Tolstoy and the Perils of Getting What We Want

"[M]y whole life...every minute of it is no longer meaningless, as it was before." - Konstantin Levin, Anna Karenina

Grant Whitty via Unsplash

I think the greatest misconception about Tolstoy is that he is an inaccessible intellectual. Like Dickens, Tolstoy wrote for the average reader, and his characters are very relatable. This is especially true of Konstantin Levin, who is one of the two protagonists of Anna Karenina. Often described as Tolstoy’s self-insert, Levin is less flashy than the famous adulteress that gives this novel its name. Still, Levin is as complex - and as fickle - as Anna.

When Anna Karenina opens, Levin is a socially awkward young aristocrat who is in love with a beautiful young woman named Kitty Scherbatsky. Levin was close with Kitty’s older brother and knows her family well, and he’s had crushes on all three of the daughters in the Scherbatsky family at one time or another. Now old enough to consider marriage, Levin can’t imagine loving anyone besides Kitty - but he is paralyzed around her. Levin does force himself to propose, but it does not go as planned. He mumbles, “I meant to say ... I meant to say ... I came for this ... to be my wife!”¹

Kitty rejects Levin, and he is devastated.

As time passes, however, Kitty grows to appreciate Levin, and she realizes that she cares for him. Eventually, Levin proposes to Kitty again, and she accepts.²

This should be Levin’s apotheosis. He is the dorky, reticent man who has won the heart of a beautiful young woman, the actual girl of his dreams.

Yet the day after Kitty accepts his proposal, Levin is already anxious. He explains to his betrothed that he is an atheist and that he has not waited for marriage, as would be the religious (if not cultural) expectation at the time. These disclosures are painful for both Levin and Kitty - Kitty is discouraged and Levin is convinced, more than ever, that he is unworthy.³

It gets worse from there. On the day of their wedding, Levin feels subdued by “dread and doubt - doubt of everything.”⁴ He fears that Kitty does not truly love him and only wants to be married. He convinces himself that she will one day betray him. He even tries to call off the ceremony before Kitty talks him down.

Levin’s behavior is dramatic, but for most of us it contains a hint of the familiar. It’s human nature to get what we want and then fail to appreciate it.

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I’ve mentioned this offhand before, though I haven’t written about it much - my husband and I struggled with several early losses before welcoming a healthy baby. I first read Anna Karenina during my successful pregnancy, and Levin’s situation made me think of how our parish priest helped me during that difficult time. He is a fantastic listener who empathized with me through everything. And he once noted in a homily - not directed at me specifically - something that shifted my perspective.

During that homily, our priest said that over the years, he had known many people who were longing for something. Some were desperate to marry, others wanted to attend a specific school, and still others felt crushed by infertility. Our priest did not deny how painful these experiences were. Indeed, he noted that the desire for a family was a good, holy one. Still, he said that most of the people he knew eventually got what they wanted - the single person found a spouse, the couple had a child.

The problem? Most of them were no happier for it.

It sounds strange, but I have observed this in my own life time and time again. We don’t feel unsatisfied because we don’t love our spouse and children or because we aren’t thrilled about our professional success. Instead, we are disappointed because we realize that even when we do have what we want, life remains hard. Suffering follows us. Always, we are flawed.

Levin’s experience illustrates how this happens. He gets the girl, but he remains an imperfect man. He has the life of his dreams, but it is still difficult. Life - even a good life - is challenging in significant, not just trivial, ways. There are also new anxieties all the time. For example, Levin wins Kitty’s love but he fears he will lose her. At first he dreads the possibility of adultery, then he panics at the idea she will die in childbirth. This anxiety makes Levin, as it does all of us, cruel. At one point, Levin’s fears, both realistic and unrealistic, overwhelm him: “without the slightest transition, he felt cast down from a pinnacle of happiness, peace, and dignity, into an abyss of despair, rage, and humiliation. Again everything and everyone had become hateful to him.”⁵

Levin suffers like this for a while before his feelings of despair awaken him to his dependence on God. Levin realizes that “he had been living rightly, but thinking wrongly,” that is, living for his own desires (even though they were good desires of marriage and children) instead of living for God. Levin decides that the meaning of life “has been given me by life itself, in my knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. And that knowledge I did not arrive at in any way, it was given to me as to all men, given, because I could not have got it from anywhere.”⁶

Only when he recognizes his dependence on God is Levin satisfied. Levin realizes that his life will never be perfect, but that it is nonetheless worthwhile. Levin understands that suffering is not useless, but points to a fundamental truth because it draws him closer to God.

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Levin’s spiritual awakening parallels my own experience with loss. Both have prompted me to look critically at how society reacts to suffering and deprivation.

