Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

[HERO]

Tolstoy: ESI



Anna Karenina (trans. Kyrill Zinovieff & Jenny Hughes); p. 689-93 (Pt. 7, Ch. 28 & 29):

The weather was clear. A fine drizzle had been falling all the morning, and now it had just cleared up. The iron roofs, the flagstones of the pavement, the cobbles in the roadway, the wheels and the leather, the brass and the metalwork of carriages – everything glistened brightly in the May sunshine. It was three o’clock, the time when streets are at their most lively.

Sitting in the corner of the comfortable carriage, swaying only slightly on its resilient springs with the swift trot of the greys, Anna again went over in her mind – to the ceaseless rattle of the wheels and the rapidly changing impressions in the open air – the events of the last few days and saw her situation in quite a different light to what it had seemed to her at home. Even the thought of death did not seem to her now as clear and terrifying, and death itself did not appear inevitable. Now she reproached herself for the depths of humiliation to which she had descended. “I am imploring him to forgive me. I gave in to him. Admitted I was in the wrong. Why? Can’t I live without him?” And leaving unanswered the question of how she was going to live without him, she began reading the signboards. “Office and Warehouse. Dental Surgeon. Yes, I’ll tell Dolly everything. She doesn’t like Vronsky. It’ll be humiliating, painful, but I’ll tell her everything. She is fond of me and I’ll follow her advice. I will not give in to him, I won’t allow him to mould my character. Filippov, Cakes. They say they send their pastry to Petersburg. Moscow Water is so good. And then the Mytishchi Wells and Pancakes.” And she recalled how long, long ago, when she was only seventeen, she had visited the Trinity Monastery with her aunt. “It still had to be by horse and carriage. Was it really me, with red hands? What a lot of things that then seemed to me so marvellous and unattainable, have become insignificant, and the things I had then are now unattainable for ever! Would I have believed then that I could reach such depths of humiliation? How proud and happy he’ll be when he gets my note! But I will show him… What a nasty smell this paint had. Why do they go on painting and building all the time? Dress-making and Millinery,” she read. A man bowed to her. It was Annushka’s husband. “Our parasites,” she remembered Vronsky saying. “Our? Why our? The terrible thing is that the past can’t be torn out by its roots. It can’t be torn out, but it can be ignored. And I shall ignore it.” And here she remembered her past with Karenin and how she had blotted it out from her memory. “Dolly will think that I’m leaving a second husband and that therefore I must surely be in the wrong. As if I had any wish to be in the right! I can’t!” she murmured and wanted to cry. But immediately she started wondering what those two girls were smiling at. “Love, probably? They don’t know how dreary it is, how humiliating… the Avenue and children. Three boys running, playing at horses, Seryozha! I shall lose everything and not get him back. I shall, I’ll lose everything if he doesn’t come back. Perhaps he has missed the train and is back by now. Want more humiliation!” she said to herself. “No, I’ll go in to Dolly and tell her straight out: ‘I’m unhappy, I deserve it, the fault’s mine, but I’m unhappy all the same, help me.’ These horses, this carriage – how I loathe myself in this carriage – they’re all his; but I shall never see them again.”

Thinking up the words she would use to tell Dolly everything and deliberately putting salt on her wounded heart, Anna went up the steps.

“Any guests?” she asked in the hall.

“Yekaterina Alexandrovna Levin,” replied the servant.

“Kitty! The Kitty Vronsky had been in love with,” thought Anna, “the girl he always remembered with affection. He is sorry he did not marry her. But me he thinks of with loathing and is sorry he has ever started this love affair.”

The two sisters were having a consultation about feeding the baby when Anna arrived. Dolly came out alone to meet her guest, who was preventing them from going on with their conversation.

“Ah, you haven’t left yet? I wanted to come and see you myself,” she said. “I received a letter from Stiva today.”

“We’ve also received a telegram,” replied Anna, looking round to see Kitty.

“He writes that he doesn’t understand what Alexei Alexandrovich really wants, but that he won’t leave without an answer.”

“I thought you had someone with you. May I read the letter?”

“I have – Kitty,” said Dolly embarrassed. “She has stayed in the nursery. She has been very ill.”

“So I’ve heard. May I read the letter?”

“I’ll bring it right away. But he has not refused; on the contrary, Stiva has hopes,” said Dolly, pausing in the doorway.

“I have no hope and, besides, I don’t want it,” said Anna.

“What’s this? Does Kitty think it beneath her dignity to meet me?” thought Anna when she remained alone. “She may be right, too. But it’s not for her, her, who was in love with Vronsky, to let me see it, even though it’s true. I know that no respectable woman can receive me in my present situation. I knew that from that very first moment I sacrificed everything to him. And here’s the reward! Oh, how I hate him. And what did I come here for? I feel worse here, feel the situation more difficult to bear.” She heard the sisters’ voices conferring in the next room. “And what shall I tell Dolly now? Shall I comfort Kitty with the knowledge that I am unhappy and submit to her patronage? No, and, besides, Dolly won’t understand anything. And I have nothing to say to her. It would be interesting only to see Kitty and show her how I despise everyone and everything, how nothing matters to me now.”

Dolly came in with the letter. Anna read it and handed it back in silence.

“I knew it all,” she said. “And it doesn’t interest me in the least.”

“But why? I have hopes, on the contrary,” said Dolly, looking at Anna with curiosity. She had never seen her in such a strange, irritable mood. “When are you going?” she asked.

Anna looked straight in front of her, screwing up her eyes, and did not answer.

“Why is Kitty hiding from me?” she said, looking at the door and blushing.

“Oh, what nonsense. She is feeding the baby and is having some trouble, I advised her… she’s delighted. She’ll come in a minute,” said Dolly awkwardly, bad at lying. “Ah, there she is.”

When she was told that Anna had arrived, Kitty had not wanted to come out, but Dolly had persuaded her. Kitty came out, nerving herself to do it, and blushed as she came up to Anna and held out her hand.

“I am delighted,” she said, in a shaky voice.

Kitty was embarrassed by the struggle that was taking place within her between animosity towards this bad woman and the desire to be forbearing; but as soon as she saw Anna’s lovely, pleasant face, all hostility immediately vanished.

“I shouldn’t have been surprised if you had refused to see me. I am used to everything. You were ill? Yes, you’ve changed,” said Anna.

Kitty felt that Anna was looking at her with hostility. She put it down to the awkward situation which Anna, who had once befriended her, now felt herself to be in in her presence, and she was sorry for her.

They chatted about Kitty’s illness, about the child, about Stiva, but quite obviously nothing interested Anna.

“I came to say goodbye to you,” she said to Dolly.

“When are you going, then?”

But again Anna did not answer and turned to Kitty.

“Yes, I’m very glad I saw you,” she said with a smile. “I’ve heard so much about you from so many sources, even from your husband. He came to see me and I liked him very much,” she added with obvious ill intention. “Where is he?”

“He has gone to the country,” said Kitty blushing.

“Remember me to him – be sure you do.”

“I will be sure to,” repeated Kitty naively, and had a feeling of pity for her as she looked into her eyes.

“Well then, goodbye, Dolly.” And Anna hastily left, having kissed Dolly and shaken hands with Kitty.

“She’s the same as ever and just as attractive. Very beautiful!” said Kitty, when Anna was gone. “But there’s something pathetic about her. Terribly pathetic.”

“No, there was something special about her today,” said Dolly. “When I was seeing her off in the hall I had the impression she wanted to cry.”

…

Anna got into the carriage feeling worse even than she had when she had left home. To her previous agony was now added the feeling of humiliation and rejection which she had clearly felt during the meeting with Kitty.

“Where now? Home?” asked Pyotr.

“Yes, home,” she said no longer even thinking of where she was going. “How they looked at me – as at something terrible, strange and curious. What can he be telling the other man?” she thought, glancing at two pedestrians. “How can one tell someone else what one feels! I was going to tell Dolly and it’s a good thing I didn’t. How she would have been delighted at my misery! She would have concealed it, but her main feeling would have been joy at my being punished for the pleasures she envied me for. And Kitty – she would have been even more delighted. How I can see the whole of her – through and through! She knows I had been more than usually polite to her husband. And she is jealous and hates me. And despises me, too. In her eyes I am an immoral woman. If I were an immoral woman I could have made her husband fall in love with me… had I wanted to. And I did want to, too. Now, that man is pleased with himself,” she thought, seeing a fat, red-faced gentleman driving past in the opposite direction, who had taken her for someone he knew, had raised his shiny hat over his shiny bald head and then discovered he had made a mistake. “He thought he knew me. But he knows me as little as anyone in the world knows me. I don’t know myself. I know my appetites, as the French say. Now those boys there want that filthy ice cream. This they know for sure,” she thought, looking at two boys who had stopped an ice-cream man; the man took a tub down from his head and was wiping his sweaty face with the end of a cloth. “We all want something sweet, something that tastes nice. If we can’t have candy, give us filthy ice cream. And Kitty is the same: couldn’t get Vronsky, so she took Levin. And she envies me. And hates me. And we all hate each other. I hate Kitty, and Kitty me. Yes, this is true. Tyutkin, coiffeur, je me fais coiffer par Tyutkin… [Tyutkin, hairdresser, I have my hair done by Tyutkin…] I’ll tell him this when he comes,” she thought and smiled. But all at once she remembered she had no one now to say funny things to. “Besides, there’s nothing funny, nothing amusing anywhere. Everything is horrible. They’re ringing the bell for Vespers and how carefully that shopkeeper crosses himself! As if he is afraid of dropping something. What are these churches for, that bell-ringing and that falsehood? Only in order to conceal the fact that we all hate each other, like those cabdrivers who swear at each other with such venom. Yashvin says: ‘He wants to leave me without a shirt and I want to leave him without one.’ That’s the truth.”



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in58wtVI9sI

p. 693-700 [Pt. 7, Ch. 29-31]:

She was so absorbed by these thoughts that she even forgot to think about her own situation, when her carriage drew up at the steps of her house. Only on seeing the doorman come out to meet it did she remember that she had sent a note and a telegram.

“Any answer?” she asked.

“I’ll have a look,” replied the doorman and after a glance at his desk took out and gave her the thin square envelope of a telegram.

“Cannot come before ten o’clock. Vronsky,” she read.

“And has the messenger come back?”

“No, he hasn’t,” replied the porter.

“Ah, in that case I know what I have to do,” she said and feeling a vague anger and need for vengeance rising within her, she ran upstairs. “I’ll go to him myself. Before leaving him for ever I shall tell him everything. Never, never have I hated anyone as much as I hate this man!” she thought. On seeing his hat on the peg she shuddered with loathing. It did not occur to her that his telegram was a reply to her telegram and that he had not received her note yet. She imagined him now talking calmly with his mother and Princess Sorokin and rejoicing at her sufferings. “Certainly I must go as soon as possible,” she said to herself, not knowing yet where to go. She wanted to get away as quickly as she could from the feelings she experienced in that terrible house. The servants, the walls, the things in that house – it all evoked loathing and fury within her and pressed her down like a weight.

“I must go to the railway station or else go there, to the house, and catch him.” Anna looked up the railway timetable in the newspaper. A train was leaving in the evening at 8.20. “Oh yes, I’ll have time.” She ordered other horses to be harnessed and began packing a travelling bag with things she would need for several days. She knew she would never return. Among all the plans that came into her head she vaguely decided on one which was that after what would take place at the railway station or at the Countess’s estate, she would go by the Nizhny Novgorod line as far as the first town and stay there.

Dinner was laid; she went up to the table, smelt the bread and the cheese and, having come to the conclusion that the smell of all food disgusted her, ordered her carriage and went out. The house already threw its shadow right across the street, and the evening was clear and still warm in the sun. And Annushka who was following her with her things, and Pyotr who was putting the things in the carriage and the coachman, obviously disgruntled – she found them all repulsive and their words and gestures irritated her.

