Anna Karenina

These doubts fretted and harassed Levin, growing weaker or stronger but never leaving him. He read and thought, 'and the more he read and the more he thought, the further he felt from the aim he was pursuing.' In Moscow and the country, convinced he'd find no solution in materialists, he read and re-read thoroughly 'Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, the philosophers who gave a non-materialistic explanation of life.' Their ideas seemed fruitful when reading, but 'as soon as he began to read or sought for himself a solution of problems, the same thing always happened.' Following fixed definitions of obscure words like 'spirit, will, freedom, essence,' he seemed to comprehend something. But forgetting the artificial train of reasoning, turning 'from life itself to what had satisfied him while thinking in accordance with the fixed definitions,' all this artificial edifice 'fell to pieces at once like a house of cards.' Reading Schopenhauer, he replaced 'will' with 'love,' and for days this philosophy satisfied him. What delighted him was the thought of 'a still existing living church, embracing all the beliefs of men, and having God at its head, and therefore holy and infallible.' But reading a Catholic writer's church history, then a Greek orthodox writer's history, seeing 'the two churches, in their very conception infallible, each deny the authority of the other,' Homiakov's doctrine 'lost all its charm for him, and this edifice crumbled into dust like the philosophers' edifices.' All that spring he was not himself. The prevalent conviction was not merely falsehood, 'it was the cruel jeer of some wicked power, some evil, hateful power, to whom one could not submit.' He must escape. The means: death. 'Levin, a happy father and husband, in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord that he might not be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun for fear of shooting himself.' But Levin did not shoot himself. He went on living.