personage of Tolstoy’s books, Constantine Levine is the incarnation of the writer himself. Not only has Tolstoy attributed to him his own ideas—at one and the same time conservative and democratic—and the anti-Liberalism of the provincial aristocrat who despises “intellectuals”;[1] but he has made him the gift of part of his own life. The love of Levine and Kitty and their first years of marriage are a transposition of his own domestic memories, just as the death of Levine’s brother is a melancholy evocation of the death of Tolstoy’s brother, Dmitri. The latter portion, useless to the romance, gives us an insight into the troubles which were then oppressing the author. While the epilogue of War and Peace was an artistic transition to another projected work, the epilogue to Anna Karenin is an autobiographical transition to the moral revolution which, two years later, was to find expression in the Confessions. Already, in the course of Anna Karenin, he returns again and again to a violent or ironical criticism of contemporary society, which he never ceased to attack in his subsequent works. War is declared upon deceit: war upon lies; upon virtuous as well as vicious lies; upon liberal chatter, fashionable charity, drawing-room religion, and philanthropy. War against the world, which distorts all truthful feelings, and inevitably crushes the generous enthusiasm of the mind! Death throws an unexpected light upon the social conventions. Before Anna dying, the stilted Karenin
- ↑ Notice also, in the epilogue, the hostility towards warfare, nationalism, and Pan-Slavism.
