I finally read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. After my post, Read Tolstoy, a friend encouraged me with the thought that I would like it. I did. While the development of characters is not as thorough as in War and Peace, the beauty and delicacy in his descriptions of events and locations is unsurpassed. One passage on sensing the sublime is a precious insight.
Tolstoy on sensing the sublime: Levin during Kitty's birthing labor.
“All he knew and felt was that what was happening was similar to what had happened the year before in the hotel of the provincial town, on his brother Nicholas's deathbed. But that had been grief – this was joy. But both that grief and this joy alike were outside all the usual circumstances of life; in this ordinary life they were like an opening through which something sublime could be seen. And now as then what was being accomplished came harshly, in agony, and just as incomprehensibly the soul soared aloft in the contemplation of this sublimity to a height it had never even understood before, where reason could no longer keep up with it.”
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