Anna Karenina · Chapter
Chapter XXV explained
Konstantin Levin visits his consumptive and volatile brother Nikolay in a cheerless Moscow room.
What happens
Konstantin Levin visits his consumptive and volatile brother Nikolay in a cheerless Moscow room. Nikolay passionately explains his plan for a productive locksmiths' association to liberate peasants from capitalist oppression, but Levin is more focused on his brother's deteriorating health and heavy drinking. The conversation turns to family, Sergey Ivanovitch's views, and Nikolay's bitterness about his wasted life. The chapter ends with Levin and Marya Nikolaevna getting the drunk Nikolay to bed.
Themes in this chapter
Isolation and Misunderstanding
Nikolay is physically and ideologically isolated, his passionate ideas met with Levin's pity rather than understanding. The brothers struggle to connect across a chasm of life choices and worldviews.
Search for Meaning
Nikolay's fervent advocacy for the locksmiths' association is an 'anchor to save him from self-contempt' and a desperate attempt to give purpose to a life he feels he has 'made a mess of.'
Family and Domesticity
The fraught brotherly bond is central. Levin's visit is driven by familial duty and pity. Nikolay's nostalgic questions about their childhood home reveal a longing for lost domestic stability.
Characters to notice
- Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin
Visits his brother Nikolay, pained by his illness and erratic behavior. Tries to navigate the tense conversation, feeling pity and horror, and ultimately helps get Nikolay to bed.
- Nikolay Dmitrievitch Levin
Consumptive, volatile, and drinking heavily. Passionately advocates for his socialist locksmiths' association, rails against capitalism and his brother Sergey Ivanovitch, and expresses fear of death and regret for his wasted life.
- Marya Nikolaevna
Nikolay's companion for over a year. She quietly tends to him, reveals his drinking problem to Konstantin, and helps calm him and get him to bed, showing a patient, protective affection.
- Sergey Ivanovitch Koznishev
Absent but a major point of contention. Nikolay fiercely attacks his intellectual views and article, seeing them as self-deceptive justifications for existing social evils.
Key passages
““You know that capital oppresses the laborer. The laborers with us, the peasants, bear all the burden of labor... all the surplus values are taken from them by the capitalists.””
Nikolay articulates a Marxist critique, arguing capitalists exploit peasants by extracting the surplus value of their labor.
Highlights the social critique and ideological divide between the brothers.
““He’s no good either,” he said. “I see, of course.…””
After Kritsky leaves, Nikolay dismisses him as worthless, showing his pattern of alienating those around him.
Illustrates Nikolay's bitterness and inability to sustain positive relationships.
““I’m afraid of death, awfully afraid of death.””
Nikolay confesses a profound terror of mortality, shifting from political rage to raw personal fear.
Reveals the vulnerability and despair beneath his ideological fervor.