Leo Tolsstoy, Anna Karenina By Leo Tolstoy

Author Leo Tolstoy had a privileged upbringing however, despite the fact that he was born into the Russian nobility, he desired nothing more than to live the simple life of a peasant. As a young man attending the University of Kazan, Tolstoy was prone to gambling, drinking, smoking, and hunting. He eventually dropped out of school and gave up his sensualist lifestyle, opting for a life of simplicity. Tolstoy was an intellectual who favored the heart over the workings of the mind and, throughout his life, was skeptical of the practices of the Roman Catholic Church. He came to believe that the church was corrupt and abandoned organized religion entirely, instead developing his own set of beliefs.

According to Tolstoy, Anna Karenina was derived from three separate occurrences. The first being in 1870, Tolstoy developed an idea for a story about a woman who commits adultery and abandons her husband for the other man, loosely based on the life of his sister. The second was a newspaper story about a woman who, after being abandoned by her lover, threw herself under a train. The third was a sentence from Pushkin’s Tales of the Balkin that read, “The guests were arriving at the country house.” Which apparently inspired Tolstoy so much that he finished the first draft of the novel within a matter of weeks, although it was not published until five years later.

While the main narrative as well as the title of the novel favor the character of Anna Karenina, the main plot line is mirrored by Konstatin Levin, who has a plot all his own. Levin, in many ways, reflects Tolstoy himself and holds the same philosophy and has the same reservations. Levin is a farmer whose search for happiness and satisfaction leads him to ask stark questions about...

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...ert back to sin. Lastly, as shown in Levin’s conversion, real faith, that comes from God alone, is the only thing that can intersect mankind’s sinful nature because it is a completely separate entity and completely from God.

After Levin and Kitty get married, it marks a turn in Levin’s search for truth. He is forced to go to confession in order to be married and, while he is suspicious towards the religious dogma, the doubts that he expresses to the priest set in motion the chain of thoughts that lead him to his eventual conversion. Levin is an example that no man is an island and his marriage to Kitty is an affirmation of his participation in something bigger than himself—being a part of God’s larger will. While Levin does not necessarily fit into the mold of the Russian Church, just like Tolstoy, that does not discredit his faith or make it any less valuable.