Amelia Lindsay-Kaufman

The Devil is in the Details: the Satanic Source of Love in Anna Karenina

There is a great tension in Western literature and culture between passionate romantic

love and Christian law, which considers lust a deadly sin. Tolstoy in his later years believed that

if sexual desire outside of marriage is immoral according to Christianity then all sexual desire

must be immoral (“…infatuation and conjunction with the object of our carnal love … will never

help our worthwhile pursuits but only hinder them.”)1 However, in many pagan traditions sexual

and romantic love are depicted as virtuous and necessary. The Western literary tradition has been

influenced heavily by both Christian and pagan mythology, resulting in an underlying tension

between the two contradictory ideologies. In Western mythology and fiction, narratives focusing

on either agape (impersonal Christian love) and eros (romantic and sexual love, often conflated

with pagan mythology and pagan love gods) mix unpredictably, resulting in inconsistent

storylines where Christian ideology is dominant in some situations and the supremacy of

romantic love is dominant in others. Paul Siegel, in an analysis of Christianity in Romeo and

Juliet, wrote that in the play “the ideas of the religion of love and those of Christianity not only

work together; they also pull in opposite directions, creating a dramatic tension ... According to a

tenet of the medieval religion of love that continued to be expressed in the Elizabethan

adaptations of novelle, joining the loved one in death qualifies the lover as one of Cupid's saints,

and ensures that the two meet in the 'Paradise in which dwelt the god of love, and in which were

reserved places for his disciples'. According to Christianity, suicide … ensures damnation.”2

While engaging with the story, Christian audiences of Romeo and Juliet both in the Elizabethan

Era and in modern times will easily dismiss their Christian worldview in favor of the pagan one
which prioritizes romantic love, and will sincerely believe that the deaths of the two lovers were

not immoral even if under any other circumstances they would agree that suicide is a sin. When

romantic love is concerned in fiction, the pagan mythology otherwise dormant in the Western

psyche reappears to take precedence over Christian doctrine. The paradox of God’s creation of

sexuality (Why is sexuality sinful if God created it?), and the apparent immunity of fictional

lovers to Christian morality are some of the reasons for the tension between sexual or romantic

love and Christian philosophy. This tension can be resolved in fiction in several ways. In Romeo

and Juliet, Siegel argues that Shakespeare takes the view that “sexual love is a manifestation of

the cosmic love of God, which holds together the universe in a chain of love and imposes order

on it”3 and thus the inconsistency is resolved. Alternately sexuality can be understood as a

deliberate punishment from God, as God tells Eve in Genesis after she has eaten the forbidden

fruit, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”4 Another way to avoid

inconsistency is to argue that sexual love is in fact not the work of God, but of a separate,

malevolent entity who operates on the same scale as God. This is closest to the worldview

expressed in Anna Karenina. Whether or not this was Tolstoy’s intention, it is clear from

associations between sexual love and demonic imagery in Anna Karenina that, in the universe in

which the novel takes place, sexual desire is created by the Devil.

Throughout the novel, Tolstoy characterizes Anna and Vronsky’s relationship with

language related to demons. After Anna and Vronsky’s relationship begins, Anna has

“something uncanny, demonic and fascinating in her”5, and later in their relationship they

nickname Anna’s jealousy “the fiend” (or, in other translations, “the demon”). In an early draft

of the novel, a chapter detailing Anna’s feelings for Vronsky was titled “The Devil”.6 From these

examples the link is evident in the novel between Anna and Vronsky’s sexual love and the Devil,
with obvious implications for the morality of their sexual desire. Additionally, Tolstoy describes

Anna’s love for Vronsky with imagery relating to shadows; when Anna returns from Saint

