“Levin… withdrew behind the screen, and put out the candle, but for a long while he could not sleep.  The question how to live had hardly begun to grow a little clearer to him, when a new, insoluble question presented itself - death.”

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Earlier today I read another chapter of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and was deeply moved by how well he captures the central character, Levin, as he awakens to life’s fragility.  In this section (Part III, Chapter 31), Levin is visited by his dying brother Nikolay.  With this arrival, however, Levin comes face to face with mortality and reality.  He reluctantly encounters this shrinking shadow of the man and brother he’s loved.  And although they have struggled through a strained relationship of moods, poor decisions, and differing politics, Levin is intimately connected with Nikolay.

What I am most enjoying about Anna Karenina is the accuracy with which Tolstoy captures the moments and emotions of daily life.  He brings me into his characters’ experiences and helps me connect to them.  Here is Levin facing mortality, reluctantly reconnecting with Nikolay.  Earlier it was the haying of the fields and the crushed romance.  In the opening chapters we find shallowness and cowardice, juxtaposed with the raw presence and poise of the title character.   Tolstoy delivers his characters and scenes so well that I even harbored a short-lived crush as I drifted through the early descriptions of Anna.

This is what I believe he wants me to do however: to saunter through the lives of others who lived (fictitiously or otherwise) years ago.  Literature, in my mind, is meant to draw us in, to help us connect to our own memories and to create hopes of the memories we might have years ahead of us.

I’m not nearly done with Anna Karenina and if I listen to my father-in-law, I should not rush it.  In fact, he suggests that I should savor it for another few months.   I like that.  I like it because Tolstoy’s characters, these captured moments, and the subtle emotions, do reconnect me to my own moments and memories, establishing hopes for my future.

“And suddenly he recalled how they used to go to bed together as children, and how they only waited till Fyodor Bogdanitch [their nanny] was out of the room to flight pillows at each other and laugh, laugh irrepressibly, so that even their awe of Fyodor Bogdanitch could not check the effervescing, overbrimming sense of life and happiness.”

As he listens to his brother struggle to breath, Levin thinks back to this sweet memory of their shared youth.  In this intimate moment, I cannot help but recall my own sister’s struggle in her last few months of life, almost ten years ago now.   My mind and heart then jumps ahead to today and to my own two children, Owen and Fiona, and the way they pounce upon one another, laughing irrepressibly.

I look forward to more of Tolstoy’s masterpiece as I unravel his captured moments.

Best, John