It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, actually, it was time to drive some places over the summer, so I packed the longest-ass audiobook I could find. The thing about stating your thesis clearly in a pithy one-liner at the start of your novel is that it invites a certain type of pedant to spend the entire time trying to pick holes in it.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
-- Leo Tolstoy narrating Anna Karenina's opening lines
Which I guess is kind of true if you squint and narrow your parameters for 'alikeness' to make it almost nonsensical. I read someone say that this is meant to mean that the proverbial 'happy family' is non-existent and like an empty set is technically homogeneous, but that seems also stupid. However the non-existence of a the perfectly happy family does parallel Levin's realization that his conversion to Christianity is not like Gandalf the Grey becoming Gandalf the White, but more of a fluid state of being where you're still going to have all of your human faults, because of course you do, that's how being human works. Apparently this kind of black and white thinking was pretty characteristic of Tolstoy, which kind of tracks as a bit of a black and white thinker myself.
Antagonistic first lines aside, I did really enjoy Tolstoy's realism and the glimpse into the high society of the late Russian empire, especially how A) there were like literally a million princes in Russia B) the aristocracy all spoke French and English. With such a large aristocracy and an aristocracy that took such pains to differentiate itself from the Russian people, it seems pretty unsurprising where this is all heading about 30 years later.
It was also an interesting look into the sexism of the time, since characters like Vronsky and Oblansky basically never pay any price for their sins, while Darya Oblanskaya suffers in silence at her husband's transgressions and lack of economic sense, Anna suffers very much not in silence at her social ostracism, eventually committing suicide, and even Vronsky's mare is ruined by Vronsky's lack of care during the steeplechase. And, in fact, his insistence on doing whatever the hell he wanted whenever the hell he wanted to do it is basically what also dooms Anna.
The conversion of Konstantin Levin was interesting...it was basically a version of the 'no atheists in a foxhole' argument against atheism, which is fine to the extent that it helps people, powerless in the face of a cruel universe, but is less effective the more smugly it is delivered. Oh and also:
"No, no, no Quagmire. Until you have a child. Until you have a child you can't possibly understand."
-- Brian Griffin being fucking obnoxious about being a father for like 5 goddamn minutes, but also Tolstoy via his stand-in, Levin
But as far as Christianity goes, Levin/Tolstoy's is a fairly inoffensive brand:
You can also see the strains of anarchy in his philosophy. It's pretty clear that Tolstoy thought the family unit was the basic unit of anarchism, which makes sense to me: if you think about the people you act the most altruistically to, they're your family and chosen family. Similarly, I think Levin's attempted farming reforms can also be seen through this anarchic lens (via the paternalistic nature of aristocratic/peasant relationships) when he tries to entice the peasants to do some additional farming for themselves but it doesn't really catch on. Similarly the Bailiff is clearly the intractable bureaucratic class that abhors change and throws up objections out of sheer reactionary bent. I think part of the resistance to change on the peasants part at least was that change for them could (and had, historically) meant less good working conditions and this is why Levin is unable to introduce the modern farming improvements that contemporary western Europe was benefiting from, but I think the upshot is that the top down 'improvements' only work as far as they can be enforced, but maybe engaging the workers and figuring out a mutually beneficial way to introduce these reforms would have been better.
We don't find out because Levin marries a teenager and stops giving a shit about farming.