Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
(Анна Каренина)
Ref: Leo Tolstoy (1878). Anna Karenina.
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Summary
Publication began in 1875.
Its moral is the opposition of duty to passion (‘Love is the Death of Duty’)
A man’s passionate pursuits can have long term psychological impacts on others.
Our dreams achieved tend to be fleeting.
Love what you have right now in front of you.
Religion, God, Divinity, is nothing more than the law of right and wrong.
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Characters
Anna Arkadyevna Karenina (Анна Аркадьевна Каренина): Stepan Oblonsky's sister, Karenin's wife and Vronsky's lover.
Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky: Anna's lover, calvary officer.
Prince Stepan "Stiva" Arkadyevitch Oblonsky: Civil servant and Anna's 34yo brother.
Princess Darya "Dolly" Alexandrovna Oblonskaya: Stepan's 33yo wife.
Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin: Senior statesman and Anna's husband, twenty years her senior.
Konstantin "Kostya" Dmitrievich Levin/Lyovin: Kitty's suitor, Stiva's old friend, landowner, 32 years of age.
Nikolai Dmitrievich Levin/Lyovin: Konstantin's elder brother, impoverished alcoholic.
Sergei (Sergey) Ivanovich Koznyshev: Konstantin's half-brother, celebrated 40yo writer.
Princess Ekaterina "Kitty" Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya: Dolly’s younger sister and later Levin's wife, 18 years of age.
Prince Alexander Shcherbatsky: Dolly and Kitty's father.
Princess Shcherbatsky: Dolly and Kitty's mother.
Princess Elizaveta "Betsy" Tverskaya: Anna's wealthy, morally loose society friend and Vronsky's cousin.
Countess Lidia (Lydia) Ivanovna: Leader of a high society circle that includes Karenin, and shuns Princess Betsy and her circle. She maintains an interest in Russian Orthodoxy, mysticism and spirituality.
Countess Vronskaya: Vronsky's mother.
Sergei "Seryozha" Alexeyich Karenin: Anna and Karenin's 8yo son.
Anna "Annie": Anna and Vronsky's daughter.
Agafya Mikhailovna: Levin's former nurse, now his trusted housekeeper.
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---Part 1---
Stiva Cheats, Kitty turns down Levin (hoping for a proposal from Vronsky), Vronsky falls in love with Anna. Levin, crushed, returns home.
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Stiva Cheats
After cheating, all he repented of was that he had not succeeded better in hiding it from his wife.
“This has not been an infidelity of the heart .”-Stiva.
The first onslaught of jealousy, once lived through, could never come back again, and even the discovery of infidelities could never now affect her as it had the first time. Such a discovery now would only mean breaking up family habits, and she let herself be deceived, despising him and still more herself, for the weakness (Dolly).
Family life certainly afforded Stepan Arkadyevitch little gratification, and forced him into lying and hypocrisy, which was so repulsive to his nature.
“To go, or not to go!” he said to himself; and an inner voice told him he must not go, that nothing could come of it but falsity; that to amend, to set right their relations was impossible, because it was impossible to make her attractive again and able to inspire love, or to make him an old man, not susceptible to love. Except deceit and lying nothing could come of it now; and deceit and lying were opposed to his nature.
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Levin Proposes to Kitty
He did not know that his mode of behavior in relation to Kitty had a definite character, that it is courting young girls with no intention of marriage, and that such courting is one of the evil actions common among brilliant young men such as he was (Vronsky).
For Levin, she (Kitty) was as easy to find in that crowd as a rose among nettles (Levin).
“There’s nothing awful in it for a girl. Every girl’s proud of an offer.”-Kitty.
“I see a man who has serious intentions, that’s Levin: and I see a peacock, like this feather-head, who’s only amusing himself (Vronsky).”-Prince Shcherbatskaya.
She knew how easy it is, with the freedom of manners of today, to turn a girl’s head, and how lightly men generally regard such a crime (Princess Shcherbatskaya).
He (he knew very well how he must appear to others) was a country gentleman, occupied in breeding cattle, shooting game, and building barns; in other words, a fellow of no ability, who had not turned out well, and who was doing just what, according to the ideas of the world, is done by people fit for nothing else (Levin).
