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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   1873 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 4, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

Still on the Iliad and Lovecraft. Picking up Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.

I’m about halfway through Anna Karenina. After that I’m finally gonna crack open Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition.

I just finished Anna Karenina myself. There's a lot to chew on there, but some of the more interesting points for me were:

  • Despite the main dramatis personae all being high class, there's a big difference wealth differential between Vronsky, who has a really lavish lifestyle, and Dolly, who is basically just scraping by (and not, apparently, due to profligacy).
  • Tolstoy really seems to think that "subsistence" farming where the landowner is barely breaking even (or worse) is a totally reasonable state of affairs and the Russian way of farmwork is just not amenable even in principle to mechanization.

Tolstoy really seems to think that "subsistence" farming where the landowner is barely breaking even (or worse) is a totally reasonable state of affairs and the Russian way of farmwork is just not amenable even in principle to mechanization.

He really did think that. There's a short story by him that is quite explicit about his view. It's literally named How much land does a man need?. The classroom interpretation is of course that it's a story about the sin of greed, but it's not.

Why is this not about greed?

To be clear, I did not get the sense from Anna Karenina that Tolstoy was against large holdings per se. It's just that he didn't think that there's any point in trying to save labor or increase profits - you can do that on a large plot or on a small one. Levin certainly seems to have vast tracts of land - forests, fields, etc etc.

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