During that difficult time in my life, I spent too much time engaging with social media influencers who shared about infertility and miscarriage. I found some of these accounts helpful at first, but before long they became pernicious.

In his wisdom, St. John Paul II warned of “a cultural climate which fails to perceive any meaning or value in suffering, but rather considers suffering the epitome of evil, to be eliminated at all costs.”⁷

This was my attitude, and it pervaded the conception-focused communities I visited online. The prevailing sentiment was something like “why don’t I get a child - especially when someone else has several?”

This line of thinking can only harms us. It convinces us that suffering is useless. This perspective also leads us to a “just world” framework in which we perceive children as a reward for good behavior and loss as a punishment. This can lead to an even more deleterious mindset - one that frames conceiving, bearing, and raising children as a human right, a right that belongs exclusively to the parent (and is often exercised at the expense of a theoretical child).

Infertility is one of the most painful experiences imaginable. Yet our cultural attitude around childbearing, steeped in the Western vocabulary of rights and justice, is dangerous. Under this view of reproduction, a child becomes a thing, a means of satisfaction.

Again, I want to reiterate that anyone experiencing infertility or repeated loss should never be ashamed of their desire for children. Infertility and loss make a person incredibly vulnerable. Society must do a better job of recognizing that deep pain. Religion - including holy scripture and the lives of the saints - provide us with some tools for coping with it. But each one of us could do more to serve the people in our communities who are suffering this way.

Furthermore, it is not only those struggling with infertility who see children as a means to an end. In fact, many people, including many religious people, see children as a means to one worldly satisfaction or another. Maybe we see children as visible manifestations of our goodness; maybe our adult children are supposed to exemplify our holiness or our brilliant parenting. This attitude is just as dangerous as the idea of children as a right. Viewing children as tools to gain worldly acclaim clashes with the reality that they are gifts from God, not something we deserve or earn.

I had to learn this the hard way, through personal experience. In other words, Levin and I made the same mistake. We both focused so much on what we wanted that we misunderstood the purpose of our desires. Indeed, neither one of us understood the purpose of life. Levin at least had the excuse of lapsing from faith at a young age, but I was always drawn to faith, and I was practicing Catholicism when I went through repeated loss.

This goes to show how difficult it is to keep our eyes on God when we suffer. That’s why we need excellent spiritual guidance and the support of Christian communities. This helps us make sense of our pain. It also helps us see that, while the outcome of life is uncertain, the grace of God never is.

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What does Anna Karenina teach Christians about desire, and how does it reinforce the Christian perspective on family and childbearing? And how is any of this connected to my experiences with loss?

Anna Karenina teaches that focusing on our desires can destroy us. Levin’s desire for marriage and a family is good, yet he does not feel happy when he gets what he wants. That is because Levin’s hope for happiness is misplaced. He expects worldly things to satisfy him. Yet Christians know - and Levin eventually learns - that earthly goods are feeble. Worldly acclaim is never good enough.

This is even true about marriage and children. As Levin learns, even the most wonderful experiences in life are not enough to cure the suffering that all human beings experience. Only a sense of purpose can make this suffering worthwhile, and we can only develop this sense of purpose by relying on God instead of ourselves. Matthew Lee Anderson, a professor at Baylor University, wrote for Plough magazine: “we must look beyond creation itself if we wish to renew its authority and goodness within our communities. Life in the kingdom of God both confirms and disturbs our love of creation. To paraphrase Lewis, those who focus on the family rather than the kingdom will eventually have neither – but those who look to the kingdom shall have family given to them as well.”⁸ Our desire for anything - even good things - must never outweigh our desire to serve God.

Tolstoy shows us that desire is not always bad, but that even a good desire can curdle into resentment and anxiety. Because of this, we must entrust our desires to God. If we allow our wishes to rule our lives, we will discover that “Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”⁹

Through my losses, I learned that any control we believe we have over life and death is an illusion. In reality, there is very little we can do except try to accept what God asks of us. Everything else is up to Him.

1. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part One (Chapter 13)

2. Id at Part Four (Chapter 13)

3. Id at Part Four (Chapter 16)

4. Id at Part Five (Chapter 2)

5. Id. at Part Six (Chapter 14)

6. Id at Part Eight (Chapter 12)

7. St. Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, Catholic Social Teaching in Action (25 March 1995) https://capp-usa.org/evangelium-vitae/ (paragraph 15).

8. Matthew Lee Anderson, “Is There A Right to Have Children?” Plough Magazine (7 December 2022), https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/parenting/is-there-a-right-to-have-children.

9. John 12:25 (NIV).