by Leo Tolstoy
'And, above all, there's much more fear and pity than pleasure. Today, after that fear during the thunderstorm, I realized how much I love him.' Kitty smiled radiantly.
'Were you very frightened?' she said. 'I was, too, but I'm more afraid now that it's past. I'll go and look at the oak. And how nice Katavasov is! And generally the whole day was so pleasant. And you're so good with Sergei Ivanovich when you want to be ... Well, go to them. It's always so hot and steamy here after the bath ...'
XIX
Leaving the nursery and finding himself alone, Levin at once remembered that thought in which there was something unclear.
Instead of going to the drawing room, where voices could be heard, he stopped on the terrace and, leaning on the rail, began looking at the sky.
It was already quite dark, and in the south, where he was looking, there were no clouds. The clouds stood on the opposite side. From there came flashes of lightning and the roll of distant thunder. Levin listened to the drops monotonously dripping from the lindens in the garden and looked at the familiar triangle of stars and the branching Milky Way passing through it. At each flash of lightning not only the Milky Way but the bright stars also disappeared, but as soon as the lightning died out they reappeared in the same places, as if thrown by some unerring hand.
'Well, what is it that disturbs me?' Levin said to himself, feeling beforehand that the resolution of his doubts, though he did not know it yet, was already prepared in his soul.
'Yes, the one obvious, unquestionable manifestation of the Deity is the laws of the good disclosed to the world by revelation, which I feel in myself, and by acknowledging which I do not so much unite myself as I am united, whether I will or no, with others in one community of believers which is called the Church. Well, but the Jews, the Mohammedans, the Confucians, the Buddhists -what are they?' He asked himself the same question that had seemed dangerous to him. 'Can these hundreds of millions of people be deprived of the highest good, without which life has no meaning?' He pondered, but at once corrected himself. 'What am I asking?' he said to himself. 'I'm asking about the relation to the Deity of all the various faiths of mankind. I'm asking about the general manifestation of God to the whole world with all these nebulae. What am I doing? To me personally, to my heart, unquestionable knowledge is revealed, inconceivable to reason, and I stubbornly want to express this knowledge by means of reason and words.
'Don't I know that the stars don't move?' he asked himself, looking at a bright planet that had already changed its position over the topmost branch of a birch. 'Yet, looking at the movement of the stars, I cannot picture to myself the turning of the earth, and I'm right in saying that the stars move.
'And would the astronomers be able to understand or calculate anything, if they took into account all the various complex movements of the earth? All their astonishing conclusions about the distances, weights, movements and disturbances of the heavenly bodies are based solely on the visible movement of the luminaries around the fixed earth, on that very movement which is now before me, which has been that way for millions of people throughout the ages, and has been and will always be the same and can always be verified. And just as the conclusions of astronomers that were not based on observations of the visible sky in relation to the same meridian and the same horizon would be idle and lame, so my conclusions would be idle and lame if they were not based on that understanding of the good which always has been and will be the same for everyone, and which is revealed to me by Christianity and can always be verified in my soul. And I don't have the right or possibility of resolving the question of other beliefs and their attitude to the Deity.'
'Ah, you haven't gone?' the voice of Kitty suddenly said. She was walking the same way towards the drawing room. 'What, are you upset about something?' she said, studying his face attentively by the light of the stars.
But she would still have been unable to see his face if lightning, again hiding the stars, had not lit it up. By its light she made out his face and, seeing that he was calm and joyful, she smiled at him.
'She understands,' he thought. 'She knows what I'm thinking about. Shall I tell her or not? Yes, I'll tell her.' But just as he was about to begin speaking, she also started to speak.
'Listen, Kostya, do me a favour,' she said. 'Go to the corner room and see how they've arranged everything for Sergei Ivanovich. I'm embarrassed to. Did they put in the new washstand?'
'Very well, I'll make sure,' said Levin, getting up and kissing her.
'No, I won't tell her,' he thought, as she walked on ahead of him. 'It's a secret that's necessary and important for me alone and inexpressible in words.
'This new feeling hasn't changed me, hasn't made me happy or suddenly enlightened, as I dreamed - just like the feeling for my son. Nor was there any surprise. And faith or not faith -I don't know what it is - but this feeling has entered into me just as imperceptibly through suffering and has firmly lodged itself in my soul.
'I'll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul's holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I'll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I'll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray - but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!'
The End
Notes
The following notes are indebted to the commentaries in the twenty-two-volume edition of Tolstoy's works published by Khudozhestvennaya Literatura (Volumes VIII and IX, Moscow, 1981-2) and to Vladimir Nabokov's notes to Part One of Anna Karenina, in Lectures on Russian Literature (London and New York, 1981). Biblical quotations, unless otherwise specified, are from the King James version.
Epigraph
Romans 12:19. St Paul refers to Deuteronomy 32:35: 'To me belongeth vengeance, and recompence.'
