Kalliope’s Reviews > Anna Karenina > Status Update

War is on the one hand such a bestial cruel, and awful think that no single person, let alone a Christian, can personally take on the responsibility for starting a war; only a government can do that, being dutybound to do so and being inevitably drawn into war. On the other hand, both science and common sense tell us that it matters of state, and in matters of war, citizens renounce their personal will.

If goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness, and if it has a consequence in the form of a reward, it is also not goodness. Goodness must therefore lie outside the chain of cause and effect.

At one point, while reading Schopenhauer he had replaced the word "will" with the word "love", and this new philosophy gave him solace for those few days while he adhered to it; but then when he looked at it from the vantage of real life, it collapsed in just the same way, and turned out to be a muslim garment providing no warmth.

While in town we have nothing in our field of vision except the Serbian war.

censuring the piece for its excessive, cloying, false simplicity and comparing it with the simplicity of the Pre-Raphaelites in painting.

From the footnotes:

Wagner’s Ring first performed in Bayreuth in 1876 – hotly discussed in Europe and in Russia where very little of his music had been heard at this point. T’s knowledge of W’s music at this time close to non-existent – later on his partial attendance of Siegfried in 1896 – would lead to a blistering critique in his What is Art? 1897.

Tolstoy did not like Wagner - Levin argued that the mistake Wagner and all his followers made was in wanting music to cross over into the sphere of another art form. From the footnotes:

He tried not to get distracted and spoil his impressions by looking at the white-tied conductor waving his arms, which was always an unpleasant distraction from the music, at the ladies in hats who had methodically tied ribbons over their ears for the concert, or at all those people who were either not engrossed in anything or engrossed in any number of things except music.

...what happened to him in this respect was what they say happens to drunkards: the first glass sticks in the throat, the second swoops down like a falcon, while the third goes down like birds.

And she recollected that Anna screwed up her eyes precisely when the intimate side of life came into question. It is as if she screws her eyes up where her life is concerned, so as not to see anything.