[Music] foreign [Music] welcome back to the book club I'm Michael Knowles this month we are reading a truly magnificent novel Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy first though in our fast-paced world it is tough to make reading a priority at least it used to be at thinker.org they summarize the key ideas from new and noteworthy non-fiction giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form you can read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes from old classics like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to recent bestsellers like Jordan Peterson's 12 rules for life if you want to I don't know challenge your preconceptions if you want to expand your horizons if you want to sound smart at cocktail parties most important of all go to thinker.org that is t-h-i-n-k-r dot org no e there's no time for that start your free trial put your mind in motion we will be putting our minds in motion with Anna Karenina subtitle why you shouldn't cheat on your husband husband Anna Karenina subtitle happy wife happy life there are so many subtitles it's a very long book I am joined by my friend Inez stepman Inez is senior policy Analyst at Independent Women's Forum he knows thank you for being here thanks for having me thank you for picking this book one of your favorite books you told me and a book that you have read seven or eight times or something by my calculation that means that you have spent every single minute of your life reading this book um yeah and yet uh it's you still have to remind yourself every time because the the there are so many sort of um threads in this book that even if you read it eight times you will still there will be something new that you forgot for these 800 pages that I hope everyone has already read for the people who have not read it could you give a summary of This Book in one minute or less everybody knows two things about this book that it starts out that all happy families are alike but every unhappy family is different in its own way and I'm butchering it because uh he wrote it more beautifully than that but as in Russian it would be it's hard with the accent yeah and then they know how it ends right they they know that Anna threw herself in front of a train and committed suicide that's most people know that going in in between leaving out many many characters the plot is uh that there are multiple couples here there's Anna and karenin her husband um and everyone admires Anna right she's not only beautiful she's good um she she's kind she actually initially in the book she comes in she saves her her brother's marriage by convincing his wife that she ought to forgive him for his infidelities she is just beloved by all she's elegant she's Charming she knows how to to hold you know a great conversation with everyone her husband is a good man an important man um perhaps a man who's who's a little bit didactic and inflexible in some ways but everybody admires this couple there are a number of other characters one Bronski the man with which she ultimately has an affair um and then a second couple who is is very much a foil to this triangle of of Anna her husband and her lover uh Kitty and Levin so Kitty is a young girl who comes in initially pursues or wants to be pursued by bronsky which seems like a more natural match he's a young hot guy Aristocrat Soldier yeah and she's she's the debutante the 18 year old girl who comes in um and then there's Levin who is a a wealthy landowner who is in many ways a tolstoy's character for himself in this book who's very concerned with living rightly and trying to figure out what that means throughout the book Bronski pursues Anna initially uh instead of he turns down Kitty who turns down Levin so there's all of these rejections in the opening of the novel right Kitty is embarrassed because she pursues a man who was only flirting with her Levin is embarrassed because he's proposed to this young woman and has been rejected he leaves the city right that's the setup of this novel and Anna of course is married and initially rejects bronsky's uh attentions um even though she is flattered by them and then she has this famous love affair um and eventually leaves her husband lives with ronsky for a while they travel into different societies there are children there's death along the way I think this is a story about how love and virtue cannot be separated and how we are the authors of our own destruction it's a deeply moral book but it's not a moralistic book which is what makes it I think such a great read this looks intimidating but it isn't um there are many shorter books that are more intimidating than this because you get this beautiful psychological omniscient portrait of each one of these characters of their motivations their emotions how they think about things as they engage with each other and the world and the backdrop of pre-revolutionary Russia I don't think this is this is actually a tough read at all I think you said also you you just kept turning the pages you really do want you fall in love with these characters and you want to see them see what happens and and see whether or not they they win their internal battles and struggles with essentially trying to be virtuous and this is something that Tolstoy really Pioneers in the novel form is that inner monologue is that inner life of the character so you're not just