Petersburg the gossiping women say that she has returned “with Vronsky’s shadow”. In her

essay on the use of shadow imagery in Anna Karenina, Amy Mandelker argues that the shadows

relate Anna’s love to original sin: “Returning to the primary text of original sin reveals the

shadow in its original shape as the Serpent in Eden. When God condemns it to slide along the

ground worrying the heel of woman and her offspring, forever crushed beneath her heel, the

early conflation of serpent, shadow, and woman is revealed.”7 Even though the serpent in

Genesis was not originally intended to be the Devil (the concept of Satan did not exist yet), the

serpent was identified as the Devil in the Book of Revelation and Christians generally accept that

they are the same figure.8 Most scholars acknowledge an association between the serpent and

sexuality and some even go as far as to say that the eating of the forbidden fruit was a

euphemism for sex with the Devil. R.F. Fortune argues that a Maori myth with obvious parallels

to the story in Genesis is in fact a preserved earlier version of that same story and that the

explicit references to sex in the Maori myth reveal the original plot point which connects

sexuality and original sin in the story of Genesis.9 The association between Anna and shadows

creates a parallel between Anna’s fall and Eve’s, and from there a connection between Anna’s

desire and the work of the Devil.

Anna’s isolation and subsequent personality change at Vronsky’s hands in Anna

Karenina strongly reflects the conditions of animus possession, which cause women to become

aggressively domineering and jealous.10 The animus represents the masculine aspects of the

psyche, and Anna’s animus possession manifests itself not only in terms of her jealousy and

aggression but also in terms of her progressive masculinization later in the novel. Jung was
aware of a relationship between animus possession and the Devil; “In myths and fairy tales

[animus possession] is often represented by the devil or an "old man of the mountain," that is, a

troll or ogre, holding the heroine prisoner and forcing her to kill all men who approach her or to

deliver them into the hands of the demon.”11 Vronsky’s sequestration of Anna away from her

female peers is reminiscent of the myth of Eros and Psyche as well. In the myth, Aphrodite is

jealous of Psyche’s beauty and commands Eros to punish her. Eros scratches himself with his

own arrow and falls in love with Psyche instead. Meanwhile Psyche’s father consults the Oracle

of Apollo, who tells him that Psyche’s husband will be “a monster whom neither gods nor men

can resist.”12 Psyche is then spirited away by Zephyr the West Wind and deposited in a secluded

grove. Each night, Eros visits her in complete darkness but forbids her to look upon him in the

light. One day Psyche is visited by her sisters, who remind her that she was prophesied to marry

a terrible monster and urge her to find out what her husband actually looks like. That night,

Psyche waits for Eros to fall asleep and then holds up a lantern to look at him. Psyche is

astounded by Eros’ beauty, but when a drop of oil falls from the lamp onto Eros, he flees and

Psyche is left to atone to Aphrodite by fulfilling various tasks including traveling to the

Underworld. Tolstoy parallels the scene with the lantern in Anna Karenina as Anna looks over

Vronsky: “He was asleep there, and sleeping soundly. She went up to him, and holding the light

above his face, she gazed a long while at him. Now when he was asleep, she loved him so that at

the sight of him she could not keep back tears of tenderness. But she knew that if he waked up he

would look at her with cold eyes, convinced that he was right, and that before telling him of her

love, she would have to prove to him that he had been wrong in his treatment of her.”13 This

scene directly follows a moment in which Anna is reading by candlelight and suddenly shadows

surround her and she experiences a premonition of her death. The shadow imagery in this scene
calls back the symbolism of Eve and the serpent, connecting Psyche’s pursuit of knowledge of

her husband’s appearance with Eve’s pursuit for knowledge in the Garden of Eden. The

connotations of both of these mythical transgressions reinforce the sinful nature of Anna’s love

for Vronsky. Here Tolstoy uses Eros as a stand-in for the Devil, which is not an impossible

stretch given that Psyche’s sisters mention him in association with serpents (“The inhabitants of

this valley say that your husband is a terrible and monstrous serpent”14) and that Eros is visually

very similar to Thanatos the god of Death.15

Gary Saul Morson argues that Tolstoy writes Stiva as a representative of the Devil.16

