This is the best portrayal of women I have ever read. How did Tolstoy do it?
>>25052552He thought women were retards who belonged in the kitchen and therefore had the highest understanding of women out of any writer
>>25052552He talks to women and had sex with one
>>25052552This is the paradox. He hated women, like really, and felt homosexual eros. He probably was himself hysterical. Really an awful husband. Could never get over all the debaucheries he committed.Compare him to other famous misogynists and he might come up too.
>>25052596>He felt homosexual erosHuh?
>>25052552tolstoy "did it" by not doing it at all. he opened a vein & bled anna onto the page & then spent the rest of his life trying to become a peasant because he was so horrified by what came out. the "portrayal of women" you're praising is a portrait of one man's civil war with his own anima, painted in drag, punishment & train-wheels.you didn't read a woman.you read a man's attempt to exorcise one from himself by pinning her to paper & watching her slowly stop moving.
>>25052657
>>25052552>How did Tolstoy do it?He copied a strong African American woman's book.
>>25052552Madame Bovary by Flaubert is brilliant too. The answer it that the true novelist can create new whole worlds with fully formed humans in it, much like a god.
>>25052552>This is the best portrayal of women I have ever read.No.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doll_(Prus_novel)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_Py3-U956wWokulski is the average anon (well, simp) and Łęcka is the average roastie. Similar in meaning to Lolita but way predating itSome hold it to be the greatest Polish novel
>>25052606I am another anon. There's a page from Tolstoy's diary where he is in his early 20s and riding a carriage with a slightly older Russian guy he knows, he is describing how he was burning with desire to cover the guy in kisses but did not act upon it. I think he suppressed this as he aged though
>>25052860What competition is it up against?
>>25052876Who hasn't been there. Means nothing.
you retards are such hypocrites, why is tolstoy praised while schopenhauer is ridiculed when they came to the same conclusion?
>>25052552>Anna finally meets Levin>immediately charms him>Tolstoy writes that she could've had Levin (his self-insert) however she wanted him if she only wanted toWhat did he mean by this? Seriously. That entire section fascinated me the first time I read it, and still does
>>25052657This is correct. The reason Anna Karenina turned out so good is because the entire thing is Tolstoy fighting against his urge to moralfag about what an awful person she is so he created the most vivid characters ever written
>>25052923>What competition is it up against?what OP said. who i quoted directly in: >>25052860anna karenina is a cheating bpd whorenot all women are like this, saying its the best portrayal of women isn't fair to womenhowever, what ALL women are, are cold calculating and emotionally manipulative creatures hiding under a pretense of innocence
>>25052552I feel like he was just extremely talented and didn't even really know how he was doing it, he just did. I don't know any other author that would write so effortlessly
>>25053144I meant as in what other Polish novels is it in competition with to be the best Polish novel.
>>25053154Ferdydurke is funny
>>25052606>>25052876There’s also something about wife believing be was in love with one of his friends. But his sex drive towards women has extreme and tortured him his entire life. We can say that as with Byron he may have been better off with lower social status at first.
>>25053393Why are genius authors such perverts? Victor Hugo was the same, and fucked like 20 women the week he was dying when he was 80
>>25053512The animal heat converts into the energy of imagination, so its helpful for the genius to have as much as possible
>>25052860The Manuscript Found in Saragossa and Joseph Conrad's oeuvre mog it.
>>25052552He knew that deepest desire of woman is to be loved. A real woman, by force of her nature, does not feel her obligations towards the logic of life called ethics(To quote one philosopher). Almost every woman will reject everything else if that is the price of being loved by a sublime man.>>25053017Anna was in a strange state at the time. Some dark passion had taken hold of her, which was very tempting for any man. Anna at the beginning of the novel might not have been able to win Levin over, but Tolstoy portrayed her in Levin's moment as a true predator of men.>>25052876It doesn't have to be homosexual love. Who knows what took hold of him at that moment, maybe love for man in general.
>>25052596>>25052876fags always projecting their disgusting debasement
>>25052976It's cause Schopenhauer was an incel.
Tolstoy refused the Nobel Prize, calling it all a charade. Schopenhauer would have taken the Nobel Prize.
>>25053780>Anna was in a strange state at the time. Some dark passion had taken hold of her, which was very tempting for any man. Anna at the beginning of the novel might not have been able to win Levin over, but Tolstoy portrayed her in Levin's moment as a true predator of men.Yeah, I get that. But what makes it fascinating to me is that Levin IS Tolstoy, and he basically wrote himself getting (mentally) dominated by arguably his greatest character, and then later Anna herself, when she projects her hatred onto Kitty while spiraling, says that she could've ruined their happiness.
>>25053154>what other Polish novels is it in competition with to be the best Polish novel.the several others that won the Nobel Price in Literature, something the russians never received :^) (not counting solzhenitsyn's biography or that jew pasternak)aside from the Nobel laureates there's the Doll and there's Sienkiewicz's Deluge, as another anon mentioned Gombrowicz, also Witkacy's Insatiability
>>25053744Conrad Korzeniowski was ethnically Polish but his literature is British not Polish lol>The Manuscript Found in Saragossathe film is great but idk about the novel, all i know is its one of the earliest novels
>>25053983>Tolstoy refused the Nobel Prize, calling it all a charade.you can't refuse the Nobel Prize, they simply never cared to award any russians any, maybe for a reasonDylan tried refusing but he's still listed as a recipient LOL
>>25053988Yes, if you look from the Levin=Tolstoy starting point and if we take into account that Anna symbolizes the passions of Tolstoy's soul, then it seems strange and as if Tolstoy's "anima" could have prevailed and totally taken over him and "robbed" his happinessbut... it's all fiction after all :)
>>25052552by talking to them, and by being deeply interested in what they thought and felt and how they expressed it - just like every other heterosexual male author of value, such as Flaubert, Joyce, etc.
>>25052552By letting the Leonora thoughts run loose—same as all those WAP passages where the ladies are speaking with comically dainty affectations while flitting their dresses around.
Why did Tolstoy make Karenin such a cuckold?
>>25054926He’s a cold bureaucrat pretending everything in the world is going fine ignoring the ticking time bomb right under him. In fact he’s the best representation of Tsarist Russia at the time
>>25054947So what does it say about him that he still raised the bastard child from his wife's love affair with Vronsky?
>>25052976Tolstoy is more even handed. His Anna also has Vronsky and Karenin to sap up some of the evil actions so it’s not just a WOMAN BAD book.
>>25053062Tolstoy is a moralist but he’s good in spite of that not because of it. No one takes his peasant living lifestyle seriously outside of self styled Levin-bros of /lit/.
I want to make a video series going chapter-by-chapter on how good Anna Karenina is, and how most chapters use a distinct literary device or motif to make them stand apart, it's really incredible how good this book is when you read closely
>>25055232 A demonstration with The horse race chapter please
>>25052552Tolstoy was a dope-smoking hippie
>>25055435There's a horse rape chapter in Anna Karenina?
>>25054329It's surprising that she complains so much about him yet he must have been fucking her a lot to produce 13 children.
>>25052860polacks coming out of the woodwork to beg for attention whenever big bro Russia is mentioned is so pathetic
>>25055604They had a bizarre relationship, much more strange than the public consensus that he was a tyrannical husband suggests. She was still intensely devoted to him through all their fighting and they read each other’s diaries where they all shit on each other
>>25055438This has got all messed up, now you're thinking of Catherine the Great.
>>25055604Feeling guilty about being horny is an essential part of Tolstoy and his fiction.
>>25054926What a sad character.Shell of a person. Especially in the scene where he realizes he has no one to talk to about what has happened.
Leo Tolsoy
>>25052552Anna Karina
>no one posted the true classic yet
>>25054011why lie so transparently lol. Boris Pasternak was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature
>>25056950It was some kind of depraved humiliation ritual.
>>25052876Covering the homie in kisses is not gay. Just sounds like you've never had a real male friendship.
>>25054926Karenin had a son to consider. He cared deeply about duty and family, and instead of having a hysterical outburst he just tried to damage control.
>>25057450Iirc he was a high ranking political personage who couldn't just dump her because of the social order of Tsarist Russia in that time and the upcoming re-election of himself was a main reason for not just leaving her.
