As he progressed in life, he identified himself more and more with his own characters. After disguising himself as Nicholas Irtenyev, Nekhlyudov, Olenin and Pierre Bezukhov,* here he was again, body and soul—and with what gusto!—in Konstantin Levin. lie shamelessly attributed to him the events of his own life, fed him with his ideas, the books he read, his own blood. The relationship between Levin and Kitty—the declaration scene using the first letters of words, the wedding ceremony, including the last-minute hesitation and the incident of the forgotten shirt in the trunk, the young couple's first days in their country home, the birth of their first child—were one and all transposed from the author's past. Sonya must have been deeply moved as she copied over the passages in which the early days of her life with
• I Icrocs of Youth, A Landlord's Morning, The Cossacks and War and Peace, respectively.
Lyovochka were described with such accuracy and delicacy-. Similarly, the death of Levin's brother is an exact replica of the death of Dmitry Tolstoy. Levin's relations with his muzhiks are drawn directly from Tolstoy's experience at Yasnaya Polyana.
Levin personifies the quandary of the landowner. With his democratic turn of mind, it seems only fair to him that the peasants should have the land, "since the lord does nothing and his muzhiks work- thereby eliminating one unproductive element from the soil." But the aristocrat in him will not die and it hurts him to sec the great estates breaking up, the nobility fleeing to Nice and abandoning priceless fields and forests behind them in the heart of Russia for a mere pittance, and crafty stewards speculating at both their employers' and the farmers' expense, as, "inexorably, on all sides, the impoverishment of the nobility pursued its course." He seeks to reconcile the interests of both parties, for he has "the love of the muzhik in his blood." "The entire agricultural system must be reorganized, and the living conditions of the people changed in every respect," he thinks. "In place of poverty, prosperity for all; in place of mutual animosity, understanding in the interest of all. In a word, a revolution, bloodless but on a grand scale, beginning in the little circle of our district and widening to include our government, then Russia, then the whole world."
However, it is a far cry from theory to practice. When more and more flesh and blood beings lean with all their weight against the current of ideas, the stream is finally blocked; piled on top of each other, one hundred exceptions ultimately disprove a rule. In spite of his enormous effort, Levin fails to give his peasants a share in their master's profits.
In addition to his problems as a landowner, there arc his metaphysical doubts. In the early days of his marriage he thinks he has gone beyond the reach of sorrow and fear. But love is a frail bulwark against the specter of death. After witnessing his brother's death agony, Levin becomes obsessed by his own ignorance of the most urgent problem of all, the end of life on earth. The birth of his child renews his fascination with the unfathomable mystery. It seems to him that, by living like other people, he is neglecting the essential for the trivial. "Like a man who trades a warm fur coat for a muslin shirt in midwinter," Tolstoy wrote, "Levin felt naked, not in his mind but in his whole being, and condemned to perish miserably." He read the Bible and the philosophers and hovered between doubt and prayer, and added to his distress by attempting to explain it. While everyone else sees him as a strong, wcll-balanced man and a happy father, he turns away at the sight of a piece of rope and leaves his gun behind when he goes walking, for fear
of yielding to the temptation of suicide, 'l'o escape from such depressing meditations, there is only one remedy: manual labor, and he hurls himself into it. Fatigue prevents him from thinking. "Now, against his will, he sank deeper and deeper into the ground like a plowshare, until he could not pull himself out without first plowing his furrow," Tolstoy went on. From associating with the peasants, Levin gradually absorbs their wisdom. One of them say's to him, "Some people live only for their bellies, and others live for God and their soul." These simple words strike the young lord at his sorest point, and all his doubts are dispelled. What no philosopher or Church Father had been able to accomplish, a humble peasant docs unwittingly: he brings a lost soul back to God. To what God? Levin doesn't know: "Just as the conclusions of the astronomers would be useless and inaccurate," he thinks, "if they were not reached through observation of the visible sky in relation to a fixed meridian and a fixed horizon, so would all metaphysical deductions be absurd if I did not base them on this knowledge of the innate goodness of every human heart which Christianity has revealed to me and of which I shall always be able to find proof in my own soul." At this point, he believes he has attained the inner peace he has so long aspired to, but the ambiguity of his religious feelings is a warning of fresh storms ahead.
During the four years (1873-77) it took him to write Anrw Karenina, Tolstoy debated every one of the questions that were bothering him in his book. On the slightest pretext the novelist hands over the pen to the essayist, and the action halts to let the author express his views on rural husbandry, the meaning of life, the education of children or the relations between psychology and physiology. In the world of Levin and Anna, as in Tolstoy's own world, conversation ccnters on Gustavc Dora's illustrations of the Bible, the novels of Daudet and Zola, the physicist Tindall's theories on radiant heat, the teachings of Spencer and Schopenhauer, tassalle's scheme for workers' unions. Anna dips into Taine's Ancien Regime, her husband reads an article by Br6al in the Revue des Deux Mondes, there is a debate at Princess Betsy's on compulsory military service. . . . Tolstoy might be said to have used the novel as an outlet for his own intellectual preoccupations. In fact, he said as much himself twelve years later, in a letter to Rusanov: "Sometimes I still have a desire to write, and, do you know, what I would like to write is a big, loose novel like Anna Karenina, one in which I might easily find room for all the tilings I have understood in an original way and that might be useful to others."
Unlike War and Peace, however, where the author intercedes directly to present his view of some point of history, strategy or politics, in
Anna Karenina, he hides behind his characters and attributes to them the opinions he holds himself. For the sake of impartiality, he even invents contradictions for them. One day, telling a friend of the difficulties he was encountering in his work, lie said he had rewritten the conversation between Levin and the priest (Part V, Chapter I) four times, so that it would be impossible to tell which of the two he favored. "I have found," he said, "that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on."1 He also became increasingly aware of the interdependence of the parts of the book. In a mass of such dimensions everything hung together, the glitter and the tarnish were equally essential. As to the progression of the sccnes, he believed it was the result of some mysterious process over which the author had no control. "I had proof of tin's," lie wrote to Strakhov, "with Vronsky's suicide. I had never clearly felt the necessity for it. I had begun to revise my rough draft and suddenly, by some means that was totally unexpected but ineluctable, Vronsky determined to put a bullet through his head, and it later became dear that that scene was organically indispensable."2 To his close friends he also said, "Do you know, I often sit down to write some specific thing, and suddenly I find myself on a wider road, the work begins to spread out in front of me. That was the way it was with Anna Karenina."3