ecause such a marriage would have been occasioned only by the beauty of experience of peasant life and thus would have been an abandonment of the search for rational structure and an admission of defeat) he realizes that he loves Kitty.The struggle to unify intuitive nonverbal communication with a philosophical theory necessarily framed in traditional verbal forms defines Levin's character. Each new diversion -- rational farming methods, his sociological essays on the "character of the Russian laborer" -- are simply examples of Levin's will to order. Anna Karenina, too, shares such a desire, devouring in the earlier chapters refined British novels that present experience but fail to fully frame it in reason, and in later chapters philosophical texts. But Anna, in part due to the confining life she has lived as a female in the oppressive Karenin household, where Christianity is used to justify the suppression of feeling and Karenin uses the Bible to try to convince Anna to lie about her affections, lives by a passion so strong that it wars against the carefully constructed social world in which she lives. Anna and Levin are, for all their differences, very similar in mental construction -- both seek to create a moral structure for their lives, Levin in rebellion against the amoral epicureanism of Oblonsky and the hedonistic male world of Moscow billiard halls, gambling dens, kept women and causal adultery, and Anna in rebellion against the oppressive world of Karenin who demands above all proper "form" -- blind adherence to the female role in society as childbearer, sexless platonic companion, and instrument of social advancement.The epigraph, as pointed out by Boris Eikhenbaum, was found by Tolstoy first in a passage of Schopenhauer, who by Tolstoy's wife's account, occupied much of Tolstoy's reading during the years he wrote Anna Karenina. While Schopenhauer, in contrast to the more spiritual Tolstoy, was a committed atheist, he had a ...