He began to see what had happened to him in quite a different light. He felt himself, and did not want to be any one else. All he wanted now was to be better than before. In the first place he resolved that from that day he would give up hoping for any extraordinary happiness, such as marriage must have given him, and consequently he would not so disdain what he really had. Secondly, he would never again let himself give way to low passion, the memory of which had so tortured him when he had been making up his mind to make an offer (Levin).
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Vronsky Falls for Anna
Kitty looked into his (Vronsky’s) face, which was so close to her own, and long afterwards—for several years after—that look, full of love, to which he made no response, cut her to the heart with an agony of shame.
The worldly relations of girls with men, which so revolted Kitty, and appeared to her now as a shameful hawking about of goods in search of a purchaser.
Marriage had never presented itself to him as a possibility. He not only disliked family life, but a family, and especially a husband was, in accordance with the views general in the bachelor world in which he lived, conceived as something alien, repellant, and, above all, ridiculous (Vronsky).
“What am I coming for?” he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. “You know that I have come to be where you are,” he said; “I can’t help it.”-Vronsky.
He felt that all his forces, hitherto dissipated, wasted, were centered on one thing, and bent with fearful energy on one blissful goal. And he was happy at it. He knew only that he had told her the truth, that he had come where she was, that all the happiness of his life, the only meaning in life for him, now lay in seeing and hearing her (Vronsky).
Vronsky’s composure and self-confidence here struck, like a scythe against a stone (Vronsky).
“Friends we shall never be, you know that yourself. Whether we shall be the happiest or the wretchedest of people—that’s in your hands.”-Vronsky.
“And so,” Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself, “questions as to her feelings, and so on, are questions for her conscience, with which I can have nothing to do. My duty is clearly defined. As the head of the family, I am a person bound in duty to guide her, and consequently, in part the person responsible; I am bound to point out the danger I perceive, to warn her, even to use my authority. I ought to speak plainly to her.”-Alexey.
This child’s (Sergei) presence called up both in Vronsky and in Anna a feeling akin to the feeling of a sailor who sees by the compass that the direction in which he is swiftly moving is far from the right one, but that to arrest his motion is not in his power, that every instant is carrying him further and further away, and that to admit to himself his deviation from the right direction is the same as admitting his certain ruin. This child, with his innocent outlook upon life, was the compass that showed them the point to which they had departed from what they knew, but did not want to know.
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---Part 2---
Kitty’s health deteriorates, Stiva visits Levin at his farm, Anna succumbs to Vronsky’s advances; they tell Alexey, Vronsky falls off his horse, Kitty goes to a spa in Germany.
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Anna & Vronsky tell Alexey
“We absolutely must tell him, and then be guided by the line he takes.”-Vronsky.
“I unhappy?” she said, coming closer to him, and looking at him with an ecstatic smile of love. “I am like a hungry man who has been given food. He may be cold, and dressed in rags, and ashamed, but he is not unhappy. I unhappy? No, this is my unhappiness....”.-Anna.
“I’m a wicked woman, a lost woman,” she thought; “but I don’t like lying, I can’t endure falsehood, while as for him (her husband) it’s the breath of his life—falsehood. He knows all about it, he sees it all; what does he care if he can talk so calmly? If he were to kill me, if he were to kill Vronsky, I might respect him.”-Anna.
“You were not mistaken. I was, and I could not help being in despair. I hear you, but I am thinking of him. I love him, I am his mistress; I can’t bear you; I’m afraid of you, and I hate you.... You can do what you like to me.”-Anna (to Alexey).
“Very well! But I expect a strict observance of the external forms of propriety till such time”—his voice shook—“as I may take measures to secure my honor and communicate them to you.”-Alexey (to Anna).
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—Part 3—
Levin ponders Agricultural and political reform from his farm and with his brother, Alexey decides against separating from Anna, Levin sees Kitty from afar.
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Levin Ponders Reform
“Instead of a lively, healthy visitor, some outsider who would, he hoped, cheer him up in his uncertain humor, he had to see his brother, who knew him through and through, who would call forth all the thoughts nearest his heart, would force him to show himself fully. And that he was not disposed to do” (Levin on Nikolai).