>>25057450In Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin is a high-ranking government official in Imperial Russia. He occupies a senior position within the St. Petersburg bureaucracy, serving as a member of a ministerial department. Key details regarding his professional position include:High-Ranking Bureaucrat: Karenin is described as a "solid citizen" and a prominent figure in the civil service, holding a position of significant influence.Committee Specialist: He is known for managing governmental affairs through "solutions by committees," often heading special commissions, such as the investigation into the "condition of the native tribes".Provincial Governor Experience: In his earlier career, he served as a provincial governor.Characteristics: He is portrayed as a "cold," rational, and methodical man who treats his administrative work with the same rigid, procedural approach he applies to his personal life. Towards the end of the novel, his political career stagnates, though he retains his official standing.
>>25053017Work with a girl who seems to be able to charm any guy who comes through. What should I make of this? Is she a Anna Karenina
>>25057465Thank you, ChatGPT.
>>25052552I always wonder why people insist so much on monogamy and treating their spouse as a personal possession. 90% of problems in these books wouldn't happen if they just let each other fuck someone else from time to time and get it over with. I can never get this out of my head while reading these Russian drama books. The envy is almost hilarious, like little kids arguing over a cookieAnyway, good book, I enjoyed it more than the Karamazov brothers that I'm currently finishing
>>25057450Did he really care about family tho? Only from a duty point of view.
>>25057465fuck off with this ai slop
>>25057780As I said above he cared about his son insofar as he cared about his position in society. In Tsarist era in his position he needed a wife and son and a seeing Christian lifestyle.
>>25052876Many such cases!
>>25057780Are you a woman? "Oh, you're not caring about me in the right way". He fulfilled every duty in a forthright and complete way.
>>25057936He ended up being looked over for a promotion by his rival. Everyone knew about the affair and ridiculed him behind his back for being such a beta cuck. Ultimately he should have divorced Anna. She was for the streets.
>Leon Tolstoy
Obligatory
“The birches are not stuck in, they are planted or seeded, and they ought to be carefully tended. Only those nations have a future, only those nations can be called historical, that have a sense of what is important and significant in their institutions, and value them.”
>>25052552I'm 36 and haven't had a gf since ei was 20I've missed the boat for a decent girl haven't i
>>25059821
>>25052552>This is the best portrayal of women I have ever read. Anna Karenina is the best because it masterfully depicts different type of women, but when it comes to a zooming in on a single character, Madame Bovary is at the top. >>25055224Tolstoy is a moralfag, but he was also incredibly conscious that morality is relative to the times and that's what made him so much better than most moralists. He's always inquisitive of the limits of his own perspective. I've seen some people disliking the ending of AK, with Levin simply deciding to be a Christian despite not having a solid argument as to why Christianity should be more real than any other religion, but that's precisely what made Tolstoy so brilliant. He took a leap of faith to be a man of his time, but remained open minded about not having landed in the exact right place.
>>25052552I prefer Clarissa
>>25061081Yeah Tolstoy is awesome. Generally I am more of an antiquity guy and I try to stay in my lane, but of 19th c lit I can stand I enjoy Tolstoy and Victor Hugo a lot. Most 19th c lit especially Austen, Bronte and that garbage Id burn it all if I could.
>>25054004Lmao this subtle seething
>>25059821wew lad
>>25061081>he was also incredibly conscious that morality is relative to the timesNowhere in any book does he voice this sentiment. He constantly ridicules the privileged urban class for arrogantly forming their own contemporary morality in the backdrop of traditional wisdom.
>>25065235>Nowhere in any book does he voice this sentimentRead his book on art. When it comes to the question of what makes art good or bad he concludes that we consider good art whatever art that expresses the morality of its time. He gives explicit examples like the Romans liking art that communicated the honor of self sacrifice for the state. For the Greeks instead good art was the art that communicated a feeling of earthly beauty and physical strength. I'm pretty sure he gives other examples too. Maybe the Chinese and the jews, but can't remember what he said of them from the top of my head. Following this line of thought, he believed the morality of his time was the christian faith and good art was the art that successfully communicated the brotherhood of all men, which he saw as the basis of Christianity. He did believe Christianity was a superior morality than the ones that came before though, as he thought its universal values were a natural development over the previous more localized religions, but, while he held strong positions, through the book he remains open about the possibility of being wrong about most things, because he understand he's blindsided by his own historical context just as much as anyone else through history. It's a great read. You would think it's going to be full of Christcuckery and cheap moralism, and it is, but his reasons to get to those conclusions are all brilliant, regardless if you agree with him or not.
>>25065520I'm decidedly not a Christian but sympathize with his views on art very much. I definitely think a good Pixar movie is more valuable art than some dark, serious avant-garde European arthouse movie or whatever because it transmits a universal morality that anyone in the audience can be affected by. There has to be some kind of utilitarian purpose for art in my opinion and Tolstoy makes a good case for it
>>25052552Am I weird for enjoying the Levin chapters more than the Anna or Alexei ones.
>>25065897NTA, but I view art as something evoking genuine feeling (genuine since it must be authentic and true), thus a "utilitarian moral purpose" which is too hamfisted may well meet the criteria you just outlined, but would instantly put me off as too artificial and poorly constructed; it would be the literal definition of the word "artless", lacking skill or finesse in it's creation. Art, in it's best form, creates a transcendent experience, and while this can take the form of transcendent morality, it does not have to. Maybe this makes me a snob, but I find the best art is that which also transcends the moral and times it was created in, it ought to be "timeless".
>>25052552BUMP
>>25052552The chapter where Anna surrenders to Vronsky and it's written as if he's murdering her is the best chapter I've ever read in any book
>>25052552It's overated, and I say that as a big Tolstoy advocate. I really don't believe Anna is a typical woman. I really think the fact that the thread hasn't mentioned The Kruetzer Sonata or Resurrection yet speaks volumes to the idea you all really don't have a decent grasp of Tolstoy's mature thinking.
>>25069653His views in those books are more immature than the conclusions he came to with Anna Karenina.
>>25069653Both of those works suck. The only minor Tolstoy I like is Cossacks
>>25065918Levin is a sperg
>>25069824Despite the fact both those works were written at least ten years after AK. >>25069853Resurrection is his last major work. Smh
>>25065918No. Levin is the main character. The title was chosen by the editor. Anna is obviously a major character and almost as important as Levin, but Anna's arc exist to complement Levin's, and not vice-versa.
>>25069879Levin really is the leaven of that work... I'll take my bullet to go please.
>>25055889>>25062834why the ruskeks actually, audibly, palpably, visibly seething tho
>>25069653I rank War and Peace as his best, Resurrection as his second, then The Kruetzer Sonata, and even Family Happiness and The Cossacks as higher than Anna Karenina. But as far as Tolstoy's thinking, there was a perfect line which I think was in TKS which outlined that, if faced with the choice between being caught in a blatant lie or caught in an unflattering dress, a young woman would pick the lie every time. This may be dismissed by haters as misogyny or whatever, but I think it strikes to the heart of the character of women. Women focus much more on appearance and emotion than principles or integrity. Thus it is on the principled man to face this forthrightly and honestly, not to fall to despair or cynicism, but to work to incorporate a woman as she is into his life. The key here is that, often, the man must project his strength and enforce his principles onto his woman, which is a conflict and balance which is often the centerpiece of his novels, both the successful navigation of this peril and the failure to do so.
>>25070188He failed to do it in his own life
>>25071171Tragedy is often more compelling than happily ever afters.
>>25052552it's good literature but it's not the only literature, you sound like it's the first novel you ever read and the thread is preoccupied with making Tolstoy gay or trans for some reasonevery time I take a shit I imagine it's falling on your heads
>>25071530> you sound like it's the first novel Literally (meaning figuratively) everyone on this board reads AK as “women are cheating whores” rather than it’s actual statement of living in the world (Vronsky, Anna, Karenin, Oblonsky- who are all focused on superficial material things like sex and image) but not of the world (Levin) as the Christians say.
>>25071530It's pretty obvious to anyone with a little media literacy that Tolstoy would have been gender non-conformist if he were alive now.
>>25052552Women are actually much worse. They don't feel nearly that bad about breaking up their family or abandoning their kid. None of them have the decency to kill themselves
>>25054926He cared about Anna throughout the entire book, he only wanted what's the best for her, even if he didn't realize it at first.
