But the principal interest of the romance, besides the tragedy of Anna and the varied pictures of Russian society towards 1860--of salons, officers' clubs, balls, theatres, races--lies in its autobiographical character. More than any other personage of Tolstoy's books, Constantine Levine is the incarnation of the writer himself. Not only has Tolstoy attributed to him his own ideas--at one and the same time conservative and democratic--and the anti-Liberalism of the provincial aristocrat who despises "intellectuals;[10] but he has made him the gift of part of his own life. The love of Levine and Kitty and their first years of marriage are a transposition of his own domestic memories, just as the death of Levine's brother is a melancholy evocation of the death of Tolstoy's brother, Dmitri. The latter portion, useless to the romance, gives us an insight into the troubles which were then oppressing the author. While the epilogue of _War and Peace_ was an artistic transition to another projected work, the epilogue to _Anna Karenin_ is an autobiographical transition to the moral revolution which, two years later, was to find expression in the _Confessions._ Already, in the course of _Anna Karenin,_ he returns again and again to a violent or ironical criticism of contemporary society, which he never ceased to attack in his subsequent works. War is declared upon deceit: war upon lies; upon virtuous as well as vicious lies; upon liberal chatter, fashionable charity, drawing-room religion, and philanthropy. War against the world, which distorts all truthful feelings, and inevitably crushes the generous enthusiasm of the mind! Death throws an unexpected light upon the social conventions. Before Anna dying, the stilted Karenin is softened. Into this lifeless soul, in which everything is artificial, shines a ray of love and of Christian forgiveness. All three--the husband, the wife, and the lover--are momentarily transformed. All three become simple and loyal. But as Anna recovers, all three are sensible, "facing the almost holy moral strength which was guiding them from within, the existence of another force, brutal but all-powerful, which was directing their lives despite themselves, and which would not leave them in peace." And they knew from the beginning that they would be powerless in the coming struggle, in which they would be obliged to do the evil that the world would consider necessary."[11]