Levin was glad to talk about himself, because then he could speak without hypocrisy.
He always felt the injustice of his own abundance in comparison with the poverty of the peasants, and now he determined that so as to feel quite in the right, though he had worked hard and lived by no means luxuriously before, he would now work still harder, and would allow himself even less luxury. And all this seemed to him so easy a conquest over himself that he spent the whole drive in the pleasantest daydreams. With a resolute feeling of hope in a new, better life (Levin).
In spite of his solitude, or in consequence of his solitude, his life was exceedingly full (Levin).
The better he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergey Ivanovitch, and many other people who worked for the public welfare, were not led by an impulse of the heart to care for the public good, but reasoned from intellectual considerations that it was a right thing to take interest in public affairs, and consequently took interest in them.
“You know that capital oppresses the laborer. The laborers with us, the peasants, bear all the burden of labor, and are so placed that however much they work they can’t escape from their position of beasts of burden. All the profits of labor, on which they might improve their position, and gain leisure for themselves, and after that education, all the surplus values are taken from them by the capitalists. And society’s so constituted that the harder they work, the greater the profit of the merchants and landowners, while they stay beasts of burden to the end.”-Nikolai.
“All profit that is out of proportion to the labor expended is dishonest. But who is to define what is proportionate?”-Nikolai.
“One must do one of two things: either admit that the existing order of society is just, and then stick up for one’s rights in it; or acknowledge that you are enjoying unjust privileges, as I do, and then enjoy them and be satisfied.”-Nikolai.
“I imagine,” he said, “that no sort of activity is likely to be lasting if it is not founded on self-interest, that’s a universal principle, a philosophical principle,” he said, repeating the word “philosophical” with determination, as though wishing to show that he had as much right as any one else to talk of philosophy.-Levin.
“The chief problem of the philosophy of all ages consists just in finding the indispensable connection which exists between individual and social interests.”
His favorite means for regaining his temper,—he took a scythe from a peasant and began mowing…In the midst of his toil there were moments during which he forgot what he was doing, and it came all easy to him, and at those same moments his row was almost as smooth and well cut as Tit’s. But so soon as he recollected what he was doing, and began trying to do better, he was at once conscious of all the difficulty of his task, and the row was badly mown (Levin).
“How beautiful!” he thought, looking at the strange, as it were, mother-of-pearl shell of white fleecy cloudlets resting right over his head in the middle of the sky. “How exquisite it all is in this exquisite night! And when was there time for that cloud-shell to form? Just now I looked at the sky, and there was nothing in it—only two white streaks. Yes, and so imperceptibly too my views of life changed!”-Levin.
That keen, intellectual mood which with him always accompanied violent physical exertion (Levin).
“Do you know, you remind me of the story of the advice given to the sick man—You should try purgative medicine. Taken: worse. Try leeches. Tried them: worse. Well, then, there’s nothing left but to pray to God. Tried it: worse. That’s just how it is with us. I say political economy; you say—worse. I say socialism: worse. Education: worse.”
The proposal made by Levin—to take a part as shareholder with his laborers in each agricultural undertaking.
Political economy told him that the laws by which the wealth of Europe had been developed, and was developing, were universal and unvarying. Socialism told him that development along these lines leads to ruin. And neither of them gave an answer, or even a hint, in reply to the question what he, Levin, and all the Russian peasants and landowners, were to do with their millions of hands and millions of acres, to make them as productive as possible for the common weal (Levin).
A new science of the relation of the people to the soil.
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—Part 4—
Karenin looks to divorce until Anna almost dies (in labor). Karenin forgives Vronsky. Anna and Vronsky depart for Italy. Stiva arranges for Levin and Kitty to get together at a dinner- they rekindle.
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Anna & Alexey
“Base! If you care to use that word, what is base is to forsake husband and child for a lover, while you eat your husband’s bread!”-Alexey (to Anna).