Because Stiva is the character aside from Anna with the greatest tendency towards infidelity and

sexuality, Tolstoy, by describing him in a way that reflects the Devil, makes another link

between sexuality and demonic influence. Even though Stiva has no evil intentions, Morson

writes that his actions are a greater determining factor in his morality. “In Tolstoy, evil is first of

all what the novel refers to as a "negative event." It does not require even evil wishes, just

forgetting, the way Stiva never can remember he has a wife and children. Evil is an absence,

which is why, like so many important things, it is camouflaged and sought in the wrong

places.”17 Therefore Stiva is not the terrifying demon figure one might expect, but rather a

pleasant, compelling version more true to the biblical description of an attractive Satan “full of

wisdom and perfect in beauty”18, in fact, Morson claims that Dostoevsky’s depiction of an

ordinary Devil character in Brothers Karamazov was inspired by Stiva.

Tolstoy also hints at the Devil’s presence when his characters talk about the source of

their feelings. From their own descriptions it seems that none of the characters have any agency

over their feelings of romantic love, as almost all of the characters describe their love as coming

from some kind of external force. Levin says of his feelings for Kitty that “It’s not love. I’ve
been in love, but it’s not that. It’s not my feeling, but a sort of force outside me has taken

possession of me.”19 This force is usually involved in creating some kind of strife. Karenin has

his own force which will not let him reconcile with Anna: “[Karenin] felt that besides the blessed

spiritual force controlling his soul, there was another, a brutal force, as powerful, or more

powerful, which controlled his life, and that this force would not allow him that humble peace he

longed for.”20 When Karenin tries to communicate with his wife the force intervenes (“But every

time he began talking to her, he felt that the spirit of evil and deceit, which had taken possession

of her, had possession of him too, and he talked to her in a tone quite unlike that in which he had

meant to talk”21), and when Anna lies to her husband the force helps her (“She felt that some

unseen force had come to her aid and was supporting her”22). A similar force creates conflict

between Anna and Vronsky; when they argue, Anna tries to reconcile, “but some strange force of

evil would not let her give herself up to her feelings, as though the rules of warfare would not

permit her to surrender”23 and she feels that “beside the love that bound them together there had

grown up between them some evil spirit of strife, which she could not exorcise from his, and still

less from her own heart.”24 While this may not be evidence of the literal Devil actively

controlling the characters like puppets, it certainly seems like a sign of all of the evil feelings

which the Devil represents. If the reader understands the Devil as a symbol of malevolent

intentions, the characters certainly have been possessed by this kind of literary Devil.

Interestingly, about half the time the characters attribute their feelings to this evil force, and the

other half they attribute it to God. When describing her feelings Anna says that “the time came

when I knew that I couldn’t cheat myself any longer, that I was alive, that I was not to blame,

that God has made me so that I must love and live.”25 Similarly Dolly says about Anna “How is

she to blame? She wants to live. God has put that in our hearts.”26 Even Stiva, who Tolstoy
writes as a version of the Devil, attributes Anna’s love to God. He tells Karenina, “it seems it

was the will of God," and then immediately senses that his statement was inappropriate (“and as

he said it felt how foolish a remark it was, and with difficulty repressed a smile at his own

foolishness”27). In Tolstoy’s later short story The Restoration of Hell a group of demons confess

to making humans confuse the teachings of Jesus with the teachings of the Devil. In the story the

Devil says “I have arranged it so that men do not believe in [Jesus’] teaching but in mine, which

they call by his name.”28 If Tolstoy believed late in his life that people could attribute sinful ideas

to God, it is not unreasonable to assume that he may have arrived at this idea earlier while

writing Anna Karenina, in which case it would be believable in these passages that the characters

are attributing the work of the Devil to God. Before Levin’s wedding, a priest even makes the

connection between the Devil and adultery: “Well, what sort of bringing-up can you give your

babes if you do not overcome the temptation of the devil, enticing you to infidelity?”29 In the

universe in which this novel takes place, sexual love and temptation to infidelity come from a

source external to the people they affect, and Tolstoy hints that the external source is in fact the

Devil.

