitty a lot less giddy than she is now. In the meantime, she'd better stay away from this post's Official Lit Recipe, no-bake espresso cookies in honor of Anna and Dolly's heart-to-heart over a coffee tray. She's definitely worked up enough over her first dance of the season without any extra caffeine pumping through her system.

 I'll part with the melancholy quip that Kitty's enthusiasm prompts from our heroine. I think many college students can relate to Anna's words as the scary thing known as Real Life looms before us:

This mist [of happiness], which covers everything in that blissful time when childhood is just ending, and out of that vast circle, happy and gay, there is a path growing narrower and narrower...

Chapters 12-17: Russian Aristocracy Problems

Is there ever a situation in a fictional work in which the man and woman clue into their mutual sexual tension without all sorts of horrible misunderstandings and angst? Of course not, because muddling through that is half the fun. Even seemingly drama-free couples, like James and Lily Potter or Zoe and Wash on Firefly, were revealed to have rocky starts.

I blame it on the mustache.

I only ask because Tolstoy makes it painfully obviously that Levin is a perfect match for Princess Kitty, who goes on to (first big spoiler alert of the blog) reject his proposal because she's distracted by Vronsky. Vronsky is the Wrong Guy First to Levin's Insecure Love Interest. He's a charming military man with certified mom approval and smoldering good looks. In case the reader is silly enough to actually consider him the better alternative to Constantin "Thank God I'm A Country Boy" Levin, it's immediately established that a) Vronsky is flirting with Kitty without any intention of marrying her and b) he doesn't see any problem with this. I know, neither do the drunk guys on Franklin Street who catcall to the sorority sisters on midnight Sweet Frog frozen yogurt runs, but things were different back then. There's even something kind of cool about a societal disdain for leading girls on, although it does throw a wrench into the casual dating.scene when people draw conclusions like this:

Vronsky openly flirted with Kitty at balls, danced with her, and came continually to the house; consequently there could be no doubt of his intentions.

Anyway, even though Vronsky is a committed bachelor whose ideas about how to confirm the "secret spiritual bond" he feels with Kitty do not involve the elaborately trimmed wedding gowns worn by Russian brides in that era, she is convinced to the contrary. This leads her to deliver Levin a rejection only slightly edged out by "You're joking, right?" on the Scale of Worst Possible Things You Can Say To Someone Who Just Asked To Spend His Life With You. Then he doesn't even get recovery time before he's roped into a hostile social setting with a countess who hates his guts and the big rival himself, Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky. Not to mention Kitty's mother, who thinks "Thank God, she's refused him" the moment she sees Levin's dejected face.

Cut to the next day at the Petersburg train station. I'd honestly forgotten all about Anna Karenina herself at this point, despite typing the title a billion times. But at last, she's poised to make an appearance as a guest to Stepan and Dolly's house, with Stepan clearly hoping that his sister can mend relations between him and his wife. Vronsky is also there to meet his mother. And in case Tolstoy didn't make it clear already that Vronsky is despicable, we get this gem:

He did not in his heart respect his mother, and, without acknowledging it to himself, he did not love her...

Dude doesn't love his own mother? Even Darth Vader and Adolf Hitler loved their mothers. Vronsky also isn't winning himself any favors from this reader when he tells Stepan that it's easier to stick to Claras (prostitutes) than carry on a genuine courtship because you risk your money instead of your dignity. If Stepan is the Jude Law of Anna Karenina, Vronsky is the Hugh Grant. He has the chance to get serious with the gorgeous Elizabeth Hurley Kitty, and he'd rather submerge himself in an unsavory and patriarchal system? For shame!

Sadly, no food items are mentioned in these chapters (I guess Stepan and Levin are still digesting those jellied oysters), so my Official Lit Dish is a bit of an extrapolation from the story. The way I see it, once Levin escaped back to his hotel room after his proposal went awry, he probably took refuge in comfort food like the baked Russian pastries called piroshki. They're carb-heavy, easy to eat, and often stuffed with sweets: what better way to soothe a broken heart? Other than taking a walking stick to Vronsky's pretty little souped-up two-wheel drive.

PETA says: Be sure to unharness any innocent horses before enacting your nineteenth-century revenge fantasies.