Friday BookReview -- Tolstoy's portrayal of Anna Karenina: which love do we really want?

                             

Leo Tolstoy 1828-1910

What is the real work of the artist? 

"Acquiring the habit of perception -- learning to notice details

 easily overlooked -- [improving our] skill of noticing what is right before us."

(from Gary Saul Morson's introduction to Anna Karenina)

One of the finest essays I have come across in recent years was written by Professor Morson. It appears in the Marian Schwartz edition of Tolstoy's classic.

Some excerpts from Mr. Morson's 'The Moral Urgency of Anna Karenina':

Often quoted but rarely understood, the first sentence of Anna Karenina—“All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—offers a paradoxical insight into what is truly important in human lives. What exactly does this sentence mean? 

In War and Peace and in a variant of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy quotes a French proverb: “Happy people have no history.” Where there are dramatic events, where there is material for an interesting story, there is unhappiness. The old curse—“May you live in interesting times!”—suggests that the more narratable a life is, the worse it is. 

With happy lives and happy families, there is no drama to relate. What are you going to say: They woke up, breakfasted, didn’t quarrel, went to work, dined pleasantly, and didn’t quarrel again? 

Happy families resemble each other because there is no story to tell about them. But unhappy families all have stories, and each story is different. 

We tend to think that true life is lived at times of high drama. When Anna Karenina reads a novel on the train, she wants to live the exciting incidents described. Both high literature and popular culture foster the delusion that ordinary, prosaic happiness represents something insufferably bourgeois, a suspension of real living. Forms as different as romantic drama, adventure stories, and tragedies suggest that life is truly lived only in moments of great intensity. 

Tolstoy thought just the opposite. 

The dramatic understanding of life that Tolstoy rejected has, if anything, grown still more powerful. Today very few people question that “true love” is the grand and glorious feeling that consumes one’s very being, as in Romeo and Juliet and countless debased imitations. By contrast, Tolstoy wants us to recognize that romantic love is but one kind of love. It is an ideology of love, in fact, but we do not recognize it as one. In Anna Karenina, Kitty at first prefers the dashing and romantic Vronsky to the kind and staid Levin because she has assumed, as most of us do, that she should marry the one she “loves”; and she has been told that “love” is romantic rather than prosaic. She does not yet recognize that what she feels for Levin is also a form of love, and that she has a real choice. Which love does she really want? 

Over time Kitty comes to recognize that in addition to romantic love there is also intimate love. Only intimate love is compatible with a family. Tolstoy wants his readers to be aware that this choice exists for them as well. 

The myth embodied in great romances tells us that love envelops our whole being. Romantic love presses upon us with irresistible intensity. It transcends all ordinary prosaic conditions and lifts lovers to a realm of resplendent meaning. All-consuming, it allows no room for anything else. Lovers love, not so much each other, but love itself. 

What is more, according to this ideology, we do not choose such love. It befalls us. We “fall in love,” we do not jump in love. Such love is a “passion,” not an action. It is something we suffer, an idea prefigured in medieval literature by love potion and in modern thought by unconscious forces overwhelming the will. 

For this reason, romantic love feels like fate, and an ideology of amoral fatalism often accompanies it. Lovers live in a realm beyond good and evil. After all, good and evil depend on choice, and where fate governs, choice is out of the question. No matter how much pain the lovers cause, one cannot condemn them. Adultery becomes as noble as revolution, and only cramped moralists worry about the pain caused the betrayed spouse or abandoned children. 

That is the story Anna Karenina imagines she is living. As one of her friends observes, she resembles a heroine from a romance. But Anna’s sense of herself is not Tolstoy’s sense of her. He places his romantic heroine not in a romance, where her values would be validated, but in the world of prosaic reality, where actions have consequences and the pain we inflict matters. 

Oprah Winfrey, who chose Tolstoy’s novel for her book club, followed many others in viewing Anna Karenina as a celebration of its heroine and of romantic love. That gets the book exactly wrong. It mistakes Anna’s story of herself for Tolstoy’s. Just as Anna Karenina imagines herself into the novel she reads, such readers imagine themselves as Anna or her adulterous lover Vronsky. They do not seem to entertain the possibility that the values they accept unthinkingly are the ones Tolstoy wants to discredit. 

Perhaps such readers simply presume that no great writer would take the side of all those shallow moralists. Would a genius endorse what we dismiss as bourgeois banality? But in an unexpected way, that is what Tolstoy does. He shows with unprecedented psychological subtlety the shallowness of the romantic view... 