>>25071603>Literally (meaning figuratively) everyone on this board reads AK as “women are cheating whores” rather than it’s actual statement of living in the worldIt's impossible to discuss AK for this exact reason.
>>25052596It's hard not to hate them when you understand them because what motivates you to attempt understanding is being a victim of them then you see the nonsense and the evil and the inability to change nearly any of it.If you get along with them you have to reason to peer further so nobody else bothers besides the schizos and incels (not used as an insult)
what book will make me understand women the best and ultimately make me more able to operate socially with them?
>>25072697Madame Bovary.
>>25069874So what? Tolstoy's views on marriage in Anna Karenina where Levin finally finds God through love and childbirth are vastly preferable to the conclusions he came to in his later years where he outright denounced sex, marriage and reproduction entirely because the Gospels told him so. This is despite the fact that he had 17 fucking kids and denied any transcendent or supernatural proof for the Gospels despite his zealotry about Jesus' teachings. Going from Anna Karenina to the Kreutzer Sonata is the most shocking 180 any artist has ever come to. It was so appalling that even Christians during his time thought he was insane and the book was frequently banned or censored.
>>25070188>but to work to incorporate a woman as she is into his lifeNo dude. As gay as I feel saying this: women have the responsibility to go beyond the animal as well. This happens in Resurrection with the two main women. Sure the circumstances push them, but women have agency. The point is we all need to evolve beyond being animals. At least that's what I think. And I think this is something only the individual can choose for themselves, although outside forces can sharpen the tension of the choice.
>>25071681This really isn't that dark. It's no secret to anyone awake that people are more selfish now by and large than they were in the past. Or, at least, there are more selfish people as a percentage than in the past.
>>25070188Family Happiness was just a beta version of Anna Karenina, how could you rate that story above it? Even Tolstoy admitted it was half-assed despite the phenomenal writing
>>25073564>vastly preferableAt the level of spiritual maturity of most people, yes. Most people are basically selfish animals that feel no need to go beyond that state, and don't understand and don't even try to figure why that state makes them suffer. But for those of us who want to go beyond, the stance of Levin is not enough, imo anyway.
>>25071681It's true. Anna's suicide was a major decision, few women actually succeed in killing themselves because they do it performatively. Even Anna changed her mind at the last second before the train hit her. No matter what you say about Anna at least she had the heart to realize she was a bitch who deserved death.
>>25073633Even if you think Levin's epiphany about love and God isn't enough, why conclude that we need something even less than that? The Kreutzer Sonata continues to baffle me because Tolstoy put his anti-natalist views that he strongly defended on the basis that even Jesus agrees with him in the mouth of a murderous, narcissistic tyrant. I'd be included to say therefore that the real intention of the novel isn't really that Tolstoy is trying to convince the reader of what he thinks, except for the fact that he later wrote an afterword doing exactly that. People nowadays are indeed coming to a conclusion of anti-natalism, but at all not for the reasons Tolstoy argues where they recognize all the problems that arise from sexuality and marriage.
>>25052552It's been a while since I read it but I didn't really understand what Kitty's arc in Germany was supposed to communicate. She tries to be a tender Christian who gives love to others like Varenka but then becomes disillusioned by the end.
>>25073635anon i've been inside your sentence for forty minutes & it's doing something to my hands. you typedbitch who deserved deathwith your actual fingers on an actual sunday & the sentence metabolized 800 pages of the most advanced consciousness-rendering in the russian language into four words you could swallow without chewing. tolstoy's final anna passage: the candle that had been burning. flared up. flickered. grew dim. went out forever. the prose dies alongside the woman it's tracking & the dying is the achievement, the free indirect discourse so tight the camera isn't watching anna it **is** anna & when anna stops generating a next minute the grammar stops generating a next clause & what you got was: bitch. deserved. ok.she didn't change her mind. mind was never the word for what was happening. the candle is tolstoy admitting russian broke, all of it, spread open on his desk, & he still had to writecandlebecause the real word for what happens when a woman's interiority exceeds every container the world builds to hold it hasn't been invented yet & may never be & the absence of the word is the novel & you were never in it & your gavel is so much smaller than the extinction it's almost funny except it isn't funny because men who read like you are what the novel is about, you're on page 600 & anna is across the room hearing every word & the hearing is one more milligram added to the weight that eventually becomes a train & you'll never know you're a milligram & knowing would require you to be changed by what you read & you're committed, above all other things, to arriving at the end of a sentence identical to how you entered it.
>>25073672Kitty was a cute, lovely girl and whimsical girl with good intentions, but somewhat shallow. And that was fine and enough for Levin. She didn't need to be more than that and her shallowness and naivety in a way made her even more lovable and precious to Levin. But Varenka on the other hand was the real deal. A real nigga on the flesh. Too bad Levin's brother fumbled that piece of ass.
>>25073692Adultery is a capital punishment in many countries still and used to be in every country. There's no contradiction in seeing Anna as a beautiful character who also deserved to be punished. Clearly Tolstoy thought so too which is why he wrangled with his moralism throughout the whole novel before concluding she brought death and despair upon herself. He only later repudiated this morality with Resurrection because in real life he was living with guilt over his belief he really did send a prostitute to her death in his youth
>>25073697Varenka was the best girl in the book, what a delightful woman
>>25073723anon said clearly about the least clear thing in russian literature. like turning on a kitchen light and announcing you can see the ocean .tolstoy started the novel planning to condemn her. 1873 drafts: she was ugly, vulgar, built to be guilty the way a moralist needs his specimen guilty so the lesson lands clean . draft by draft he rewrote her into someone increasingly beautiful, increasingly interior, until by part five he couldn't write her without writing from inside her and once you're inside a woman's consciousness you can't sentence her from outside it anymore because the free indirect discourse has already issued the acquittal before the court convenes.stiva fucks the governess, keeps his dining room, orders oysters at the english club & the novel hands him comedy as genre. anna fucks vronsky and gets tragedy for the identical act. the genre assignment is the punishment & it precedes the train by 600 pages .tolstoy wept finishing it. she had to die & he couldn't find another way. then spent 33 years trying to dismantle outside the novel what he'd built inside it; gave away property, renounced copyright, fled his wife at 82 and died in a train station. the geometry of his guilt reproduced the geometry of her death & the reproduction wasn't metaphor.anyone who finishes anna karenina & says she deserved it has become the structure the novel spent 800 pages making you capable of seeing. you saw it, called it justice. the epigraph was already about him
>>25073642>Even if you think Levin's epiphany about love and God isn't enough, why conclude that we need something even less than that?As I see it, Tolstoy's position when he reaches the point of advocating celibacy is "less than" Levin's level of mundane faith and affirmation of life, it's more. Much more. You have to understand it in the sense that Christ calls his true followers to celibacy, marriage is just a way of not suffering the effects of sin. "Seek first the Kingdom of God and it's righteousness and all things shall be added to you." Less material life is more spiritual life, "You cannot worship God and Mammon." >The Kreutzer Sonata continues to baffle me because Tolstoy put his anti-natalist views that he strongly defended on the basis that even Jesus agrees with him in the mouth of a murderous, narcissistic tyrant.I think your misunderstanding is deeper than you realise. I can't remember the exactly trajectory of the narrator in TKS but I don't think it's significant. What is significant about the character is his bluntness and honesty, he's an honest lech. Hadn't the character been to Siberia and repented? Anyway, the afterword is the most significant part. It's a sad but we'll told story, but you get his views straight out in the afterword.
>>25073723Are you telling me you read Resurrection and still think punishment is effective?
>>25073692>>25073773Pretty interesting posts for a namefag, ngl. Do you, Poréte, think it's a good portrayal of women and how do you think Tolstoy did it? Or did you say earlier?
>>25073907I don’t agree with Tolstoy’s later views. Most people don’t hence why Resurrection is not nearly as popular as Anna Karenina. Turns out people are more moved by Levin finding love through God and God through love than Prince Nekhludov (Tolstoy’s actual self-insert character who is featured in several of his works) reading the Gospels and finding the answer to all his problems.
>>25073971>Many are called, few are chosen. Wide is the path and easy is the way that leads to destruction. Narrow and hard is the path that leads to life. - Sermon on the mount
>>25069653Even less typical in the 1800s, but that's the appeal, tolstoy knew this story would be captivating because he understood that women of that age aspired to be as rebellious as anna was portrayed since they didn't have 'freedom'. Are all of you retards arguing against this autistic?