reading what the character is saying out loud or the arguments or conversations but how the characters are interpreting facial movements what they want to say but don't say what they thought of saying after the fact when they go home and one of the reasons that it's so easy to keep turning the pages while you really can't put this novel down is that on the one hand you have the heights of tragedy at another moment you will have a discourse on political economy and the fashionable ideas moving through the the political circles in Russia at the time at the next moment you'll have a comedy scene that could have been out of I Love Lucy or the Marx Brothers or something there's a scene in particular when Levin's brother is dying and he's decayed and he's desiccated and Levin goes and kitty insists on going and it really tells you something about their marriage and it and it tells you something about the difference between men and women and but it's a really sad tragic moment and just they say okay he's gone he's dying and then you hear you hear the supposedly dead man he says I'm Not Dead Yet hold on not yet and it goes on for days eventually you know the 11 says I just wish he'd die already you know why are we and so you can be it can be actually laugh out loud funny and then there is so much tragedy the the novel opens up with that very famous line and then it opens up on Anna karenina's brother step on oblansky who's a kind of minor major character and oblansky has just cheated on his wife with the governess with this form with the babysitter and his wife is going to leave him and he's a kind of a frivolous man in many ways he spends too much money womanizes and he says oh my gosh I'm I'm being held responsible for my ACT I didn't think I'd be I didn't mean anything by it I just wanted to shut up the babysitter what you know why is that and Anna shows up he sends for his sister to come to save their marriage and she does how does that woman this this Paragon of virtue this woman whom everyone loves become this awful Fallen woman who destroys multiple homes by the end one of the things about this book that it just plays to um kind of everybody's biases in the sense that everybody finds some character to blame this on in this book um and I think that actually the point is that none of them are like a sort of bad none of them are truly bad people they are all seeking virtue in some way so um and and you're right so it opens up with Anna saving um her brother's marriage uh by appealing to his wife Dolly about how he can still love her he can he can make these mistakes but in fact he can still have a regard for his wife for his family for his duties um and and saves saves their marriage um soy also pressages uh the the end of the book as well because the first time that Anna meets bronsky he's on it's on a train and somebody Falls in front of the track and dies and she's very impressed with his virtue because he pays he pays the family of the man right these are all Russian nobility so he he gives the the family of the dead man money and she is touched by the fact that you know he has this amount of virtue that he he's you know moved by what happened or is he moved by that cute little hot to trot Anna and is he trying to impress her by giving money to the family one of the interesting things about the relationship between Anna and bronsky is that she does end up loving bronsky he ends up loving her in a very serious and not frivolous way this is not just a sort of lustful flirtation they do fall in love and I think without acknowledging that they they did fall in love um the novel is cheaper right if you treat it as lustful flirtation you don't get the point about how even real love can be so so unbelievably destructive um when it's it's decoupled from virtue because it is simply wrong she is a married woman and it is wrong for them to get together and yet he pursues her at the encouragement by the way of many of his aristocratic friends and relatives who live all sorts of degenerate lives and then the moment that Anna actually does leave her husband all those same people who encourage the love affair turn on her and they say well we can't associate with this Fallen woman and so Anna does this she leaves her husband she leaves her son even her beloved Son and goes with with bronsky and you you mentioned the Train the train is such an important Motif in the novel and it actually only occurred to me today on my drive into the studio after I took a plane to land in in Los Angeles and all that I can I can be in a totally different part of the country almost instantly you know within a matter of hours that the train is a symbol of modernity that the train is a symbol of the the new liberal social attitudes that that are so at issue in the novel I'm reminded of Russell Kirk the late conservative philosopher who described the automobile as a mobile Jacobin that this this ability to move places very very quickly is is a symptom of and a cause of also modernity and the upending of tradition and it and it is the cause of the downfall of Anna Karenina and bronsky after Anna in a long time turned down bronsky's affections she's very flattered by them but she returns to her husband and she she finds that even though she did The Virtuous thing she finds her husband deeply unattractive in a way that she didn't before right that she has in