L. 톨스토이의 『안나 카레니나』에 나타난 삶과 죽음 = Life and Death in Tolstoy's «Anna Karenina»

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The purpose of this study is to examine the theme of life and death in "Anna Carrenina" by focusing on Anna and Levin's two plots and to interpret its meaning. The theme of life and death is one of the leitmotifs of Tolstoy's work. He describes this subject in various ways in his many works. «Three Deaths», «Ivan Ilyich's Death», «War and Peace», and «Anna Karenina» are some of their representative works.
Tolstoy experienced various deaths. The mysterious death of a family in his childhood; the terrible death on a battlefield during youth; the appearance of death at the middle of the night in a rural inn at the height of life; the fundamental changes in life after convincement and preaching about the truth of life based on Tolstoyism
and its practicing; his death alone solitarily. Based on this experience, he tried to identify this topic through his life and literature as a whole.
For Tolstoy, the meaning of life and death is closely related. Because human life can realize true value and true meaning through death. The nature of death is determined entirely by the content of individual human life and his attitude toward life. Tolstoy argues that death is not just an object of fear and rejection, but an extension of life and a new dimension of life. Therefore, death is a new dimension of life, not destruction that stops life.
The novel «Anna Karenina» is one of the most famous novels in Russian literature that is well known throughout the world. The novel depicts the stories of three aristocratic families - Karenins, Oblonskys, and Levins. One of them (the Karenin) is completely broken, and the other family (Oblonsky) only preserves the name. And the third, the happy husband and father, Constantine Levin experiences a deep spiritual crisis but overcomes it through the life of the peasantry.
Through the passionate love made by the accidental encounter with Bronsky, the heroine, Anna realizes the real life and thoroughly liberated falsehood of the high society. She boldly leaves the world and escapes to another world where she can freely express her true feelings. However, the gap between the two worlds is extremely solid and she can not overcome it and ends her life with suicide. Anna's death can be interpreted in
various ways. However, although she was a party to the affair, it is clear that she rebelled against the false consciousness of the high society through her entire life, and was finally killed by it. Although she tragically died, her death caused a change in the thoughts and attitudes of the people around her. This is another meaning of her death.
For Levin, it was the life and work of peasants in the country that gave answers to the unresolved life and death problems before and after his marriage. Unlike many characters who forget to die, this problem is a fundamental task that must be solved in order to live their proper life. Levin tried to solve this by means of self-reflection, conversation with others, reading, and so on. But they were all fragmentary, superficial, or ambiguous stories. The reason is that they have diverged from real life. They also live for their own sake, never caring for others or living for others. So death is the end of life that can not be avoided, and as a result, life is meaningless, so they only indulge pleasure. However, Levin finds the wisdom of the peasants who embody the meaning of life in the consideration of labor and the life of others and through which they fully accept death. This kind of life is a way of living according to God, the wisdom that the Russian people have kept.
The meaning of life that Levin realized is nothing more than the meaning of life that Tolstoy found and preached. Tolstoy accepts the feelings of being alive humbly and turns it into the heart of 'good' as the meaning of death. Tolstoy's thought about a death has changed the attitude of life in the real world and becomes a moment of lowering oneself in a moral, innocent and modest attitude.