Anna Karenina
convictions, as he called them, which had during the period from his
twentieth to his thirty-fourth year imperceptibly replaced his childish
and youthful beliefs—he had been stricken with horror, not so much of
death, as of life, without any knowledge of whence, and why, and how,
and what it was. The physical organization, its decay, the
indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy,
evolution, were the words which usurped the place of his old belief.
These words and the ideas associated with them were very well for
intellectual purposes. But for life they yielded nothing, and Levin
felt suddenly like a man who has changed his warm fur cloak for a
muslin garment, and going for the first time into the frost is
immediately convinced, not by reason, but by his whole nature that he
is as good as naked, and that he must infallibly perish miserably.
From that moment, though he did not distinctly face it, and still went
on living as before, Levin had never lost this sense of terror at his
lack of knowledge.
He vaguely felt, too, that what he called his new convictions were not
merely lack of knowledge, but that they were part of a whole order of
ideas, in which no knowledge of what he needed was possible.
At first, marriage, with the new joys and duties bound up with it, had
completely crowded out these thoughts. But of late, while he was
staying in Moscow after his wife’s confinement, with nothing to do, the
question that clamored for solution had more and more often, more and
more insistently, haunted Levin’s mind.
The question was summed up for him thus: “If I do not accept the
answers Christianity gives to the problems of my life, what answers do
I accept?” And in the whole arsenal of his convictions, so far from
finding any satisfactory answers, he was utterly unable to find
anything at all like an answer.
He was in the position of a man seeking food in toy shops and tool
shops.
Instinctively, unconsciously, with every book, with every conversation,
with every man he met, he was on the lookout for light on these
questions and their solution.
What puzzled and distracted him above everything was that the majority
of men of his age and circle had, like him, exchanged their old beliefs
for the same new convictions, and yet saw nothing to lament in this,
and were perfectly satisfied and serene. So that, apart from the
principal question, Levin was tortured by other questions too. Were
these people sincere? he asked himself, or were they playing a part? or
was it that they understood the answers science gave to these problems
in some different, clearer sense than he did? And he assiduously
studied both these men’s opinions and the books which treated of these
scientific explanations.
One fact he had found out since these questions had engrossed his mind,
was that he had been quite wrong in supposing from the recollections of
the circle of his young days at college, that religion had outlived its
day, and that it was now practically non-existent. All the people
nearest to him who were good in their lives were believers. The old
prince, and Lvov, whom he liked so much, and Sergey Ivanovitch, and all
the women believed, and his wife believed as simply as he had believed
in his earliest childhood, and ninety-nine hundredths of the Russian
people, all the working people for whose life he felt the deepest
respect, believed.
Another fact of which he became convinced, after reading many
scientific books, was that the men who shared his views had no other
construction to put on them, and that they gave no explanation of the
questions which he felt he could not live without answering, but simply
ignored their existence and attempted to explain other questions of no
possible interest to him, such as the evolution of organisms, the
materialistic theory of consciousness, and so forth.
Moreover, during his wife’s confinement, something had happened that
seemed extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into
praying, and at the moment he prayed, he believed. But that moment had
passed, and he could not make his state of mind at that moment fit into
the rest of his life.
He could not admit that at that moment he knew the truth, and that now
he was wrong; for as soon as he began thinking calmly about it, it all
fell to pieces. He could not admit that he was mistaken then, for his
spiritual condition then was precious to him, and to admit that it was
a proof of weakness would have been to desecrate those moments. He was
miserably divided against himself, and strained all his spiritual
forces to the utmost to escape from this condition.
Chapter 9
These doubts fretted and harassed him, growing weaker or stronger from
time to time, but never leaving him. He read and thought, and the more
he read and the more he thought, the further he felt from the aim he
was pursuing.
Of late in Moscow and in the country, since he had become convinced
that he would find no solution in the materialists, he had read and
re-read thoroughly Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and
Schopenhauer, the philosophers who gave a non-materialistic explanation
of life.
Their ideas seemed to him fruitful when he was reading or was himself
seeking arguments to refute other theories, especially those of the
materialists; but as soon as he began to read or sought for himself a
solution of problems, the same thing always happened. As long as he
followed the fixed definition of obscure words such as _spirit, will,
freedom, essence,_ purposely letting himself go into the snare of words
the philosophers set for him, he seemed to comprehend something. But he
had only to forget the artificial train of reasoning, and to turn from
life itself to what had satisfied him while thinking in accordance with
the fixed definitions, and all this artificial edifice fell to pieces
at once like a house of cards, and it became clear that the edifice had
been built up out of those transposed words, apart from anything in
life more important than reason.
