belief that the phenomenal world is separate from man and does not enter a man's life to pass judgement upon his actions.Oblonsky then, in the final analysis, is unconcerned with the human ability to create structures to filter and interpret experience. He is exempt from the tortures of doubt and guilt that descend upon the other characters whose experiences are intertwined with an inner moral sense. No where is this clearer than in his interactions with Levin, where his continual lack of caution and respect for language causes the love struck Levin such pain. Oblonsky's tipsy quotations from Pushkin and Heine spoken quite innocently torment Levin, for if Oblonsky is the image of a man unconcerned with self-judgement, Levin is a man for whom structure is everything, a man who, driven by a search for moral order to place over a chaotic world that torments him (and yet pleases Oblonsky), alternately picks up and puts down different systems of morality and aesthetics in the search for truth. Levin is a man for whom words are powerful, dangerous, and sacred tools. Oblonsky's casual and merry remark about Levin's rival for Kitty's affection, Vronsky, leaves Levin "desecrated."Perhaps one of the most famous scenes of Anna Karenina is the mowing at Levin's estate. The first fully developed interaction between Levin and the peasant class that, at different stages of artistic development symbolized for Tolstoy the triumph of nature over the stained upper classes, the essence of Slavism that would save Russia from Europe's fate of immolation by the intellectual class of nihilists and anarchists, and the core of a future religious utopia here appear in the narrator's brief snatches of description in a very neutral, factual light. Characteristic of Tolstoy's prose is the importance of point of view, and often Tolstoy will recount the same scene from many different vantage points -- even to the point of including the inner monologues of Levin's hunt...
