Cold, Cold, Cold Books...for a Mildly Cold Winter

This is one of my favorite books because of its nuanced depictions of the characters, their world, and the human condition. It is amazing for me to see how times have changed since this book was written in the late 19th Century, but how people have not.

Konstantin Levin is a farmer and an idealist embattled with societal forces and with the nagging setbacks that seem to keep him from creating his perfect farm and finding a way to better the situation of the Russian Peasant. He is a sincere but unpolished bachelor, but he thinks he has finally found the woman who he wants to marry, Kitty, and she seems to like him okay too. However, He is competing for Kitty’s affection with a younger man named Alexei Vronsky who is a sharp contrast to Levin. He is much more presentable, but seems to lag behind Levin in capacity for empathy and commitment…

But I haven’t even explained who Anna is. She is Kitty’s older sister’s husband’s sister who is unhappy in her marriage (The relationships will be more understandable in the context of the whole story)…

Actually, I don’t want to give too much away. Just read it. It’s good.

This story is about an author who leaves behind a box of notes that he instructs his family to destroy. Sound familiar? This is the fictional version that Nabokov wrote long before leaving behind his own notes to be destroyed. Sebastian Knight’s brother tries to uncover the details of his life in order to gain closure and write a biography. But how well did he know his brother and what do the details of Knight’s life mean apart from his fiction?