My very own Pava
I thoroughly enjoy reading the many "best of 2024" reading lists.
Mine was woefully short, but the year was crowned early in January when I finally read Anna Karenin, by Leo Tolstoy.
I was inspired by an episode of the Doomer Optimism podcast on YouTube to attempt again reading this magnificent Russian novel because of the agricultural themes.
I bought my Penguin Classics edition of the novel, translated by Rosemary Edmonds, at a train station in England in 1983 or '84, intending to read it on a long train ride, perhaps from Liverpool to Reading.
Forty years ago I was not yet ready to read this tome. But when I picked it up again in 2024, I was at the perfect stage in my life, mostly because I had now fallen in love with cattle and knew what it was like to sweat in the hot summer sun bringing in the hay.
And when I read of Levin's lyrical love of his prize cow, Pava, I knew that was the name I would give Lina's first calf due in June, if it was a heifer.
But there had been one important and happy event: Pava, his best cow, that he had paid a big price for at a cattle-show, had calved. [...]
Levin went into the stall, looked Pava over, and lifted the speckled calf on to its long, tottering legs. [...] The calf pushed its nose under its mother's belly and whisked its little tail.
Later, Levin daydreams about his wife (whom he does not yet have) and him showing off their herd to visitors.
'How extraordinarily nice it will be when Pava's calf has grown into a red-speckled cow and the whole herd with those three others. ... Splendid! And I and my wife will go out with our guests to see the herd come in.'
My Pava (with evidence of her mother's tender cow lick) is almost seven months old in this (muddy) picture today.
