i’m going to start journaling about what i read, more so how i feel about it and less so events that happen and less of a synopsis.
today’s passages: largely about vronsky before a big horse race and then he goes to sees anna
story has progressed rather quickly in terms of their romance, very few scenes of them together up until this point, just internal thoughts pointing at what they mean to each other. i wish it was a little bit more smutty. lol but interesting technique, just telling us where the relationship is through the character’s thoughts.
i gasped when she told him she was pregnant. already?! we’re not even halfway through the book yet. is the rest of the book just going to be impending doom?
i enjoyed vronsky’s connection to his horse, described as not the most physically buff (hah! for lack of a better word), but seemingly human somehow, the little detail of how if she could talk, she would. how she stomped out of excitement but quieted down when he came near.
fave quote:
“Vronksy stroked her firm neck, straightened a strand of her mane that had fallen on the wrong side of her sharp withers, and put his face to her nostrils, taut and thin as a bat’s wing.”
going to write first and then talk to ai, tried to talk to grok today and it was just grossly wrong (new 4.1 update needs some updating? saying anna’s son had just come home from a gymnastics lesson, wtf lol) — anywho, switched to claude.
tri: i was definitely excited the whole time throughout this passage, but this analysis definitely makes a lot of sense in terms of the techniques used, short phrases when things become urgent, telling us directly they are not on the same page etc etc
claude:
That’s a really sharp observation—you felt the excitement even as the passage is technically about entrapment and misunderstanding. And that’s exactly right. Tolstoy is doing something sophisticated here: he’s making the reader feel the intoxication of their love even while showing us intellectually why it’s doomed.
The short sentences don’t just convey urgency—they convey aliveness. When Anna tells him she’s pregnant and his head sinks, yes it’s a moment of recoil, but it’s also visceral and immediate. Same with the final kiss—”rapid movement,” “swiftly kissed”—that language has energy. You’re caught up in it because they’re caught up in it. The prose does what their bodies are doing.
This is what Saunders really cares about: the gap between what we know (this will end badly, they’re lying to themselves, the situation is impossible) and what we feel (this is beautiful, this is real, this matters). Good literature holds both things at once. You’re not supposed to intellectually understand the tragedy and be bored. You’re supposed to be excited AND see the tragedy. That tension is where the power lives.
The detail about her being unable to say “my son”—Tolstoy tells us why she can’t face it, but he doesn’t make us not care about the kiss that’s happening right now. The urgency is real. The love is real. The doom is also real. And we feel all three simultaneously.
That excitement you felt? That’s you reading the passage the way Tolstoy wrote it. You’re experiencing what Anna and Vronsky are experiencing in that moment, even though you also know (because the narrator keeps telling you) that this is a trap.