At one time, reading Schopenhauer, he put in place of his _will_ the
word _love_, and for a couple of days this new philosophy charmed him,
till he removed a little away from it. But then, when he turned from
life itself to glance at it again, it fell away too, and proved to be
the same muslin garment with no warmth in it.
His brother Sergey Ivanovitch advised him to read the theological works
of Homiakov. Levin read the second volume of Homiakov’s works, and in
spite of the elegant, epigrammatic, argumentative style which at first
repelled him, he was impressed by the doctrine of the church he found
in them. He was struck at first by the idea that the apprehension of
divine truths had not been vouchsafed to man, but to a corporation of
men bound together by love—to the church. What delighted him was the
thought how much easier it was to believe in a still existing living
church, embracing all the beliefs of men, and having God at its head,
and therefore holy and infallible, and from it to accept the faith in
God, in the creation, the fall, the redemption, than to begin with God,
a mysterious, far-away God, the creation, etc. But afterwards, on
reading a Catholic writer’s history of the church, and then a Greek
orthodox writer’s history of the church, and seeing that the two
churches, in their very conception infallible, each deny the authority
of the other, Homiakov’s doctrine of the church lost all its charm for
him, and this edifice crumbled into dust like the philosophers’
edifices.
All that spring he was not himself, and went through fearful moments of
horror.
“Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life’s impossible; and
that I can’t know, and so I can’t live,” Levin said to himself.
“In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a
bubble-organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that
bubble is Me.”
It was an agonizing error, but it was the sole logical result of ages
of human thought in that direction.
This was the ultimate belief on which all the systems elaborated by
human thought in almost all their ramifications rested. It was the
prevalent conviction, and of all other explanations Levin had
unconsciously, not knowing when or how, chosen it, as anyway the
clearest, and made it his own.
But it was not merely a falsehood, it was the cruel jeer of some wicked
power, some evil, hateful power, to whom one could not submit.
He must escape from this power. And the means of escape every man had
in his own hands. He had but to cut short this dependence on evil. And
there was one means—death.
And Levin, a happy father and husband, in perfect health, was several
times so near suicide that he hid the cord that he might not be tempted
to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun for fear of
shooting himself.
But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on
living.
Chapter 10
When Levin thought what he was and what he was living for, he could
find no answer to the questions and was reduced to despair, but he left
off questioning himself about it. It seemed as though he knew both what
he was and for what he was living, for he acted and lived resolutely
and without hesitation. Indeed, in these latter days he was far more
decided and unhesitating in life than he had ever been.
When he went back to the country at the beginning of June, he went back
also to his usual pursuits. The management of the estate, his relations
with the peasants and the neighbors, the care of his household, the
management of his sister’s and brother’s property, of which he had the
direction, his relations with his wife and kindred, the care of his
child, and the new bee-keeping hobby he had taken up that spring,
filled all his time.
These things occupied him now, not because he justified them to himself
by any sort of general principles, as he had done in former days; on
the contrary, disappointed by the failure of his former efforts for the
general welfare, and too much occupied with his own thought and the
mass of business with which he was burdened from all sides, he had
completely given up thinking of the general good, and he busied himself
with all this work simply because it seemed to him that he must do what
he was doing—that he could not do otherwise. In former days—almost from
childhood, and increasingly up to full manhood—when he had tried to do
anything that would be good for all, for humanity, for Russia, for the
whole village, he had noticed that the idea of it had been pleasant,
but the work itself had always been incoherent, that then he had never
had a full conviction of its absolute necessity, and that the work that
had begun by seeming so great, had grown less and less, till it
vanished into nothing. But now, since his marriage, when he had begun
to confine himself more and more to living for himself, though he
experienced no delight at all at the thought of the work he was doing,
he felt a complete conviction of its necessity, saw that it succeeded
far better than in old days, and that it kept on growing more and more.
Now, involuntarily it seemed, he cut more and more deeply into the soil
like a plough, so that he could not be drawn out without turning aside
the furrow.
To live the same family life as his father and forefathers—that is, in
the same condition of culture—and to bring up his children in the same,
was incontestably necessary. It was as necessary as dining when one was
hungry. And to do this, just as it was necessary to cook dinner, it was
necessary to keep the mechanism of agriculture at Pokrovskoe going so
as to yield an income. Just as incontestably as it was necessary to
repay a debt was it necessary to keep the property in such a condition