The happiness of forgiveness has revealed to me my duty. I forgive completely. I would offer the other cheek, I would give my cloak if my coat be taken. I pray to God only not to take from me the bliss of forgiveness!” Tears stood in his eyes, and the luminous, serene look in them impressed Vronsky. “This is my position: you can trample me in the mud, make me the laughing-stock of the world, I will not abandon her, and I will never utter a word of reproach to you,” Alexey Alexandrovitch went on. “My duty is clearly marked for me; I ought to be with her, and I will be. If she wishes to see you, I will let you know, but now I suppose it would be better for you to go away.”-Alexey (to Vronsky).
“I have heard it said that women love men even for their vices, but I hate him for his virtues.”-Anna (on Alexey).
There was bitterness, there was shame in his heart, but with bitterness and shame he felt joy and emotion at the height of his own meekness.
For Alexey Alexandrovitch…it was such a necessity for him in his humiliation to have some elevated standpoint, however imaginary, from which, looked down upon by all, he could look down on others, that he clung, as to his one salvation, to his delusion of salvation.
The question of divorce for her in her position is a question of life and death. If you had not promised it once, she would have reconciled herself to her position, she would have gone on living in the country. But you promised it, and she wrote to you, and moved to Moscow. And here she’s been for six months in Moscow, where every chance meeting cuts her to the heart, every day expecting an answer. Why, it’s like keeping a condemned criminal for six months with the rope round his neck, promising him perhaps death, perhaps mercy (Anna on her Divorce).
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Anna & Vronsky
“Our love, if it could be stronger, will be strengthened by there being something terrible in it.”
He soon felt that the realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand out of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the mistake men make in picturing to themselves happiness as the realization of their desires. For a time after joining his life to hers, and putting on civilian dress, he had felt all the delight of freedom in general of which he had known nothing before, and of freedom in his love,—and he was content, but not for long. He was soon aware that there was springing up in his heart a desire for desires—ennui. Without conscious intention he began to clutch at every passing caprice, taking it for a desire and an object (Vronsky).
Just as the hungry stomach eagerly accepts every object it can get, hoping to find nourishment in it, Vronsky quite unconsciously clutched first at politics, then at new books, and then at pictures.
At every step he experienced what a man would experience who, after admiring the smooth, happy course of a little boat on a lake, should get himself into that little boat. He saw that it was not all sitting still, floating smoothly; that one had to think too, not for an instant to forget where one was floating; and that there was water under one, and that one must row; and that his unaccustomed hands would be sore; and that it was only to look at it that was easy; but that doing it, though very delightful, was very difficult (Vronsky).
When I come back from abroad and put on this,” he touched his epaulets, “I regret my freedom.”-Vronsky.
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—Part 5—
Levin and Kitty marry, death of Nikolai. In Italy, Vronsky finds himself bored and unsatisfied, they return to St. Petersburg where Vronsky is free in society, while Anna is not; she attends a show and is ridiculed.
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Levin & Kitty
She and Levin had a conversation of their own, yet not a conversation, but some sort of mysterious communication, which brought them every moment nearer, and stirred in both a sense of glad terror before the unknown into which they were entering.
Two things caused him anguish: his lack of purity and his lack of faith. His confession of unbelief passed unnoticed. She was religious, had never doubted the truths of religion, but his external unbelief did not affect her in the least. Through love she knew all his soul, and in his soul she saw what she wanted, and that such a state of soul should be called unbelieving was to her a matter of no account. The other confession set her weeping bitterly.
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Death of Nikolai
Kitty, on the contrary (to Levin), was more active and livelier than usual. She ordered supper to be brought, herself unpacked their things, and herself helped to make the beds, and did not even forget to sprinkle them with Persian powder. She showed that alertness, that swiftness of reflection comes out in men before a battle, in conflict, in the dangerous and decisive moments of life—those moments when a man shows once and for all his value, and that all his past has not been wasted but has been a preparation for these moments.