In Tolstoy’s universe, sexuality and romantic love, like the Devil, can take the place of

Christianity in the lives of his characters. Once Anna succumbs to romantic love for Vronsky,

she is unable to access Christianity in the way that she had before: “She repeated continually,

"My God! my God!" But neither "God" nor "my" had any meaning to her. The idea of seeking

help in her difficulty in religion was as remote from her as seeking help from Alexey

Alexandrovitch himself, although she had never had doubts of the faith in which she had been

brought up. She knew that the support of religion was possible only upon condition of

renouncing what made up for her the whole meaning of life.”30 This goes back to the tension
between narratives following the laws of Christian doctrine versus narratives following the laws

of romantic love. De Rougement described the process by which lovers come to exist outside of

conventional Christian morality, and the paradox of holding lovers accountable for their actions

according to Christian laws that no longer apply. He writes of Tristan and Isolde that “They love,

but not one another. They have sinned, but cannot repent; for they are not to blame. They make

confession, but wish neither to reform for even beg forgiveness. Actually, then, like all other

great lovers, they imagine that they have been ravished "beyond good and evil" into a kind of

transcendental state outside ordinary human experience, into an ineffable absolute irreconcilable

with the world, but that they feel to be more real than the world."31 In its capacity to set new

standards for good and evil, romance comes to resemble religion itself. Morson writes that

“Romance sets itself against the daily grind. Reflecting its religious origins (in the

Manichaeanism of the Albigensian heresy), it aspires to lift us above the mundane. In the modern

world, romantic love has therefore readily served as a secular substitute for religion.”32 Romantic

love offers up a set of doctrines which prioritize passion and hedonism and work contrary to

Christianity. Similarly, the Devil (as seen in Tolstoy’s own story The Restoration of Hell) tries to

supplant Christian laws with his own hedonistic ones. The Devil can here represent an opponent

to the moral hegemony of Christianity, which in Anna Karenina takes the form of romantic love.

Tolstoy also links romantic love with the Devil in that romantic love is often tied to death

and Tolstoy mentions the Devil in conjunction with death. Just as feelings of love manifest as

external forces to the characters, so does death. As Levin’s brother is dying, “Death, the

inevitable end of all, for the first time presented itself to [Levin] with irresistible force”33 exactly

as Levin’s feelings of love for Kitty had presented themselves earlier. Additionally, as he is

dying, Levin’s brother is “groaning half asleep and from habit calling without distinction on God
and the devil”34 much like the other characters attribute their romantic feeling to God and the evil

force without distinction. Tolstoy was famously terrified of death, therefore associating two

things that he feared (lust and death) with each other and with the Devil is not unexpected for

Tolstoy.

Anna Karenina supposedly contains examples of every kind of love, so it is especially

clear by contrast with the many other types of love in the novel that only passionate sexual love

is linked with the Devil. Stiva, who Tolstoy characterizes by his tendency to infidelity, is as

Morson describes him, “The Russian ideal of evil” and was likely the inspiration for

Dostoevsky’s depiction of the Devil. Anna and Vronsky’s relationship is full of demonic

imagery and shadows, which Mandelker links to the Devil in his role in the story of Genesis.

