![]() ![]() We “fall in love,” we do not jump in love. What is more, according to this ideology, we do not choose such love. Lovers love, not so much each other, but love itself. All-consuming, it allows no room for anything else. It transcends all ordinary prosaic conditions and lifts lovers to a realm of resplendent meaning. Romantic love presses upon us with irresistible intensity. The myth embodied in great romances tells us that love envelops our whole being. Tolstoy wants his readers to be aware that this choice exists for them as well. Only intimate love is compatible with a family. Over time Kitty comes to recognize that in addition to romantic love there is also intimate love. She does not yet recognize that what she feels for Levin is also a form of love, and that she has a real choice. In Anna Karenina, Kitty at first prefers the dashing and romantic Vronsky to the kind and staid Levin because she has assumed, as most of us do, that she should marry the one she “loves” and she has been told that “love” is romantic rather than prosaic. ![]() It is an ideology of love, in fact, but we do not recognize it as one. By contrast, Tolstoy wants us to recognize that romantic love is but one kind of love. Today very few people question that “true love” is the grand and glorious feeling that consumes one’s very being, as in Romeo and Juliet and countless debased imitations. The dramatic understanding of life that Tolstoy rejected has, if anything, grown still more powerful. ![]()
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