Anna Karenina interweaves two major stories—the story of the destruction of Anna’s marriage and life and the making of Levin’s life and marriage. But it is the novel’s third story, concerning Anna’s brother, Stiva, and his wife, Dolly, that provides the book’s moral compass. 

If by the hero or heroine of a novel, we mean not the one who occupies the most dramatic space but the one who best embodies the author’s values, then the real hero of Anna Karenina is Dolly. Her everyday goodness, her ceaseless efforts for her children, and her fundamental decency attract no attention, but they are, from Tolstoy’s perspective, the most meaningful possible activities. Here, as in many other works, Tolstoy teaches that we do not notice the really good people among us. 

If a life well lived is one without major events, how does one write a novel about it? Tolstoy’s solution is to put the life based on mistaken values—Anna’s—in the foreground, while Dolly’s virtues and troubles remain in the background where they can easily be missed. Readers, critics, and filmmakers often treat Dolly as nothing more than a boring housewife—merely a good mother, as Stiva thinks of her—but for Tolstoy, nothing is more important than a good mother. Life’s most important lessons are acquired in childhood or not at all. Vronsky will always remain a shallow person because, as Tolstoy explains, he never had a family life. How one is raised truly matters. 

Perhaps the novel’s key moment belongs to Dolly. She finds herself in the country with her children in a house that Stiva has promised but neglected to make suitable for them. At last, she manages to get things in order: 

And for Darya Alexandrovna her expectations were being fulfilled of a comfortable, if not peaceful, country life. Peaceful with six children, Daria Alexandrovna could never be… But in addition, however hard it might be for a mother to bear the fear of illnesses, the illnesses themselves, and the grief at the sight of signs of bad tendencies in her children, the children themselves were even now repaying her sorrows with small joys. These joys were so small they passed unnoticed like gold in sand and in bad moments she saw only the sorrows, only the sand; but there were good moments, too, when she saw only the joys, only the gold. 

Gold in sand: That is what true happiness is like. It occurs at ordinary moments and does not call attention to itself, much as Dolly does not call attention to herself. And yet it is moments like these that make a life meaningful.

                                              

     [The second part of this essay will appear next Friday].

         

"... if the world could write directly, it would write like Tolstoy"

His final resting-place at Yasnaya Polyana

To protect Europe, build the FRATERNITY of armed nations

[All eyes are on Europe, with its immigration problems and frequent jihadist bloodshed.

Pierre Manent's comment on his countrymen: "The French are exhausted, but they are first of all perplexed, lost. Things were not supposed to happen this way..."

When the First World War broke out, Europe contained a quarter of the world's population. Today it's roughly 1 out of 9. The largest countries are:

GERMANY - 82 million
U.K. - 66 million
FRANCE - 64 million
ITALY - 61 million
SPAIN - 47 million
POLAND - 39 million

Here is an interview with David Pence on his view of the situation.]



After the elderly priest was murdered at the church altar in Normandy, the British writer Austen Ivereigh commented that "violence has no part in God’s plan; it is no-thing; it is absurd." 
What is he talking about? The D-Day invasion against the Nazis; policemen and soldiers shooting at terrorists... these actions are absurd? Violence has an important part in God's plan.

Dr. Pence: Mr. Ivereigh and Robert Barron (one of the bishops out in L.A.) are both deeply unbiblical in trying to explain Christianity as a nonviolence project. It simply ain't so! They have turned non-violence into a principle of not fighting, rather than a spiritual way of engaging the oppressor. This deprives non-violence of its true confrontational spiritual component -- they speak a very different language than Gandhi or Martin Luther King. And, of course, Ghandi and King were dealing with 20th century English magistrates and American officials who believed in law and public opinion. Their movements would not have worked in Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or Comanche country in 18th century Texas. Non violence is a modern movement of the Spirit. It evokes little biblical resonance. When the Israelites took the Promised Land they forcibly ejected all the residing peoples. Saul was deposed from the throne because he disobeyed God in not carrying out a complete enough destruction of a city. Aaron’s Levitical priesthood was founded on a slaughter of "friend, kinsman, and neighbor" who worshipped the Golden Calf against G-d. The greatest Old Testament prophet, Elijah, after humiliating the 450 priests of Baal told the people to capture them all and then executed them. Christ sheathed Peter’s sword because he was going to conquer death and the devil, not because He didn’t believe in conquering. It is hard not to notice that the Catholic clergy which has failed so miserably as a brotherhood of protective fathers in expelling their own homosexual predators seems similarly limp in building protective culture for persecuted Christians in Africa and the Mideast.