Part One
1 Il mio tesoro: Probably the aria 'Il mio tesoro' sung by Don Ottavio in Act II, scene ii of Mozart's Don Giovanni.
2 physiology: Reflexes of the Brain, by I. M. Sechenov (1829-1905), was published in 1863. There was widespread interest at the time in materialistic physiology, even among those who knew of it only by hearsay.
3. newspaper: Stepan Arkadyich probably reads The Voice, edited by A. Kraevsky, the preferred newspaper of liberal functionaries, known as 'the barometer of public opinion', or possibly, as Nabokov suggests, the mildly liberal Russian Gazette.
4 Rurik: Chief (d. 879) of the Scandinavian rovers known as Varangians, he founded the principality of Novgorod at the invitation of the local populace, thus becoming the ancestor of the oldest Russian nobility. The dynasty of Rurik ruled from 862 to 1598; it was succeeded by the Romanovs.
5 Bentham and Mill: Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), English philosopher and jurist, founded the English utilitarian school of philosophy. John Stuart Mill (1806-73), philosopher and economist of the experimental school, was the author of the influential Principles of Political Economy, published in 1848.
6 Count Ferdinand von Beust: (1809-86), prime minister of Saxony and later chancellor of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a political opponent of Bismarck, he was frequently mentioned in the press. Wiesbaden, capital of the German province of Hesse, was famous for its hot springs. Von Beust visited Wiesbaden in February 1872 (see Nabokov's extensive note).
7 kalatch: A very fine white yeast bread shaped like a purse with a handle; pl. kalatchi.
8 zertsalo: A three-faced glass pyramid bearing an eagle and certain edicts of the emperor Peter the Great (1682-1725) which stood on the desk in every government office.
9 kammerjunker: The German title ('gentleman of the bedchamber') was adopted by the Russian imperial court.
10 zemstvo: An elective provincial council for purposes of local administration, established in Russia
in 1865 by the emperor Alexander II (1818-81).
11 his opinion: Levin expresses a widely shared opinion of the time, that zemstvo activists commonly abused their position in order to make money.
12 psychological and physiological phenomena: In 1872-3 there was a heated debate in the magazine The Messenger of Europe about the relations between psychological and physiological phenomena, one side saying there was no known connection (but possibly a 'parallelism') between the two, the other that all psychic acts are reflexes subject to physiological study. Tolstoy, like Levin, took his distance from both sides.
13 origin of man: In the early 1870s works by Charles Darwin (1809-82) were published in Russian and his theories of natural selection and the descent of man from the animals were discussed in all Russian magazines and newspapers.
14 Wurst, Knaust, Pripasov: Tolstoy invented these names for comic and parodic effect; they mean, respectively, 'sausage', 'stingy' and 'provisions'.
15 leaning on chairs: Chairs on runners were provided for beginners and occasionally for ladies to hold on to or be pushed around in.
16 Tartars: One of the 'racial minorities' of the Russian empire, they are a people originally native to Central Asia east of the Caspian Sea. Tolstoy seems to have no special intention in having them work as waiters in the Hotel Anglia (an actual hotel of the time, located on Petrovka, which enjoyed a dubious reputation as a place for aristocratic assignations).
17 shchi: Cabbage soup, and kasha, a sort of thick gruel made from various grains, most typically buckwheat groats, are the two staple foods of Russian peasants.
18 Levins are wild: In a letter to his aunt Alexandra A. Tolstoy (1817-1904), his elder by only ten years, Tolstoy spoke of the 'Tolstoyan wildness' characteristic of 'all the Tolstoys', meaning originality of behaviour and freedom from conventional rules. She in turn used to call him 'roaring Leo'.
19 'Bold steeds ...': Oblonsky quotes (imprecisely) the poem 'From Anacreon'(1835), by Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837). Later he will quote it, again imprecisely, in a conversation with Vronsky.
20 'with disgust reading over my life ...': Levin now quotes Pushkin's poem 'Remembrance' (1828), one of Tolstoy's own favourites.
21 'Himmlisch ist's ...': 'Heavenly it would be to conquer/My earthly lusts;/But though I've not succeeded,/I still have lots of pleasure' - a stanza from the libretto of Die Fledermaus, an operetta with music by Johann Strauss (1825-99).
22 lovely fallen creatures: The words are a paraphrase from a speech by Walsingham in Pushkin's 'little tragedy' The Feast During the Plague (1830).
23 words ... misused They are referring to Luke 7:47: 'Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much' - a passage often quoted out of context as a justification for loose behaviour.
24 threw all difficult questions over his right shoulder...: Refers to a character by the name of Mr John Podsnap in Charles Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend (1865).
25 two loves: The two loves discussed by the participants in Plato's Symposium are typified by two aspects of the goddess Aphrodite: earthly, sensual love (Aphrodite Pandemos) and heavenly love free of sensual desire (Aphrodite Urania). The latter came to be known as 'platonic love'.
26 some sort of courses: In 1872 a school of continuing education for women was opened in Moscow, where girls with a high-school diploma could study literature, history, art history and the history of civilization, foreign languages, physics, mathematics and hygiene.
