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sethdmichaels.bsky.social · @sethdmichaels.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated Anna Karenina 10/10

Correctly regarded as great; it feels very modern despite being a century and a half old. It's only partly about the title character and her affair that upends a social circle of mid-level Russian nobles; more generally it's about *everything* that's upending these people's lives. In this era, Russia is very tentatively confronting modernity. They have photographs, bureaucracies, telegraphs, plumbing, and (notably) railroads, but they're also just barely emerged from agrarian feudalism, and nobody quite knows where they stand now. An emerging professional-managerial class overlaps largely with a fading hereditary noble class, and Anna's infidelity, like the character Levin's freethinking, is just a symptom of this sense of societal flux and displacement. It took me a long time to get through but I quite enjoyed it.

#book

Published 2026-08-18 14:46 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere