Lifelong marriage sentence

The controversial proposal of a „lifelong“ marriage revealed one thing, among others, about its author, Culture Minister Jehlička: He has never read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

The scandalized proposal of a „lifelong“ marriage revealed one thing, among others, about its author, Culture Minister Jehlička: He has never read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

Maybe he remembers the novel's synopsis from when he was a schoolboy: A married woman falls in love with another man and jumps under a moving train. The minister certainly knows that she jumped under the train, but he has probably never searched for the reason why she did it. Her husband Karenin refused to give his consent to a divorce for which she had repeatedly asked him. That is how it went in the 19th century: A divorce was granted, but one had to ask for it.

Anna's tragic story must have left a permanent impression on an attentive reader and shown him the dark side of an involuntary union between two people, the rules of which are determined by society. The minister therefore cannot have read Anna Karenina. Or maybe he did, but he thought to himself that the unfaithful woman deserved such a fate. In any case, the ludicrous amendment to the civil code revealed something strange: the 19th-century museum of ideas that Jehlička preserves in his head.

What would this contract agreed upon by fiancés as a replacement of regular…