Forget Oneself and Love Others
In Tolstoy’s Anne Karenina , the young woman named Kitty goes into a sort of depression after the man she thought wanted to marry her abandoned her for someone else. Eventually her desperate parents took her to a town in Germany to try to recover, and there she became acquainted with another young lady named Varenka. As Kitty got to know Varenka, she was amazed at her selflessness as she went about in an unassuming way helping others. She learned that Varenka did not have living parents but had been raised by another lady to whom Varenka was devoted. Varenka went about taking care of the sick, and the text describes her this way: “Varenka, alone in the world, without friends or relations, with a melancholy disappointment in the past, desiring nothing, regretting nothing, was just that perfection of which Kitty dared hardly dream. In Varenka she realized that one has but to forget oneself and love others, and one will be calm, happy, and noble. And that was what Kitty longed to be. Seei...