“I don’t need you, Pyotr.”

“But what about the ticket?”

“Oh, as you like, I don’t care,” she said, vexed.

Pyotr jumped on to the box and, arms akimbo, ordered the coachman to drive to the station.

…

“There’s that girl again! Again I understand everything,” said Anna to herself as soon as the carriage moved off and, swaying a little, rattled over the small cobbles of the roadway; and again impressions succeeded each other in her head.

“Oh yes, what was the last thing I was thinking of? It was rather good,” she said to herself, trying to remember. “Tyutkin, coiffeur? No, that wasn’t it. Oh yes – what Yashvin was saying: the struggle for existence and hatred are the only things that bind people together. No, it’s no use you going,” she said, mentally addressing a party of people in a four-in-hand, who were evidently driving off to the country on pleasure bent. “And the dog you are taking with you won’t help you. You can’t get away from yourselves.” Glancing in the direction in which Pyotr was looking she saw a half-drunk factory worker, his head swaying, being led away by a policeman. “Now that one’s done it quicker,” she thought. “Count Vronsky and I also failed to find any joy, even though we expected so much from it.” And now for the first time Anna turned that bright light by which she was seeing everything on her relations with him, which up till now she had avoided thinking about. “What did he look for in me? Not so much love as the satisfaction of his vanity.” She recalled his words and the expression on his face, reminiscent of a docile pointer, in the early days of their liaison. And everything now confirmed this. “Yes, he felt the triumph of successful vanity. Of course, there was some love in it too, but it was mainly pride in his success. I was something for him to boast about. Now that’s past. There is nothing to be proud of. Not to be proud of, but to be ashamed of. He took from me all he could and now I am no use to him. He finds me a burden and is trying not to behave dishonourably towards me. He let the cat out of the bag yesterday when he said what he said – he wants the divorce and marriage in order to burn his boats. He loves me – but how? The zest is gone,” she said to herself in English. “This man wants to astonish everyone and is very pleased with himself,” she thought, looking at a pink-faced shop assistant riding a hired horse. “He finds all the savour gone, so far as I am concerned. If I leave him, in his heart of hearts he will be pleased.”

This was no supposition; she saw it clearly in that piercing light which now revealed to her the meaning of life and of human relations.

“My love is becoming more passionate and selfish all the time, and his is gradually fading, and this is why we are drifting apart,” she went on thinking. “And there’s nothing that can be done about it. I have staked everything on him and I demand from him an increased devotion to me. But he wants to get further and further away from me. Before our liaison we were drawn towards each other, but now we are being irresistibly drawn apart. And nothing can change it. He tells me I am jealous for no reason and I used to tell myself I was jealous for no reason; but this isn’t true. I’m not jealous, but I am displeased. But…” She opened her mouth and moved to another seat in the carriage from the sheer excitement aroused by the thought that suddenly occurred to her. “If I could be anything other than his mistress who passionately loves his caresses; but I can’t be anything else and don’t want to be. And by this desire of mine I arouse revulsion in him and he anger and resentment in me, and it cannot be otherwise. As if I didn’t know he would not deceive me, that he has no designs on the Sorokin girl, that he is not in love with Kitty, that he will not be unfaithful to me! I know all this, but I’m none the happier for it. If he becomes kind and tender to me not because he loves me but out of a sense of duty, while what I desire will simply not be there – why, that would be a thousand times worse even than resentment. It would be hell! And it’s precisely what is happening. He has long stopped loving me. And where love stops hate begins. I don’t know these streets at all. All these hills and these houses, endless houses… And the houses are filled with people and more people… So many of them, there’s no end to them and they all hate each other. All right, let’s say I think up something which will make me happy. Well? I get a divorce, Karenin gives up Seryozha to me and I get married to Vronsky.” At the thought of Karenin, an extraordinarily vivid picture of him rose up before her eyes, very true to life with his meek, lifeless, dull eyes, blue veins on white hands, tone of voice and cracking of fingers, and the recollection of the feeling which had existed between them and which had also been called love, made her shudder with revulsion. “All right then, I’ll get my divorce and shall become Vronsky’s wife. And so Kitty will no longer look at me the way she looked at me today? No. And will Seryozha no longer ask or think about my two husbands? And what sort of new emotion will I think up between me and Vronsky? Is anything possible – which will not be happiness, of course, but will not be agony either? No, no and no!” she answered herself without the slightest hesitation now. “It is not possible. Life itself is drawing us apart, and I’m the cause of his unhappiness and he of mine; he can’t be changed and nor can I. We’ve tried everything but the screw has worn smooth. Oh yes, there’s a beggar woman with her child. She thinks people are sorry for her. Aren’t we all thrown out into the world only in order to hate each other and therefore to torment ourselves and others? Schoolboys walking out there, laughing. Seryozha?” she thought. “I also thought I loved him and admired my own tenderness. But I did, after all, live without him, did give him up in exchange for another love, and did not complain about the exchange, so long as I was satisfied with that other love.” And she remembered with revulsion what she called that other love. And the clarity with which she now saw her own and other people’s lives made her glad. “That’s how I am, and Pyotr, and Fyodor the coachman, and that tradesman, and all those people who live along the Volga where those advertisements invite us to, and everywhere and always,” she thought as she drove up to the low building of the Nizhny Novgorod station and the porters ran out to meet her.

“Shall I get a ticket to Obiralovka?” said Pyotr.

She had quite forgotten where to and why she was travelling and understood the question only with great effort.

“Yes,” she said, handing him her purse and, taking a small red bag in her hand, she stepped out of the carriage.

As she made her way through the crowd to the first-class waiting room, she remembered little by little all the details of her situation and the various choices she was hesitating between. And again hope and despair in turn touched the old sore places and rubbed salt into the wounds of her aching, her terribly fluttering heart. Sitting on the star-shaped sofa waiting for the train and looking with loathing at the people coming in and out (they all seemed repulsive to her), she thought of how she would arrive at the station and would write a note to him and of what she would write; she thought of how, in his inability to understand her sufferings, he was now complaining to his mother of the situation he found himself in, and of how she would come into the room, and of what she would say to him. Then she thought of how life might still be happy, and of how agonizingly she loved and hated him and of how terrible was the pounding of her heart.


…


The bell rang, some young men went hurriedly by, ugly and insolent and yet careful of the impression they were creating; Pyotr, in his livery and gaiters, with his vacuous, brutish face, also crossed the hall and came up to her in order to see her to her railway carriage. The noisy men became quiet when she passed them on the platform and one of them whispered something about her to another – something horrid, naturally. She climbed up the high step of the carriage and sat down in an empty compartment on the dirty well-sprung seat which had once been white. The springs of the seat made her bag bounce once before it lay still. Pyotr, with an inane smile raised his gold-braided hat by way of saying goodbye to her, and an insolent guard slammed the door and banged down the catch. A lady, ugly and wearing a bustle (Anna mentally undressed the woman and was appalled at her hideousness), and a little girl ran past the carriage window laughing affectedly.

“Katerina Andreyevna’s got it, she’s got it all, ma tante,” shouted the girl.

“Even the girl is unnatural and affected,” thought Anna. To avoid seeing anyone she quickly got up and sat down at the opposite window of the empty compartment. A grimy, ugly peasant with strands of matted hair sticking out from under his cap went past the window, stooping down to the carriage wheels. “There is something familiar about that hideous peasant,” Anna thought. Then she remembered her dream and went over to the opposite door trembling with fear. The guard was opening the door to let in a man and his wife.

“Are you getting out, madam?”

Anna did not reply. Neither the conductor nor the passengers coming in noticed the terror on her face under her veil. The couple sat down opposite her, and examined her dress with some attention, though trying not to show it. Both husband and wife seemed repulsive to Anna. The husband asked her for permission to smoke, obviously not in order to smoke but in order to start a conversation with her. On receiving her permission, he began to speak to his wife in French about something he had even less need to speak about than he had to smoke. Pretending to talk, they spoke nonsense only so that she should hear. Anna saw clearly how sick they were of each other and how much they hated one another. Indeed, it was impossible not to hate such pathetic monsters.

The second bell rang, followed by luggage being moved, by noise, shouting and laughter. It seemed so clear to Anna that no one had anything to rejoice about that the laughter irritated her to the point of physical pain and she wanted to stop her ears so as not to hear it. The third bell rang at last, the engine whistled and screeched, the coupling chain jerked and the husband crossed himself. “It would be interesting to ask him what he means by this,” thought Anna, glancing up at him with hatred. She was looking past the lady, out of the window, at the people seeing the train off, who were standing on the platform and appeared to be gliding backwards. Jerking rhythmically over the rail joints the carriage in which Anna was sitting rolled past the platform, past a stone wall, past the signals, past other carriages; the wheels with a movement ever more oily-smooth, gave a slight ringing sound as they rolled on the rails, the window was lit up by the bright evening sun, and a light breeze played with the blind. Anna forgot about her fellow-passengers and, rocked gently by the movement of the train, breathed in the fresh air and resumed her thoughts.

“Oh yes, what was it I was thinking of? Of the fact that I couldn’t conceive of a situation in which life would not be a torment, that we are all created in order to suffer, and that we all know this and are all busy thinking up different ways of self-deception. But when you see the truth what are you to do?”

“Man is given reason to be rid of his worries,” said the lady in French, obviously pleased with her phrase and saying it in an affected accent.

Those words seemed to answer Anna’s thought.

“To be rid of worries,” repeated Anna. And glancing at the ruddy-faced husband and his thin wife she realized that the sickly wife believed herself to be a misunderstood woman and the husband was unfaithful to her and encouraged her in her belief. By turning her searchlight on them, Anna seemed to know their history and all the nooks and crannies of their souls. But there was nothing of any interest there and she resumed her train of thought.

“Yes, I am very worried and reason is given to man to be rid of worries; therefore I must get rid of them. Why not snuff out the candle when there’s nothing more to look at, when all is loathsome to see? But how? Why did that guard run along the footboard? Why do they shout, those young men in that carriage? Why do they talk, why do they laugh? It is all lies, all falsehood, all deceit, all evil…”

When the train stopped at a station Anna came out in a crowd of other passengers and, shunning them like lepers, stood on the platform trying to remember why she had come there and what she had intended doing. Everything that before seemed possible to her was now so difficult to grasp, particularly in all that noisy crowd of ugly people who never left her in peace. The porters were running up and offering their services; young men, tapping the wooden floor of the platform with their heels, were talking in loud voices and looking her up and down; people trying to get out of her way dodged the wrong way. Recollecting that she had meant to continue her journey if there was no answer, she stopped a porter and asked whether there was a coachman there with a note from Count Vronsky.

“Count Vronsky? Someone from him has just been here. Meeting Princess Sorokin and her daughter. What’s the coachman like?”

While she was speaking to the porter, the coachman, Mikhail, pink-cheeked and cheerful, dressed in a smart blue coat with a watch chain, evidently proud of having carried out his errand so well, came up to her and handed her a note. She unsealed the envelope and felt a pang in her heart even before she had read it.

“Very sorry your note did not catch me. I’ll be back at ten,” Vronsky had written in a careless hand.

“There! That’s what I expected!” she said to herself with a contemptuous little laugh.

“All right, go home then,” she said softly, turning to Mikhail. She spoke softly because the rapid pounding of her heart interfered with her breathing. “No, I shan’t let you torment me,” she thought, directing her threat not at him, not at herself, but at whoever it was made her suffer, and went along the platform past the station building.

Two servant-girls walking up and down the platform turned their heads round to look at her and commented on her dress: “Real,” they said about the lace she was wearing. The young men would not leave her in peace. They went past her again, peering into her face, laughing and shouting out something in unnatural voices. The station master asked her, as he walked by, whether she was going on in the train. A boy selling rye beer never took his eyes off her. “Oh God, where am I to go?” she thought going further and further along the platform. At the end of it she stopped. A few ladies and children who had come to meet a bespectacled gentleman, and had been laughing and talking in loud voices, fell silent and stared at her when she drew even with them. A goods train was approaching. The platform shook and she had the impression she was going in the train again.

And suddenly she remembered the man crushed by the train the day she had first met Vronsky, and realized what she had to do. With a swift, light tread she went down the steps leading from the water tank to the rails and stopped close to the passing train. She was looking at the underside of the trucks, at the screws and chains, and at the tall iron wheels of the first truck slowly rolling forwards, and tried to estimate the point midway between the front and back wheels and the precise moment at which that midway point would be opposite her.

“There!” she said to herself, looking in the shadow of the truck at the mixture of sand and slag which covered the sleepers, “there, right in the middle, and I’ll punish him and escape from them all and from myself.”

She wanted to fall under the first truck, the middle portion of which was now directly opposite her. But the little red bag, which she began to take off her arm, delayed her and it was too late: the middle of the truck had already passed her. She had to wait for the next truck. A feeling similar to the one she used to have, when about to enter the water bathing, seized her and she made the sign of the cross. The familiar gesture of crossing herself evoked within her a whole series of memories of her childhood and youth, and suddenly the darkness that had shrouded everything for her was torn apart and life appeared before her for a moment, radiant with all its past joys. But she did not take her eyes off the wheels of the second truck, which was now approaching. And at precisely the moment when the midpoint between the wheels drew level with her, she threw aside the little red bag and, drawing her head in between her shoulders, dropped on her hands under the truck and with a light movement, as if about to rise at once, she sank to her knees. And at that same instant, she was horror-struck at what she was doing. “Where am I? What am I doing? Why?” She tried to rise, to throw herself aside; but something huge and inexorable struck her on the head and dragged her along by her back. “God, forgive me everything!” she murmured, feeling the impossibility of struggling. A little peasant, muttering something, was working over some iron. And the candle by which she had read the book filled with anxiety, deceit, sorrow and evil flared up with a brighter light than ever, lit up for her all that before had been in darkness, spluttered, grew dim and went out for ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfK-OI3oXWQ




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6rqCy83EcA

p. 462-76 (Pt. 5, Ch. 21-25):

Once Karenin realized, from his talks with Betsy and Oblonsky, that all that was required of him was that he should leave his wife in peace and not trouble her with his presence and that his wife herself desired this, he felt so lost that he could not decide anything himself, did not himself know what he wanted and, putting himself in the hands of those who took such pleasure in looking after his affairs, he agreed to everything. Only when Anna had actually left the house and the English governess sent to enquire whether she should dine with him or separately, did he for the first time clearly realize his position and was appalled by it.

The most difficult thing about his situation was that he was quite unable to find a link or reconcile his past with what was taking place now. It was not the past, during which he had lived happily with his wife, that disturbed him. He had already lived through the agony of transition from the past to the knowledge of his wife’s infidelity; that state had been painful to him but he found it comprehensible. If his wife had left him then, after confessing to her infidelity, he would have been grieved and unhappy but he would not have been in the same hopeless, to him incomprehensible, situation in which he now felt himself to be. He was quite unable to reconcile his recent forgiveness of her, his emotion of tenderness, his love for his sick wife and for another man’s child, with what was happening now: with the fact that his reward was to find himself now alone, disgraced, ridiculed, not wanted by anyone and despised by all.

During the first two days after his wife’s departure Karenin received petitioners, saw his private secretary, went to committee meetings, and had dinner in the dining room as usual. Without realizing why he was doing so, during these two days he stretched every nerve and thought with the sole aim of appearing calm and even indifferent. When replying to the servants’ enquiries as to what should be done with Anna’s rooms and belongings, he made a supreme effort to appear like a man for whom the event which had taken place had not been unforeseen and had nothing out of the ordinary about it, and he achieved his aim: no one could have discerned in him any signs of despair. But on the third day after Anna’s departure, when Korney handed him a bill from a milliner’s shop which she had forgotten to pay and informed him that the manager had come in person, Karenin had him shown up.

“Forgive me, sir, for being so bold as to trouble you. But if you would like us to send the bill to madam, then would you be good enough to let us have madam’s address?”

Karenin seemed to the shopkeeper to be pondering, and then suddenly turned around and sat down at the table. His head sunk in his hands, he sat there in that position for a long while, several times attempting to say something and stopping short.

Korney, who had understood his master’s feelings, asked the shopkeeper to call another time. Left alone once more, Karenin realized that he was no longer capable of keeping up the appearance of firmness and calm. He gave orders for the carriage, which was waiting, to be unharnessed, said that he would receive no one, and did not appear at dinner.

He felt he would not be able to endure that general pressure of contempt and harshness, which he had clearly seen on the face of the shopkeeper and of Korney, and of everyone, without exception, whom he had met during those two days. He felt that he could not avert people’s hatred from himself, for the hatred was there not because he was bad (for then he could have tried to be better) but because he was shamefully and repulsively unhappy. He knew for that very reason – because his heart was torn to shreds – they would be merciless to him. He felt that people would destroy him like dogs who tear out the throat of some poor maimed dog whining in pain. He knew that the only hope of escape from people was to hide his wounds from them and he had unconsciously tried to do this for two days, but now he felt that it was beyond him to carry on this unequal struggle any longer.

His despair was further increased by the consciousness that he was entirely alone in his grief. It was not just that there was not a single person in Petersburg to whom he could tell everything he was experiencing, who might pity him not as a high-ranking civil servant, not as a member of society, but just as a suffering human being; it was that he had no such friend anywhere.

Karenin had grown up an orphan, together with his only brother. They did not remember their father; their mother had died when Karenin was ten years old. They had small means. They had been brought up by Karenin’s uncle, an important civil servant and sometime favourite of the late Emperor.

Having finished school and university with distinction, Karenin, with the help of his uncle, had at once embarked on a distinguished civil service career and, from then on, had entirely devoted himself to professional ambition. Neither at school nor at university, nor later at work, had Karenin made close ties of friendship with anyone. His brother had been the person closest to his heart, but he had been in the diplomatic service and had always lived abroad where, indeed, he had died, shortly after Karenin’s marriage.

It was when Karenin had been Governor of a province that an aunt of Anna’s, a rich provincial lady, had introduced him – no longer a young man, though a young Governor – to her niece, and had manoeuvred him into such a position that he either had to propose to her, or leave the town. Karenin had hesitated for a long time. There were, at the time, just as many reasons for this step as there were against it, and there was no decisive reason to make him change his rule: when in doubt, refrain. But Anna’s aunt had intimated to him through a mutual acquaintance that he had already compromised the girl and that he was in honour bound to propose to her. He did so, and bestowed upon his bride and wife all the feeling of which he was capable.

His attachment to Anna excluded from his heart any vestige of a need he may have felt for affectionate relations with other people. And now, among all his acquaintances, he had not a single close friend. He had many so-called social connections; but no friends at all. Karenin knew a great many people whom he could invite to dinner, whom he could ask to take part in a project which interested him or whose influence he could use on behalf of a petitioner, or with whom he could frankly discuss the activities of other people and of the government; but his relations with these people were limited to one sphere, sharply defined by custom and habit, beyond which it was impossible to go. He did have one acquaintance from his university days with whom he had later become close friends and with whom he could have talked about his personal grief; but this friend was now Chief Education Officer in a remote part of the country. Of the people he knew in Petersburg the closest to him and the most likely were his private secretary and his doctor.

Mikhail Vasilyevich Slyudin, his private secretary, was a simple, intelligent, kindly and upright man, and Karenin felt that he was well disposed towards him personally; but their five years of official relationship had set up a barrier in the way of heart-to-heart talks.

Having finished signing some papers, Karenin remained silent for a long time, occasionally glancing up at Slyudin, and several times made an attempt to say something but could not bring himself to do so. He had a phrase all ready prepared: “Have you heard about my misfortune?” But he ended up by saying, as usual: “Then you’ll get this ready for me, won’t you?” and with that, let him go.

The other person was the doctor, who was also well disposed towards him; but a tacit agreement had long ago been reached between them that they were both overwhelmed with work, and both in a hurry.

Of his women friends, including the principal one, Countess Lidia Ivanovna, Karenin did not think at all. All women, simply as women, terrified and repelled him.

…

Karenin had forgotten about Countess Lidia Ivanovna, but she had not forgotten about him. At that most painful moment of lonely despair, she had come to see him and entered his study unannounced. She found him sitting with his head in his hands.

“J’ai forcé la consigne,” [“I’ve forced my way in”] she said, coming in with rapid steps and breathing heavily from emotion and her rapid movements. “I’ve heard all about it, Alexei Alexandrovich! My friend!” she continued, firmly pressing his hand in both of hers and looking with her lovely dreamy eyes into his.

Karenin got up with a frown and, freeing his hand from hers, gave her a chair.

“Won’t you sit down, Countess? I’m not receiving anyone today because I’m not well, Countess,” he said, and his lips quivered.

“My friend!” Countess Lidia repeated, without taking her eyes off him, and suddenly the inside corners of her eyebrows went up, forming a triangle on her forehead; her plain, sallow face became even plainer; but Karenin felt that she was sorry for him and on the verge of tears. He was overwhelmed with emotion; he seized her puffy hand and began kissing it.

“My friend!” she said, in a voice breaking with emotion. “You must not abandon yourself to grief. Your grief is great, but you must find consolation.”

“I am shattered, crushed, I’m no longer a human being!” said Karenin, letting go of her hand, but continuing to gaze into her eyes, which were full of tears. “What is so terrible about my situation is that nowhere, not even in myself, can I find any point of support.”

“You will find support, but don’t look for it in me, although I ask you to believe in my friendship,” she said with a sigh. “Our support is love, the love which He bequeathed to us. His yoke is light,” she said, with that ecstatic look which Karenin knew so well. “He will suport you and help you.”

Although these words were tinged with the Countess’s emotion at her own lofty feelings as well as with that ecstatic mystical attitude which had lately spread through Petersburg* and which, to Karenin, seemed excessive, he nevertheless was now pleased to hear them.

“I’m weak. I’m reduced to nothing. I did not foresee anything and, now, I don’t understand anything.”

“My friend,” repeated Countess Lidia.

“It’s not the loss of what now no longer exists, it’s not that,” Karenin went on. “I don’t regret that. But I can’t help feeling ashamed in front of people because of the situation I’m in now. It’s wrong, but I can’t help it, I can’t help it.”

“It was not you who accomplished that lofty act of forgiveness that I and everyone admires, but He who dwells in your heart,” said Countess Lidia, raising her eyes ecstatically, “and therefore you cannot be ashamed of your action.”

Karenin frowned and, bending back his hands, began making his fingers crack.

“One must know all the details,” he said, in a high-pitched voice. “There are limits to a man’s strength, Countess, and I’ve reached the limits of mine. The whole day today I’ve had to make arrangements, domestic arrangements arising” (he stressed the word arising) “from my new, solitary situation. The servants, the governess, the bills… These petty flames have burnt me up, I couldn’t stand it any longer. At dinner… yesterday I very nearly left the table. I couldn’t bear the way my son was looking at me. He didn’t ask me what was the meaning of it all, but he wanted to, and I couldn’t stand the look in his eyes. He was afraid to look at me, but that’s not all…”

Karenin was going to mention the bill which had been brought to him, but his voice shook and he fell silent. He could not recall that bill on blue paper for a hat and some ribbons without feeling sorry for himself.

“My friend, I understand,” said Countess Lidia. “I understand everything. It is not in me that you will find help and consolation but I have, all the same, come here only to help you if I can. If only I could relieve you of all these petty, humiliating cares… I understand that what is needed is a woman’s word, a woman’s authority. Will you entrust it to me?”

Karenin pressed her hand in silent gratitude.

“We’ll look after Seryozha together. I’m not very good at practical matters. But I’ll tackle it; I’ll be your housekeeper. Don’t thank me. I’m doing it myself…”

“I can’t but thank you.”

“But, my friend, you mustn’t surrender yourself to that feeling of which you were speaking – of being ashamed of what is, for a Christian, the very summit: ‘He that humbleth himself shall be exalted.’ And you cannot thank me. You must thank Him and ask Him for help. In Him alone shall we find tranquility, consolation, salvation, and love,” she said and, raising her eyes to heaven she began, so Karenin gathered from her silence, to pray.

Karenin listened to her now, and as he did so those phrases which had formerly seemed to him, if not unpleasant, at least superfluous now seemed natural and comforting. Karenin did not like this new, ecstatic spirit. He was a believer, interested in religion mainly from a political point of view; but the new teaching, which ventured certain new interpretations, he disliked on principle precisely because it opened the door to argument and analysis. In the past his attitude to this new teaching had been cold and even hostile and he had never argued with Countess Lidia, who was carried away by it, but had studiously evaded her challenges in silence. But now, for the first time, he listened to her words with pleasure and without any mental reservations.

“I’m very, very grateful to you both for your deeds and for your words,” he said, when she had finished praying.

Once again Countess Lidia pressed both her friend’s hands.

“Now I must set to work,” she said with a smile after a moment’s silence, and wiping the traces of tears from her face. “I’m going to Seryozha now. I shall only apply to you as a last resort.” And she got up and left the rom.

Countess Lidia went to Seryozha’s part of the house and there, spilling tears all over the frightened boy’s cheeks, she told him that his father was a saint and that his mother had died.

…


Countess Lidia fulfilled her promise. She really did take over all the cares of the arrangement and running of Karenin’s house. But she had not exaggerated when she had said that she was not good at practical matters. All her instructions had to be changed as they were impossible to carry out, and they were changed by Korney, Karenin’s valet, who was now, without anyone noticing it, running the whole of Karenin’s house and who, while helping his master to dress, would quietly and warily report to him what he thought he ought to know. But Countess Lidia’s help was, nevertheless, highly effective: she gave Karenin moral support by imparting to him the consciousness of her affection and respect and, more especially (so she comforted herself in her imagination), by almost converting him to Christianity – that is, she turned him from being an indifferent and lazy believer into an ardent and steadfast supporter of that new interpretation of Christian teaching which had latterly spread in Petersburg. It was not difficult to convince Karenin about this. Karenin, like Countess Lidia, and the other people who shared their point of view, was quite devoid of any depths of imagination, of that spiritual capacity thanks to which ideas provoked by imagination become so real that they demand conformity with other ideas and with reality. He saw nothing impossible or incongruous in the idea that death, which existed for unbelievers, did not exist for him and that, since he had complete faith (of the completeness of which he himself was the judge), there was no longer any sin in his soul and he was already experiencing full salvation here on earth.

It is true that Karenin was dimly aware that this faith was both shallow and erroneous and he knew that when, without thinking that his forgiveness was the act of a Higher Power, he had surrendered himself to the spontaneous emotion of forgiveness, he had experienced more happiness than when, as now, he thought constantly that Christ was living in his soul and that, when signing papers, he was fulfilling His Will. But it was essential for Karenin to think this; in his humiliation it was so essential for him to occupy that higher, if spurious, level from which he, despised by all, could despise others, that he clung to his imaginary salvation as if it really was salvation.


*The main agent of [this religious movement’s] spread through high society in St Petersburg was the third Baron Radstock (1833-1913), who preached a version of the doctrine of Salvation by Grace alone.


…


As a very young and ecstatically minded girl, Countess Lidia had been married off to a rich, aristocratic, very good-natured, jovial and profligate man. Not quite two months later, her husband had abandoned her, and responded to her rapturous assurances of affection merely with mockery and even animosity, which those who knew the Count’s kind heart and could see no shortcomings in the ecstatic Lidia were quite unable to explain. Since then, although they had not been divorced, they had lived apart and, whenever they did meet, her husband always treated her with unvarying and venomous mockery, the reason for which it was impossible to understand.

Countess Lidia had long ago ceased to be in love with her husband, but since then had never ceased being in love with someone or other. She would be in love with several people at the same time, both men and women; she would be in love with almost anyone who was in any way particularly distinguished. She was in love with all new princes and princesses who became connected by marriage with the Imperial family; she was in love with a Metropolitan, a bishop, and a parish priest. She was in love with a journalist, three Slavs and with Komisarov; with a cabinet minister, a doctor, an English missionary, and Karenin. All these loves, now waxing, now waning, did not prevent her from keeping up the most widespread and complex relationships at Court and in society. But ever since she had taken Karenin under her special protection after the misfortune which had befallen him, ever since she had been helping in his house, looking after his welfare, she had felt that none of her other loves were true loves and that now she was genuinely in love with Karenin only. The feeling which she now felt towards him seemed to her stronger than any previous feelings. Analysing that feeling and comparing it with those she had had before, she saw clearly that she would not have been in love with Komisarov if he had not saved the Emperor’s life, that she would not have been in love with Ristić-Kudžicki* if there had been no Slav question, but that she loved Karenin for himself, for his lofty, misunderstood soul, for the high-pitched sound of his voice with its drawling intonation which, to her, was sweet, for his tired gaze, for his character, for his soft white hands with swollen veins. She not only found joy in meeting him but she searched his face for signs of the impression she was making on him. She wanted to attract him not only by what she said but by her whole person. For him she now paid more attention to her clothes than she ever had before. She caught herself dreaming of what might have been, if she had not been married and if he had been free. She blushed from excitement when he entered the room and she could not restrain a smile of delight when he said something pleasant to her.

For the past few days Countess Lidia had been in a state of extreme agitation. She had learnt that Anna and Vronsky were in Petersburg. Karenin must be saved from meeting her, must be saved even from the agonizing knowledge that the dreadful woman was in the same town and that at any moment he might meet her.

Through her acquaintances Countess Lidia reconnoitred to find out what those abominable people, as she referred to Anna and Vronsky, were intending to do and, during those days, tried to direct all her friend’s movements so that he should not meet them. A friend of Vronsky’s, a young equerry through whom she had her information and who hoped, through the Countess, to obtain a concession, had told her that they had concluded their business and were leaving the next day. Countess Lidia was just beginning to breathe freely again when, the next morning, she was brought a note and was appalled to recognize the handwriting. The handwriting was Anna’s. The paper of which the envelope was made was as thick as parchment; the oblong yellow page bore a huge monogram, and the letter exuded a delicious smell.

“Who brought it?”

“A commissionaire from the hotel.”

For a long time, Countess Lidia was unable to sit down and read the letter. Her agitation brought on a fit of asthma, to which she was subject. When she had composed herself she read the following letter, which was written in French:


Madame la Comtesse,

The Christian sentiments which fill your heart give me what, I feel, is the unpardonable boldness of writing to you. I am unhappy at being parted from my son. I beg you to allow me to see him once before my departure. Forgive me for reminding you of myself. I am addressing myself to you, rather than to Alexei Alexandrovich only because I do not wish to make that magnanimous man suffer by reminding him of myself. Knowing your friendship for him, I feel you will understand me. Will you send Seryozha to me, or shall I come to the house at some prearranged time or will you let me know when and where I can see him away from the house? I do not anticipate a refusal, knowing the magnanimity of the person on whom it depends. You cannot imagine the yearning I have to see him, and therefore you cannot imagine the gratitude your assistance will awaken in me.

Anna


Everything in this letter irritated Countess Lidia: its contents, the allusion to magnanimity and, especially, its tone, which seemed to her too familiar.

“Say there’s no answer,” said the Countess, and then, opening her blotter, she immediately wrote a note to Karenin saying that she hoped to see him just before one o’clock at the Birthday Reception in the Palace.

“I must discuss an important and distressing matter with you. We can arrange there where to meet. It would be best of all at my house, where I will have your tea prepared for you. It is essential. He gives us a cross, but He gives us strength to bear it,” she added, so as to prepare him a little.

Countess Lidia usually wrote two or three notes a day to Karenin. She liked this means of communication with him, since it had elegance and mystery about it, elements lacking in her personal relations with him.


…


The reception was drawing to an end. Those who were leaving chatted as they met each other about the latest news of the day, newly acquired honours and changes in appointments for high officials.

“If we could only have Countess Marya Borisovna as Minister of War, and Princess Vatkovsky as Chief of Staff,” said a little white-haired old man in a gold-embroidered uniform, addressing a tall and beautiful lady-in-waiting, who had asked him about the changes.

“And me as a new equerry,” replied the lady-in-waiting, smiling.

“You have already been appointed – to the Ecclesiastical Department, with Karenin as your assistant.”

“How are you, Prince?” said the little old man, shaking the hand of a man who had just come up to him.

“What were you saying about Karenin?” said the Prince.

“He and Putyatov both got the Order of Alexander Nevsky.”

“I thought he’d already got it.”

“No. Just you look at him,” said the old man, pointing with his embroidered hat at Karenin who, wearing Court uniform with the red ribbon of his new order over his shoulder, was standing in the doorway of the hall with one of the influential members of the State Council. “He’s as pleased and merry as a cricket,” he added, breaking off to shake hands with a handsome, athletic Court Chamberlain.

“No,” said the Court Chamberlain, “he’s aged.”

“From worry. He’s drafting government projects all the time. He won’t let the wretched man go now until he has expounded it all point by point.”

“What d’you mean, he’s aged? Il fait des passions. [He makes people fall in love with him.] I think Countess Lidia must be jealous of his wife now.”

“Oh come! Please don’t say anything bad about Countess Lidia.”

“But is there anything bad about her being in love with Karenin?”

“Is it true that Mrs Karenin is here?”

“Well, she isn’t here in the Palace, but she is in Petersburg. I met her yesterday with Alexei Vronsky, bras dessus, bras dessous [arm in arm], in Morskaya Street.”

“C’est un homme qui n’a pas… [He’s a man who’s not…]” the Court Chamberlain began, but broke off to make way and bow to a member of the Imperial family who was passing.

So people went on talking incessantly about Karenin, blaming him and laughing at him, while he, barring the way to the member of the State Council whom he had cornered and never for a moment breaking off his exposition for fear of letting him escape, was expounding his financial project point by point.

At almost the same time that his wife had left him, an event had occurred in Karenin’s life which was the bitterest that could happen to a civil servant – his official advancement had come to a stop. It had come to a stop, and everyone clearly saw this, but Karenin himself did not yet realize that his career was over. Whether it was because of his clash with Stremov, or because of his misfortune with his wife, or simply because Karenin had reached the limit he was destined to reach, it had become obvious to everyone that year that his civil service career was over. He still occupied an important post, he was a member of many commissions and committees; but he was a man who had given all he had to give and from whom no one expected anything more. No matter what he said, no matter what he proposed, people listened to him as if what he was proposing had already been thought of long ago and was the very thing that was not needed.

But Karenin did not sense this and, on the contrary, being excluded from taking a direct part in government activities, he could now see, more clearly than before, shortcomings and mistakes in the activity of others, and considered it his duty to point out ways of correcting them. Soon after his separation from his wife he began to write a memorandum on the new legal procedure, the first of an innumerable number of useless memoranda which he was destined to write on all branches of administration.

Karenin not only failed to notice the hopelessness of his position in the administrative world – and was far from being distressed by it – but was more pleased with his activities than ever.

“He that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife… but he that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, and how to please the Lord,” — says the Apostle Paul, and Karenin, now guided in all his affairs by the scriptures, often remembered this text. It seemed to him that ever since he had been left without a wife, he had been serving the Lord with these memoranda better than ever before.

The obvious impatience of the State Councillor who wanted to get away from him did not disturb Karenin; he stopped holding forth only when the State Councillor, seizing the opportunity when a member of the Imperial family went past, slipped away from him.

Left alone, Karenin bowed his head, collecting his thoughts, then looked round absentmindedly and went towards the door where he hoped to meet Countess Lidia.