I have to add that other Catholics who label all of Islam as violent by nature (as opposed to Christianity?) and desirous of worldwide spread (as opposed to Christianity?) are not clarifying the conversation. We need to discuss predation and protection, not violence and non-violence. We are facing a demonic force within Islam; and we need Muslims who seek to do the will of God to join Christians and our national armed forces to militarily defeat Satan’s jihad. We are not contrasting ourselves with them by saying we reject the sword. We don’t. We reject Satan. This movement is not of God and thus we can agree -- it is not Islam ('submission' to the Will of God). At the same time this movement wears the garments of Islam, abides in the holy cities of Islam, and shelters and propagates the Wahhabi ideology from those sites. This is an uniquely Islamic problem. I would go further and say it is uniquely a Sunni issue. We need the Sunni Islamic nations to militarily condemn and fight the Salafists -- this begins with Indonesia, Egypt, Jordan, Oman, and Turkey.


It seems like there is much confusion among Catholics about the very different duties of priests and laymen. When the Archbishop of Rouen, in France, commented that the Church "has no other arms besides prayer and fraternity between men" -- how should we as laymen take that?

DP: Well, first we must appreciate the role of the priests who are always the champions of humanity as a whole. We need them to speak as priests calling the whole species into the Body of Christ. They are speaking in a different voice than laymen. We need their voice of unity as we enter into conflict, and we will need it as we seek peace after a bitter struggle. Laymen, however, must speak as temporal rulers responsible for the protection of the innocent and charged with the duty of disabling or slaying the evil ones. When we talk of fraternity we mean joining with other men in providing protection and order in some defined territory. Masculine fraternity has boundaries and a mission to protect and provide.

Peter has sheathed his sword -- but King Arthur must assemble the knights. Fraternity among men is not a flowery wish for all mankind. Fraternity among men is a call to political order -- one nation at a time; one protective union at a time. France needs to call all its men in muster. Who are citizens? Who will fight for the whole of the people? They need to sort out the men of their country into citizens, enemies, and simple inhabitants. There is fraternity in Europe. Those sacred fraternities have names: France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, and Germany.

                         

Arthur's Round Table

The protective role of male citizens is the covenantal bond which binds countrymen in fraternity. France’s republic was one of the first nations to define a universalistic masculine citizenship that way. The masculine bond of citizenship is as real and as specific in shaping a local patriotic public as the marital bond is in making sexual love particular and real for a given couple. The couple shares their rings, the male groups share their flag.

Satan hates the Mass and holy nations in the same way that he hates holy matrimony. Our public life constituted by our masculine civic bonds has broken down. In many areas of the world, such bonds have never existed. Christianity begot the republican movement which kept extending the radius of male citizenship within the nation. This led to universal male suffrage as all men were invited into the citizen bond regardless of property or racial or religious considerations. To make the bond real, though, there was a territorial definition of the covenant. Fraternity is not a throw-away word -- it is the essential protective bond of politics and citizenship. Masculine public bonds of love have a protective function. When carrying out that public duty is not part of the masculine public persona then men become clowns or a crowd of consumers, not citizens and a body politic. Fraternity cannot be formless -- it is an ordering of public love; when one is in the presence of real civic brothers, the sense of public solidarity and safety for all present is palpable. The Catholic clergy is a well-ordered universal brotherhood manifested locally in well-defined territorial dioceses. Christendom has bequeathed laymen in Europe with an orderly pattern of national histories and institutions. Laymen must awaken to their public duties and identities. The archbishop was right. Along with prayer, fraternity really is the only Christian response to crime and slaughter.

Map on Monday: SOUTH AMERICAN NATIONS

An Introduction to the Rise of the Independent Christian Nation States of South America

by A. Joseph Lynch

Although many of these nations struggle with internal political turmoil, the relative peace among the nations of South America is a testament to the peaceful fraternity of Christian nations. Where decolonization occurred throughout much of the world only after the Second World War, the rise of an independent South America, free of European rule, came rather swiftly during the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

While the national borders displayed on the map above have experienced some change, the broad shape of South America's Christian nations emerged from a series of revolutionary wars taking place at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Here it is important to place these wars in the context of two previous revolutions: the American Revolution (1775-1783) and the French Revolution (1789-1799). The success of America's war for independence did not go unnoticed by its southern neighbors. Haiti would be the location of the first revolution in Latin America - and the successful uprising of its slave population startled the landed aristocracy of both the United States and the Spanish colonies.

It was the fateful rise of Napoleon Bonaparte through doors opened by the French Revolution, however, that set in motion the revolutionary wars of South America.