Most of the characters attribute feelings of love to external forces or to God as a way of avoiding

responsibility for their feelings in the same way that they attribute feelings of spite and evil to

external forces. The element of demonic force applies not just to the characters who commit

adultery, but also to Karenin and Levin, showing that the link to the Devil extends to all romantic

love and not just adulterous love, although in general the demonic presence is much stronger in

cases of infidelity. By the end of his life Tolstoy supported a position that all sexuality is sinful,

even in marriage, as evidenced by his famous 1889 story The Kreutzer Sonata. At the time that

he wrote Anna Karenina he had not arrived at this conclusion yet; Tolstoy in general describes

Kitty and Levin’s love positively, with the implication that their attraction to one another is

moral because they conducted their relationship and marriage according to conventional societal

and religious rules. However, the many associations between sexual love and the Devil in Anna

Karenina show that the beginnings of disapproval of sexuality were already forming in Tolstoy’s

mind during his writing of the novel, even if it was not his conscious intention to associate
sexuality with the Devil. The natural end point of these ideas was his short story The Devil,

written in 1889 (the title of the story overtly presents the idea that the Devil is the source of

carnal desires)35, which is further evidence that the connection may have already occurred to him

while writing Anna Karenina. Tolstoy’s novels are so vast and detailed that the reader can

assume that the universes and laws of reality within the novels are internally consistent. From the

many hints of Satan’s influence in Tolstoy’s accounts of romantic love, it is evident that the

Devil is the source of passionate sexual love in Anna Karenina. In this way the paradox of the

source of sexuality (“why did a benevolent God create sexuality if it is sinful?”) is resolved: In

Anna Karenina sexuality is created not by the benevolent God but by the Devil.

Citations:

1
"The Kreutzer Sonata." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 15 Apr. 2017. Web..
2
Siegel, Paul N. "Christianity and the Religion of Love in Romeo and Juliet." Shakespeare Quarterly 12.4 (1961):
371-392.
3
Ibid.
4
Genesis 3:16. New International Version. Print.
5
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Trans. Constance Garnett. N.p.: Modern Library, 1901. Project Gutenberg. David
Brannan, 1 July 1998. Web.
6
Mandelker, Amy. "The Woman with a Shadow: Fables of Demon and Psyche in" Anna Karenina"." Novel: A Forum
on Fiction. Vol. 24. No. 1. Duke University Press, 1990.
7
Ibid.
8
"Serpents in the Bible." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 10 Apr. 2017. Web.
9
Fortune, R. F. "The symbolism of the serpent." The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 7 (1926): 237.
10
Sanford, John A. "Chapter 2." The Invisible Partners: How the Male and Female in Each of Us Affects Our
Relationships. New York: Paulist, 1980. N. pag. Print.
11
"Marie-Louise Von Franz." Marie-Louise Von Franz - Wikiquote. Web.
12
Apuleius, Lucius. Cupid and Psyche. University of Pittsburgh, Web.
13
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Trans. Constance Garnett.: Modern Library, 1901. Project Gutenberg. David
Brannan, 1 July 1998. Web.
14
Apuleius, Lucius. Cupid and Psyche. University of Pittsburgh, Web.
15
"Thanatos." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Web.
16
Morson, Gary Saul. Anna Karenina in Our Time: seeing more wisely. Yale University Press, 2007.
17
Ibid.
18
Ezekiel 28:12. New International Version. Print.
19
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Trans. Constance Garnett.: Modern Library, 1901. Project Gutenberg. David
Brannan, 1 July 1998. Web.
20
Ibid
21
Ibid
22
Ibid
23
Ibid
24
Ibid
25
Ibid
26
Ibid
27
Ibid
28
Tolstoy, Leo. "The restoration of hell." On Life and Essays on Religion (1934): 309-330.
29
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Trans. Constance Garnett.: Modern Library, 1901. Project Gutenberg. David
Brannan, 1 July 1998. Web.
30
Ibid
31
De Rougemont, Denis. Love in the Western World. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1956. Print.
32
Morson, Gary. "Marriage, love, and time in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina." Journal of Family Theory & Review 2.4
(2010): 353-369.
33
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Trans. Constance Garnett.: Modern Library, 1901. Project Gutenberg. David
Brannan, 1 July 1998. Web.
34
Ibid
35
Tolstoy, Leo, Louise Maude, and Aylmer Maude. The Devil. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Pubishing, 2004. Print.