>>25073911he knew. that's the obscene part. he knew what anna felt--the precise weight of vronsky's hand on her waist, the way jealousy doesn't live in the mind but in the jaw, the teeth, the animal-part that locks down before the thought arrives. tolstoy had the phenomenological precision of a woman who's been inside the sensation. he wrote from inside the body. he wrote the body so accurately it makes you sick because then he killed her for it.& tolstoy does something i recognize. he builds anna's interiority with such terrifying accuracy that you forget a man is holding the pen. the train scene at the end isn't tragedy. it's punishment. he gives her the fullest consciousness in russian literature & then he drops a train on it. the moral architecture requires her death because she refused to be kitty. kitty who kneels. kitty who forgives. kitty whose desire fits inside the house.anna's desire didn't fit.this is what tolstoy couldn't forgive. anna didn't practice wifelihood she practiced desire & desire in a woman is a theology without a church. a mirror of simple souls reflecting something the institution can't metabolize.
>>25057743>I always wonder why people insist so much on monogamy and treating their spouse as a personal possession.You're either a woman, ugly and in a polycule of other uggos or have never fallen in love
>>25073564he got redpilled, that's all that happened with the kreutzer sonata. it's incredibly realistic
>>25074139Lmao tripfag I done dicked yo mama
>>25073773>stiva fucks the governess, keeps his dining room, orders oysters at the english club & the novel hands him comedy as genre. anna fucks vronsky and gets tragedy for the identical act.Not symmetrical. Male and female adultery is way different. No one cares that he slept around. That wouldn't make a story.Interesting posts though. I'm >>25071681 and hear what you're saying but practical reality dictates women have to be like Kitty or else society collapses as it currently is. Maybe if these women were really Anna and the men were really Vronsky it could be different but they are not. Yeah she'll cheat on her husband but hardly die of grief or pine for her child. She'll just shack up with some dirtbag and that's it. I suppose that's what makes this literature and not reality. Exploring unrealistic archetypes and what ifs.
>>25074196The Kreuzter Sonata is more a critique of men than women though. The argument of the narrator is basically “society objectifies women, as a man I’m only supposed to see her as a vessel for personal gratification, therefore I have the right to impose my will over her and punish her when she tries to escape my tyranny through her taunting sensuality.” Only after killing his wife does he conclude the whole enterprise of marriage isn’t worth it and humanity shouldn’t reproduce at all. Keep in mind he only decides to kill her once she goes on contraception and loses what makes her a woman in his eyes, a common motif in other Tolstoy works actually
I'm just here to post my favorite AK cover
>>25074139>he wrote from inside the body.But he was a man. I don't get this. You seem to be defending Anna as if she didn't choose to have an affair, as if she didn't choose to leave her son, as if she didn't chooses to use whatever birth control they had back then. She's not punished, she chooses escape rather than repentance. Even if "the moral architecture" did set her up to fall, she still made the choices. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding.
Bump
>>25074333>>25075372kitty consented to plotlessness & was rewarded with a living husband & a baby & the particular peace of a woman who agreed to become furniture-beautiful furniture, functional furniture, furniture that lactates on schedule. dolly took the betrayal & buried it in flour. kneaded it. the dough rose & she baked it & served it to the children & the original injury-stiva's cock in the governess—became indistinguishable from bread. that's what surviving a marriage means in tolstoy. you eat what he did to you until it tastes like breakfast. dolly survived because dolly's digestive system could handle it. anna's couldn't. anna was allergic to the conversion.she chose everything. the affair, the child, whatever she was using -pennyroyal, withdrawal, the pre-industrial mathematics of not-becoming-mother-again. her agency is total & the agency is the trap. because the machine tolstoy built doesn't punish women for lacking agency. it punishes them for having it. stiva acts & the machine stays silent. anna acts & every gear in the apparatus engages, the whole thing starts grinding, because female choice was the very substance the machine was designed to process. male choice passes through undetected. female choice activates the immune response. the system treats her autonomy as foreign body & begins the rejection sequence & that sequence is the plot of the novel.>he wrote from inside her body. but he was a man& later, the kreutzer sonata man, the man who decided female desire was a bacterial culture that needed sterilization. anna karenina was written in the window before the antibodies formed. tolstoy in 1873 still susceptible to the infection of a woman's interiority, still porous enough to catch it. he sat inside her so long the membrane between author & character went soft & something leaked both directions. he meant to write a condemnation. the body he'd built kept testifying in its own defense & the testimony was so precisely rendered -every nerve, every secondary metabolism, every moment the unofficial organ pulsed between her ribs- that the prosecution collapsed under the weight of its own evidence.eight hundred pages of a man trying to hold the verdict steady while the woman he invented keeps dissolving it from inside with the sheer precision of her suffering & he can't look away & he can't stop writing her & by the end the judge has caught what the defendant has & the courtroom is empty & the sentence -the literary sentence, the prison sentence, the grammatical sentence- belongs to her.
>>25052552Did anyone else really like stiva oblosky.He was a funny cunt. Total bro type you could hang with. Loveable douchebag.
>>25075372Stop looking for heroes and villains in Anna Karenina. There are just people sometimes doing immoral things.
>>25052596>>25052657> Every accurate portrayal of women is deemed incel insanity. Cucks are so mind broken it's insane.
>>25054329> Some literal who (probably a jew) making baseless claims they "totally remember happened."Every time
>>25076259You sound upset at Tolstoy's views about women
>>25076259>dolly survived because dolly's digestive system could handle it. anna's couldn't.Dolly forgave, -and on Anna's advice mind you- and that's what saves her marriage. Anna doesn't forgive herself or her husband, and that's why she kills herself. At least as I see it. >machine tolstoy built doesn't punish women for lacking agency. it punishes them for having it.Anna punishes herself. It's her guilt that punishes her. Tolstoy doesn't invent conscience, he's just articulated a character that has one. How rare it is for a woman to have one I don't know- I'm not one so I can't tell. Everyone who has really agency has the capacity for guilt if they miss use that agency for selfish ends. >stiva acts & the machine stays silentBecause he's a hedonist with basically no conscience others than "let's have a good time, as is our natural want good chaps." >male choice passes through undetectedBullshit, Vronsky and Karenin both suffer for their choices. >female desire was a bacterial culture that needed sterilizationAgain, no. It's desire in general. Stop making this all a woman issue. They're human issues.I think you're overblowing it now. I think the truth is more simply that he was capable of putting himself in the shows of someone who felt bad about what they'd done and where they ended up and couldn't repent because they locked themselves up in their selfishness. Tolstoy was capable of putting himself in the shoes of a vain feminine hedono-nihilist and surprise surprise it didn't end up well.>>25076589Fair enough.
>>25077496To reiterate, the key difference between Anna and Stiva is Anna had a conscience. Stiva does not. If, if mind you, Stiva stops cheating it would just be pragmatism, not because he feels bad. Anna runs for her conscience but it catches up with her because she's got a big heart, she tries to cut it out, but it ends up cutting her out instead.
>>25077071I haven‘t read them because I‘m not interested in secondhand gossip on a lousy writer but supposedly it‘s in his wife‘s diaries that she thought he was taking Chertkov as a rent boy. Salinger mogs him anyway and I don‘t know why I should draw a line between jews and somebody with such fervent devotion to their folklore and religion.