fact fallen in love with this other man um and and karenin has all of his faults but those were faults that Anna did not find unlovable before and she does after and nevertheless she sort of she she does hold out for a very long time she knows it's wrong but eventually she begins this affair she actually becomes pregnant with his child and she confesses to her husband he doesn't even imagine that the rumors could be true initially he's just concerned with their reputation his response is not to dual bronsky he actually reminds her of her duty to her marriage to her son and says no you need to come back into your marriage I will have you back you but this is you need to come back to your duties and she's unable to do that and that's where she she leaves even her son they carry this affair openly and the same as you say the society that had accepted these Affairs as long as they weren't honest right Anna and bronsky are just more honest about their Affairs than many of the other characters and that honesty is in its own sense says something good about their character but even honesty as separated from virtue just like love is actually their undoing right if they if they had been a little bit more like steva it probably would not have caused the kind of Destruction that ends up happening they try to find a society in which they'll be accepted they try to kind of forget about their former life they try to restart um they bounce around from Italy to St Petersburg to Moscow in many of these places bronsky's accepted but Anna isn't um you can you can either say that's because he's a man she's a woman or you can say it's because she left her marriage yeah um and and he was a single man but the trains allowed them to kind of just distract themselves for an ongoing period of time before the evil act that they've committed must actually play itself out and show up again there's a message for Millennials here too I've noticed this about Millennials even impulses that I might have myself Millennials want to travel all the time they don't want stuff they don't want a house they don't want a car they don't want to get married at least not very young they just want experiences they want to and there was a wiser man who I forget who said it so maybe I'll just claim the quote for myself but pointed out that that the issue with frequent travel people who travel frequently constantly seem to be trying to get away from something but you can't ever get away from that thing that you're trying to get away from because that thing is yourself and so wherever they go bronsky and Anna find themselves the same people in the same situation and Anna lovable though she may be in the first part of the novel by the end she is deeply deeply unlovable she I mean she cannot love herself which is why she commits suicide she she makes herself repellent to everyone around her and and everyone is trying to be good to her at least that the two the two men in her life uh karanine has tried to do right by her at least as he sees fit uh bronsky says no I'll stay by you even amid her wild jealousies her insane emotional outbursts her suspecting him wrongly of of loving other women he says no no it's lady come on you know sweetheart I love you I'm not I don't know why you think this way and she becomes she she says by the end she basically can't love her son whom she has abandoned and she's at various times wanted to to get him back she can't love her daughter she can't she seems not to be able to love everyone in the final moments of her life when she's in a kind of mania she's eventually finds herself right back there at the train station and and ultimately kills herself she just keeps looking at everyone and says I hate that person look at that fat person look at that awful look they're probably talking about me I hate them I hate them I hate them and in this Mania she flings herself at the train but because we get the the inner life that the Tolstoy gives us we also see that when she lands on the track she has this she wakes up she says wait where am I what am I doing oh no I don't want to do this Ona and she as she tries to pick herself up it's too late and the train hits her and it there's there's such reality to this moment even people who jump off buildings some people have survived that and people who have survived jumping off buildings say that they instantly regretted it as just anecdotally and she instantly regrets it in her final please Lord God forgive me for what I'm doing kind of what but she she makes herself so deeply unlovable as she's pursuing love is the only object in her life yeah there really is a deep rebuke to sort of millennial ethos and not just in the um in the travel point that you made earlier but uh in the pursuit of happiness and love above Duty and family and virtue and I think the one of the the profound themes of this book is in fact if I pursuing happiness you don't find it and that's why Kitty and Levin are such an important foil whole story is quite critical both of sort of frivolous masculinity and frivolous femininity he you know Kitty is a sweet girl but she is silly initially and in fact perhaps in some way Unworthy of of Levin's love and the way that he does love her but um and and that's sort of the frivolousness of men right that that he loves her even though she is silly but we see them as a foil actually coming into their