Driving the revolutionary cause was Napoleon's invasion of Portugal in 1807 and his overthrow of the Spanish government in 1808. Portugal's royal family fled to their largest colony, Brazil, while the colonies of Spain - which rejected the puppet rule of Bonaparte's brother - turned to self-rule until legitimate authority returned to power. When King Fernando VII came back to the throne in 1814, however, his colonial subjects resisted his rule as an absolutist monarch. Meanwhile, Brazil's breaking with the Portugal took place after the Portuguese king's return to Europe in 1821. Endangered by revolutionaries throughout his kingdom, John VI threatened Brazil's semi-autonomous status. This prompted the full independence movement of the Brazilians - led now by none other then John's son, Pedro. Brazil declared its independence on September 7, 1822 and Pedro was made the first Emperor of Brazil the following month. By early 1924, Emperor Pedro secured Brazil's military independence, and the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro in 1825 formally ratified the independence won on the battlefield.

The story of how Spain's South American colonies became independent can largely be told by the contribution of two military men: Simon Bolivar and Jose de San Martin. Bolivar's skills on the battlefield helped win independence for what would become Venezuela, Columbia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia - all in the north of the continent. By far a better general than a politician, Bolivar was also no George Washington and he died on his way to a self-imposed European exile. See also our book review of Marie Arana's Bolivar. The Argentine, Jose de San Martin, fought against the French in Spain but returned home to help Argentina win independence, and later fought his way north to liberate Chile and then Lima, Peru.

All told, the independent Christian nation states of South America began to take shape by the mid-nineteenth century. The revolutions were won on the battlefield; and a shared Christian culture and memory of a pan-continental struggle against colonial forces sowed the seeds of peace between these new nations that persists to this day.

For more information about central America, see our Map on Monday: Central America.

Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, July 30

by Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch

I. PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS

HILLBILLY ELEGY - A TERRIFIC INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR: Understanding poor whites and Trump. This interview has received the most traffic in the history of the 'American Conservative' site.

ON PICKING A WHITE MALE INSTEAD OF FEMALE OR LATINO AS HER RUNNING MATE: Here is a quote from Hillary Clinton that sounds like she judges other ladies and the many black and Latino office holders filling the Democratic Party as not really ready for the top office. Our hypersensitive press will not wince when Hillary uses genetics to explain why she picked a white over those who might have diversified the ticket and made it look more like America and a lot more like the Democratic Party? If only Donald Trump had said it.

From the New York Times: "Ultimately, Mrs. Clinton, who told PBS that she was “afflicted with the responsibility gene,” avoided taking a chance with a less experienced vice-presidential candidate and declined to push the historic nature of her candidacy by adding another woman or a minority to the ticket.” That's the New York Times explaining.

A GLASS CEILING SHATTERS -- PRAY IT DOESN’T RAIN
Feminists Rejoice and Reflect.  No one has asked if there is any good reason all our presidents and war generals have been male. From the giddy Fox females to the serious elderly matrons of PBS, all agreed this is long overdue. Other views to follow once the wave has crested.

TIM KAINE FOR VP - RELIGION FACTS: Five quick facts.

COSMOPOLITANS VS. PATRIOTS; WORKINGMAN AND NEW ELITE: From Crisis magazine. Realignment of the Working class and Donald Trump by Stephen Young. The real alternatives in foreign policy - Is Bushism dead? Donald Trump by his ghostwriter - not a flattering tale. Trump interview on foreign policy - a different look at NATO, NAFTA, and Korea. The new class of risk adverse credentialed; immobility for the poor.

II. AROUND THE WORLD R&G ROUND UP

VIETNAM WAR DEAD: 58,000 men, 8 females.

SUDAN - TRIBES REEMERGE: The nations divided by religion and South Sudan now divides by ethnic group.

TURKEY - THE COUP THAT FAILED AND THE ERDOGAN COUP THAT CONTINUES: Erdogan consolidates Islamic but non-ISIS government.

CHINA: New nationalism.

GREECE-RUSSIA ORTHODOX ALLIANCE IS STRONGER THAN LEFT RIGHT PARADIGM: This writer thinks Europe should work against the strong alliance of Greece and Russia. The fact is that leftist Greece and nationalist Russia have deep ties and many personal ties now among leaders. The Russians helped the Greeks when they broke from the Ottoman Empire (Independence day is on the feast of the Annunciation Mar 25, 1821). Orthodox Russia helped the orthodox nation of Greece break from the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Greek nationalism pitted against the superstate of the EU once again finds the Russian nation as their ally against Empire.

SAUDIS AND A STRIKE AT WAHHABI PRACTICE: The story the Saudis may allow more reverence at holy sites will be resisted if true.

