Everybody Hates a Tourist, or the Problem with Levin

This post contains minor spoilers for ANNA KARENINA and DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON.

It was the summer of Britpop. The sun was always shining and I had hours to spare lazing on a grassy field, chatting to my friends about life, literature and the musical revolution. The media was fixated with the battle between Blur and Oasis, but we were working class and from Yorkshire so we preferred Pulp.

In our A-level English class we were reading George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. To fill in the subject matter for those unfamiliar with it, the book recounts the time that Orwell decided to live as a tramp in the two capital cities, in order to experience what life is like on the other side of the tracks. At the end of Down and Out, Orwell grows tired of his life on the streets and casually writes home to ask for the cash he needs to return to his middle class existence.

Orwell’s underworld excursion reminded us strongly of the lyrics of Pulp’s most famous song, Common People. The lyrics relate the story of a rich Greek girl who while studying St Martin’s College asks one of her less well off co-students to show her how the ‘common people’ live and help her pretend to be one of them. “Everybody hates a tourist,” sings Pulp frontman, Jarvis Cocker, adding that “the chip stains and grease will come out in the bath”. He concludes that “you'll never get it right, cos when you're laid in bed at night watching roaches climb the wall, if you call your Dad he could stop it all.”

This all came back to me when I recently read Anna Karenina for the first time. Although I loved the chapters covering the tragic romance of Anna and Vronsky, I was less enthusiastic about the parallel storyline dealing with the enthusiastic countryside landowner, Levin.

Many readers have disliked the Levin chapters of Anna Karenina, largely because they drag by when compared to the Anna storyline. This wasn’t my mine objection to them. With Levin I felt like I was reading Down and Out in Paris and London all over again.

In one famous scene, Levin spends a happy day working in the fields alongside the peasants of his estate. Like Orwell, he is a great friend of the workers and much prefers this day out to spending time among politicians in Moscow. At one level, his views seem refreshing for a Russian aristocrat in the late nineteenth century. Tolstoy relates that “if he had been asked whether he liked or didn't like the peasants, Konstantin Levin would have been absolutely at a loss what to reply. He liked and did not like the peasants, just as he liked and did not like men in general.”

But this ability to see peasants in no different light to other men, does not extend to a wish to see them become anything other than peasants. “The man that can read and write is much inferior as a workman,” Levin says and he believes in a world where everyone knows their place and is happy with it. To him, anyone who wants to educate the peasants and take them away from their work in the fields is doing them a disservice.

Levin never stops to consider that what may be to him an enjoyable day of exercise in the country, is a chore if there is no escape from it. At the end of his day in the fields he can happily go back to his warm safe home and eat a good meal. There are servants to feed him and if his aches grow too painful he can always spend the next day in bed and know that a decent doctor will be there for him if he needs help.

For the peasants there is no escape and no choice. Levin is so wrapped up in his idea of a working class idyll that he never realises that. For him, the grass is greener on the other side and he mistakenly thinks that because he would rather be at work in the fields than behind a desk in Moscow then everyone else feels the same way.

Levin may see himself as the peasants’ friend, but as long as he doesn’t allow them to make their own choices, he’s actually their enemy. Disconcertingly, Levin is held as an extremely positive character in the novel and is widely believed to be a cipher for Tolstoy’s own political views, which are considered liberal for the time. With even the peasants’ supporters looking to deny them a choice, it seems little wonder to me that Russia came to revolution just 28 years after the publication of Anna Karenina.