own as you know a virtuous man and a virtuous woman to to imperfect people um who are helping each other actually to a type of domestic comfort and contentment exactly because they they are not pursuing happiness in in this sort of passionate way um that that Anna and bronsky are and it really is a rebuke to sort of a a modern conception of of love a modern conception of pursuing happiness as the highest goal and and the point here is that and even you don't even get happiness at the end that you can pursue happiness um as totally divorced from virtue you can pursue love as divorced from virtue but in the end you will have neither happiness or love because it's divorced from virtue you see it especially with the kids the the most shocking and repulsive aspect of the novel to me is that she abandons her son and and she then she says oh no now I want to go back and see my son and she goes back and sees him and he breaks down he falls ill he they say he could have died because he's just so Mommy Mommy where'd you go it was just ran away and now you're back and now you're not going to come back anymore and she goes back and forth on you know the importance of having her son near her as she then has this daughter with Bronski who she doesn't seem to care very much for eventually and then then she says we're not having any more kids and foronski says no you need to get the divorce from your husband so that we can be a legit couple and get married then we can have more kids she says no we're not going to have more kids and she says or she at least thinks that his desire to have more children with her is because he doesn't appreciate her beauty that she's not enough for him basically and you compare that to the marriage between Levin and kitty and Levin doesn't seem all that gung-ho on kids either he seems kind of cool when his when his child is born but then when when he's he fears for their safety he comes running over it he really he really gets into the kid he really gets into the family he loves it gives him a great source of joy and they're building something together they're building this family together whereas for Anna she she ends up putting the cart before the horse love is a wonderful thing our desire for love is not something that should be suppressed or denied or anything like that but it has to be put in the right direction and it needs to be used as an instrument towards something that is greater it has to have a point it's not just about our frivolous longings and you go around blown as the wind pursuing whatever love affairs that you want for Anna it becomes the end in itself and and a man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package indeed I say there really is that sense that they're they're pursuing something that's slipping away from them and and when you're you are pointing to the fact that Anna at the end um becomes she becomes unlovable because she's so obsessed with Clinging On to the only thing that that can justify the decisions that she's made right which is is love for bronsky you know that's the great thing about seeing all the characters and how they think she sees it in herself and she has this battle every day in a similar way that once she falls in love with bronsky she battles with herself for a long time before giving in she knows that in her jealousies she's she's actually pushing Bronski away and he's actually admirable in kind of trying to to get through that um and and trying to like be understanding and try to to continue to love her despite the person she's turning into but she knows all that it's all visible to her and his face and his actions and she knows it and she she has this battle with herself every day to not do what she feels compelled to do to fly into these like sort of mad jealous rages correspondingly and kitty and Levin you see that a quite frivolous and young silly girl grows into her deep femininity and the he 11 kind of makes a piece a lot of peace with married life um and the contentment it brings him when he sees her nursing his brother this the scene that you're talking about where he's like I'm Not Dead Yet right I'm not dead and you're just cute though a little bit more a little longer but but he realizes how she she has like very deep virtues that he never can have um and she and he sees her in a totally different way and loves her for it there's almost like a physical sensation at least to me when I read this of of dissent and Ascent right of of um you know descending away from God and raising towards God is probably a household story would think about it and when you say an Ascent toward God when we're talking about leaven say you mean that in a very literal sense the novel ends with his conversion this man who has been agnostic doesn't doesn't have very strong religious views he is grappling with questions eventually he begins to Grapple with questions he's he's trying to find himself he says should I go should I leave the society and just live on a farm somewhere I think a lot of us have that inclination sometimes when life gets too hectic should I go I'll give it all up I'll give up my aristocratic life I'm gonna go marry a peasant girl I'm gonna go live on a farm that'll be fine he said no that's not it I'm not going to I'm not going to find happiness by pulling out of society I'm going to find happiness in community by and by helping to grow