This one gave me a moment’s pause. If you and I are friends, the chances are good that it should give you a moment’s pause also.
In Vronsky’s Petersberg world all people were divided into two absolutely distinct and diametrically opposite sorts. One - the lower sort - vulgar, stupid, and above all ridiculous people, who believed that a husband should live only with the woman he has married, that young girls should be chaste, women modest, men brave, self-controlled, and steadfast; that one should bring up one’s children, earn one’s living, and pay one’s debts, and all sorts of nonsense like that. They were the old-fashioned and ridiculous people. But there was another sort of people, the real people, to which all his set belonged, in which the main thing was to be elegant, handsome, generous, daring, and gay, giving oneself up unblushingly to every passion and laughing at everything else.
Posted by Marie Gryphon on March 2, 2004Si. Un momento pause.
Posted by: Keelay on March 3, 2004 2:21 PMHe may have written this sarcastically. I say this because "the Christianity of Tolstoy's last decades stressed five tenets was based on the Sermon on the Mount and crystallized in five leading ideas: human beings must suppress their anger, whether warranted or not; no sex outside marriage; no oaths of any sort; renunciation of all resistance to evil; love of enemies.
Nonresistance to evil, the doctrine that inspired Gandhi, meant not that evil must be accepted but only that it cannot be fought with evil means, especially violence. Thus Tolstoy became a pacifist."
Yes, the context of the passage (a rather dissipated party) indicates pretty clearly that he's being sarcastic. I didn't realize my comments might be taken to mean otherwise. That's an interesting historical nugget, though. Anna Karenina as a whole is supposed to be a bit of a morality play, contrasting Vronsky and Anna's decline against the flowering of affection between Levin and Kitty, who lead very conservative lives. I'm nowhere near the end though, so perhaps someone else can comment more definitively.
Posted by: Marie on March 4, 2004 12:39 AMThey werenât taken otherwise, I just wasn't sure how YOU were taking it. I guess I don't know you well enough.
Posted by: Yarn on March 5, 2004 3:57 PM