However many women and girls he thought of whom he knew, he could not think of a girl who united to such a degree all, positively all, the qualities he would wish to see in his wife. She had all the charm and freshness of youth, but she was not a child; and if she loved him, she loved him consciously as a woman ought to love; that was one thing. Another point: she was not only far from being worldly, but had an unmistakable distaste for worldly society, and at the same time she knew the world, and had all the ways of a woman of the best society, which were absolutely essential to Sergey Ivanovitch’s conception of the woman who was to share his life. Thirdly: she was religious, and not like a child, unconsciously religious and good, as Kitty, for example, was, but her life was founded on religious principles. Even in trifling matters, Sergey Ivanovitch found in her all that he wanted in his wife: she was poor and alone in the world, so she would not bring with her a mass of relations and their influence into her husband’s house, as he saw now in Kitty’s case. She would owe everything to her husband, which was what he had always desired too for his future family life. And this girl, who united all these qualities, loved him. He was a modest man, but he could not help seeing it. And he loved her. There was one consideration against it—his age. But he came of a long-lived family, he had not a single gray hair, no one would have taken him for forty, and he remembered Varenka’s saying that it was only in Russia that men of fifty thought themselves old, and that in France a man of fifty considers himself dans la force de l’âge, while a man of forty is un jeune homme. But what did the mere reckoning of years matter when he felt as young in heart as he had been twenty years ago?
“When I was very young, I set before myself the ideal of the woman I loved and should be happy to call my wife. I have lived through a long life, and now for the first time I have met what I sought—in you. I love you, and offer you my hand.”-Sergey.
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—Part 6—
Anna and Vronsky’s relationship declines, they move to Moscow to get away from St. Petersburg.
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Anna’s Misery
She had unconsciously the whole evening done her utmost to arouse in Levin a feeling of love—as of late she had fallen into doing with all young men—and she knew she had attained her aim, as far as was possible in one evening, with a married and conscientious man. Yet as soon as he was out of the room, she ceased to think of him (Anna).
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—Part 7—
Kitty and Levin visit Moscow. Levin visits Anna with Stiva- and likes her. Kitty is jealous. Anna starts taking morphine to sleep. Levin and Kitty have a child. Anna becomes increasingly jealous and kills herself.
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Anna’s Jealous & Suicide
“I can do nothing, can begin nothing, can alter nothing; I hold myself in, I wait, inventing amusements for myself—the English family, writing, reading—but it’s all nothing but a sham, it’s all the same as morphine.”-Anna.
These fits of jealousy, which of late had been more and more frequent with her, horrified him, and however much he tried to disguise the fact, made him feel cold to her, although he knew the cause of her jealousy was her love for him. How often he had told himself that her love was happiness; and now she loved him as a woman can love when love has outweighed for her all the good things of life—and he was much further from happiness than when he had followed her from Moscow.
He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it.
He was sorry for her, and angry notwithstanding. He assured her of his love because he saw that this was the only means of soothing her, and he did not reproach her in words, but in his heart he reproached her. And the asseverations of his love, which seemed to him so vulgar that he was ashamed to utter them, she drank in eagerly, and gradually became calmer.
“He looked at me with a cold, severe expression. Of course that is something indefinable, impalpable, but it has never been so before, and that glance means a great deal,” she thought. “That glance shows the beginning of indifference.”-Anna (on Vronsky).
By now he had grown used to it. That had happened to him in this matter which is said to happen to drunkards—the first glass sticks in the throat, the second flies down like a hawk, but after the third they’re like tiny little bird (Vronsky on Anna).
In her eyes the whole of him, with all his habits, ideas, desires, with all his spiritual and physical temperament, was one thing—love for women, and that love, she felt, ought to be entirely concentrated on her alone. That love was less; consequently, as she reasoned, he must have transferred part of his love to other women or to another woman—and she was jealous. She was jealous not of any particular woman but of the decrease of his love. Not having got an object for her jealousy, she was on the lookout for it. At the slightest hint she transferred her jealousy from one object to another.
“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
All the most cruel words that a brutal man could say, he said to her in her imagination, and she could not forgive him for them, as though he had actually said them.
Death rose clearly and vividly before her mind as the sole means of bringing back love for her in his heart, of punishing him and of gaining the victory in that strife which the evil spirit in possession of her heart was waging with him (Anna pondering suicide).
How much that seemed to me then splendid and out of reach has become worthless, while what I had then has gone out of my reach forever!