Community by having a family by by accepting by accepting the kinds of behaviors that create all the happy families all the happy families resemble one another and you're probably not going to reinvent the wheel and even Kitty even my probably not very intelligent wife Kitty this silly girl in many ways she has the faith of a child and I very intelligent Levin I don't and she's right and I'm wrong and the The Peasants who just have an ordinary way of life certainly The Virtuous ones the one people who just he keeps going into churches and the only people in the churches are old women and beggar and there's very very few people in there but they're right actually and all these genius Aristocrat liberal reformers intellectuals they don't know a damn thing one of Levin's Brothers is this High my very celebrated sort of intellectual he doesn't know anything he flits from one intellectual movement to another he has no wisdom whatsoever and Levin ends the book getting a little bit of that old-time religion writes himself into this character but what's very clear from the beginning with Levin is that he wants to be good and but he he's interrogating himself and the world for what that means and he yes he ends up converting but not in this like sort of like full story himself not this sort of ardent way where he has uh uh sort of encounter with the Divine or or in the but in the way that he just accepts that there's there's so much wisdom and goodness that in fact he's never going to be perfectly good and he has to accept some measure of imperfectability and faith in his life because he does have there is a moment in which he says you know I had this feeling I I you know he he has this sense of a kind of cosmic order and of the presence of God but then as you say then he goes on and he makes some stupid mistake and he sins and he does that he says oh so it's not it's not just that everything is perfect okay I guess that's the way it is though and he and he's you say he he just kind of accepts it what I really like is that even the the happy family life right is not what we would call happy I mean kitty and Levin do not have a sort of blissful marriage right what they find is exactly what you're referencing with regard to Faith what they find is is something um is contentment is is stepping into a role as a man or a woman a wife a husband a a mother and father that's stepping into those roles may not bring them sort of bliss but it brings them something good something better and that's why yeah the the you know the happy families and the unhappy families the happy families aren't really like they don't they aren't Blissful and I think again this is this is a totally different way than we tend to think about love and marriage today where we think about it as you know this is the soulmate concept or like we think about it as as um that there's something wrong for example if if we don't have those those kind of blissfulness or whatever um in fact this book says that is is an illusion the institution of marriage is much deeper than that your life is not something unusual because you suffer yeah right or psychologically or in turmoil in fact that is life and that is that the best that you can proceed towards is something like what Kitty and Levin have um which and and and that if you follow your sort of psychological turmoil you you can end up much much worse off even on the same metrics about Bliss happiness you know whatever Pursuit of Happiness what's unusual about these conclusions I suppose is that we consider them unusual and and that that was true at the time of Tolstoy this time of Rapid uh social and political change it that had occurred in the west and now was spreading through Russia as well and he's he's writing in that milieu and all the more so today it's not as though that change has slowed down in any way we you know when Kitty young 18 year old cute kitty is up to be married her mother is very upset she said you know in the old days we would just arranged these marriages and we don't do that anymore but we can't we can't let the people just choose their own spouses willy-nilly she says no one in Russia even knows what you're supposed to do anymore and that that's a profound observation no all the rules have just changed Within a matter of decades and now no one really knows what to do and today today we forget about we don't know what marriage is we just redefined marriage in in our own country within the last 10 years forget that we don't know the relationship between men and women we don't know what men and women even are anymore we can't we can't even Define it a Supreme Court Justice can't even Define it so we're at a moment uh sort of like tolstoy's moment on steroids where everything is so deeply unsettled and you've got you've got a choice that you can make the choice is do I maybe give a little Credence to the stuff that has always worked even if it doesn't look like the extremes of my euphoric Bliss my fantasies of what could be me and bronsky riding off on a horse somewhere Into the Wilderness do I do I give a little deference to what works or do I try to recreate everything into and I'm going to figure it out I'm gonna I'm gonna settle this question of Happiness once and for all on my own terms well tolstoy's got bad news for you because all happy families they kind of broadly look the same and all the unhappy