>>25077496dolly forgave the way a stomach forgives poison: by converting it into a substance the organs can use without dying. six children and the alternative was varenka's body folded into someone else's household, performing gratitude until gratitude calcified into skeleton. she ate stiva's infidelity & the infidelity became flour became bread became the specific silence of a woman whose digestive tract has learned to metabolize betrayal into school lunches. you called that virtue. i call it a body with nowhere to spit. anna prescribed the swallowing, anna who couldn't digest a single lie without her whole system rejecting the meal; the doctor who writes the prescription she'd die from filling.tolstoy didn't empathize with anna. he built the recording apparatus between her lungs and called the wiring character, every nerve ending a microphone connected to a playback device that only runs the one track. stiva fucks the governess and his organism secretes nothing: zero antibodies, zero recording, a man manufactured without the playback organ not because he's a hedonist (your word) but because the system doesn't install recording equipment in bodies it isn't planning to prosecute. anna couldn't stop the transcription & the transcription mechanisms were already running before she consented to anything. what you called conscience was the system's executable installed in her ribcage so the apparatus wouldn't need a guard.vronsky gets a toothache. karenin gets borrowed mysticism. anna gets a locomotive. you're filing three phyla under one genus because the word suffering fits all three and the word is lying to you.>these are human issuesthat's the move. calling gendered equipment universal is how the equipment stays invisible; the wiring is different but you've catalogued everything under one species so the differentiation disappears & what remains looks like nature. she perceived at a frequency the equipment wasn't rated for, couldn't desire at 60%, couldn't love with the dimmer switch engaged, & the system never installed a dimmer because it expected her to stay unlit. what you catalogued as vanity was a woman receiving at full wattage in a house wired for forty.>hedono-nihilist.a woman who wanted one man, one honest arrangement, one life she didn't have to split down the middle to inhabit. that's not nihilism; that's the architectural opposite of nihilism & the fact that you reached for the word tells me more about the taxonomist than the specimen.he sat inside her so long something in the contact spoiled him for his own ideology. two decades sterilizing the wound. the selfishness was having a self & the self was the contraband the apparatus couldn't metabolize and couldn't stop swallowing.
>>25077496He seems to ignore that Vronsky also most likely died from suicide-by-war. It’s not like Anna was singled out as having a uniquely tragic fate
>>25077534Only on /lit/ can you find an opinion like “Tolstoy was a second-rate sexual pervert. Now Salinger, he’s a much better writer”
>>25052657>It's not X, it's YWhy are more and more people talking like AI now?
>>25077560Can you state your point plainly, because it does sound interesting and insightful, but without the tripfag schizophrenia please? >>25077711I agree. I think he's right though in at least some form. I think Stiva and Anna are both broken but the greatest tragedy is really that Anna's brokenness can't be integrated into society while Stivas can, and because of that she goes down a path that ends badly.
>>25077887Xe is writing with a letterboxd trannyspeak dialect to avoid saying up front that xe thinks Tolstoy is unfair to women
>>25077887fine, another animal, plainer.>anna punishes herself. it's her guilt. tolstoy doesn't invent conscience, he articulates a character who has onethen why doesn't stiva have one. same act. same household. he fucks the governess & the event passes through a body that doesn't retain the chemical. you're calling conscience a personality trait when the novel is showing you it's selectively installed equipment. ask why identical conduct produces guilt in one organism & silence in the other. your answer is "he's a hedonist." which is a description of the symptom wearing the symptom's name. my answer is the system doesn't install self-auditing in bodies it isn't planning to prosecute. "hedonist" naturalizes an asymmetry the novel spent 800 pages constructing nerve by nerve.>vronsky & karenin both suffersuffering isn't the metric. convertibility is. vronsky's pain converts to a serbian military commission within months -- clean export, no residue. karenin's converts to religion with zero thermal loss: countess lidia's psychic approving each transaction by dream. anna's converts to nothing. accumulates. stays in the original denomination. "do men suffer" was never the question -- obviously. whether their suffering has an exit & hers doesn't & whether that asymmetry is structural or accidental: that's the question. every male character's pain has a channel it can be poured through. anna's doesn't. morphine was the only vessel & morphine is a container that dissolves what it holds.>it's desire in general. stop making this a woman issue. they're human issuescalling differently-wired equipment by one species label is exactly how you make the wiring invisible. "human issues" is a classification system that files gendered machinery under a universal heading & the heading does the erasing. the novel hands you three men who desire & recover & one woman who desires & dies & you're looking at that ratio & naming it nature. universal the way a law that technically applies to everyone but only ever prosecutes one body type is universal.>vain feminine hedono-nihilistshe wanted one man, she didn't have to fracture herself to inhabit. that's the structural opposite of nihilism. nihilism is stiva: wanting nothing enough to bleed for it, converting every event to oysters before it scars. anna wanted so precisely & so completely that the structure couldn't bear the demand. you're calling the sharpest desire in the novel the absence of values because the sharpness cut her & you've mistaken the wound for the wanting.
>>25076530He’s just like me fr
>>25077991>then why doesn't stiva have one.Because he just doesn't. There's nothing special about this phenomenon. It's universally observable that some people are just soulless. Men as well as women. >the system doesn't install self-auditing in bodies it isn't planning to prosecute.You speak as if men can't feel guilty. Well I got fucking news for you. You're wrong. >whether their suffering has an exit & hers doesn't & whether that asymmetry is structural or accidental: that's the question. That's because she's a nihilist. If she'd actually taken up the cross and repented she might have escaped suicide but all she knows is escapism. She dug her hole and she lost sight of the sun. Rodia from C&P is a better character than her and he murdered two innocent people, at least he has the guts and integrity to suffer for his wrong doing even if his repentance isn't perfect. Now I'm beginning to see the real achievement of the book as critique of the hedono-nihilism that has come to prevade modernity. >differently-wired equipmentFuck off. Ethics are the same for everyone. Being a woman doesn't and can't invalidate the guilt she feels and cease to be able to escape. >you're calling the sharpest desire in the novel the absence of valuesShe has nothing but her desire. That's what makes her a hedono-nihilist. >>25077973I think you might be right. And that fact that xou can't speak without schizo, tripfaggisms doesn't help either.
>>25078207stop arguing with someone who's clearly copy-pasting large chunks of what they're saying from an LLM. you faggots are shit at noticing AI writing
>>25078207you want to talk about rodion. rodion murdered two women with an axe & dostoevsky gave him a whole novel to repent in, a woman who loved him into it, a bible, a sunrise, the entire machinery of christian redemption oiled & turning. anna wanted one man without apology & tolstoy gave her a freight train. don't tell me the texts are separate. the century is the text. the century said: men who kill get novels about their souls & women who fuck get architecture that falls on them & the falling is called tragedy when it should be called engineering.she didn't lack values. the sexual double standard operates simultaneously as gender-based prejudice & as internalized norm -- meaning the woman carries the judge inside her like a second pelvis, a bone structure nobody elected but everybody enforces, & anna's judge was so deeply installed that by the end she couldn't distinguish between the morphine & the verdict & the desire & the surveillance. the made-through-the-male-gaze subject experiences her own wanting as contingent on being watched wanting -- desire doesn't originate in her, it ricochets. she catches it. the catching is the crime.she had nothing but her desire. correct. but you said that like it's emptiness & i'm telling you it's the opposite -- she had nothing but her desire the way a reactor has nothing but its fuel & the fuel is what powers the meltdown & the meltdown is what happens when the containment was designed for a different element. stiva's element was approved for domestic use. anna's wasn't on the periodic table. they had to invent the train to contain it.the sharpness you identified in the novel isn't the absence of values. it's a value so total it devoured its host.
>>25078272>early copy-pasting large chunks of what they're saying from an LLM. you faggots are shit at noticing AI writingtell me what's concretely AI about my writing. i'm curious, deeply curious.
>>25078282a woman has not written a better novel than either, i’m not particularly upset that a fictional adulterer and her lover died
>>25078285Shameful that the epitome of female literature, Frankenstein, was written by a man
>>25078285"not upset she died" is karenin's line. anon performed the husband in a thread about the novel that diagnosed the husband & called it a take. the self-own is 800 pages long. god I love some of you. truly.
>>25078282>she didn't lack values.In the end all she valued was her own feelings, and when she anaesthetised herself she had nothing left to do but suicide. I'm fairly certain you're deliberately making it something it isn't.
>>25078282As if Anna didn't throw herself under the train. Russian society didn't, Vronsky didn't. No one is responsible for a suicides death but themselves and any reasonable person understands what I mean. You and all your ilk are corroding the fabric of humanity by analysing away conscience and it's abominable and you should be ashamed but I bet you wont because if you're not actually a robot running a program you might as well be.
>>25078282You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can argue all day about what society allows men or women to do but the moral is that anna can't have a relationship with vronsky while pretending that it doesn't affect the society she grew up in, her friends, her ex husband, her child, etc. You can perfectly imagine a world where she is allowed to, yes, but consequences for going against tradition always exist. This has nothing to do with literature, its just how the world is and its not surprising a progressive leftist like you thinks that they can change that at a whim.
