Created at: 2025-04-08
Absolutely brilliant! I should've read this Russian classic much earlier.
The book is long, about ~1,000 pages, but it has been a very satisfying read and it didn't feel like a chore at any point.
This is my first Tolstoy, I will certainly be reading more.
Serving for the third year as head of one of the Moscow offices, Stepan
Arkadyich had acquired the respect as well as the affection of his
colleagues, subordinates, superiors, and all who had dealings with him. The
main qualities that had earned him this universal respect in the service
were, first, an extreme indulgence towards people, based on his awareness of
his own shortcomings; second, a perfect liberalism, not the sort he read
about in the newspapers, but the sort he had in his blood, which made him
treat all people, whatever their rank or status, in a perfectly equal and
identical way; and, third – most important – a perfect indifference to the
business he was occupied with, owing to which he never got carried away and
never made mistakes.
though he was now thirty-two, he did not have any regular, defined activity
or position in society, whereas among his comrades one was already a colonel
and imperial aide-de-camp, one a professor, one the director of a bank and a
railway or the chief of an office like Oblonsky, while he (he knew very well
what he must seem like to others) was a landowner, occupied with breeding
cows, shooting snipe, and building things, that is, a giftless fellow who
amounted to nothing and was doing, in society’s view, the very thing that
good-for-nothing people do.
‘I don’t suppose one can possibly excuse such a man, though he is your
brother,’ Alexei Alexandrovich said sternly. Anna smiled. She understood that
he had said it precisely to show that considerations of kinship could not
keep him from expressing his sincere opinion. She knew this feature in her
husband and liked it.
Now he experienced a feeling similar to what a man would feel who was calmly
walking across a bridge over an abyss and suddenly saw that the bridge had
been taken down and below him was the bottomless deep.
You find it mean that I count the trees in the forest, while you give away
thirty thousand to Ryabinin; but you’ll have rent coming in and I don’t know
what else, while I won’t, and so I value what I’ve inherited and worked for…
We’re the aristocrats, and not someone who can only exist on hand-outs from
the mighty of this world and can be bought for twenty kopecks.’
‘You should get your hair cut, it’s too heavy, especially on the bald spot.’
He’s not a man, he’s a machine, and a wicked machine when he gets angry,’ she
added, recalling Alexei Alexandrovich in all the details of his figure,
manner of speaking and character, holding him guilty for everything bad she
could find in him and forgiving him nothing, on account of the terrible fault
for which she stood guilty before him.
Kitty fell silent, not because she had nothing to say, but because she did
not want to disclose her secret thoughts even to her father.
Konstantin Levin did not like talking or hearing about the beauty of nature.
For him words took away the beauty of what he saw.
What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us?
Hard as Stepan Arkadyich tried to be a solicitous father and husband, he
never could remember that he had a wife and children. He had a bachelor’s
tastes, and they alone guided him.
Inside the coach an old lady dozed in the corner and a young girl, apparently
just awakened, sat by the window, holding the ribbons of her white bonnet
with both hands. Bright and thoughtful, all filled with a graceful and
complex inner life to which Levin was a stranger, she looked through him at
the glowing sunrise. At the very instant when this vision was about to
vanish, the truthful eyes looked at him. She recognized him, and astonished
joy lit up her face. He could not have been mistaken. There were no other
eyes in the world like those. There was no other being in the world capable
of concentrating for him all the light and meaning of life. It was she. It
was Kitty. He realized that she was driving to Yergushovo from the railway
station. And all that had troubled Levin during that sleepless night, all the
decisions he had taken, all of it suddenly vanished.
Levin went on talking with the landowner, trying to prove to him that all the
difficulty came from our not knowing the properties and habits of our worker;
but the landowner, like all people who think originally and solitarily, was
slow to understand another man’s thought and especially partial to his own.
He
Another difficulty lay in the peasants’ invincible mistrust of any other
purpose on the landowner’s part than the desire to fleece them as much as
possible. They were firmly convinced that his true goal, whatever he might
tell them, would always lie in what he did not tell them. And they
themselves, when they spoke, said many things, but never said what their true
goal was.
In a moment he had kneaded this social dough so well that the drawing room
was in fine form and ringing with voices.