For a long while now he hasn’t loved me. And where love ends, hate begins.
“I will punish him and escape from everyone and from myself.”-Anna on suicide.
“My use as a man, is that life’s worth nothing to me. And that I’ve enough bodily energy to cut my way into their ranks, and to trample on them or fall—I know that. I’m glad there’s something to give my life for, for it’s not simply useless but loathsome to me. Anyone’s welcome to it….Yes, as a weapon I may be of some use. But as a man, I’m a wreck.”-Vronsky.
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—Part 8—
Vronsky departs Russia to fight in the Orthodox Bulgarian revolt against the Turks. Levin comes to accept God.
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Levin Accepts God
“At the time he left the university he was fond of science, took an interest in humanity; now one-half of his abilities is devoted to deceiving himself, and the other to justifying the deceit.”
The physical organization, its decay, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, evolution, were the words which usurped the place of his old belief. These words and the ideas associated with them were very well for intellectual purposes. But for life they yielded nothing, and Levin felt suddenly like a man who has changed his warm fur cloak for a muslin garment, and going for the first time into the frost is immediately convinced, not by reason, but by his whole nature that he is as good as naked, and that he must infallibly perish miserably.
“If I do not accept the answers Christianity gives to the problems of my life, what answers do I accept?” And in the whole arsenal of his convictions, so far from finding any satisfactory answers, he was utterly unable to find anything at all like an answer.
One fact he had found out since these questions had engrossed his mind, was that he had been quite wrong in supposing from the recollections of the circle of his young days at college, that religion had outlived its day, and that it was now practically non-existent. All the people nearest to him who were good in their lives were believers.
Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, the philosophers who gave a non-materialistic explanation of life.
“In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble-organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.”
Whether he were acting rightly or wrongly he did not know, and far from trying to prove that he was, nowadays he avoided all thought or talk about it. Reasoning had brought him to doubt, and prevented him from seeing what he ought to do and what he ought not. When he did not think, but simply lived, he was continually aware of the presence of an infallible judge in his soul, determining which of two possible courses of action was the better and which was the worse, and as soon as he did not act rightly, he was at once aware of it.
“And I looked out for miracles, complained that I did not see a miracle which would convince me. A material miracle would have persuaded me. And here is a miracle, the sole miracle possible, continually existing, surrounding me on all sides, and I never noticed it!”
“We are all agreed about this one thing: what we must live for what is good… If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.”
Now I say that I know the meaning of my life: ‘To live for God, for my soul.’ And this meaning, in spite of its clearness, is mysterious and marvelous. Such, indeed, is the meaning of everything existing. Yes, pride. “And not merely pride of intellect, but dullness of intellect. And most of all, the deceitfulness; yes, the deceitfulness of intellect. The cheating knavishness of intellect, that’s it,” he said to himself.
“Where could I have got it? By reason could I have arrived at knowing that I must love my neighbor and not oppress him? I was told that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one’s neighbor reason could never discover, because it’s irrational.”
“Don’t all the theories of philosophy do the same, trying by the path of thought, which is strange and not natural to man, to bring him to a knowledge of what he has known long ago, and knows so certainly that he could not live at all without it? Isn’t it distinctly to be seen in the development of each philosopher’s theory, that he knows what is the chief significance of life beforehand, just as positively as the peasant Fyodor, and not a bit more clearly than he, and is simply trying by a dubious intellectual path to come back to what everyone knows?
Leave us with our passions and thoughts, without any idea of the one God, of the Creator, or without any idea of what is right, without any idea of moral evil. “Just try and build up anything without those ideas! “We only try to destroy them, because we’re spiritually provided for. Exactly like the children!
It seemed to him that there was not a single article of faith of the church which could destroy the chief thing—faith in God, in goodness, as the one goal of man’s destiny.
The one unmistakable, incontestable manifestation of the Divinity is the law of right and wrong.
“I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”
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Misc Quotes
“There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day—that is, forget oneself. Forget oneself in the dream of daily life.”
“Woman, don’t you know, is such a subject that however much you study it, it’s always perfectly new.” “Well, then, it would be better not to study it.” “No. Some mathematician has said that enjoyment lies in the search for truth, not in the finding it.”
