This irritable self-consciousness is shown no less strikingly in his relations with men who, although they esteem his integrity and talents, find it exceedingly difficult to like him. The same self-consciousness makes him clumsy in society, and, when he has to act with other people in public business, he grows caustic and angry because they do not agree with him in everything. The worst egoism of all occurs in his attitude towards his dying brother. When he sees his brother visibly perishing from consumption, he pities him deeply, but, none the less, his chief concern lies in the thought that this horrible and degrading misfortune of illness and death will one day befall himself; he positively disturbs the invalid in the night (how terrible to break that hard-won sleep of the consumptive!) by rising to look in the glass, dreading to find that he has wrinkles and grey hairs and is growing old.
When he and Kitty attend Nikolai's death-bed we see the strongest possible contrast between the unselfish courage of the young wife, thinking only of the sick man, and doing everything possible for him, and the distressing egoism of Levin, who is filled with fear, disgust, and almost anger at the sight of death.
"Levin, though terrified at the thought of lifting this frightful body under the coverlet, submitted to his wife's influence, and put his arms around the invalid, with that resolute air she knew so well": and again, "The sight of the sick man paralysed him; he did not know what to say, how to look or move about.... Kitty apparently did not think about herself, and she had not the time. Occupied only with the invalid, she seemed to have a clear idea of what to do; and she succeeded in her endeavour."
Anna Karénina shows already that fear of death which is such an obsession in Tolstoy's later works. In War and Peace, he takes the soldier's view of it, as something almost trifling in comparison with greater matters; his noble Prince Andrei grieves over many things, but neither the utmost extremity of peril, nor the anguish of his gangrened wound, nor the immediate presence of dissolution can shake his courage or dismay his soul. It is different with the pitiful, almost animal terror of death shown by poor Nikolai Levin, and it plays an increasing part in Tolstoy's mind until, as he describes in My Confession, it becomes an obsession which occupies the whole of his mind, and from which he can only shake himself free by an entire conversion. Even then, like a mediæval monk, he allows the thought of death to colour almost the whole of life. The truth is that he thinks too much of it. Even his pagan Homer might have taught him better; Achilles cries:
"My friend, thou too must die; why thus lamentest thou? Patroklos too is dead, who was better far than thou. Seest thou not also what manner of man am I for might and goodliness? and a good man was my father and a goddess-mother bare me. Yet over me too hang death and forceful fate."
Tolstoy had reached, more than once, the height of the heroic age. It is a pity his soul ever condescended to our modern and craven fear of death.
The canvas of Anna Karénina is rich in minor characters, almost as excellently drawn as the main one. Stepan, Anna's brother, has been already referred to; he is an ironically complete portrait of the man of the world, drawn with a Thackerayan lightness and zest. There are not, as a rule, many resemblances between Thackeray and Tolstoy, for Tolstoy is so much the deeper, but the portrait of Stepan might have come from the same pen as that of Major Pendennis. Stepan is always kind, but his kindness is as purely constitutional as a good digestion. He is faithless to his wife, not once nor twice, but habitually; he deserts the "adorable" women who confide themselves to his protection; he claims an excellent post, and thinks he has fulfilled all its duties by keeping himself invariably well-dressed; he is, of course, a connoisseur in meats and wines, and, however well-spread the table may be, must always show his fastidiousness by ordering something else. He is very generous, and pays all his debts of honour, but the money for this has to be found by his unfortunate family, who economise even in the necessities of life; one summer they spend their time in a miserable tumble-down house; next year, as the place is positively uninhabitable, they are driven to take refuge with the Levins. But it does not grieve Stepan that Konstantin Levin should support Stepan's wife and six children; he doubtless thinks that Levin enjoys that sort of thing as much as he—Stepan—the spending of money. Yet Stepan is invariably liked, for he will do a good turn for anyone if he can, and is always tactful and sympathetic. If Tolstoy has drawn a candid and unflattering picture of his own type of egoism in Konstantin Levin, he has drawn in Stepan a portrait of the other type of egoism—the amiable, Epicurean type—which is still more drastically complete.
Stepan's wife—Dolly, sister to Kitty Shcherbatsky—is a thoroughly natural and lovable creature; terribly disillusioned by her husband's infidelity, she is yet persuaded, for the children's sake, to forgive him and reunite the family; she bears with endless patience the worries his extravagance entails, and copes single-handed with the debts and the six children. It is hardly surprising if, at moments, she murmurs, and is almost inclined to think that the people who lead irregular lives (like Anna) have the best of it; it is only after a visit to Anna and Vronsky that she realises her own blessings, and understands that the tortures of a dissatisfied conscience are worse even than debts and a faithless husband. Dolly, however, stands by Anna in all her misfortunes; while women full of secret sins insult Anna in public, Dolly, the irreproachably virtuous, loves her to the end.
Aleksei Karénin—the husband of Anna—is brought before us in all his reality. We see the ugliness which so exasperates Anna—the ears that stick out straight, the habit of cracking the finger-joints—and we realise his cold vanity. And yet it is impossible not to be sorry for Karénin; he suffers a veritable martyrdom; that which he dreads worse than death—ridicule—overwhelms him at all points; he is crushed by the undeserved contempt of his fellows. Tolstoy shows us how little Anna's persecution was dictated by morality, for the cruelty accorded to the guiltless husband is just as great.
For a moment, when Karénin pardons Anna and Vronsky, he rises to real heroism, but it is a height to which he cannot keep; the poor man really is, as Anna well knew, a pretentious mediocrity; he is found out as a husband, found out as an official, found out even as a martyr; for a brief space, after the scene of the pardon, the reader is inclined to feel as if Karénin had been all along misjudged, but he returns to his usual self. When Anna has left him he falls under the influence of the stupidly sentimental Lidia Ivanovna; he becomes a convert to the most foolish form of spiritualism, submits Anna's fate to the decision of a medium, and refuses her a divorce because the medium pronounces against it—a course of procedure so extravagantly silly that it amazes even Stepan.