Fragments from Tolstoy’s polemics and novels
From A Confession
To people who do not comprehend life, the emotion of love does not appear as the essence of human life but as a transitory mood—as independent of his will, just like all those other moods that a person is prone to. One often reads and hears the opinion that love is some false, tormenting mood, something that disrupts the correct course of life—much as sunrise must seem to an owl.
There is no love in the future; love is something happening only in the present. Someone who does not express love in the present has no love.
The possibility of loving activity, something that will always satisfy him and others, arises only when someone rejects the possibility of happiness in individual life and therefore does not concern himself with this false happiness and has liberated from within himself the goodwill toward all, a desire that is natural to man. The happiness of this person’s life is in love, as the happiness of the plant’s life is in light. A plant that is not shaded by anything cannot and does not ask what direction it should grow and whether the light is good enough, nor whether it should wait for another, better light. It rather accepts the single light that is in the world and reaches out toward it. In just such a way, a man who has renounced his individual happiness does not theorize about what he should receive from others, nor what his loved ones should receive, nor whether there might be some other, even better love than the one now making its demands. He devotes himself, his whole existence, to whatever love is available to him and stands before him. Only this love gives full satisfaction to the reasonable nature of man.
Fragment 1, from Anna Karenina
“The place was unoccupied, and when in imagination he tried to put one of the girls he knew there, he felt that it was quite impossible. Moreover, the memory of her refusal, and the part he had played in it, tormented him with shame. However much he told himself that he was not at all to blame in that matter, the memory of it, together with other shameful memories, made him start and blush. There had been in his past, as in that of every man, actions which he realized were bad, and for which his conscience ought to have tormented him; but the recollections of those bad actions did not torment him nearly as much as these trivial yet shameful memories. These wounds never closed up. And among these recollections stood the memory of her refusal and the pitiful rôle he must have played in the eyes of the others that evening.”
Fragment 2, from Anna Karenina
“Why do you torment me?’
‘On the contrary, I see you are in distress.…’
But Kitty in her excitement did not listen to her.
‘There is nothing for me to grieve for or seek comfort about. I have enough pride never to let myself love a man who does not love me.’
‘But I am not suggesting it…. Only, tell me frankly,’ said Dolly, taking her by the hand, ‘did Levin speak to you?’
The mention of Levin seemed to deprive Kitty of the last fragments of self-control: she jumped up from her chair, threw the buckle on the floor, and rapidly gesticulating with her hands she began:
‘What has Levin to do with it? I don’t understand why you need to torment me! I have said and I repeat I will never, never do what you are doing—returning to a man who has betrayed you and has loved another woman. I can’t understand it! You may do it, but I can’t.”
Fragment 3, from Anna Karenina
“She questioned him about his health and his work, persuading him to take a rest and to move out to her in the country.
She said all this lightly, rapidly, and with peculiarly sparkling eyes; but Karenin did not now attach any importance to this tone of hers. He only heard her words, and gave them only their direct meaning. And he answered simply, though jokingly. In all this conversation nothing particular passed, but never afterwards could Anna recall this short scene without being tormented by shame.”