Art, Literature, and Passions of the Skies by Anna Teresa Tymieniecka

Author:Anna Teresa Tymieniecka
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

The terrible agony of the character, that would perhaps seem outlandish from a natural or a realist standpoint alien oddly enough to the realism of Tolstoy, which limits itself to the style but not to the philosophical comprehension of the character, is none the less justifiable in the light of the outright puritan condemnation of flesh and of the would-be diabolical potency thereof, which spreads to the whole personality like a cancerous tumour: a man that always had been cheerful and clever and that had taken from life what if offered to him, all of a sudden goes mad about a simple desire that he must set aside without further ado, and the worst is that he cannot soothe his sorrow neither with himself nor with anyone else for he does not have a trustful confident at hand. However, when his tautness is unbearable, he makes the decision of speaking to an uncle of his, who is at first amazed to hear that he has been faithful to his wife and that thinks that there is no need to make such a fuss, unless Yevgeny is in love with Stepanida, which the latter denies eagerly: “Oh, it’s nothing like that. It’s a kind of force that’s taken hold of me and won’t let me go”.7 And since the grip of flesh is more and more stifling, he, already desperate, follows his uncle’s advice and arranges a trip of 2 months to Crimea with his wife, who brings forth a baby when they are there. Utterly free from obsession, Yevgeny recovers his level-headedness and when they return home he is elected unanimously as the representative of his region to the local council; withal, the crop is abundant, the estate works well and life smiles on him. But as soon as he runs into Stepanida, the obsession springs with redoubled violence and he has to acknowledge that his liberty was a momentary illusion and that he has lost the fight: “After all, she’s a devil. Just that – a devil. She’s taken possession of me against my will. Shall I kill her? Yes”.8 On a second thought, he decides not to kill Stepanida but to kill himself, which he does. None is able to understand what he has done, not even his uncle, who by no means binds his suicide with the confession of his inward torment. And this sensation of total absurdness reappears perhaps with greater force in an alternative ending that Tolstoy wrote but never brought to light, wherein Yevgeny kills in fact Stepanida and spends some months in prison and then in a monastery because he is acquitted under the pretext of his having been temporarily insane, but before his releasing he starts to drink and when he returns home he is a hopeless alcoholic.

Before anything, I would like to emphasise the unlikelihood of either of these endings, which only recapitulates the unlikelihood of the whole psychological development of the protagonist: is it believable that a man in his

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