He found his brother suffering, amid squalid and sordid surroundings. Levin was struck with the uncleanliness and disorder of the room, and the bad air and the sick man’s groans, and it seemed to him that there was no hope. It did not occur to him to investigate how his poor limbs were lying, under the coverlid, to try to comfort him materially, and if he could not improve his condition, at least to make the best of a bad situation. The mere thought of these details made a cold chill run down his back; and the sick man, feeling instinctively that his brother was powerless to help him, was irritated. So Levin kept leaving the room under various pretexts, and coming back again,—unhappy to be with his brother, still more unhappy to be away from him, and unable to stay alone by himself.
“Kitty saw these things under a very different light: as soon as she came near the dying man, she was filled with pity for him, and instead of feeling fear or repulsion, her womanly heart moved her to seek every means of ameliorating his sad condition. Convinced that it was her duty to help him, she did not doubt the possibility of making him more comfortable, and she set herself to work without delay. The details which repelled her husband were the very ones which attracted her attention. She sent for a doctor, she went to the drug store; she set her maid and Marya Nikolayevna to sweeping, washing, and dusting, and she helped them herself. She had all needless articles carried away, and she had them replaced by things that were needed. Without minding those whom she met on the way, she came and went from her room to her brother-in-law’s, unpacking the articles that were necessary,—cloths, pillow-cases, towels, nightshirts....
“‘Go and get a little flask out of my bag, and bring it to me,’ she said to her husband. ‘In the meantime we will finish fixing him.’
“When Levin came back with the flask, the invalid was lying down in bed, and everything about him had assumed a different appearance. Instead of the stuffy air which they were breathing before, Kitty was perfuming the room with aromatic vinegar from an atomizer. The dust was all gone; a carpet was spread under the bed; on a little table were arranged the medicine vials, a carafe, the necessary linen, and Kitty’s English embroidery. On another table, near the bed, stood a candle, his medicine, and powders. The sick man, bathed, with smoothly brushed hair, lying between clean sheets, and propped up by several pillows, was dressed in a clean nightshirt, the white collar of which came around his extraordinarily long, thin neck. A new expression of hope shone in his eyes as he looked at Kitty....
“‘He has hidden it from the wise, and revealed it unto children and fools,’ thought Levin as he was talking with his wife a little while later.”
The description of the sufferings and death of Nikolai are given with a fidelity to truth which must commend itself to all those who have witnessed the last days of agony in those who are near to them.
We are now led on to another scene of Tolstoi’s realism, the birth of his first child, and here, too, every detail—the cheerfulness of the young wife amid her suffering, the terror, anxiety, and utter uselessness of the husband upon this critical occasion—were never set forth with greater power. Tolstoi writes very freely upon subjects in regard to which we English-speaking people deal with restraint and much false modesty, so that his plain-speaking is quite startling to us as we read.
In the later pages of the book are described the conversion of Levin (probably Tolstoi himself) to that religious faith which became the controlling force of his life. Evidently he had not advanced very far when the book closed, for this religious regeneration did not materially change his nature for the better nor make him so happy as he hoped, and he thus concludes: “I shall probably continue to be vexed with Ivan the coachman, and get into useless discussions, and express my thoughts blunderingly. I shall always be blaming my wife for what annoys me, and repenting at once. I shall always feel a certain barrier between the sanctuary of my inmost soul, and the souls of others, even my wife’s. I shall continue to pray without being able to explain to myself why, but my inward life has conquered its liberty. It will be no longer at the mercy of circumstances; and my whole life, every moment of my life, will be, not meaningless as before, but full of deep meaning, which I shall have power to impress on every action.”
In “Anna Karenina” the contrast is very strong between the two pairs, Anna and Vronsky on the one hand, and Levin and Kitty on the other, between the course of illicit and of lawful love. Yet one can not lay down the book without feeling that the concluding chapters have fallen off a little in power from those that had preceded them. But despite its prolixity and thus weakening at its close Anna Karenina is entitled to a place beside the very best that human genius has accomplished in the literature of fiction.