there are a billion ways to have an unhappy family but if you want to have a happy family you pretty much got to kind of do the same stuff and that of course comes especially down to pursuing the good pursuing just just doing the good stuff and and maybe don't just think about your own personal pleasures and your radical fancies this is I think we would have to say a very conservative novel it takes the side of the conservatives against the radicals and the reformers and there are a couple moments in it that subtly show you this too obviously the broad themes of the book speak to that but even these subtle moments where you'll have the reformers and the Socialists and the Liberals and they'll they'll say here's our plan we've got to create this brand new kind of public school system and then Levin says why do we need that well because this is going to work to the benefit of the the peasantry and and the aristocracy he goes I will it I don't I don't think anyone will I'm not going to send my kids to those schools and I don't think the peasants care and they don't want to send their why do we want to do well because this will change the position of Labor in the economy goes well I don't know all your theories on labor they don't seem to be doing anything really at all I'm just trying to make a couple extra bucks on my farm here uh and and he has this observation he says you're thinking about Labor as labor as this abstract concept he said I'm thinking about the Russian peasants that I know I'm thinking about the people that I can talk to and I'm trying to think how can I work my little parcel of land to make it work better for everybody and to get make a little bit more money out of it I'm not thinking Pie in the Sky how to recreate the world Anew I'm just I'm just asking hey that person that I know that custom that I know that institution that I'm familiar with and that I've actually been a part of but what can I learn from that what perhaps modest improvements can I make within in a very practical way that's going to be a better guide for life before we go we have to get actually to the very first line of the novel not just not the one that everybody knows but the Epitaph of the novel which is vengeance is mine I will repay it's an ominous way to start a book what does it mean by the time we get to the end of the book I think it means you can't escape you can't escape the the consequences of of your actions you will be repaid acting virtuously repays itself and repays you and the end not in a cheap sort of like oh if you're a good person life is going to be easy kind of way I'm not a religious person but one of the the things that's profoundly true about the the moral teachings for example of the Bible it's not from the exterior that's punishing you it's not the society consequences it's the consequences that are inevitable because of man's nature that when you act in this way those consequences will follow you and you won't be able to escape them it's not the world imposing on you it's the decisions you've made for yourself and the inevitable consequences of those decisions it's way too easy to say as so many so many liberal critics of this book do that essentially the problem was that Anna Anna lives in a patriarch Oracle society that wouldn't accept her Affair it's such a cheapening human nature compels consequences when you act in certain ways and you are the author of your own destruction when you do and those are those are real life those are not um sort of moralizing from above you're not religious but you don't sound exactly irreligious either sort of like Levin maybe you you might you even not only Tolstoy but maybe maybe you and I think certainly as I read the book I you get to the end with a character like Levin you think wow I'm glad he I'm glad he's working it out and then you look at a character like Anna you say there but for the grace of God go I don't want and then and then you look at all those reformers and all those people with all their bright ideas and all their practice and that's and in the moment they know they say no what I'm doing is so right I know everyone says it's wrong and all of history says it's wrong and all the books say it but I know I and it'll work out for me and it won't entrance is mine I will repay all happy families resemble one another and and each the many unhappy families that are on display in this novel each can be very unhappy in their own way quite quite a warning to live in especially to all those Millennials and Zoomers out there who are watching it it's an important word it's a wonderful work of art and a very important warning okay that's it I've kept you too long Inez thank you so much for being here where can people find you you can find my work over at Independent Women's Forum mostly on actually issues for example the definition of sex uh so system it's a very modern questions as opposed to these these more important questions um and and you can find me on Twitter at Inez felcher you can find me right here next time on the book club I'm Michael Knowles happy reading thank you so much for watching this episode of the book club on prageru prageru is a 501c3 non-profit organization so we rely on donations from viewers like you to keep this content on the air please consider making a tax deductible contribution today to help keep this content coming thank you very much