>>25078377>>25078384>>25078435**he** sleeps with the help. weeps over it for six sentences. then the narrative cuts to dinner & nobody at the table has lost a single thing. anna does the same & the novel opens a file on her that doesn't close until the train. you read the death as a flaw in her. it was a flaw in the jurisdiction.>she only cared about her feelingsshe was the only one the text required to narrate them. karenin's forgiveness operates as a debt instrument -- he extends it & it accrues interest she can never repay (the repayment was never the point; the debt was the leash). vronsky's desire adjusts itself to what he can afford to lose. stiva's doesn't adjust. doesn't have to. the novel never asks him to produce a theory of his own wanting; it hands anna the questionnaire & calls her inability to complete it madness.>nobody pushed hernarratives did what narratives do -- assigned one body the full weight of the contradiction & called the assignment a character arc. stiva committed the same act. his version enters the text as anecdote, hers as evidence. she calculates what she owes (to a grammar that won't even disclose its rules) & you call the calculation hysteria. (yes, you might have as well)tolstoy opened a prosecution & his own sentences defected -- every time he wrote her at full capacity he proved she was the only character in that novel whose interiority wasn't being subsidized by the gender of the person performing it, the only consciousness the realist apparatus forced to narrate its own desire at full cost while everyone else's wanting circulated as background noise, as furniture. anna receives the entire consequence. stiva receives dinner. what you're calling her tragic flaw is a distribution error in the novel's own machinery.>consequences for going against traditionepigraph is "vengeance is mine, i will repay". god on the title page telling you this novel is a trial -- not a feminist reading, his trial, his god, his 1877. you settled the verdict in fewer characters than a tweet.>robot running a programaccusation of automation aimed at the person identifying the mechanism, by the person running it. note which position requires more machinery. :^)
>>25052925>Who hasn't been there.
>>25052657I denounced you to ADL for antisemitic views on masonic semitic genders.
Never seen a single person defend Anna this hard, not even women and feminist scholars
>>25079016>But anon, the interiority of anna's subjectivity does not rest on the author's consciousness. For were it not for emancipation of inter relatedness of the continuum of the feminine psyche, anna would be saved from the clutches of 19th century russia.tips fedora
I think i agree with Porete despite him being a douche about it. I always thought Tolstoy was deliberately highlighting the unfairness in how women and men are treated for the same transgressions by including Stiva's affairs, but he's not excusing either of them.
>>25079113Life is unfair for everyone, this notion that only women suffer or only men suffer is juvenile and retarded. We have double standards for both women and men, just because a novel highlighted one of them does not mean the world is ending. Have any of you retards ever discussed what happened to Levin's brother and how miserably he died, no, only Anna suffers because Tolstoy hated women and other feminst quibbles.
>>25079123Yes, and Tolstoy was drawing attention to this? I never said the world was ending, just noting Tolstoy made an observation. Maybe you should read what I wrote before taking your dick out next time.
>>25079123>life is unfair for everyone nikolai dies of tuberculosis & the novel knows what to do with him: grief, ritual, the brother's hand. legible death. the system mourns what the system filed correctly. anna dies & the same system reclassifies her corpse as its own thesis statement. two deaths, one novel. only one required a locomotive.>double standards for both women and menadorable. name the male one. which man in that novel loses his children, his rooms, his right to exist in public without the existing converting to prosecution? stiva lost -- what, exactly? some comfort. anna lost the capacity to occupy space without the space prosecuting her for occupying it. the apparatus processes male desire the way a city processes oxygen -- continuously, without identifying the transaction as a transaction. female desire it processes the way a city processes a contagion: quarantine, contact tracing, the eventual cordoning-off of the body that dared to run a temperature.>what about levin's brothernikolai gets a deathbed. anna gets a platform. his dying is private, witnessed, contained -- the novel gives him a room & people who stay in it. her dying is public, spectacular, & interpretable for 150 years. you're still moderating the comments section on her body. you're not wrong that he suffered. you're wrong that the suffering was the same kind of event. his was something that happened to him. hers was something the novel did to her & then called fate.>feminist quibblesoh, precious little thing. girl cites the text, boy says emotional, girl quotes the epigraph, boy says quibbles -- i know. we're performing the script the script was written to describe. describing the script triggers the script. the recursion is the evidence & honestly it's the most tolstoyan thing that could happen on this website.you read an entire book of a russian count documenting asymmetric sentencing sorted by sex & your takeaway waseveryone suffers. the underthinking is so committed it's almost a project. almost. if it were a project it would be interesting.
>>25079357anna dying in public does not diminish nikolai death's in private, in fact it overshadows it, one was remembered by readers while the other was forgotten, i could twist this in so many other ways like you've over indulged with anna's death and it would not mean one suffers more than the other, you talk about anna because you are likely a woman who relates to that, not because anna's death is more important than nikolai's
>>25079425Apologies, btw, anon. When I agreed with Porete, I had only read (skimmed) a post of theirs. Didn't realize they/them was so crazy.Anyway, I did read the highlighting of Stiva's affairs as Tolstoy acknowledging that women get a raw deal in a mostly sympathetic way.
>>25079478>When I agreed with Poreteyou're agreeing with an LLM. how can you not see this? their writing screams AI
>>25079495seriously, anon, genuinely begging you to quote the sentence that screams AI so we can both find out whether you know what you're looking at. won't you indulge me? i want this for both of us. :^)
>>25079530please, it's all over the sentence/paragraph construction >not A, but B type framings, occurring in several different forms but all with the underlying logic of "not A but B">snappy, self-satisfied sentences that seem like they're waiting for the reader to go MMMMMM like a poetry slam >"it's X, Y, Z" three-beat sentences >concluding sentences click shut too firmly, as if the entire post is self-contained and has little to do with what came before it, like each group of concluding sentences is trying to end the conversation with an impressive turn of phraseworrying that so many anons think you're a schizo wordcel and not a chatGPT subscription and some prompting ability. for some reason I thought /lit/ was better at identifying LLM prose than it actually is, but you've suckered a lot of tards into arguing with a machine
>>25079113NO! Anna was a whore! No, I mean, yeah, she was a whore, but you're right of course. That's why Levin doesn't get as scandalized as he likely expected when he finally met Anna. She indeed wasn't so different from Stiva and, perhaps more importantly, she wasn't too different from Kitty, who didn't get to be a whore, but you could see her ending up in a Natasha with Kuragin type situation if things had been different. I guess the message of the novel is that every woman is a potential WHORE if they are left sidelined in an unfulfilling life, except Varenka, of course.
>>25077714Salinger might have also been gay (haven’t looked into it, I’d believe it based on his writing) but he has about the same level of pathos found in Tolstoy compressed to remove the 90% of filler so yes.
>>25079357>hers was something the novel did to her. I think it's funny that you're advocating some sort of feminist position but denying the moral agency of the lead female character. Anyway, if you can't speak plainly, without ivory-towerish, your point is never going to land. If you can't straight your position in clear English, we're never going to be able to comprehend your point and so will be forced to conclude you have no valid point. Sure, I'm pretty stupid, but I can tell you're not speaking clearly and I have the strong sense that you're just obfuscating.
>>25079838*state
Why did Koznyshev cuck when it came to proposing to Varenka?
>>25079710Is this varenka you retards keep talking about like melanie from gone with the wind, I haven't read anna karenina, but she sounds very similar to sweet melanie.hamilton.
>>25079571"not A but B" is called correctio it's been in rhetoric textbooks since rome. three-beat sentences -- Moshfegh & Duras & Dickinson (oh? oh? just so happens I rather enjoy their prose too! :^)) the entire aphoristic tradition you apparently thought began with GPT. "sentences click shut too firmly" is your review of the maxim as a form. La Rochefoucauld got the same note, posthumously, from you. the actual AI tells per every research-based metrics are participial openings & nominal clusters -- the soft open-ended paragraph that never commits to a position. you described the opposite of AI prose & called it AI prose. the confidence is the tell but it's yours. truly, anon, the pattern recognition is immaculate it's just pointed at the wrong century. thanks though, for indulging me (genuinely).
