Waiting With Anna Karenina

Folks, we have some time to kill here.

The Ministry of Education’s call for more paperwork at the end of March and the subsequent expiration of all accreditations means we have to wait to get the referrals coming again. We might as well use it productively.

So here’s my proposal: An online book club on Anna Karenina. At 864 pages in paperback, it definitely has enough heft to keep us reading for a while. (After all, it took author Leo Tolstoy four years to publish it all!) And there is nothing more emblematic of Russian literature than this book. Imagine the tale you can someday spin for your child’s life book: “Happy families are all alike”, you could say, borrowing from the novel’s opening line, they begin with an adoption from Russia.

I first tackled Anna a long, long time ago, and saw it through to the end despite a dodo plot spoiler uttered by college classmate (No, I won’t repeat it here). It was one of a long line of mid-19th century novels I had to read at school, many of which were originally commissioned on the installment method. It wasn’t uncommon for publishers of the star media platform of that era–newspapers!–to hire writers to print their work chapter by chapter in their pages to draw readers. Tolstoy and Charles Dickens did it well; Georges Sand (a French woman author who wrote under a male pen name) far less so.

While Anna Karenina didn’t originally draw rave revues from Russian critics, it regularly tops list of best books around the globe. Oprah Winfrey even put it on her book club back in 2004. And so many people joined her in her reading that the billionaire TV host made a substantial donation of books to children in St. Petersburg orphanages. (Oprah also gets points in my books for having a consistently enquiring mind on adoption.)

You can find copies of Anna Karenina pretty much everywhere, from your local library to the big online booksellers. You can even download the whole thing from Project Guttenberg, the free online book repository, something I’m not going to attempt given the memory strains on my already creaky six-year-old Dell.

OK, here are the ground rules: I’ve set up an Anna Karenina thread on the Russian Adoption forum to gather our comments. You can check Oprah’s site and Wikipedia for reading guides, but no plot-spoiler comments, please.

With luck, the accreditations will be out before we finish.

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