“And how strong and healthy they all are physically,” thought Karenin, looking at a powerfully built Court Chamberlain with well-combed and scented side-whiskers and at the red neck, encased in uniform, of a prince, in front of whom he had to pass. “How truly it is said that everything in the world is evil,” he thought, giving another sidelong glance at the Court Chamberlain’s calves.

Walking unhurriedly, with his habitual air of weariness and dignity, Karenin bowed to these gentlemen who had been talking about him and looked at the door, trying to find Countess Lidia.

“Ah, Alexei Alexandrovich!” said the little old man, with a malevolent gleam in his eye, just as Karenin drew level with him and nodded coldly to him. “I have not congratulated you yet,” he said, indicating Karenin’s newly-acquired order.

“Thank you,” Karenin replied. “What a fine day it is today,” he added, particularly stressing, as was his habit, the word “fine”.

That they laughed at him, he knew; but he never expected anything from them but hostility; he was used to this by now.

Catching sight of Countess Lidia’s sallow shoulders arising out of her corset, and her lovely dreamy beckoning eyes, Karenin smiled, revealing his perfectly white teeth, and went up to her.

Countess Lidia’s dress had cost her a great deal of trouble, as had all her dresses of late. Her aim in dressing was now quite the opposite to the one she had pursued thirty years earlier. Then she had wanted somehow to dress herself up and the more the better. Now, on the contrary, she was obliged to adorn herself in a way so out of keeping with her years and figure that she was concerned only that the contrast between these adornments and her looks should not be too appalling. And, so far as Karenin was concerned, she had achieved this and she seemed to him to be attractive. For him she was the only island not only of kindly feeling but of love in the sea of hostility and mockery which surrounded him.

As he ran the gauntlet of mocking glances, he was drawn to her amorous gaze as naturally as a plant to the light.

“I congratulate you,” she said, indicating his order.

Restraining a smile of pleasure, he shrugged his shoulders and closed his eyes, as if to say that such a thing could not gladden him. Countess Lidia knew well that it was one of his principal joys, although he would never admit to it.

“How is our angel?” said Countess Lidia, referring to Seryozha.

“I cannot say that I am wholly satisfied with him,” said Karenin, raising his eyebrows and opening his eyes. “And Sitnikov is not satisfied with him either.” (Sitnikov was the teacher to whom Seryozha’s secular education had been entrusted.) “As I’ve said before, there is in him a certain coolness to those questions which are the most important of all and which should touch the heart of every man and every child,” began Karenin, explaining his ideas on the only subject, apart from his work, which interested him – his son’s education.

When Karenin, with the help of Countess Lidia, had returned once more to life and to work, he had felt it his duty to concern himself with the education of the son who had been left on his hands. Never before having been concerned with questions of education, Karenin had devoted some time to a theoretical study of the subject. And having read several books on anthropology, pedagogy and didactics, Karenin had drawn up for himself a plan of education and, having invited the best educationalist in Petersburg to supervise it, he had set to work. And this work kept him constantly occupied.

“Yes, but what about his heart? I see in him his father’s heart and with such a heart the child can’t be bad,” said Countess Lidia with rapture.

“Yes, perhaps… So as far as I am concerned, I am fulfilling my duty. That is all I can do.”

“Come to my house,” said Countess Lidia, after a moment’s silence, “we must have a talk about what is, for you, a sad business. I would give anything to spare you certain memories, but others do not think in the same way. I have received a letter from her. She is here, in Petersburg.”

Karenin winced at the mention of his wife, but immediately his face assumed that absolute immobility which expressed his complete helplessness in this matter.

“I expected it,” he said.

Countess Lidia looked at him rapturously and her eyes filled with tears of admiration at the loftiness of his soul.


. . .


When Karenin entered Countess Lidia’s cosy little study, decorated with old china and hung with portraits, the lady of the house was not yet there. She was changing her dress.

The round table was covered with a cloth, and on it stood a Chinese tea service and a silver kettle with a spirit lamp. Karenin looked round absentmindedly at the innumerable and familiar portraits which decorated the study and, sitting down at the table, opened the New Testament which was lying on it. The rustle of the Countess’s silk dress diverted his attention.

“Well, now we can sit down peacefully,” said Countess Lidia with an uneasy smile, squeezing herself in between the table and the sofa, “and have a talk over our tea.”

After a few words of preparation Countess Lidia, breathing heavily and blushing, handed over the letter which she had received to Karenin.

When he had read the letter he remained silent for a long time.

“I don’t suppose I have the right to refuse her,” he said timidly, looking up.

“My friend! You don’t see evil in anyone!”

“On the contrary, I see that everything is evil. But is this right?...”

His face expressed indecision and a search for advice, support and guidance in a matter which was, to him, incomprehensible.

“No,” interrupted the Countess, “there’s a limit to everything. I understand immorality,” she said, not quite sincerely since she had never been able to understand what led women to immorality, “but cruelty I don’t understand, and cruelty to whom? To you! How can she stay in the same town as you? Oh yes, ‘live and learn’. And I am learning to understand your high-mindedness and her low character.”

“But who will throw a stone?” said Karenin, obviously pleased with the part he was playing. “I have forgiven everything, and therefore cannot deprive her of what her love – her love for her son – needs…”

“But is that love, my friend? Is it sincere? Suppose you have forgiven, that you do forgive… But have we the right to treat our angel’s heart like that? He thinks she is dead. He prays for her and asks God to forgive her her sins… And it’s better that way. Otherwise what will he think?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Karenin, evidently agreeing.

Countess Lidia covered her face with her hands and was silent for a moment. She was praying.

“If you ask my advice,” she said, having finished praying, and uncovering her face, “I don’t advise you to do this. As if I did not see how you are suffering, how this has opened up your wounds! But suppose that you, as always, forget about yourself. What, then, can this lead to? To fresh suffering on your side, to torment for the child? If she has any human feeling left in her, she should not want this herself. No, I have no hesitation in advising against it and, if you allow me, I will write to her.”

And Karenin agreed, and Countess Lidia wrote the following letter in French:


Madame,

To remind your son of you might lead to questions on his part to which it would be impossible to reply without inducing in the child’s heart a spirit of condemnation of what should, for him, be sacred; and I therefore ask you to accept your husband’s refusal in a spirit of Christian charity. I pray to the Most High to have mercy on you.

Countess Lidia.


This letter achieved the hidden aim which Countess Lidia had not even admitted to herself. It offended Anna to the very depths of her soul.

Karenin, too, returning home from Countess Lidia, was unable that day to devote himself to his usual occupations or to find the spiritual peace of mind, which he had felt before, of a believer who had found Salvation.

The memory of his wife who was so guilty towards him, and to whom he had been so saintly, as Countess Lidia used so justly to tell him, should not have disturbed him; but he was not easy in his mind: he could not understand the book he was reading, could not drive away agonizing memories of his relations with her, of those mistakes which, it now seemed to him, he had committed in regard to her. The recollection of how he had received her confession of infidelity, on the way back from the races (and, in particular, of his insistence that she should keep up merely the outward appearances, and of his failure to challenge Vronsky to a duel), tormented him like remorse. The memory of the letter which he had written her also tormented him; in particular, his forgiveness, which no one wanted, and his care for another man’s child seared his heart with shame and remorse.

And he now experienced an exactly similar feeling of shame and remorse, as he went over his past with her in his mind and recalled the clumsy words with which, after long hesitation, he had proposed to her.

“But how am I to blame?” he kept saying to himself. And this question always evoked another question: did those other people, those Vronskys, those Oblonskys… those Court Chamberlains with fat calves, did they feel differently, did they love differently, did they marry differently? And he visualized a whole row of these vigorous, strong, self-confident people, who always and everywhere automatically attracted his inquisitive attention. He tried to drive away these thoughts, tried to convince himself that he was not living for this transient life but for life eternal, and that he had peace and love in his soul. But the fact that in this transient, insignificant life he had committed, so it seemed to him, a few trivial mistakes, tormented him as if the eternal life in which he believed did not exist. But this temptation did not last long and, soon, the serenity and high-mindedness, thanks to which he was able to forget what he did not want to remember, were restored to his heart.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QcB6O4Uytg

p. 666-673 (Pt. 7, Ch. 20-22):

Princess Betsy Tverskoy and Oblonsky had long been on a very odd footing with each other. Oblonsky always flirted with her in a bantering way and told her, also in joke, the most improper things, knowing that that was what she liked most. The day after his conversation with Karenin, Oblonsky went to see her and felt himself so young that in this bantering talk and flirtation got carried away beyond the limits within which he knew how to extricate himself as, unfortunately, he found her not only unattractive but actually repulsive. But initially this bantering relationship between them had been established because she found him very attractive. He was, therefore, very glad when Princess Myakhky came and put an end to their tête-à-tête.

“Ah, you’re here, too,” she said when she saw him. “Well, and how’s your poor sister? Don’t you look at me like that,” she added. “Ever since everyone’s started attacking her – and they’re all a hundred thousand times worse than she is – I’ve thought she did a very fine thing. I can’t forgive Vronsky for not letting me know when she was in Petersburg. I would have called on her and would have taken her everywhere with me. Please give her my love. Now tell me all about her.”

“Oh indeed, her situation is very difficult, she…” began Oblonsky who, in the simplicity of his heart, mistook Princess Myakhky’s words for sterling coin!

“Tell me all about your sister.” Princess Myakhky immediately interrupted him, as she generally did, and started speaking herself. “She did what everyone does except me – only they hide it but she did not want to deceive anyone and did a very fine thing. And did even better by throwing up that half-witted brother-in-law of yours. You must forgive me. Everybody said he was so clever, so clever, only I said he was a fool. Now that he’s struck up that friendship with Countess Lidia and Landau they all say he is half-witted, and I would be glad not to agree with them all, but this time I can’t.”

“Do explain, please,” said Oblonsky, “what does it all mean? I saw him yesterday in connection with my sister and asked for a definite answer. He did not give me an answer, but said he would think it over, and this morning instead of an answer I got an invitation from Countess Lidia for this evening.”

“Ah, there you are!” said Princess Myakhky with glee. “They’ll ask Landau what he thinks.”

“What do you mean – Landau? Who’s Landau?”

“What? You don’t know Jules Landau, ‘le fameux Jules Landau, le clairvoyant’ [the famous Jules Landau, the clairvoyant]? He is another half-wit, but on him depends your sister’s fate. That’s what comes of living in the provinces, you don’t know anything. Landau, you see, was a ‘commis’ [shop assistant] in Paris, and went to see a doctor. In the doctor’s waiting room he fell asleep and in his sleep started to give advice to all the patients. And remarkable advice it was. Then Yury’s wife – you know, that man who is always an invalid? – heard about that fellow Landau and brought him to see her husband. He is treating him now. And hasn’t done him any good, I consider, because he is just as weak as ever, but they believe in him and take him with them everywhere. And they’ve brought him to Russia. Here he has become all the rage and has taken to treating everyone. He’s cured Countess Bezzubov and she became so fond of him that she adopted him.”

“How do you mean – adopted him?”

“She just did. He’s not Landau any longer, but Count Bezzubov. But this is not the point, but Lidia – I love her dearly but she hasn’t got her head screwed on in the right place – is naturally all over Landau now and neither she nor Karenin take any decisions without him and, therefore your sister’s fate is now in the hands of that man Landau, alias Count Bezzubov.”

…

After an excellent lunch and a great quantity of cognac at Bartnyansky’s, Oblonsky arrived at Countess Lidia’s only slightly later than the time appointed.

“Who else is here? The Frenchman?” Oblonsky asked the porter, looking at Karenin’s familiar coat and an odd, rather artless-looking coat with clasps.

“Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin and Count Bezzubov,” replied the porter sternly.

“Princess Myakhky has guessed right,” thought Oblonsky as he went up the stairs. “Strange! However, it might be as well to get on friendly terms with her. She has enormous influence. If she drops a hint to Pomorsky, the thing’s in the bag.”