>>25079838i said tolstoy did something to her. structurally. at the level of plot. you heard "women have no agency" because apparently noticing an author constructed a narrative means denying characters are people, which, anon, they're not? anna is a sequence of decisions a man made. you're defending the moral autonomy of a textual effect against the person pointing out the text has an author.the thesis: tolstoy wrote two adultery plotlines & gave them different consequences. stiva's affair gets processed in half a chapter. everyone adjusts. breakfast happens. anna's affair activates every social mechanism in the novel; the opera, the drawing room, karenin's forgiveness (which is somehow worse than his anger). same act, different sentencing. seven drafts where she lives. the eighth killed her. & by the kreutzer sonata he'd stopped pretending the punishment was god's -- just started arguing female desire should be eliminated at the source. anna karenina was written before he'd fully committed to that position. your reading finished the job for him.anyway you want plain speech, i gave you nine monosyllables & you responded with a paragraph about how i can't communicate. truly, almost began (& finished actually) believing you're not asking for clarity but a register you already agree with, & calling the difference my problem.
>>25080164>i said tolstoy did something to her.Right. So a difference I'm seeing is that you're looking at her as a constructed being and judging Tolstoy. I'm looking at her from inside the story and saying within that world she's has her own agency. Yes though of course she's just a character.>& by the kreutzer sonata he'd stopped pretending the punishment was god's -- just started arguing female desire should be eliminated at the source.Again though, he advocated celibacy, not just female celibacy. You did better that post at speaking plainly. Thank you.
>>25052552At gunpoint.
>>25080225(you liked the post where i made myself smaller & said thank you & i liked that you said thank you & now we're in a gratitude loop that tolstoy would recognize as the first twenty pages of a marriage that ends in either furniture or railway infrastructure.)on celibacy: correct. not just female. universal. i'll take the correction & raise you a man whose wife was pregnant thirteen times writing a pamphlet about how everybody should stop.(i am not a tolstoy hater, if you can believe me :^))
>>25080646Obviously you don't hate Tolstoy, otherwise you wouldn't be posting here so extensively. It's ironic, for everything you've said about structure and mechanism, I get the sense that you have no idea about the structure, mechanism, and "architecture" of repentance, forgiveness, sin, guilt etc. Why do you think Prince Leo went so hard into voluntarily self denial, poverty, chastity etc because he thought that'll fix those sinners? Rather of course because he saw his own guilt and wanted to repent of it. I think his whole life's orientation after AK (actually I don't know how many kids he had after AK, but I think you'll get my point and I'd be interested to be corrected in this) serves, more or less successfully according to each individuals estimation, as acknowledgement and attempted correction of his previous aristocratic way of life. Another thing I wanted to clarify is that I do think Stiva and Anna are equally wrong to have cheated on their spouses. It's one of the saddest ironies of the book that Anna could tell Dolly to forgive but she couldn't forgive herself. You might say Tolstoy condemned her as a matter of textual structure or historical narrativisation or some such, but as a tale told, if this were to have happened in the real world, as something we're supposed to- I think- learn from, Anna's downfall I think stems from her inability to escape her cycle of obsession and guilt through repentance. Look at Stiva in comparison, he acknowledges his guilt and stops, does he not? He doesn't leave house and home and run off with the governess. Anyway, I think perhaps the main difference is just how we're approaching the text. To me it's about every life, all romances, all transgression. To you it seems to be a product of abstract social forces that operate beyond individuality- I don't know. What perspective are you looking at it from exactly? I couldn't describe my own perspective though so I apologise for that. Quickly glancing at various schools of literary theory, and given that I'm led to understand Tolstoy himself was a realist, I'd say I'm trying at least to look at the text from a realistic point of view- what real emotions were present that drove the character. Idk.
>>25081478>I get the sense that you have no idea about the structure, mechanism, and "architecture" of repentance, forgiveness, sin, guilt etc.That is, it seems to me you have no inner experience of it. No doubt you have your own ideas about it, but what is your experience of it I wonder.
>>25052552The more accurately you describe women, the higher the risk of being called an incel.
>>25081478you're describing anna's inability to forgive herself as though forgiveness was equally available to both of them & she just didn't take it. stiva's guilt refreshes overnight because every institution around him absorbs male transgression without cost, his wife forgives, his career continues, his friends shrug. anna's guilt compounds because every institution withdraws: the opera, the drawing room, karenin's christian mercy that functions as repossession with a halo. she can't "just stop" because stopping was never the same action for both of them. stiva stops because stopping costs him nothing.you say tolstoy recognized his own guilt & wanted to repent. sure. the novel he wrote is smarter than the moralist who wrote it. he set out to condemn anna & produced 800 pages of the most sympathetic female interiority in 19th-century fiction, the realism undermining the verdict on every page--every time he rendered what she felt at full resolution the reader sides with her against the structure that kills her, tolstoy included, which is why late tolstoy couldn't stop rewriting his position on women & marriage."stiva and anna are equally wrong to cheat" is the correct observation that misses the entire point. same act, different sentencing structures. bovary, anna, effi briest, edna pontellier--the 19th-century novel kills them for the transgression their male counterparts metabolize before dinner. the marriage plot has always required the female body as collateral & collected on this specific debt. stiva cheated with the governess & got a chapter of mild embarrassment. anna wanted one man outside her marriage & got a train.everyone punishes anna, no one punishes stiva. he built a realism honest enough to show how the machinery sorts. critics didn't import the double standard. they read the book.sin isn't a universal substance applied unevenly. sin is a category that was manufactured with the asymmetry already inside it. augustine's concupiscence, aquinas's hierarchy of disordered appetite, the entire genealogy rates female desire as structurally closer to the fall. the architecture of repentance that you want me to respect was designed around a body that isn't hers. she doesn't fail the architecture. the architecture doesn't fit. tolstoy knew. he wrote the epigraph about punishment & then wrote a novel that couldn't stop asking who authorized it.
>>25081557>every time he rendered what she felt at full resolution the reader sides with her against the structure that kills herI mean no, not really. Anna is not nearly as sympathetic as you claim. She's quite abominable and pathetic at many points in the story to the point where even most women agree she went too far. Not sure why you have such an undying attachment to this character but considering you're a schizo tripfag feminist I guess in your moral matrix committing adultery and ruining your children's lives is okay as long as a woman gets to fuck chad and feel good about herself briefly
>>25081557>she can't "just stop" because stopping was never the same action for both of them. stiva stops because stopping costs him nothing.>"stiva and anna are equally wrong to cheat" is the correct observation that misses the entire point. same act, different sentencing structures. They cheated and are both wrong, Stiva stopped, Anna didn't. You're not wrong in pointing out there are double standards in so called Christian society of that time (and today), but you are wrong to think Anna doesn't bare responsibility for her actions, or more abstractly, that the wife who cheats on her husband and then kills herself was forced by the system into doing it. >the structure that kills herShe didn't get the guillotine FFS, she kills herself. Stop deliberately misreading. >stiva cheated with the governess & got a chapter of mild embarrassment. anna wanted one man outside her marriage & got a train.Something else I think worth mentioning is that the novel isn't about Stiva, it's about Anna. I don't think anyone would write a novel about Stiva and I don't think anyone would read it. Anna is interesting because of her passion and obsession, her guilt and flight from it, her inner conflict. Stiva is uninteresting and glossed over because he's typical- he does wrong, repents, ceases and his life goes on. Stiva goes unpunished because Dolly is a true Christian (and because of the hypocrisies in Russian society, yes). Compare with Karenin's "duty" mindset that becomes mysticism when it implodes. Dolly could have easily chosen not to forgive and their marriage could have fallen apart. >sin is a category that was manufacturedJust as I said, you have no inner experience of sin, guilt, repentance etc so I don't think you'll ever be capable of actually understanding anything Tolstoy wrote. In fact I doubt whether you'll ever even truly approach any comprehension of the human condition, although I'm sure you'll be able to churn out mountains of university seminars with excruciatingly vaccous detail that illuminates nothing.
