Entry 6:

Dear Tony,

Accompanying as it does the intellectual Katavasov's scornful answer to the question of what the soul is ("'By God, I haven't the slightest idea!' Katavasov said with a loud laugh."), Levin's revelation is indeed a moving one--a relief to the reader, even.

Did you notice that the incommunicability you mention in Levin's religious awakening has its parallel in Kitty's? The reason she is "pure" to Tolstoy's satisfaction upon her marriage to Levin is that her prior infatuation with Vronsky occurred while she was a child and not a moral free agent. It is her blossoming into Christianity at the German spa--not her Vronsky crush--that is her first adult experience, and the proof is that she won't tell her parents, whom she usually tells everything. ("Kitty kept her new views and feelings hidden from her mother. She kept them hidden, not because she did not respect or love her mother, but because she was her mother." And later: "She did not want to disclose her secret thoughts even to her father ... to let him into her sanctuary.")

Levin's alienation from his own happiness, as you put it, is his salvation. Tolstoy distrusts what we call happiness. Modern happiness, he thinks (correctly), is in fact just sensualism renamed. It's Vronsky--of all people--who sees this most clearly. When Karenin frees Anna to gad about Europe with her lover, Vronsky "was not fully happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires." If one were required to extract a sentence to stand for the whole book, this would be it.

Hate to interrupt this argument, but I say Vronsky "of all people" because Vronsky never quite gets it--he doesn't, as I mentioned yesterday, understand Anna the way Levin does. He's a devoted lover, but there's always something hollow and merely comme il faut about him. Maybe it's going too far to say he's the Ken who would turn Anna into a Barbie, but he's smug, a bit of a cad. (There's a beautiful description of this caddishness when Anna, in despair, calls him home from the noblemen's elections in Zashin: "'Well, I'm very glad,' he said, coldly looking at her, her hair, the dress he knew she had put on for him. He liked it all, but he had already liked it so many times!") His politics are just as revealing. He is the kind of self-aggrandizing progressive (we would call him a "limousine liberal") Tolstoy deplores. The charitable hospital he builds with such vaunting false modesty ("I just got carried away") is a folly and, worse, built on the proceeds of his bilking his peasants out of a fair price for their grain. Sviyazhsky faults him for not building a school--i.e., something to improve the mind or soul rather than the body--but such things don't interest him. That's why his suicide sits uneasily in the book. Vronsky fails at it, and he's not the kind of guy who fails at much he sets his mind to. And here I think too much reading of Tolstoy could really lead one round the bend, for Tolstoy considers this a spiritually ambitious thing to do, the ultimate bid for the spiritual high ground.

It's not just that happiness is to be distrusted. It's that suffering is to be sought. You're right about the "mortal honesty that expresses itself in [Anna's] case as passion, in [Levin's] as doubt." (Our word passion, of course, being derived from patere, "to suffer.") This book is a seductive summons to masochism, culminating in Levin's ecstatic revelation that "this feeling has entered me ... imperceptibly through suffering." Anna is a social masochist. A big part of her wants to be ruined. (Think of her scandalous visit to the opera.) Anna is in a Levin-esque quest for truth but has chosen the wrong means. Her mistake is a costly one, but it's not without an admirable side. Her tragedy is that, as Tolstoy notes when Karenin provisionally gives her her freedom, "However sincerely Anna wanted to suffer, she did not suffer."

Levin, too, is drawn to suicide. "It was necessary to stop this dependence on evil. And there was one means--death. And, happy in his family life, a healthy man, Levin was several times so close to suicide that he hid a rope lest he hang himself with it, and was afraid to go about with a rifle lest he shoot himself." His revelation follows a period in which he keeps asking, "What am I? And where am I? And why am I here?" just as Anna's final question, moments before she is crushed under the goods train is, "Where am I? What am I doing? Why?" What's haunting is that, as soon as she asks this question, she has the same revelation as Levin. It's just that it lasts only for the final second of her life, before she has her final thought, which is: This is a mistake!

Only those who rely on their God-given tools can feel this revelation. Anna, that is, has all her life been stuck in her own ratiocinative gearwork, and only as she enters eternity does she see things as God does. God must be sought outside "the slyness of reason ... the swindling of reason." Rationality works fine for railroads, but applying it to human conduct is a form of madness, most evident in the bureaucrat Karenin, whom Anna calls a "machine." A scene that displays the Tolstoyan humor you like so much is the one where Karenin's arch-rival, Stremov, gets the appointment he himself has been seeking:

Alexei Alexandrovich threw down the dispatch and, turning red, got up and began to pace the room. 'Quos vult perdere dementat [Those whom God would destroy he first makes mad],' he said, meaning by quos those persons who had furthered this appointment.

Rationalism on a human level means happiness-seeking, but all attempts to control others--let alone to rationally alter human nature--provoke the very affective catastrophes they're meant to thwart, particularly in the matter of sex. Karenin drives Anna away by being too forgiving. Levin turns his wife into a flirt by being too jealous; Anna provokes in Vronsky a previously unfelt need for freedom by trying to lure him into a more constrictive intimacy.

You know, I worry that our world is twice as distant from Tolstoy's belief system than it was when I first read Tolstoy in the 1980s. Levin's action-based, ritual-based faith is more or less independent of scripture (as Tolstoy's was), but if you substitute thou shalts for he coulds, you are back in the world of Deuteronomy or Numbers:

He could sell the muzhiks straw when there was a shortage ... but the inn and the pot-house, even though they brought income, had to be eliminated. For felling timber he had to punish them as severely as possible, but he could not fine them for cattle that strayed into his pastures ...

Tolstoy, writing just 125 years ago, is much closer to the Old Testament than he is to us. I didn't think this when I first read him. A most blues-inducing realization on closing this novel is that Tolstoy chose to defend belief in God in what he felt to be belief's most unassailable redoubt: man's natural goodness, which cannot be understood except in a divine way; man's natural gravitation toward a moral code, which cannot be explained rationally:

Yet when he did not think, but lived, he constantly felt in his soul the presence of an infallible judge who decided which of two possible actions was better and which was worse; and whenever he did not act as he should, he felt it at once.

Today, bookstores are full of titles by journalists, ethicists, and scientists--Robert Wright, James Q. Wilson, E.O. Wilson--seeking to show through Darwinism and sociobiology that our hitherto inexplicable altruism, in fact, "makes sense," and thus to blow that Mighty Fortress to smithereens.

Sorry to ramble on. You sure do know how to read a novel, Tony, and it always opens my eyes when I get to read one with you.

Best,
Chris