It was still quite light outside, but in Countess Lidia’s little drawing room the blinds were drawn and the lamps lit.

At a round table, under a lamp sat the Countess and Alexei Alexandrovich discussing something in low tones. A shortish, lean man with hips like a woman’s, knock-kneed, very pale, handsome, with beautiful shining eyes and long hair that fell over the collar of his frock coat, stood at the other end of the room, examining portraits on the wall. After greeting his hostess and Karenin, Oblonsky could not help casting another glance at the stranger.

“Monsieur Landau,” said the Countess, turning to him with a gentleness and caution that impressed Oblonsky.

Landau hastily looked round, came up with a smile and put a clammy, flaccid hand into the hand that Oblonsky stretched out to greet him, and then immediately went back to look at the portraits.

“I am very glad to see you, particularly today,” said Countess Lidia, motioning Oblonsky to a seat next to Karenin.

“I’ve introduced him to you as Landau,” she said in a low voice, glancing at the Frenchman and then back to Karenin, “but he is really Count Bezzubov, as you probably know. Only he doesn’t like the title.”

“Yes, I have heard,” replied Oblonsky. “They say he completely cured Countess Bezzubov.”

“She came to see me today, she is so pathetic!” said the Countess, turning to Karenin. “For her this separation is terrible. It’s such a blow for her.”

“And he is definitely going?” asked Karenin.

“Yes, he is going to Paris. He heard a voice yesterday,” said Countess Lidia, looking at Oblonsky.

“Ah, a voice!” repeated Oblonsky, feeling that he had to be as circumspect as possible in that company where something special, to which he had as yet no key, was either happening or about to happen.

There was a minute’s silence, after which Countess Lidia said to Oblonsky with a subtle smile, as if about to broach the main topic of conversation:

“I have known you for a long time and am delighted at this opportunity of getting to know you better. ‘Les amis de nos amis sont nos amis’ [‘Our friend’s friends are our friends’]. But to be a friend one must try to understand one’s friend’s spiritual state, and I’m afraid you are not doing this in the case of Alexei Alexandrovich. You understand what I mean,” she said raising her beautiful, dreamy eyes.

“In a way, Countess, I realize that the position of Alexei Alexandrovich…” said Oblonsky who did not quite understand what it was all about and was therefore keen to keep to generalities.

“The change is not in the external circumstances,” said Countess Lidia sternly, while her love-sick eyes followed Karenin who had got up and gone across to Landau, “his heart has changed, he has been given a new heart and I am afraid you have not sufficiently tried to understand the change that has occurred within him.”

“Well, in a general sort of way I can imagine the change. We have always been friendly, and now…” said Oblonsky, responding with a tender glance to the glance of Countess Lidia, and considering which of the two ministers she was more friendly with, so as to know which of the two he would have to ask her to use her influence on.

“The change that has taken place in him cannot weaken his feeling of love for his neighbour; on the contrary, the change that has taken place in him must strengthen this love. But I’m afraid you don’t follow me. Would you like some tea,” she said indicating with her eyes a servant who was handing tea round on a tray.

“Not entirely, Countess. Naturally, his misfortune…”

“Yes, a misfortune which became the highest happiness, when his heart was made new and was filled with Him,” she said casting love-sick glances at Karenin.

“I daresay I can ask her to speak to both of them,” thought Oblonsky.

“Oh certainly, Countess,” he said, “but I should imagine these changes are so intimate that no one, not even the closest of friends, likes to talk about it.”

“On the contrary, we must talk about these things and help each other.”

“Yes, of course, but people can differ so much in their convictions, and besides…” said Oblonsky with a gentle smile.

“There can be no difference when it is a matter of Holy Truth.”

“Oh no, naturally not, but…” and Oblonsky stopped short. He realized she was talking of religion.

“I think he will be falling asleep soon,” said Karenin in a significant whisper, coming up to Countess Lidia.

Oblonsky looked round. Landau was sitting at a window, leaning against the back and an arm of an armchair, his head drooping. On becoming aware of all the glances directed at him he raised his head and smiled a childishly naïve smile.

“Don’t pay any attention,” said Countess Lidia, and deftly moved up a chair for Karenin. “I have noticed…” she began, when the servant came into the room with a letter. Countess Lidia quickly ran her eyes over the note, excused herself and with extraordinary speed wrote a reply, gave it to the servant and came back to the table. “I have noticed,” she continued where she had left off, “that Muscovites, particularly the men, are of all people the most indifferent to religion.”

“Oh, no, Countess, the Muscovites seem to me to have the reputation of being the firmest upholders of it,” replied Oblonsky.

“But, so far as I understand, you, unfortunately, belong to those who are indifferent,” said Karenin, turning to him with a weary smile.

“How can one be indifferent!” said Countess Lidia.

“In this respect it is not so much that I am indifferent, but I suspend judgment,” said Oblonsky with his most appeasing smile. “I don’t think the time for these questions has come for me yet.”

Karenin and Countess Lidia exchanged glances.

“We can never tell whether the time has come for us or not,” said Karenin sternly. “We must not think of whether we are ready or not ready; Grace is not amenable to human consideration; sometimes it fails to descend on those who labour for it but descends on those who are unprepared, as in the case of Saul.”

“No, I don’t think it’ll be just yet,” said Countess Lidia, who had been watching the Frenchman’s movement.

Landau got up and walked over to them.

“May I listen?” he asked.

“Oh, yes; I didn’t want to disturb you,” said Countess Lidia looking at him tenderly. “Sit here with us.”

“All one must do is not close one’s eyes to the light,” continued Karenin.

“Ah, if you knew the happiness we feel, sensing His constant presence in our hearts!” said Countess Lidia with a beatific smile.

“But a man may sometimes feel unable to rise to such heights,” said Oblonsky, conscious that he was not being entirely honest in acknowledging the existence of religious heights, yet not daring to confess to his free-thinking tendencies in the presence of one who, by dropping a single word to Pomorsky, could obtain for him the coveted appointment.

“In other words you mean to say that he may be prevented by sin?” said Countess Lidia. “But this is a wrong conviction. There is no sin for those who have faith, sin has been atoned. Pardon,” she added, with a glance at the servant who had come in again with another note. She read it and answered verbally: “tomorrow, at the Grand Duchess’s, tell him.” “For those who have faith there is no sin,” she said, continuing the conversation.

“Yes, but faith without works is dead,” said Oblonsky, having suddenly remembered this phrase out of the catechism [of the Orthodox Church], and maintaining his independence now by a mere smile.

“There it is – straight out of the Epistle of St James,” said Karenin, addressing Countess Lidia somewhat reproachfully, and as if it was a subject they had discussed many a time before. “How much harm the wrong interpretation of this passage has done! Nothing turns people away from faith as much as does this interpretation: ‘I have no works, I cannot have faith.’ Yet this is not said anywhere but just the opposite.”

“To labour for God with works and save one’s soul with fasting,” said Countess Lidia with fastidious disdain, “those are the primitive ideas of our monks… Yet this is not said anywhere. It is all far, far simpler and easier,” she added, looking at Oblonsky with the same encouraging smile with which she tried to put heart into young maids of honour, embarrassed by the unfamiliar surroundings at Court.

“We are saved through Christ who suffered for us. We are saved by faith,” said Karenin in confirmation of her words, giving her an approving look.

“Vous comprenez l’anglais? [You do understand English?]” asked Countess Lidia and receiving an affirmative answer, got up and began examining the books on a shelf.

“I want to read Safe and Happy or Under the Wing,” she said with a look of enquiry at Karenin. And having found the book [by Lord Radstock], she went back to her seat, and opened it. “It’s very short. It describes the way in which faith is acquired and the happiness, above all earthly bliss, which thereby fills the soul. A man who has faith cannot be unhappy because he is not alone. But you will see for yourself.” She was about to start reading when the servant came in again. “Madame Borozdin? Say tomorrow at two. Yes,” she said with a sigh, keeping the place in the book with a finger and looking straight in front of her with her beautiful, dreamy eyes. “That’s how true faith acts. You know Marie Sanin? You know her tragedy? She lost her only child. She was in despair. And then what happened? She found this friend and now she thanks God for the death of her child. Such is the happiness faith can give.”

“Oh yes, this is very…” said Oblonsky delighted that she was going to read and give him time to come back to reality. “No, obviously better not to ask her about anything today,” he thought. “If only I can get away from here without putting my foot in it.”

“You’ll be bored,” said Countess Lidia, turning to Landau, “you don’t know English, but this is short.”

“Oh, I’ll understand,” said Landau with the same smile and closed his eyes.

Karenin and Countess Lidia exchanged significant glances and the reading started.


…

Oblonsky was completely baffled by all this strange new talk to which he had been listening. In general, the complexity of Petersburg life had a stimulating effect on him, taking him out of Moscow’s stagnant pool; but this complexity he liked and understood in spheres congenial and familiar to him; but in this alien set he was baffled, stunned and unable to grasp the meaning of it all. Listening to Countess Lidia and feeling Landau’s beautiful eyes – naïve or sly, he was not sure which – fixed upon him, Oblonsky was overcome with a peculiar heaviness in his head.

The most varied thoughts jostled each other in his head. “Marie Sanin is glad her child has died… wish I could have a smoke now… to be saved you must have faith and monks don’t know how it must be done but Countess Lidia does… why does my head feel so heavy? Because of the cognac or because it’s all so very strange? I don’t think I’ve done anything improper, as yet anyway. But all the same, I can’t ask her. I’ve heard they make you pray. Suppose they make me do it? This would really be too silly. And what rot she is reading, but she’s got a good accent. Landau is Bezzubov. Why is he Bezzubov?” Suddenly Oblonsky felt his lower jaw twisting itself irresistibly into a yawn. He smoothed his whiskers to hide the yawn and sat up. But immediately afterwards he felt he was already asleep and was about to snore. He came to at the precise instant when Countess Lidia’s voice said “He is asleep.”

Oblonsky came to with a guilty start, feeling himself caught out. But he was relieved to see that the words “he is asleep” were addressed not to him, but to Landau. The Frenchman had fallen asleep, just as he had done. But Oblonsky’s sleep would have offended them, he thought (though, as a matter of fact, he did not even think that, so odd did everything seem to him), while Landau’s sleep delighted them extremely, particularly Countess Lidia.

“ ‘Mon ami’ [‘My friend’],” said Countess Lidia, carefully holding the folds of her silk dress so as not to let it rustle, and in her excitement now calling Karenin ‘mon ami’ instead of Alexei Alexandrovich, “donnez lui la main. Vous voyez? [give him your hand. You see?] Sh-sh,” she hissed at the servant who came in again. “I’m not at home.”

The Frenchman was sleeping or pretending to sleep, with his head against the back of the armchair, and his clammy hand resting on his knee was making feeble gestures as if in an attempt to catch something. Karenin got up, knocking against the table as he did so in spite of efforts to be careful, and went and put his hand in the Frenchman’s. Oblonsky got up, too, and, with his eyes wide open to wake himself up in case he was asleep, looked alternately from one to the other. It was all quite real. Oblonsky felt his head going from bad to worse.

“Que la personne qui est arrivée la dernière, celle qui demande, qu’elle sorte! Qu’elle sorte! [The person who came last, the one who is asking, must leave! Must leave!]” muttered the Frenchman without opening his eyes.

“Vous m’excuserez, mais vous voyez… Revenez vers dix heures, encore mieux demain.” [“You must forgive me, but you see… Come back at ten; better still tomorrow.”]

“Qu’elle sorte! [Must leave!]” repeated the Frenchman impatiently.

“C’est moi, n’est-ce pas? [It’s me, isn’t it?]”

