Anna Karenina

ver since, by his beloved brother’s deathbed, Levin had first glanced
into the questions of life and death in the light of these new
convictions, as he called them, which had during the period from his
twentieth to his thirty-fourth year imperceptibly replaced his childish
and youthful beliefs—he had been stricken with horror, not so much of
death, as of life, without any knowledge of whence, and why, and how,
and what it was. 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.

From that moment, though he did not distinctly face it, and still went
on living as before, Levin had never lost this sense of terror at his
lack of knowledge.

He vaguely felt, too, that what he called his new convictions were not
merely lack of knowledge, but that they were part of a whole order of
ideas, in which no knowledge of what he needed was possible.

At first, marriage, with the new joys and duties bound up with it, had
completely crowded out these thoughts. But of late, while he was
staying in Moscow after his wife’s confinement, with nothing to do, the
question that clamored for solution had more and more often, more and
more insistently, haunted Levin’s mind.

The question was summed up for him thus: “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.

He was in the position of a man seeking food in toy shops and tool
shops.

Instinctively, unconsciously, with every book, with every conversation,
with every man he met, he was on the lookout for light on these
questions and their solution.

What puzzled and distracted him above everything was that the majority
of men of his age and circle had, like him, exchanged their old beliefs
for the same new convictions, and yet saw nothing to lament in this,
and were perfectly satisfied and serene. So that, apart from the
principal question, Levin was tortured by other questions too. Were
these people sincere? he asked himself, or were they playing a part? or
was it that they understood the answers science gave to these problems
in some different, clearer sense than he did? And he assiduously
studied both these men’s opinions and the books which treated of these
scientific explanations.

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. The old
prince, and Lvov, whom he liked so much, and Sergey Ivanovitch, and all
the women believed, and his wife believed as simply as he had believed
in his earliest childhood, and ninety-nine hundredths of the Russian
people, all the working people for whose life he felt the deepest
respect, believed.

Another fact of which he became convinced, after reading many
scientific books, was that the men who shared his views had no other
construction to put on them, and that they gave no explanation of the
questions which he felt he could not live without answering, but simply
ignored their existence and attempted to explain other questions of no
possible interest to him, such as the evolution of organisms, the
materialistic theory of consciousness, and so forth.

Moreover, during his wife’s confinement, something had happened that
seemed extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into
praying, and at the moment he prayed, he believed. But that moment had
passed, and he could not make his state of mind at that moment fit into
the rest of his life.

He could not admit that at that moment he knew the truth, and that now
he was wrong; for as soon as he began thinking calmly about it, it all
fell to pieces. He could not admit that he was mistaken then, for his
spiritual condition then was precious to him, and to admit that it was
a proof of weakness would have been to desecrate those moments. He was
miserably divided against himself, and strained all his spiritual
forces to the utmost to escape from this condition.