Deep Analysis of Anna Karenina Part Five: The Marriage of Kitty and Levin (Chapters 1-6) (Patreon)

We're into Part Five of Anna Karenina, and we've broken the back of this tremendous novel. It only gets better and better. 

In this lecture, we're looking at the wedding of Levin and Kitty, tying in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and A Confession, discussing the existential crisis in Russia at the time, talking more about empathy and understanding, diving into Tolstoy's technique of "estrangement" (as the Russian Formalists call it), talking about Tolstoy's view of women in literature and his personal life, and much more. 

• 0:00 is Anna Karenina a monster?
• 1:00 Kitty and Levin getting married
• 1:30 Tolstoy and Levin
• 2:00 the importance of confession (Crime and Punishment tie-in)
• 2:51 Tolstoy’s A Confession
• 3:00 the existential crisis in Russia
• 5:00 Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago
• 6:00 rich vs poor, man vs woman
• 8:30 how can we understand one another?
• 9:10 Tolstoy’s art of estrangement (Schlovsky and Russian Formalism)
• 10:00 shared consciousness and why we like certain writers more than others
• 12:12 How Tolstoy renders interior monologues (psychological prose)
• 15:00 Levin the “unbeliever”, and the real treat of Anna Karenina
• 16:44 How can you doubt the Creator when you behold His creations?
• 17:06 who is God in Anna Karenina? Us or Tolstoy?
• 18:00 why we need to read these great books slowly
• 20:00 the power of literature
• 22:00 the central theme of Anna Karenina: “understand”
• 22:29 how to become top 10x more empathetic/top 1% for empathy
• 23:52 Levin getting ready for his wedding (and why we believe this episode)
• 24:44 Tolstoy, women, and his wife Sofia’s diaries
• 26:26 a passage I find beautiful
• 29:00 confession, therapy, and the metaphors we live by

Thank you for watching, listening, and reading along!