And on getting an affirmative answer, Oblonsky tiptoed out, and forgetting what he had wanted to ask Countess Lidia, forgetting, too, his sister’s interests, and impelled only by the desire to get away from the place as quickly as possible, he rushed out into the street, as if out of a pest house, and chatted and joked with the cab driver for a long time to recover his spirits.

In the congenial atmosphere of the French Theatre where he was just in time for the last act, and later in the Tartar restaurant, Oblonsky came to a little over his champagne. However, throughout that evening he did not feel quite himself.

On his return home to Pyotr Oblonsky’s house, where he was staying while in Petersburg, Oblonsky found a note from Betsy. She very much wanted, she wrote, to finish the interrupted conversation and would like him to call on her tomorrow. No sooner had he had time to read the note, and make a wry face over it, then he heard the ponderous tread of men carrying something heavy.

Oblonsky went out to have a look. It was the rejuvenated Pyotr Oblonsky. He was so drunk that he was unable to get up the stairs; but on seeing Stiva Oblonsky he ordered the men to put him on his feet and, clinging on to Stiva, he went to his room, started telling him how he had spent the evening and fell asleep then and there.

Oblonsky was in low spirits, which rarely happened to him, and took a long time to go to sleep. Whatever he recalled seemed to him horrible but the most horrible, shameful even, was the memory of Countess Lidia’s evening.

The following day he received from Karenin a definite refusal to grant Anna a divorce and realized that that decision was based on what the Frenchman had said the day before in his genuine or feigned sleep.












p. 76-9 (Pt. 1, Ch. 23):

Vronsky and Kitty waltzed round the ballroom a few times. When the waltz was over Kitty went up to her mother, and scarcely had time to say a few words to Countess Nordston before Vronsky came to fetch her for the first quadrille. During the quadrille nothing of any significance was said; now they carried on a desultory conversation about the Korsunskys, husband and wife, whom Vronsky described very amusingly as nice, forty-year-old children, now about the projected people’s theatre, and only once did the conversation touch a sensitive nerve in Kitty – when he asked whether Levin was there or not and added that he had liked him very much. But Kitty had not expected more of the quadrille. It was the mazurka she was waiting for with bated breath. It seemed to her that it would be during the mazurka that all would be decided. The fact that, during the quadrille, he did not ask her for the mazurka, did not worry her. She was convinced that she would dance the mazurka with him, as she had done at previous balls, and she refused the mazurka to five other partners, saying that she was already engaged for it. For Kitty the whole ball up to the last quadrille was an enchanted dream of joyful colours, sounds and movement. She only stopped dancing when she felt too tired, and begged for a rest. But, while she was dancing the last quadrille with one of the boring youths whom it was impossible to refuse, she happened to come face to face with Vronsky and Anna. She had not run into Anna again since the beginning of the evening and now, suddenly, she saw her in a completely new and unexpected light. She saw in her a characteristic – which she knew so well in herself – of being excited by success. She saw Anna drunk with the wine of the admiration which she was arousing. Kitty knew this feeling, knew its symptoms, and she saw them in Anna – she saw the tremulous, flashing glitter in her eyes, the smile of happiness and excitement naturally curling her lips, and the graceful precision, the sureness and lightness of her movements.

“Who is it?” she asked herself. “Everyone, or just one person?” And without helping her agonized partner with the conversation, the thread of which he had lost and could not pick up again, and outwardly obeying the glad cries and imperious yells of Korsunsky as he launched everyone now into a ‘grand rond’ [‘big circle’], now into a ‘chaîne’ [‘chain’], Kitty watched, and her heart contracted more and more. “No, it is not the admiration of the crowd that has intoxicated her, but the admiration of one man. And who is that one man? Can it really be he?” Every time he spoke to Anna, her eyes lit up with a joyous sparkle and a smile of happiness curved her rosy lips. She seemed to be making an effort not to show these signs of joy but they broke out on her face of their own accord. “But what about him?” Kitty looked at him, and was appalled. What she saw in his face was so clearly mirrored in Anna’s. What had become of the calm, firm manner, and the light-hearted calm expression which were invariably his? Now, every time he turned to Anna, he slightly inclined his head, as if he wanted to fall down at her feet, and his eyes expressed nothing but submission and fear. “I don’t want to hurt you,” his glance seemed to say each time, “but I want to save myself, and I don’t know how to do it.” His face bore an expression which Kitty had never seen before.

They were talking about acquaintances they had in common, carrying on the most insignificant conversation, but it seemed to Kitty that every word they said was deciding their fate, and hers. And strangely enough, although they were, in fact, talking about how ridiculous Ivan Ivanovich was when he spoke French, and how a better match might have been found for the Eletsky girl, the words they were saying held a significance for them, and they felt this, just as Kitty did. The whole ball, the whole world indeed, was shrouded in fog in Kitty’s heart. Only the strict school of upbringing which she had gone through sustained her and forced her to do what was expected of her, that is, to dance, to answer questions, to talk, even to smile. But before the mazurka began, when the chairs were already being arranged in readiness for it, and a few couples had moved into the main ballroom from the smaller rooms, Kitty had a moment of despair and terror. She had refused five partners, and now had no one with whom to dance the mazurka. There was not even any hope that someone would ask her for it, precisely because she was too much of a success in society, and it would never occur to anyone that she had not a partner already. She would have to tell her mother that she was feeling ill, and go home, but she had not the strength to do so. She felt completely crushed.

She went into the furthest recess of a little drawing room and sank into an armchair. The gossamer-like skirt of her dress billowed up in a cloud around her slender figure; one thin, bare, delicate girlish arm, hanging down listlessly, sank in the folds of her pink skirt; in the other hand she held her fan, and with short, quick movements was fanning her burning face. But, despite the fact that she looked like a butterfly which had just alighted on a blade of grass, ready at any moment to spread its rainbow wings and fly away, her heart was aching with terrible despair.

“But perhaps I was mistaken, perhaps it didn’t really happen?”

And once more she recalled everything that she had seen.

“Kitty, what’s all this?” said Countess Nordston, coming up to her silently over the carpet. “I don’t understand it.”

Kitty’s lower lip trembled; she stood up quickly.

“Kitty, aren’t you dancing the mazurka?”

“No, no,” said Kitty, in a voice quivering with tears.

“I heard him ask her for the mazurka,” said Countess Nordston, knowing that Kitty would understand whom she meant by ‘him’ and ‘her’. “She said: ‘But aren’t you dancing with Princess Kitty Shcherbatsky?’”

“Oh, I don’t care!” replied Kitty.

Nobody but she herself understood her position, nobody knew that a few days before she had refused a man whom, perhaps, she loved, and had refused him because she had put her faith in another.

Countess Nordston sought out Korsunsky, who was her partner for the mazurka, and told him to ask Kitty for it.

Kitty danced in the first pair and, fortunately for her, did not have to talk, as Korsunsky was rushing about all the time, giving instructions and carrying out his duties. Vronsky and Anna were sitting almost opposite her. She saw them with her long-sighted eyes, indeed saw them close to as well, when they came face to face as couples in the dance, and the more she saw of them, the more convinced she became that her misfortune was indeed all too real. She saw that they felt they were all alone together, in that ballroom full of people. And on Vronsky’s face, usually so firm and independent, she saw the lost, docile expression she had noticed before – the expression of an intelligent dog when it feels guilty.

When Anna smiled, he too caught her smile. If she was thoughtful, he too became pensive. Some sort of supernatural force drew Kitty’s eyes to Anna’s face. She was lovely in her simple black dress; lovely were her plump arms with their bracelets; lovely was her firm neck with its string of pearls around it; lovely her straying curls; lovely the graceful, light movements of her small hands and feet and lovely, too, was her beautiful face in its animation. But there was something terrible and cruel in her loveliness.

Kitty was looking at her with even greater admiration than before – and was suffering more and more. She felt crushed, and her face showed it. When Vronsky caught sight of her, as he bumped into her during the mazurka, he did not recognize her at once, so greatly had she changed.

“What a delightful ball!” he said to her, in order to say something.

“Yes,” she replied.

Half-way through the mazurka, while they were repeating a complicated figure which Korsunsky had just devised, Anna stepped into the centre of the circle, taking two men with her, and beckoned to another woman and to Kitty to join them. Kitty gave Anna a scared look as she approached her. Anna looked at her through slightly narrowed eyes, and smiled as she pressed Kitty’s hand. But seeing that Kitty’s face only responded to her smile with a look of despair and amazement, she turned away from her and began to talk gaily to the other lady.

“Yes,” said Kitty to herself, “there’s something alien, diabolical and fascinating about her.”




ESI V.jpg

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[HERO]

ESI


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsaZOc8y-FM

Anna Karenina (trans. Kyrill Zinovieff & Jenny Hughes); p. 689-93 (Pt. 7, Ch. 28 & 29):

The weather was clear. A fine drizzle had been falling all the morning, and now it had just cleared up. The iron roofs, the flagstones of the pavement, the cobbles in the roadway, the wheels and the leather, the brass and the metalwork of carriages – everything glistened brightly in the May sunshine. It was three o’clock, the time when streets are at their most lively.

Sitting in the corner of the comfortable carriage, swaying only slightly on its resilient springs with the swift trot of the greys, Anna again went over in her mind – to the ceaseless rattle of the wheels and the rapidly changing impressions in the open air – the events of the last few days and saw her situation in quite a different light to what it had seemed to her at home. Even the thought of death did not seem to her now as clear and terrifying, and death itself did not appear inevitable. Now she reproached herself for the depths of humiliation to which she had descended. “I am imploring him to forgive me. I gave in to him. Admitted I was in the wrong. Why? Can’t I live without him?” And leaving unanswered the question of how she was going to live without him, she began reading the signboards. “Office and Warehouse. Dental Surgeon. Yes, I’ll tell Dolly everything. She doesn’t like Vronsky. It’ll be humiliating, painful, but I’ll tell her everything. She is fond of me and I’ll follow her advice. I will not give in to him, I won’t allow him to mould my character. Filippov, Cakes. They say they send their pastry to Petersburg. Moscow Water is so good. And then the Mytishchi Wells and Pancakes.” And she recalled how long, long ago, when she was only seventeen, she had visited the Trinity Monastery with her aunt. “It still had to be by horse and carriage. Was it really me, with red hands? What a lot of things that then seemed to me so marvellous and unattainable, have become insignificant, and the things I had then are now unattainable for ever! Would I have believed then that I could reach such depths of humiliation? How proud and happy he’ll be when he gets my note! But I will show him… What a nasty smell this paint had. Why do they go on painting and building all the time? Dress-making and Millinery,” she read. A man bowed to her. It was Annushka’s husband. “Our parasites,” she remembered Vronsky saying. “Our? Why our? The terrible thing is that the past can’t be torn out by its roots. It can’t be torn out, but it can be ignored. And I shall ignore it.” And here she remembered her past with Karenin and how she had blotted it out from her memory. “Dolly will think that I’m leaving a second husband and that therefore I must surely be in the wrong. As if I had any wish to be in the right! I can’t!” she murmured and wanted to cry. But immediately she started wondering what those two girls were smiling at. “Love, probably? They don’t know how dreary it is, how humiliating… the Avenue and children. Three boys running, playing at horses, Seryozha! I shall lose everything and not get him back. I shall, I’ll lose everything if he doesn’t come back. Perhaps he has missed the train and is back by now. Want more humiliation!” she said to herself. “No, I’ll go in to Dolly and tell her straight out: ‘I’m unhappy, I deserve it, the fault’s mine, but I’m unhappy all the same, help me.’ These horses, this carriage – how I loathe myself in this carriage – they’re all his; but I shall never see them again.”

Thinking up the words she would use to tell Dolly everything and deliberately putting salt on her wounded heart, Anna went up the steps.

“Any guests?” she asked in the hall.

“Yekaterina Alexandrovna Levin,” replied the servant.

“Kitty! The Kitty Vronsky had been in love with,” thought Anna, “the girl he always remembered with affection. He is sorry he did not marry her. But me he thinks of with loathing and is sorry he has ever started this love affair.”

