onsky is a materialist, although not in a formally philosophical way. He might better be said to be a pragmatist, or hedonist, although those labels, too, have their problems, since, as Anna remarks to Dolly, family life for him is sacred. He is not particularly religious but neither is he an intellectual such as Koznyshev or an nihilist such as Nicholas. Perhaps the best way to characterize Oblonsky is as a man who never held a coherent system of behavior, a man to whom the idea of thinking rationally about the way he lives his life would never occur."All the variety, charm and beauty of life are made up of light and shade." Oblonsky's aesthetic consciousness is devoid of the traditional ethical, religious and literary structures that man has created to understand and appreciate beauty. The poetry Oblonsky quotes when he remarks upon (and, importantly, empathizes with) Levin's love for Kitty is more often than not misquoted, and in recalling his various adulterous escapades, he takes great pleasure in referring to the women he has loved outside of marriage using Levin's metaphor of stealing rolls of bread. Oblonsky is far from Karenin's dry inability to see clearly the beautiful and pleasurable in life, but yet how far also he is from Socrates and the ethical imperative of love in the Symposium, the religious eroticism of the Song of Solomon, the tortured analysis and reanalysis of Goethe's Werther. The two words Oblonsky yokes together with beauty are variety and charm, and beauty in life for him is just that -- a rather incoherent series of inconsequential yet pleasurable encounters with a world that, through its own apparent random nature, never suggests any greater ethical obligation than to perceive and appreciate. That Oblonsky survives so intact a storyline that leaves the lives of others shattered implies that Tolstoy does not derive moral responsibility and the power to judge from nature, that he shares with Immanuel Kant the ...
