Tolstoy’s Search

On Faith and Reason

The epigraph

• “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.” (Letter of St Paul to the Romans, 12.19)

• Preceding line: “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God…”

• Old testament vision of a punishing God.

• Brings into play from the beginning the central theme of the novel: the nature of faith, the wages of sin

Marriage

• “With regard to religion, Levin, like most of his contemporaries, was in a very uncertain position. He could not believe, yet at the same time he was not firmly convinced that it was all incorrect.” (Five, i, p. 439)

• Ritual of marriage brings the problem to the fore: is it all an empty ritual? The priest is uninterested in Levin’s doubts.

• Levin feels “shame” – and begins to search.

Representation of faith in the novel

1. The fashionable imported mysticism and evangelism of the St Petersburg socialites: Countess Lydia: hypocrisy and falseness

2. The rationalism of the intellectuals, esp. Koznyshev, Levin’s half-brother

3. The radical atheism of Nikolai, Levin’s brother, the proto-Communist

4. The traditional faith of the old Russian gentry: the Kitty’s mother, Dolly, Kitty

5. The simple faith of the Russian peasant

Salon mysticism

• The fashionable imported mysticism and evangelism of the St Petersburg socialites: Countess Lydia, Karenin.

• “Our foothold is love, the love that He left us. His burden is light” (Five, xxii, p. 509).

• The mystic Landau (Seven, xxi-xxii, pp. 732-739): the immediate cause of Karenin refusing Anna a divorce.

• Description of Landau, p. 732.

Rationalism

• The rationalism of the intellectuals, esp. Koznyshev, Levin’s half-brother

• Influence of Darwin, scientific explanations for life• Conversation with Koznyshev and the professor of

philosophy: “Listening to his brother’s conversations with the professor, he noticed that they connected the scientific questions with the inner, spiritual ones, several times almost touched upon them, but that each time they came close to what seemed to him the most important thing, they hastily retreated…” (One, vii, p. 24)

• Levin’s question: “Therefore, if my senses are destroyed, if my body dies, there can be no further existence?” (p. 25)

Death: the enigma

• The radical atheism of Nikolai, Levin’s brother, the proto-Communist: not indifference, but an angry rejection of faith

• Nikolai the equivalent of Raskolnikov in the novel: his companion Masha, a former prostitute

• (Masha – Maria Magdalene; Raskolnikov and Nikolai as inverted Christ figures)

• Nikolai dies of tuberculosis; the person who is able to help is not Levin, but Kitty.

Nikolai’s Conversion

• Deathbed conversion: “ Levin knew his brother and his train of thought; he knew that his unbelief had come not because it was easier for him to live without faith, but because his beliefs had been supplanted step by step by modern scientific explanations of the phenomena of the world…” (Five, xx, p. 499)

• “…a moment later his face brightened, a smile showed under the moustache, and the assembled women began to busy themselves with laying out the deceased.” (504)

The effect on Levin

• “…he felt even less capable than before of understanding the meaning of death, and its inevitability appeared still more horrible to him; but now, thanks to his wife’s nearness, the feeling did not drive him to despair; in spite of death, he felt the necessity to live and to love. He felt that love saved him from despair and that under the threat of despair this love was becoming still stronger and purer.” (Five, xx, 504-5)

Death and birth

• Kitty realizes she is pregnant as Nikolai Levin dies• When she gives birth, Levin recalls this: “…what was

being accomplished was similar to what had been accomplished a year ago in a hotel in a provincial capital, on the deathbed of his brother Nikolai. But that had been grief and this was joy. But that grief and this joy were equally outside all the ordinary circumstances of life, were like holes in this ordinary life, through which something higher showed…” (Seven, xiv, p. 713)

Traditional faith

• The traditional faith of the old Russian gentry: the Kitty’s mother, Dolly, Kitty

• “Hidden from the wise and revealed unto babes and the imprudent…” (Five, xix, p. 496)

• Kitty and Agafya Mikhailovna: “Both unquestionably knew what life was and what death was… neither had any doubt about the meaning of this phenomenon and looked at it in exactly the same way…” (p. 496)

• Instinctive knowledge attributed to women (rationalism belongs to “masculine minds”).

The danger of suicide

Levin searches for faith, close to suicide:

“Happy in his family life, a healthy man, Levin was several times so close to suicide that he hid a rope lest he hang himself with it, and was afraid to go about with a rifle lest he shoot himself.” (Eight, ix, p. 789)

The “stupidity of reason”

• “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” (Eight, x, p. 791)

Epiphany…

The simple faith of the Russian peasant Platon Fokanych:

“Fokanych, he’s an upright old man. He lives for the soul. He remembers God.” (Eight, xi, p. 794)

…and joy

“A new, joyful feeling came over him. At the muzhik’s words about Fokanych living for the soul, by the truth, by God’s way, it was as if a host of vague but important thoughts burst from some locked-up place and, all rushing towards the same goal, whirled through his head, blinding him with their light.” (Eight, xi, p. 794)