27 table-turning and spirits: Tolstoy was very interested in the fashion of spiritualism, which reached Russia in the 1870s. His earliest criticism of it appears here in Levin's argument with Vronsky; in 1890 he wrote a satirical comedy on spiritualism entitled The Fruits of Enlightenment, performed in 1892 by the Maly Theatre in Moscow. (See Nabokov's delightful note to this same place.)
28 Corps of Pages: An elite military school connected to the imperial household, made up of one hundred and fifty boys drawn mostly from the court nobility. After four or five years in the Corps of Pages, those who passed the examination were accepted as officers in whatever regiment they chose, and the top sixteen pupils each year were attached to various members of the imperial family. Enrolment in the Corps of Pages was thus considered the start of a brilliant career in the service.
29 bezique: A card game (besique in French), introduced in the seventeenth century, that came back into fashion in the 1860s.
30 Chateau des Fleurs: The name of a Moscow restaurant and amusement spot featuring singers, dancers, cyclists, gymnasts and the like.
31 Honi soit...: 'Shamed be he who thinks evil of it' - motto of the Order of the Garter, the highest order of English knighthood, founded by Edward III c. 1344.
32 sole provider ...: Frequent and spectacular accidents in the early days caused widespread public fear of the railways, whose owners were not required to pay indemnities to victims or their families. These problems were much debated in the press of the time.
33 cast a stone: 'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her' (John 8:7).
34 public theatre: The first public theatre was opened in Moscow in 1873. Prior to that, the theatres of Moscow and Petersburg all functioned under the control of the Department of Imperial Theatres.
35 without cuffs or collar: A sign of poverty. Women's dresses had detachable cuffs and collars, which could be changed and laundered frequently. A woman would normally have a good supply of them in her wardrobe.
36 Nikolai Dmitrich: Nabokov notes that Masha addresses Nikolai Levin formally, by his first name and patronymic (and in the second person plural), as a respectful petty bourgeois wife would address her husband, while an aristocratic woman like Dolly, when she refers to her husband in the same way, deliberately chooses it as the most distant and estranged way to speak of him.
37 Sunday schools: In the early 1870s revolutionaries organized Sunday schools in the factories to give workers the rudiments of education. In 1874 strict control over these schools was introduced, and many students were expelled from the universities for participating in them.
38 rug sleigh: 'A type of rustic comfortable sleigh which looked as if it consisted of a rug on runners' (Nabokov).
39 book by Tyndall: John Tyndall (1820-93 ). British physicist; in 1872, Tolstoy read his book Heat as a Mode of Motion (1863), translated and published in Petersburg in 1864.
40 third bell... sleeping car: Three bells signalled the departure of a train in Russian stations: the first fifteen minutes before, the second five minutes before, and the third at the moment of departure. (See Nabokov's detailed note on Russian sleeping cars and first-class night travel.)
41 Petersburg face: The soft water of the Neva and the salt air of Petersburg were considered good for the complexion.
42 Pan-Slavist: The Pan-Slavists saw the future of Russia in an eastward-looking political and spiritual union of all the Slavs, rather than in a closer rapprochement with the West. This is referred to in Part Eight as 'the Eastern question'.
43 Duc de Lille: The name Tolstoy gives to the poet is a play on the name of the French poet Leconte de Lisle (1818-94), leader of the Parnassian school; the title of the book also parodies the titles of a number of French books of the time, including Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. For the fullest expression of Tolstoy's dislike of the new art of his time see his What Is Art? (1898).
44 slave-girl Rebecca genre: That is, the Semitic type of beauty, which had became fashionable in the nineteenth century as an alternative to the classical type.
Part Two
1 Great Lent: The forty-day fast period preceding Holy Week and Easter in the Orthodox liturgical calendar, called 'great' to distinguish it from several 'lesser' fasts at other times of the year.
2 famous singer: The singer, as we learn later, is Swedish soprano Christiane Nilsson (1843-1927). She had great success on the stages of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and the Mariinsky Theatre in Petersburg between 1872 and 1885.
&n
bsp; 3 Blessed are the peacemakers ...: Cf. Matthew 5:9: 'Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.'
4 young men are out driving ...: The story that follows was told to Tolstoy by his brother-in-law, Alexander Bers. Tolstoy found it 'a charming story in itself and asked permission to use it in his novel.
5 titular councillor and councilloress: Titular councillor was ninth of the fourteen ranks of the imperial civil service established by Peter the Great, equivalent to the military rank of staff-captain.
6 Talleyrand: Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord (1754-1838), French diplomat and political figure, served in a number of important capacities throughout the period of the revolution, the empire and the restoration, perhaps most brilliantly at the Congress of Vienna (1814-15).
7 unable to continue standing: There are no pews in Orthodox churches; people stand through the services, which can be very long.
8 Kaulbach: The German painter Wilhelm Kaulbach (1805-74), director of the Munich Academy of Art, was considered the last representative of idealism. Actors and opera singers of the time studied his monumental biblical and historical compositions in order to learn stage gestures and movements.
