(Host) With the new film of Anna Karenina due out in mid-November,
commentator Stephanie Greene, a freelance writer who lives with her
family on a farm in Windham County, makes a pitch for reading the book.
(Greene) The movie trailer is bewitchingly gorgeous, with great ballroom scenes and lavish costumes – truly amazing to watch.
But as with any book I love, I’m afraid they’re going to leave out my favorite parts.
Count
Leo Tolstoy was a writer who understood and loved rural life. His farm
scenes still ring true today, more than a century later and half a world
away.
We all know Anna Karenina as a tragic love story. But
I’ve read it a few times, now, and my patience for Anna’s bad taste in
men has become strained. I want to yell at her: "No! Don’t! He’s a dead
end and you’ll regret it in a few hundred pages, trust me!" But the
wheels of the plot roll on, despite my frustrated squeaking.
I’m
more taken with Constantine Levin, an earnest and diffident character
who moves uneasily between city and country. He’s a landowner who runs a
vast estate with 1500 acres under cultivation. He has a love interest
in Moscow, but in society he often feels like a bumbling fool. Tolstoy
contrasts the artifice and intrigue of society life in the city with the
simpler and perhaps more real satisfactions to be found in life on the
land.
My concern is that it’s much easier, on film, to seduce
the viewer with a candlelit ballroom scene, than to shoot an equally
enthralling scene where a newborn calf is being rubbed down with a
handful of hay in a warm barn at night.
As I read a passage
about haying, I can recall the joy of reaping a generous harvest, the
smell of the hay, the repetitive, exhausting work, slipping on the chaff
when piling the hay, even the thirst you build up that seems
unquenchable. I relate to the hurry and drama of getting hay into the
barn before rain. I add the smell of a barn full of hay to the
experience of reading about it.
There’s also a wonderful scene
in which Levin and his extended family gather by the apiary for
cucumbers, bread and bowls of new honey. Bees fly to the nearby
flowering lime trees, returning laden to the hive, while the humans sit
shaded by a grove of aspens enjoying the sweet harvest. It’s ravishing.
I’m
more gatherer than hunter, but I still love Tolstoy’s hunting scenes.
In one, Levin hunts birds with his friends, going after snipe and duck
in the early spring when there are still patches of snow in the swamp.
Levin waits in a thicket and eventually fills his game bag with birds
he’s shot. He can’t tear himself away and waits to see Venus rise above
the birches.
A movie is an escalator you step onto, and enjoy a
carefully programmed ride. But a book is a walk, in which you can double
back, poke among the wildflowers or just stand quietly, listening to
the wind in the trees.