One of the most famous scenes of Anna Karenina is the mowing at Levin's estate. The first fully developed interaction between Levin and the peasant class symbolizes the triumph of nature over the stained upper classes, the essence of Slavism that would save Russia from Europe's fate of nihilism and anarchism, and the core of a future religious utopia. They here appear in the narrator's brief snatches of description in a very neutral, factual light. Characteristic of Tolstoy's prose is the importance of point of view, and often Tolstoy will recount the same scene from many different view points, even to the point of including the inner monologues of Levin's hunting dog during a shooting outing.

In the fields so prosaically presented by the

marriage, occur almost entirely without words, and the intuitive understanding of someone else's thoughts, whether occasioned by chalk marks on a leather table cover or by the subtlest nuance in someone's eyes, in contrast to the falsehoods of social language that obscure and separate people, create a few brief and sometime ecstatic moments of penetratiom between usually separate conciousnesses. And yet words are still the tools by which, literally, men live or die. Levin's search for structure, as mentioned above, may be considered a struggle to find a language of truth.

Levin's first encounter with the vastness of blue sky occurs in Part III, Chapter XII, before he has fully understood the necessity of relating experience to his own internal belief. At the edge of perception comes a mystic change to remind Levin of his duty to reason. Abandoning his dream of marrying a peasant girl (which for Levin would have been disaster because such a marriage would have been occasioned only by the beauty of experience of peasant life and thus would have been an abandonment of the search for rational structure and an admission of defeat) he realizes that he loves Kitty.

It is through the struggle that Levin manages to save himself. Instead of the i

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Approximate Word count = 841
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)