III. FAITH AND CULTURE R&G ROUND UP

GOD IS DEAD - THE ROLE OF BOENHOFFER - THE TRIUMPH OF GODLESS PROTESTANTISM: Rod Dreher on Matt Rose First Things article. I note especially that part of the death of God movement was to replace all that was authoritarian about the Christian Gospel with a service motif. Do not bring the authoritative message of God made man... just be like Jesus and serve man. We cannot deny that "servant leader" is a Christian term, but the notion that leadership can be reduced to service to the will of others is a trap of democratic thinking, which is a trap of autonomous thinking which is the essence of diabolical thinking.

The eclipse of White Christians is a demographic fairly clueless piece at Atlantic Monthly. But if we couple this article with the above history of how "the God is dead" theologians morphed into the diversity human rights establishment, we begin to see what has really happened. White Protestant Christianity (WASPS) has morphed into the godless West gender ideologues who dominate our media, educational, and governmental institutions. They have hold of church bureaucracies even if their pews are emptying. That doesn’t matter - they are taking their spoiled kids to sports games on Sunday morning anyway. The godless white Protestants are represented by the Democratic party. Blacks and tribal Catholics accompany them. Their most important military arm is NATO, aimed against both Orthodox Christians to their east (Russia and Serbia) and various actors in the Muslim world. The Obama presidency and Sanders movement are rebellions against the smugness of the elite, but not a true revolution since both adopt the godless gender ideology at the heart of the death-of-God White Protestant movement.

The alternative to this is understanding multicolored global Christianity as the real Christendom and nations as their military arms.

VIRGINITY AND ITS MARTYR - WHY DOES MARIA GORETTI GET SO MANY PEOPLE MAD: What is it about virginity -- physical and spiritual -- that is such a dangerous sword?

CATHOLIC NUNCIO BLOCKS INVESTIGATION OF HOMOSEXUAL ARCHBISHOP: St. Paul-Minneapolis facts uncover the secret no one will touch at the heart of Catholic sex abuse scandal: the undercover homosexual subculture in Catholic clergy. They can pose as anti-gay and orthodox or pro-gay and progressive but there is no truth in them and they are covered by very high officials.  Archbishop Nienstedt, Nuncio Vigano and the bishops and lawyer priest who tried to tell the truth.

THEOCENTRIC WORSHIP AND EDUCATING THE SOUL: Liturgical reform - orienting man to God and truth.

PRIEST-MARTYR IN FRANCE: French Catholic priest killed during Mass in Normandy. May he RIP and may the nations respond. A report from France.

WHITE BOY PRIVILEGE AND BLACK MAN ANGER: Ladders and Bridges. Travis Smiley, black TV journalist, on listening to the killers. Gavin Long and Micah Xavier, black, male, military. Gavin Long, before black power gets your momma, gotta kill the cops.

BLACK PASTORS REJECT GAY ANALOGY: Gender ideology is not civil rights.
Sheriff Clarke and BLM and CNN.

Friday BookReview -- Robert Caro is the finest 20th century biographer

[first published June 25, 2013]



Robert Caro is close to 80 now, and working away at the fifth and final book in his biography of Lyndon Johnson.

                           

Having read the other volumes, I am several chapters into Master of the Senate, and my awe of Mr. Caro only increases. It took me a few years to fully appreciate him, but he is an eagle who soars higher than Catton or Tuchman, Shelby Foote or McCullough.

One facet that jumps out: even though the author is a thoroughly liberal New York intellectual, his commitment to truth runs deeper than his ideology. Each Caro book you pick up has devastating revelations about LBJ – as well as other chief executives who prided themselves as lions of progress: Franklin Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson.


A couple anecdotes from Mr. Caro about the political misuse of the IRS:

** In 1934 President Roosevelt asked his Treasury Secretary to examine the taxes of publisher William Randolph Hearst. So, Henry Morgenthau pored over the returns of Hearst and his Hollywood mistress, Marion Davies – and "advised FDR to mount a preemptive attack" on the pair.

** A decade later, congressman Lyndon Johnson was able to engage the String-Puller-in-Chief to keep his political goose from being cooked.
The first LBJ volume (The Path to Power, chapter 35) tells how he, with his longtime friend and lawyer Alvin Wirtz, had a private audience with President Roosevelt – and the next day the IRS investigation, that had been looking into the illegal money which poured into Johnson’s unsuccessful senatorial campaign, was quashed!

[Mr. Wirtz was at one point the #2 man at the Interior Department under Harold Ickes. Wirtz was a type of genial thief who, after hammering out a contractual deal, secretly "adjusts" some of the wording before the parties actually sign the document].


UPDATE: Check out this earlier post regarding the hatred between LBJ and Bobby Kennedy, covered by Mr. Caro in the fourth book.