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My big fat slowmaxxing winter break reading was Leo Tolstoy’s classic Anna Karenina, or at least that was the plan. The book is over 850 pages long and I had been reading some other stuff during the first half of break, so I don’t know what on Earth made me think I was going to read the thing in six days and have a nice fat book already on my list by January 2nd, even if I hadn’t ended up spilling water all over it on December 30 and needing three full days just to dry it out to a readable condition. (It took at least five days to get it fully devoid of moisture again, even when strategically placed right by a heating vent.) Then I had to go back to work, and so here we are, halfway through January, and I have finally finished it.

It was absolutely worth the time and even the damp interruptions.

While Anna is the title character–and certainly provides one of the main storylines–this book has a pretty large cast of characters, and we spend significant inside-their-head time with at least half a dozen of them. The book opens from the point of view of Anna Arkadyevna’s brother Stepan Arkadyevich, a friendly, good-humored specimen of Russia’s upper class, holding various executive-level government jobs that consist entirely of schmoozing and continually cheating on his long-suffering wife with an absolutely clueless lack of malice about it. We also end up spending a lot of page time with his wife Dolly; with Dolly’s little sister Kitty Schterbatskaya; with Konstantin Levin, a friend of Stepan’s who’s in love with Kitty; and of course, with Count Vronsky, the man Anna blows up her life over, who in the beginning is having a flirtation with Kitty that temporarily blows up Levin’s plans to marry her. We also spend some time with Anna’s husband, who I found to be a particularly fascinating character. A lot of the time we spend with these folks they are not necessarily doing very much, although they are all very busy; Levin is basically a little freak among the Russian aristocracy in that he spends a lot of time in his place in the country, not only managing it and trying to come up with better administrative schemes, but also actually doing the occasional spot of farming himself. He’s got very tortured ideas about what it would mean to fix Russian agriculture and how to be alive, which are oddly relatable if you are the type of person prone to overthinking things sometimes, like me, even if the things he is overthinking are entirely outside of my experience (I have no opinions, tortured or otherwise, about 1870s Russian agricultural improvements). These very close third-person POVs are full of dryly funny observations about the absurdities and hypocrisies of these characters, and yet all of them are ultimately sort of endearing (except Vronsky, who is not necessarily actually a bigger piece of shit than any of these other useless rich idiots but who I just could not ever warm up to). The result is both timeless & universal exploring the human condition etc. and also extremely specific, deeply rooted in the time and place that the story takes place in. The place of the church in society, the influence of various 19th-century social and political movements, the state of the divorce and custody laws, the unsustainable financial state of the Russian nobility, all shape the novel and the events that happen in it profoundly, and it simply could not be the novel that it is if it took place somewhere else or at another time.

It is very hard to try to say anything about this book that smarter people than I haven’t said a million times in the past 150 years, I am sure. I haven’t read all that people have said about it but I really don’t feel like I have the chops to comment on a work like this. For starters, everything I know about 1870s Russia is basically running on knowledge of 1870s England and hoping it’s not that vastly different.

One reason I am under-read in the great Russian novels is that every Russian short story or novella I have ever read has been the saddest thing in the entire world, especially Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” which continues to haunt me even as it’s been several years since I’ve read it. As a result I have been a little hesitant to be like “Yes, I want 870 consecutive pages of that.” But somehow, Anna Karenina ends on a hopeful note, even though Anna rather famously dies by throwing herself under a train. The trick to this is that the train thing is a full fifty pages from the end, and we have to tour the entire rest of the dramatic personae afterwards to see how they are reacting to it. Somehow, this works.

This book is just truly excellent on a craft level. While the whole book is long, its story huge and sprawling and taking place over many years, the sentences and chapters are wonderfully clear and direct, especially compared to a lot of other 19th-century writing that I’ve been exposed to. They are only convoluted and long when a character is having convoluted long thoughts, in which case, they work perfectly to illustrate the confusion, heartbreak, dissociation, or just plain disordered thinking that afflicts the characters. Big credit to translator Constance Garnett, since I certainly wasn’t reading the book in the original Russian.

I am extremely curious to check out some of the many, many, many adaptations that have been made, since I really can’t see how they could get across some of the stuff going on in these characters’ heads. Maybe they don’t. But I will find out!