Anna Karenina

‘Is it possible that I’ve found the solution to everything, is it possible that my sufferings are now over?’ thought Levin, striding along the dusty road, noticing neither heat nor fatigue, and experiencing a feeling of relief after long suffering. This feeling was so joyful that it seemed incredible to him. He was breathless with excitement and, unable to walk any further, went off the road into the woods and sat down on the unmowed grass in the shade of the aspens. He took the hat from his sweaty head and lay down, propping himself on his elbow in the succulent, broad-bladed forest grass.

‘Yes, I must collect myself and think it over,’ he thought, looking intently at the untrampled grass before him and following the movements of a little green bug that was climbing a stalk of couch-grass and was blocked in its ascent by a leaf of angelica. ‘From the very beginning,’ he said to himself, holding back the leaf of angelica so that it no longer hindered the bug and bending down some other plant so that the bug could get over on to it. ‘What makes me so glad? What have I discovered?

‘I used to say that in my body, in the body of this plant and of this bug (it didn’t want to go over to that plant, it spread its wings and flew away), an exchange of matter takes place according to physical, chemical and physiological laws. And that in all of us, along with the aspens, and the clouds, and the nebulae, development goes on. Development out of what? Into what? An infinite development and struggle? ... As if there can be any direction or struggle in infinity! And I was astonished that in spite of the greatest efforts of my thinking along that line, the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses and yearnings, was still not revealed to me. Yet the meaning of my impulses is so clear to me that I constantly live by it, and was amazed and glad when a muzhik voiced it for me: to live for God, for the soul.

‘I haven’t discovered anything. I’ve only found out what I know. I’ve understood that power which not only gave me life in the past but is giving me life now. I am freed from deception, I have found the master.’

And he briefly repeated to himself the whole train of his thought during those last two years, the beginning of which was the clear, obvious thought of death at the sight of his beloved, hopelessly ill brother.

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.

But he had done neither the one nor the other, and had gone on living, thinking and feeling, and had even married at that same time and experienced much joy, and was happy whenever he did not think about the meaning of his life.

What did it mean? It meant that his life was good, but his thinking was bad.

He lived (without being aware of it) by those spiritual truths that he had drunk in with his mother’s milk, yet he thought not only without admitting those truths but carefully avoiding them.

Now it was clear to him that he was able to live only thanks to the beliefs in which he had been brought up.

‘What would I be and how would I live my life, if I did not have those beliefs, did not know that one should live for God and not for one’s needs? I would rob, lie, kill. Nothing of what constitutes the main joys of my life would exist for me.’ And, making the greatest efforts of imagination, he was still unable to imagine the beastly being that he himself would be if he did not know what he lived for.

‘I sought an answer to my question. But the answer to my question could not come from thought, which is incommensurable with the question. The answer was given by life itself, in my knowledge of what is good and what is bad. And I did not acquire that knowledge through anything, it was given to me as it is to everyone, given because I could not take it from anywhere.

‘Where did I take it from? Was it through reason that I arrived at the necessity of loving my neighbour and not throttling him? I was told it as a child, and I joyfully believed it, because they told me what was in my soul. And who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence and the law which demands that everyone who hinders the satisfaction of my desires should be throttled. That is the conclusion of reason. Reason could not discover love for the other, because it’s unreasonable.

‘Yes, pride,’ he said to himself, rolling over on his stomach and beginning to tie stalks of grass into a knot, trying not to break them.

‘And not only the pride of reason, but the stupidity of reason. And, above all - the slyness, precisely the slyness, of reason. Precisely the swindling of reason,’ he repeated.

XIII