Artipathy discussion

I haven't managed to finish a book lately but I'm working on it. That said, it is fascinating for me to read more than one book at a time. One book often gives insights on another that doesn't really have anything to do with the other... until it does. I have been reading Anna Karenina by Tolstoy this Fall and I was struck by something so amazing, or so it seems. The character of Levin in the story could be Van Gogh! (This is a bit of a spoiler post, so if you want to read Karenina and don't want to hear about it, skip this part.) Levin is a character of the higher class that falls in love with a girl of his own class and is a bit obsessed about her. He finally asks her to marry him and she refuses. Her mother is also looking to a better match. Things happen, blah, blah, blah... We find out he has a house in the country where he lives a sort of country gentleman's life. But he's fascinated by the peasants and their joy in hard work. I've just read a passage where he spends a night on a haystack and enjoys the peasant singing and has convinced himself to become one of them. The descriptions are so like Van Gogh's of the countryside, though perhaps a bit less morose, and the whole life of the worker, not to mention the visual image of the hay of course. It just amazed me, here you have this sort of gentlemen farmer (Van Gogh being from an upper class family) bringing himself "down" to the peasant level (as V.G. did in his way of dress), the glorification of the peasant (V.G. doing it visually, Tolstoy in a verbal painting of a Marxist utopia). Yet they both can't lose their class status, remaining apart from the peasant life no matter how they aspire to it's simple ways. Just found this really, really fascinating, how one book can have such a similarity to another, especially as one character is fictional and the other real. If I read that the character of Levin whipped out a canvas and began to paint the peasant scenes he describes I would have to check the cover and see if I were reading the Letters of V.G. or A.K. Has anybody else here read A.K.?