CONCERNING TOLSTOY
431
mention but one of innumerable instances of such spiritual confron–
tation, there is t&e moment in
Anna Karenina
when Anna's husband
begins to suspect her relation to Vronsky. That is the moment when
the accepted .and taken-for-granted falls to pieces, when the carefully
built-up credibility of the world is torn apart by a revelation of its
underlying irrationality. For according to Alexey Alexandrovitch's
ideas one ought to have confidence in one's wife because jealousy was
insulting to oneself as well as to her. He had never really asked him–
self why his wife deserved such confidence and why he believed that
she would always love him. But now, though he still felt that jealousy
was a bad and shameful state, "he also felt that he was standing face
to face with something illogical and irrational, and did not know
what was to be done. Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face
with life, with the possibility of his wife's loving some one other than
himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and incomprehensible
because it was life itself. All his life Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived
and worked in official spheres, having to do with the reflection of
life. And every time he stumbled against life itself he had shrunk
away from it. Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man
who, while calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge, should suddenly
discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below.
That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which
Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived. For the first time the question pre–
sented itself to
him
of the possibility of his wife's loving some one else, .
and he was horrified at it."
It is exactly this "standing face to face with life," and the real–
ization that there are things in it that are irreducible and incom–
prehensible, which drew Tolstoy toward the theme of death. Again
and again he returned to this theme, out of a fear of death which is
really the highest form of courage. Most people put death out of their
minds because they cannot bear to think of
it.
Gorky reports that Tol–
stoy once said to him that "if a man has learned to think, no matter
what he may think about, he is always thinking of his own death. All
philosophers were like that. And what truths can there be, if there
is death?" That is a statement of despair and nihilism the paradox
of which is that it springs from the depths of Tolstoy's existential feel–
ing of life; and this is because the despair and nihilism spring not
from the renunciation but from the affirmation of life; Tolstoy never
gave up the search for an all-embracing truth, for a rational justifica–
tion of man's existence on the earth.
The fact is that Tolstoy was at bottom so sure in his mastery of
life and so firm in his inner feeling of security that he could afford to
