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257 16. Essentialism Another kind of unity evoked in Anna Karenina is essentialism, which takes two forms. The first is the claim made by the narrator and several characters that some categories of human beings—especially women and peasants— are defined by unalterable traits. (The “situation rhymes” among different characters also imply the interchangeability and therefore the universality of certain human traits.) The text does not always support these generalizations , but there are enough of them to constitute an argument—albeit not a proof—for the existence of transpersonal truths, and to imply that the world is more structured than might seem to be the case if we judge only by the perceptions of individual characters. This is obviously an important consideration in the context of the novel’s allusions to God, divine law, good and evil, fate, and the like. However, as in the case of characters’ feelings of unity with others, which tend to be overshadowed by descriptions of how they are isolated from each other, the claims for essentialism occupy relatively little textual space even though they carry considerable hermeneutic weight. And as in the case of the unclear relation between personal and universal ethics, the nexus between individual behavior and supposedly universal essentialist traits is difficult to trace, in part because it is not something with which the narrator concerns himself outside the moments when he asserts its existence. The second form of essentialism is manifested in the link between human beings and nature. Some of the narrator’s descriptions, and the attitudes of several characters, imply that human existence in proximity to or in harmony with nature and natural processes is most fulfilling and best. In other words, there is something in human behavior and values that is fixed, that is not simply a product of culture, and that reflects an ordering principle that encompasses the seemingly disparate worlds of nature and humankind.1 16.1. Nature and Humankind The character who embodies this link most fully is Levin. One of the most elaborate passages confirming his harmony with nature begins with the narrator’s description of spring’s arrival following the winter when Kitty rejects Levin’s proposal. The narrator directly correlates the seasonal change, which he describes as bringing “joy to plants, animals and people alike” (152, II.12), with Levin’s determination to overcome his past disappointments and to redefine his life without Kitty. However, given how the rest of this scene develops, there is a curious discrepancy between the harmony Levin experiences and what he wants. Levin never entirely overcomes his love for Kitty, and by the end of the summer reconfirms it when he glimpses her in a carriage at dawn. Thus, although the narrator shares in Levin’s ecstatic mood when spring arrives, the harmony between Levin and nature is falsely prophetic or inaccurate about the future course of his life, which turns out more positively than he had dreamt (although he does claim later that he always felt his marriage to Kitty was preordained [see 17.2]). An additional link between nature and things human is suggested by the narrator’s correlating changes in weather with the Russian Easter church calendar—Lent, Easter Monday, Krasnaya Gorka (the week after Easter). Moreover, his closely observed and highly knowledgeable observations are couched in rhythmically organized language, which adds a correlation between nature and the human mode of expression.2 This is further augmented by the narrator’s inclusion of human, animal, and vegetable agents in an anaphoric structure, and by his personifying verbs applied to the animal world. In the example that follows, I intentionally betray English word order, and Pevear and Volokhonsky’s fine translation, in order to preserve some of the structure of the original Russian: “the bright sun rose and quickly ate up the thin ice covering the water . . . Greened the old grass and sprouting needles of new grass, swelled the buds . . . buzzed the newly hatched bee . . . trilled invisible larks . . . wept the peewit . . . flew with their spring honking the cranes and geese . . . lowed in the meadow . . . the cattle, played the bow-legged lambs, ran the fleet-footed children, chattered by the pond the many voices of women, knocked in the yards the peasants’ axes . . . came the real spring” (153, II.12). Immediately following this variegated chorus, the narrative shifts to Levin striding across his estate and culminates in the hermeneutic index that he is “like a tree in spring” because...

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