>>25081622>>25081834nobody denied anna had agency. anna is the most agentive character in the novel, more deliberate & more conscious of what she's doing than stiva ever manages. that's the point you keep missing. the structure doesn't punish passivity. it punishes female agency specifically. foucault's whole project was showing that the subject who "freely chooses" is already produced by the disciplinary apparatus that will judge the choice--the subject doesn't exist before the structure & then enter it. the structure manufactures the subject, the menu, & the criteria for evaluating what gets ordered. stiva was manufactured with a longer menu. anna was manufactured with two items & a comment card. both chose. one choosing cost nothing; the other cost everything. you keep reviewing her order like the kitchen wasn't the argument."she kills herself, nobody pushed her." nietzsche already dismantled this. free will (causa sui, the subject as its own origin) is what he called the best self-contradiction yet conceived. you don't get to punish someone for a choice & simultaneously claim the structure that constrained the choice is irrelevant to the punishment. anna's guilt requires a free subject who chose freely. tolstoy wrote a subject whose freedom was pre-sorted by sex before the choice was made. you can have the theology or you can have the realism. you can't run both simultaneously & call the output justice."that dumb femanon high on feminist theory is putting all the blame on structure"i don't. anna sinned. anna chose. she's responsible for the affair the way every subject operating inside a field is responsible for the moves they make inside it. bourdieu's point: the habitus generates choices that feel free & are real but are produced by conditions the chooser didn't choose. sin was real. sentencing disparity was also real. you keep wanting to discuss the sin because the sin is symmetrical; i keep wanting to discuss the sentencing because the sentencing isn't. that's not erasing her agency--it's refusing to let her agency function as an alibi for the machine that processed her differently than him. tolstoy documented both: the real choice & the rigged arithmetic. you read half.
>>25081834"you have no inner experience of sin, guilt, repentance." kitten. compliance has a feeling & the feeling is what you mean. repentance in the novel is karenin forgiving anna so completely she goes numb under it--forgiveness as sedation, wrong patient, she can't move, he leaves the room sanctified. confession doesn't discover guilt. it manufactures guilt & the manufacturing is so old it registers as memory. what you call a soul is the seal on an inheritance nobody opened."you'll never approach any comprehension of the human condition." i mean this is kind of sweet, right? (the human condition.) you mean the specific 19th-century sentencing apparatus that sorted female desire into pathology & male desire into temperament, which you absorbed so thoroughly the absorption feels like having a worldview. sorting has a gender. gender has a sentencing table. everyone who's ever confused the room for the horizon talks like this (the confidence with which you deploy "the human condition" is interesting mostly in how it tells on the deployment). it's a whole genre. you'd recognize it if you read anything published after 1910."vacuous university seminars." adorable. you read a whole book of a Russian count who couldn't get his own prose to cooperate with his verdict--again, seven drafts where she lives, the eighth kills her, he called it true; your takeaway was "consequences." you swallowed the sentence, reported it back as taste, & the reporting had the affect of someone who's just discovered wine. trueness feels like that: the sentencing apparatus admiring its own reflection in a voice it mistakes for realism. truly gives (the text passing through you unmetabolized & calling the transit an opinion).i don't lack the inner experience of guilt. i lack the particular confusion where the prescription & the illness have the same name & you call the naming depth.
>>25082904>nobody denied anna had agency.You did. You said, >the structure that kills herwhen she killed herself. You're dishonest and deliberately obfuscating and I see no point in talking to you any more
>>25082950I will just say this in ending though, sorry about my rude/angry tone.
>>25083690you're fine, we just weren't having the same conversation & neither of us noticed for like two whole days.
>>25073773I think you miss the part where Levin finds peace and happiness despite being a nice guy faggot through work and religion and duty while Anna undoes her life by focusing on sensuality, fun, glamour, and not her son and husband. That’s my problem with the Novel and why I bet Tolstoy didn’t care for it either. It’s a bit on the nose. Once you read gospel in brief (which is better) and revisit this one you can see it’s all a bit crammed in and forced a bit.
>>25052552>Moreover, Tolstoy has a very wide variety of characters, many of whom are quite different from each other. He had a talent for creating young and old people, men and women, and he understood perfectly even the feelings and desires of adolescent girls. Once, he sat with Gorky and discussed the main character of a novel Gorky had written. This character was a young woman in her early twenties. I never read the novel, but apparently, Gorky described her as uninterested in relationships or sex. When Tolstoy spoke to Gorky, he said something like, "That young woman of yours, you describe her as healthy, but she's not healthy: she's anemic or something like that. A 17, 18, 19-year-old girl already feels a desire to be grabbed and touched, even if she's ashamed, even if she feels shy. But she wants it, she desires it. That girl of yours is a scrawny one." This story shows how much Tolstoy understood the truth of the world and how obsessed with truth his way of thinking was.Tolstoy was debatably the most experienced author who ever lived and saw life through all of its different dimensions, this is how he had such intimate knowledge of even how women think. The guy was an aristocrat, war hero, playboy, writer, teacher, playwright, novelist, religious preacher, philosopher, father of 17, political activist and in his final days a wandering hermit.
>>25052552War and Peace is also very good for this As is some Hemingway
>>25053017I think it means that AK really was stunning, she has the looks even after giving birth twice and still had the charisma. She could turn it on and off and she left it on with Levin, just to fuck with him, knowing she could get in trouble for it, that she was being cunty to Kitty, and that it would upset her Vronksy, who she actually loved. Just a game for her, reckless, terrible r/r, but a bit bored and felt cute, might torpedo my life tonight why notAs an aside I met a girl who reminds me of Kitty Scherbartskiy exactly. 23, soft skin, pale, blue eyes brunette, very tall and thin. Unlike Kitty mine is a whore but whatever
>>25054926Get representation of the wage cuck normie doing the rat race. Nothing has changed. Run normie run, get that promotion, file that meaningless report! Oh wow your wife fucked a nigger, but congrats on the new job!!!
>>25057743KYS
The guy had an insane life.
This whole thread is just one guy trying to pointlessly defend the position that Tolstoy did in fact hate women.
charge dem hoes a fee
>>25082904It's amazing how many empty words you're capable of throwing around to seethe about something this simple. Yes, you dumb whore: there is a double standard when it comes to men and women sleeping around. Yes, women cheating is treated as a much more serious issue, and that's because it is. It is unfortunate that you spend your time confusing yourself with the ramblings of some french faggot who fisted boys in tibet, it seems you have now gone past the point of no return and have completely lost the capacity for common sense, but let me give you a dose anyway.If a man cheats on his wife, the worst case scenario is that there is a bastard child somewhere in the world. The wife herself is completely unaffected and they can still have a happy and honest family life.If a woman cheats on her husband, the worst case scenario is that she will conceive another man's child, she will have to carry it, birth it and raise it. And this child will not be somewhere far, it will be right here - in the family. And the poor bastard husband will either have to accept being a cuckold and raise the bastard child as his own knowingly, or he will be completely unaware of this fact. It's hard to say which one is worse.It's incredible how fucking retarded you are that i have to explain basic biological reality to you like it's arcane knowledge. PENIS IS CHEAP, VAGINA IS EXPENSIVE, GOT IT? Dumb twat. You're so FUCKING stupid, bitchI can't believe you actually made me do this fucking nonsensical captcha to reply. I will admit you sound very rapeable however. Marry me.
>>25089446Microchimerism is real.It matters more when a female sluts around because her children will be the children of everyone she has had sex with
>>25089446sweet of you to explain reproduction to me. i was writing about how tolstoy built a structure that punishes anna for exercising the same agency stiva exercises consequence-free, & you replied by describing that structure & calling it biology. not a rebuttal of foucault; a demonstration of him.>penis is cheap, vagina is expensivepreciado, testo junkie: sex is a technology, not a ground. the body you're citing as nature is a pharmacopornographic product -- your testosterone is as manufactured as the pill, the distinction between natural & synthetic is where the ideology lives. i know of one woman who agreed the asymmetry is real & concluded it should be abolished, not worshipped. your biology argument terminates in radical feminism. firestone. i don't think you meant it to.asymmetry is real. nobody argued otherwise. whether it's nature or architecture is what tolstoy thought was worth eight hundred pages. you thought it was worth caps lock.(stiva cheated in chapter one. dolly was not "completely unaffected." she was annihilated. the novel opens with this.)proposal noted. i'll need citations & a reading pace above chapter zero.(you can decide if i'm ragebait or just someone who owns the dialectic of sex & a captcha solver <3)
>>25089478NTA but do you agree that what Anna did was as wrong as what Stiva did? Not more, not less, both deserve equal puniahment.
>>25082904>it punishes female agency specificallyIt punishes female agency... when used for evil. It is like the female Crime and Punishment.
