What Is a Happy Family?

Reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

In the Provo Great Books Club (see here, here, and here) we recently began to read and discuss Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. We are reading the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation, and we meet each Wednesday evening at 7 pm MST on the following Zoom link to discuss what we read:

Join Zoom Meeting
https://byu.zoom.us/j/98553289451

This is the schedule for Anna Karenina:

1/22 Part I, chaps 1-15

1/29 Part I, chaps 16-34

2/5 Part II, chaps 1-18

2/12 Part II chaps 18-35

2/19 Part III

2/26 Part IV

3/5 (or another night that week) Part V

3/12 Part VI

3/19 Part VII

3/26 Part VIII

I enjoyed the first fifteen chapters of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a book that has been on my “to read” list for a long time. I also enjoyed our discussion last Wednesday. (It’s not too late to join us.)

What stands out to me most thus far is the nature of the rivalry for Kitty’s affection between Vronsky and Levin, Levin’s excellent ice-skating skills, and the questions raised by Tolstoy’s opening passage of the book and the subsequent account of betrayal:

Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

I tend to think that the opposite is true, namely, that there is a great variety of ways in which happy families are happy, whereas all unhappy families resemble each other in their misery. But this only begs the question “What is a happy family?”