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ANNA KARENIN PERIOD
87
The strenuous activity of the seventies, his family cares and duties, the question of the education of the children, his successful literary career, his beneficent social work—all these did not fully satisfy Tolstoy, and at the end of that period the same doubts about the meaning of life arose as he had experienced after the death of his brother, towards the end of his bachelor life. At that time, as we know from Tolstoy’s own words, he overcame those doubts by his marriage, which opened to him a new and yet untried side of life. But now these doubts, not being subdued by any outside influence, returned with renewed strength and inevitably carried him on to the crisis of his life.