“Woman is deprived of rights from lack of education, and the lack of education results from the absence of rights. We must not forget that the subjection of women is so complete, and dates from such ages back that we are often unwilling to recognize the gulf that separates them from us” said Pestsov. “You said rights,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, waiting till Pestsov had finished, “meaning the right of sitting on juries, of voting, of presiding at official meetings, the right of entering the civil service, of sitting in parliament...” “Undoubtedly.” “But if women, as a rare exception, can occupy such positions, it seems to me you are wrong in using the expression ‘rights.’ It would be more correct to say duties. Every man will agree that in doing the duty of a juryman, a witness, a telegraph clerk, we feel we are performing duties. And therefore it would be correct to say that women are seeking duties, and quite legitimately. And one can but sympathize with this desire to assist in the general labor of man.” “Quite so,” Alexey Alexandrovitch assented. “The question, I imagine, is simply whether they are fitted for such duties.” “What seems strange to me is that women should seek fresh duties,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, “while we see, unhappily, that men usually try to avoid them.” “Duties are bound up with rights—power, money, honor; those are what women are seeking,” said Pestsov.
“Woman desires to have rights, to be independent, educated. She is oppressed, humiliated by the consciousness of her disabilities.”-Pestsov.
“The liberal party said that religion is only a curb to keep in check the barbarous classes of the people.”
“Women with a shadow usually come to a bad end.”-Anna’s Friend.
“I often think men have no understanding of what’s not honorable though they’re always talking of it.”-Anna.
“All one has to do is not spoil children, not to distort their nature, and they’ll be delightful.”
“All the long day of toil had left no trace in them but lightness of heart.”
“I do value my idea and my work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have something great—ideas, work—it’s all dust and ashes.” when you grasp this fully, then somehow everything becomes of no consequence. When you understand that you will die tomorrow, if not today, and nothing will be left, then everything is so unimportant!”
“Is he aiming at doing anything, or simply undoing what’s been done?
“No difference is less easily overcome than the difference of opinion about semi-abstract questions.”
“It is hard for anyone who is dissatisfied not to blame someone else, and especially the person nearest of all to him, for the ground of his dissatisfaction.”
“Dear friend, you never see evil in anyone!” “On the contrary, I see that all is evil. But whether it is just...”
“All these people, just like our spirit monopolists in old days, get their money in a way that gains them the contempt of everyone. They don’t care for their contempt, and then they use their dishonest gains to buy off the contempt they have deserved.”
“The monotony of respectable existence.”
“The more he listened to the fantasia of King Lear the further he felt from forming any definite opinion of it. There was, as it were, a continual beginning, a preparation of the musical expression of some feeling, but it fell to pieces again directly, breaking into new musical motives, or simply nothing but the whims of the composer, exceedingly complex but disconnected sounds. And these fragmentary musical expressions, though sometimes beautiful, were disagreeable, because they were utterly unexpected and not led up to by anything. Gaiety and grief and despair and tenderness and triumph followed one another without any connection, like the emotions of a madman. And those emotions, like a madman’s, sprang up quite unexpectedly.”
“He saw that a great many people were taking up the subject from motives of self-interest and self-advertisement. He recognized that the newspapers published a great deal that was superfluous and exaggerated, with the sole aim of attracting attention and outbidding one another. He saw that in this general movement those who thrust themselves most forward and shouted the loudest were men who had failed and were smarting under a sense of injury—generals without armies, ministers not in the ministry, journalists not on any paper, party leaders without followers. He saw that there was a great deal in it that was frivolous and absurd.”
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Chronology
24 Apr, 1877- 3 Mar, 1878: The Russo-Turkish War is fought in the Caucasus and the Balkans; the Russian Empire leads a coalition of states including Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro to victory against the Ottoman Turks. The conflict originated with ideas of 19c Balkan nationalism (under Ottoman control), Russian goals to recover territorial losses from the Crimean War (1853-1856). Russia claims the Caucasus provinces of Kars and Batum and annexes the Budiak region while Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro formally proclaim independence from the Ottoman Empire (Wiki).
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