It is amazing to me how, with every episode of this podcast, the participants interpret the work they are reading through the veil of their personalities and era. The idea that, for instance, Anna is a more real or interesting or dynamic character than Kitty and the affair she conducts in some way more real than Kitty's marriage to L. I think it is clear from the very things they quoted as interesting traits that Anna is a vacuous and even reprehensible woman. She is entirely artifice and fakery, does things only for the sake of how it will appear to others, is moved by sentimentality. The thoughts she has just before the train runs over her can not be more unequivocal in this regard: this is actually happening, she is going to die, and she wants to stop it. Up to that instant, she was faking it and the reality of the iron wheel approaching her head brings her out of her self-centered play-acting. AK is only more "interesting" or "dynamic" because of the melodrama of her story. She is essentially a boring little materialistic, narcissistic mannequin, an artist's dummy. The fact that, to some degree, it isn't her fault that she is like this (the plight of women at the time, happier women being those with less natural talents than she, who accepted the lot of wife or who were uncomplicated in their needs from their extramarital affairs) is to my mind her only redeeming characteristic. That the reviewers were so eager to accept her narcissism and wrong behavior shows only that, as they did with The Emperor's Children, they find her to be like their friends and acquaintances: morbidly self-obsessed. It is a great novel, as they said, and many of their points are interesting and correct, but they remade the book in their own likeness.

It's funny to log in and read your comments because I had been wondering for several days why I found this discussion so relatively tedious. I decided it was the lack of connection to our present moment. And lack of analysis of the book's ideas about marriage, fidelity, and the double standard; legit and illegitimate bases of women's power/authority; Christian faith and its implications for the conduct of life and the exercising of power over others; critique of urban life as alienated from nature and enervating esp to men of the upper class (the passage they read where Levin tries and fails to keep up with the fieldworkers' speed and technique). None of these issues being unique to this novel, but pertinent to our lives and concerns today.

I felt the discussion spent too much time affirming things that don't need discussion; too much cooing over Tolstoy's greatness and not enough about his ideas as manifest in the book.

I'm not sure what you mean by "connection to the present moment", though the TV analyst mumbled something incoherent about the role of time in the novel, the delivery of which thought reminded me of Miss South Carolina 2007 discussing education (I wonder why they feel a sharp eye for criticism of Survivor or House translates to understanding of literature), but I do agree that the talk was more a "who's your favorite and why?" debate, skirting entirely the reasons why the novel is good. It was a love-fest, which is a departure from their usual, I suppose since the author is safely dead.