I’ve been reading Anna Karenina intermittently for a couple of weeks now, and I find it somewhat difficult to sympathize with such characters who are so clearly in an entirely different social world than I. They talk of Society (with the ever-important “S”) and take off abroad on a whim. Hard work for the men is listening to petitioners in their civil service job or riding around their estate to make sure all the serfs are working as directed (maybe occasionally working with them!); had work for the women is dealing with servants’ incompetence. It’s not difficult to see why Marxist ideology took root there as it did, and it’s strikingly evident already in Tolstoy’s mid—19th century Russia. One character even semi-accurately predicts that Marxism will be the new theology, sweeping Christianity off to one side.
And just when you think none of the characters is going to address any of this, Oblonsky, Levin, and Veslovsky head off into the marshes for a couple of days of shooting. Sitting in a peasant’s hut, enjoying his hospitality, they begin talking about the justness of social system when their host must step outside for a while.
“Why do we eat and drink, go shooting and do no work, while he is always, always working?” said Vasenka Veslovsky, evidently for the first time in his life thinking of this, and therefore speaking quite genuinely (582).
Why indeed? Because you can afford it.
The conversation ends with an exchange between Oblonsky and Levin, in which the former admits the inherent injustice in the system, but encourages Levin to accept them nonetheless.
“One of two things: either you confess that the existing order of Society is just, and then uphold your rights; or else own that you are enjoying unfair privileges, as I do, and take them with pleasure.”
“No! If it were unjust, you could not use such advantages with pleasure; at any rate I could not. The chief thing for me is, not to feel guilty” (583).
It reminds me of a similar emotion I experienced a few years ago in Berlin viewing an exhibition of Gauguin’s work:
While at the new National Gallery I was struck with a terrible sense of the stupid futility of all that I was seeing around me. Here we were, the privileged ten or fifteen percent of the world’s population, paying fifteen marks to look at some paintings (created by someone who was, by his own admission, trying to escape reality) while the remaining eighty-five percent of the world’s population is fighting for survival. We spend so much of our time trying to inject some kind of meaning in our lives while they simply try to live. The significance of the Expressionist movement or the impact of Bach’s music on his contemporaries seems pitifully insignificant when others go to bed hungry every night. Their suffering robbed me of any pleasure I might otherwise have experienced at the gallery. And then I turned this critical light on my own aspirations and once again felt that I would be wasting my life by devoting my time and energy to studying and teaching religion and philosophy. What does it matter whether Berkley is right or wrong about the relationship between perception and existence when people are starving and disease ridden? It’s a simply matter of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — most people don’t get the most basic needs fulfilled while we in the western world scurry about trying to find meaning in paintings and music.
Perhaps Gauguin just doesn’t appeal to me . . .
You said…
I find it somewhat difficult to sympathize with such characters who are so clearly in an entirely different social world than I. They talk of Society (with the ever-important “S”) and take off abroad on a whim.
– – –
I have always, on the other hand, been insanely jealous of the beat-generation writers, a la Kerouac, who would talk about just taking off, again on a whim, driving across the country, and when the money ran out, being able to get some quick job to make a few bucks.
Everything is so regulated these days, I bet you couldn’t do that, at least not to such a degree of success. Job application forms, background checks, etc. etc… I bet it’d make spontaneity a bitch.