Levin had often noticed in arguments between the most intelligent people that
after enormous efforts, an enormous number of logical subtleties and words,
the arguers would finally come to the awareness that what they had spent so
long struggling to prove to each other had been known to them long, long
before, from the beginning of the argument, but that they loved different
things and therefore did not want to name what they loved, so as not to be
challenged. He had often felt that sometimes during an argument you would
understand what your opponent loves, and suddenly come to love the same thing
yourself, and agree all at once, and then all reasonings would fall away as
superfluous; and sometimes it was the other way round: you would finally say
what you yourself love, for the sake of which you are inventing your
reasonings, and if you happened to say it well and sincerely, the opponent
would suddenly agree and stop arguing. That was the very thing he wanted to
say.
Who hast brought into unity those who were sundered, and hast ordained for
them an indissoluble bond of love” – how profound these words are, and how
well they correspond to what one feels at this moment!’ thought Levin. ‘Does
she feel the same as I do?’
In fact, those who understood it, to Vronsky’s mind, ‘in the right way’, did
not understand it in any way, but behaved generally as well-bred people do
with regard to all the complicated and insoluble questions that surround life
on all sides – decently, avoiding hints and unpleasant questions. They
pretended to understand fully the significance and meaning of the situation,
to acknowledge and even approve of it, but considered it inappropriate and
unnecessary to explain it all.
painting. He knew it was impossible to forbid Vronsky to toy with painting;
he knew that he and all the dilettantes had every right to paint whatever
they liked, but he found it unpleasant. It was impossible to forbid a man to
make a big wax doll and kiss it. But if this man with the doll came and sat
in front of a man in love and began to caress his doll the way the man in
love caressed his beloved, the man in love would find it unpleasant.
In the first moment he felt like a man who, having suddenly received a
violent blow from behind, turns with vexation and a desire for revenge to
find out who did it, and realizes that he has accidentally struck himself,
that there is no one to be angry with and he must endure and ease the pain.
all this tension, while producing no results, gave Levin a painful feeling
similar to that vexing impotence one experiences in dreams when one tries to
use physical force.
‘Lord, have mercy, forgive us, help us!’ he repeated words that somehow
suddenly came to his lips. And he, an unbeliever, repeated these words not
just with his lips. Now, in that moment, he knew that neither all his doubts,
nor the impossibility he knew in himself of believing by means of reason,
hindered him in the least from addressing God. It all blew off his soul like
dust. To whom was he to turn if not to Him in whose hands he felt himself,
his soul and his love to be?
Levin remembered being sent somewhere. Once he was sent to move a table and a
sofa. He did it zealously, thinking it was for her (his pregnant wife), and
only later learned that he had prepared his own bed.
What he felt for this small being was not at all what he had expected. There
was nothing happy or joyful in this feeling; on the contrary, there was a new
tormenting fear. There was an awareness of a new region of vulnerability. And
this awareness was so tormenting at first, the fear lest this helpless being
should suffer was so strong, that because of it he scarcely noticed the
strange feeling of senseless joy and even pride he had experienced when the
baby sneezed.
‘In infinite time, in the infinity of matter, in infinite space, a
bubble-organism separates itself, and that bubble holds out for a while and
then bursts, and that bubble is – me.’
Reasoning led him into doubt and kept him from seeing what he should and
should not do. 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.
Understanding clearly then for the first time that for every man and for
himself nothing lay ahead but suffering, death and eternal oblivion, he
decided that it was impossible to live that way, that he had either to
explain his life so that it did not look like the wicked mockery of some
devil, or shoot himself.
‘And don’t all philosophical theories do the same thing, leading man by a way
of thought that is strange and unnatural to him to the knowledge of what he
has long known and known so certainly that without it he would not even be
able to live? Is it not seen clearly in the development of each philosopher’s
theory that he knows beforehand, as unquestionably as the muzhik Fyodor and
no whit more clearly than he, the chief meaning of life, and only wants to
return by a dubious mental path to what everybody knows?
‘It’s the newspapers that all say the same thing,’ said the prince. ‘That’s
true. And it’s so much the same that it’s like frogs before a thunderstorm.
You can’t hear anything on account of them.’
‘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!’