The two sisters were having a consultation about feeding the baby when Anna arrived. Dolly came out alone to meet her guest, who was preventing them from going on with their conversation.

“Ah, you haven’t left yet? I wanted to come and see you myself,” she said. “I received a letter from Stiva today.”

“We’ve also received a telegram,” replied Anna, looking round to see Kitty.

“He writes that he doesn’t understand what Alexei Alexandrovich really wants, but that he won’t leave without an answer.”

“I thought you had someone with you. May I read the letter?”

“I have – Kitty,” said Dolly embarrassed. “She has stayed in the nursery. She has been very ill.”

“So I’ve heard. May I read the letter?”

“I’ll bring it right away. But he has not refused; on the contrary, Stiva has hopes,” said Dolly, pausing in the doorway.

“I have no hope and, besides, I don’t want it,” said Anna.

“What’s this? Does Kitty think it beneath her dignity to meet me?” thought Anna when she remained alone. “She may be right, too. But it’s not for her, her, who was in love with Vronsky, to let me see it, even though it’s true. I know that no respectable woman can receive me in my present situation. I knew that from that very first moment I sacrificed everything to him. And here’s the reward! Oh, how I hate him. And what did I come here for? I feel worse here, feel the situation more difficult to bear.” She heard the sisters’ voices conferring in the next room. “And what shall I tell Dolly now? Shall I comfort Kitty with the knowledge that I am unhappy and submit to her patronage? No, and, besides, Dolly won’t understand anything. And I have nothing to say to her. It would be interesting only to see Kitty and show her how I despise everyone and everything, how nothing matters to me now.”

Dolly came in with the letter. Anna read it and handed it back in silence.

“I knew it all,” she said. “And it doesn’t interest me in the least.”

“But why? I have hopes, on the contrary,” said Dolly, looking at Anna with curiosity. She had never seen her in such a strange, irritable mood. “When are you going?” she asked.

Anna looked straight in front of her, screwing up her eyes, and did not answer.

“Why is Kitty hiding from me?” she said, looking at the door and blushing.

“Oh, what nonsense. She is feeding the baby and is having some trouble, I advised her… she’s delighted. She’ll come in a minute,” said Dolly awkwardly, bad at lying. “Ah, there she is.”

When she was told that Anna had arrived, Kitty had not wanted to come out, but Dolly had persuaded her. Kitty came out, nerving herself to do it, and blushed as she came up to Anna and held out her hand.

“I am delighted,” she said, in a shaky voice.

Kitty was embarrassed by the struggle that was taking place within her between animosity towards this bad woman and the desire to be forbearing; but as soon as she saw Anna’s lovely, pleasant face, all hostility immediately vanished.

“I shouldn’t have been surprised if you had refused to see me. I am used to everything. You were ill? Yes, you’ve changed,” said Anna.

Kitty felt that Anna was looking at her with hostility. She put it down to the awkward situation which Anna, who had once befriended her, now felt herself to be in in her presence, and she was sorry for her.

They chatted about Kitty’s illness, about the child, about Stiva, but quite obviously nothing interested Anna.

“I came to say goodbye to you,” she said to Dolly.

“When are you going, then?”

But again Anna did not answer and turned to Kitty.

“Yes, I’m very glad I saw you,” she said with a smile. “I’ve heard so much about you from so many sources, even from your husband. He came to see me and I liked him very much,” she added with obvious ill intention. “Where is he?”

“He has gone to the country,” said Kitty blushing.

“Remember me to him – be sure you do.”

“I will be sure to,” repeated Kitty naively, and had a feeling of pity for her as she looked into her eyes.

“Well then, goodbye, Dolly.” And Anna hastily left, having kissed Dolly and shaken hands with Kitty.

“She’s the same as ever and just as attractive. Very beautiful!” said Kitty, when Anna was gone. “But there’s something pathetic about her. Terribly pathetic.”

“No, there was something special about her today,” said Dolly. “When I was seeing her off in the hall I had the impression she wanted to cry.”

…

Anna got into the carriage feeling worse even than she had when she had left home. To her previous agony was now added the feeling of humiliation and rejection which she had clearly felt during the meeting with Kitty.

“Where now? Home?” asked Pyotr.

“Yes, home,” she said no longer even thinking of where she was going. “How they looked at me – as at something terrible, strange and curious. What can he be telling the other man?” she thought, glancing at two pedestrians. “How can one tell someone else what one feels! I was going to tell Dolly and it’s a good thing I didn’t. How she would have been delighted at my misery! She would have concealed it, but her main feeling would have been joy at my being punished for the pleasures she envied me for. And Kitty – she would have been even more delighted. How I can see the whole of her – through and through! She knows I had been more than usually polite to her husband. And she is jealous and hates me. And despises me, too. In her eyes I am an immoral woman. If I were an immoral woman I could have made her husband fall in love with me… had I wanted to. And I did want to, too. Now, that man is pleased with himself,” she thought, seeing a fat, red-faced gentleman driving past in the opposite direction, who had taken her for someone he knew, had raised his shiny hat over his shiny bald head and then discovered he had made a mistake. “He thought he knew me. But he knows me as little as anyone in the world knows me. I don’t know myself. I know my appetites, as the French say. Now those boys there want that filthy ice cream. This they know for sure,” she thought, looking at two boys who had stopped an ice-cream man; the man took a tub down from his head and was wiping his sweaty face with the end of a cloth. “We all want something sweet, something that tastes nice. If we can’t have candy, give us filthy ice cream. And Kitty is the same: couldn’t get Vronsky, so she took Levin. And she envies me. And hates me. And we all hate each other. I hate Kitty, and Kitty me. Yes, this is true. Tyutkin, coiffeur, je me fais coiffer par Tyutkin… [Tyutkin, hairdresser, I have my hair done by Tyutkin…] I’ll tell him this when he comes,” she thought and smiled. But all at once she remembered she had no one now to say funny things to. “Besides, there’s nothing funny, nothing amusing anywhere. Everything is horrible. They’re ringing the bell for Vespers and how carefully that shopkeeper crosses himself! As if he is afraid of dropping something. What are these churches for, that bell-ringing and that falsehood? Only in order to conceal the fact that we all hate each other, like those cabdrivers who swear at each other with such venom. Yashvin says: ‘He wants to leave me without a shirt and I want to leave him without one.’ That’s the truth.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCd-j-xqnBQ



p. 693-700 [Pt. 7, Ch. 29-31]:

She was so absorbed by these thoughts that she even forgot to think about her own situation, when her carriage drew up at the steps of her house. Only on seeing the doorman come out to meet it did she remember that she had sent a note and a telegram.

“Any answer?” she asked.

“I’ll have a look,” replied the doorman and after a glance at his desk took out and gave her the thin square envelope of a telegram.

“Cannot come before ten o’clock. Vronsky,” she read.

“And has the messenger come back?”

“No, he hasn’t,” replied the porter.

“Ah, in that case I know what I have to do,” she said and feeling a vague anger and need for vengeance rising within her, she ran upstairs. “I’ll go to him myself. Before leaving him for ever I shall tell him everything. Never, never have I hated anyone as much as I hate this man!” she thought. On seeing his hat on the peg she shuddered with loathing. It did not occur to her that his telegram was a reply to her telegram and that he had not received her note yet. She imagined him now talking calmly with his mother and Princess Sorokin and rejoicing at her sufferings. “Certainly I must go as soon as possible,” she said to herself, not knowing yet where to go. She wanted to get away as quickly as she could from the feelings she experienced in that terrible house. The servants, the walls, the things in that house – it all evoked loathing and fury within her and pressed her down like a weight.

“I must go to the railway station or else go there, to the house, and catch him.” Anna looked up the railway timetable in the newspaper. A train was leaving in the evening at 8.20. “Oh yes, I’ll have time.” She ordered other horses to be harnessed and began packing a travelling bag with things she would need for several days. She knew she would never return. Among all the plans that came into her head she vaguely decided on one which was that after what would take place at the railway station or at the Countess’s estate, she would go by the Nizhny Novgorod line as far as the first town and stay there.

Dinner was laid; she went up to the table, smelt the bread and the cheese and, having come to the conclusion that the smell of all food disgusted her, ordered her carriage and went out. The house already threw its shadow right across the street, and the evening was clear and still warm in the sun. And Annushka who was following her with her things, and Pyotr who was putting the things in the carriage and the coachman, obviously disgruntled – she found them all repulsive and their words and gestures irritated her.

“I don’t need you, Pyotr.”

“But what about the ticket?”

“Oh, as you like, I don’t care,” she said, vexed.

Pyotr jumped on to the box and, arms akimbo, ordered the coachman to drive to the station.

…

“There’s that girl again! Again I understand everything,” said Anna to herself as soon as the carriage moved off and, swaying a little, rattled over the small cobbles of the roadway; and again impressions succeeded each other in her head.

“Oh yes, what was the last thing I was thinking of? It was rather good,” she said to herself, trying to remember. “Tyutkin, coiffeur? No, that wasn’t it. Oh yes – what Yashvin was saying: the struggle for existence and hatred are the only things that bind people together. No, it’s no use you going,” she said, mentally addressing a party of people in a four-in-hand, who were evidently driving off to the country on pleasure bent. “And the dog you are taking with you won’t help you. You can’t get away from yourselves.” Glancing in the direction in which Pyotr was looking she saw a half-drunk factory worker, his head swaying, being led away by a policeman. “Now that one’s done it quicker,” she thought. “Count Vronsky and I also failed to find any joy, even though we expected so much from it.” And now for the first time Anna turned that bright light by which she was seeing everything on her relations with him, which up till now she had avoided thinking about. “What did he look for in me? Not so much love as the satisfaction of his vanity.” She recalled his words and the expression on his face, reminiscent of a docile pointer, in the early days of their liaison. And everything now confirmed this. “Yes, he felt the triumph of successful vanity. Of course, there was some love in it too, but it was mainly pride in his success. I was something for him to boast about. Now that’s past. There is nothing to be proud of. Not to be proud of, but to be ashamed of. He took from me all he could and now I am no use to him. He finds me a burden and is trying not to behave dishonourably towards me. He let the cat out of the bag yesterday when he said what he said – he wants the divorce and marriage in order to burn his boats. He loves me – but how? The zest is gone,” she said to herself in English. “This man wants to astonish everyone and is very pleased with himself,” she thought, looking at a pink-faced shop assistant riding a hired horse. “He finds all the savour gone, so far as I am concerned. If I leave him, in his heart of hearts he will be pleased.”

This was no supposition; she saw it clearly in that piercing light which now revealed to her the meaning of life and of human relations.

“My love is becoming more passionate and selfish all the time, and his is gradually fading, and this is why we are drifting apart,” she went on thinking. “And there’s nothing that can be done about it. I have staked everything on him and I demand from him an increased devotion to me. But he wants to get further and further away from me. Before our liaison we were drawn towards each other, but now we are being irresistibly drawn apart. And nothing can change it. He tells me I am jealous for no reason and I used to tell myself I was jealous for no reason; but this isn’t true. I’m not jealous, but I am displeased. But…” She opened her mouth and moved to another seat in the carriage from the sheer excitement aroused by the thought that suddenly occurred to her. “If I could be anything other than his mistress who passionately loves his caresses; but I can’t be anything else and don’t want to be. And by this desire of mine I arouse revulsion in him and he anger and resentment in me, and it cannot be otherwise. As if I didn’t know he would not deceive me, that he has no designs on the Sorokin girl, that he is not in love with Kitty, that he will not be unfaithful to me! I know all this, but I’m none the happier for it. If he becomes kind and tender to me not because he loves me but out of a sense of duty, while what I desire will simply not be there – why, that would be a thousand times worse even than resentment. It would be hell! And it’s precisely what is happening. He has long stopped loving me. And where love stops hate begins. I don’t know these streets at all. All these hills and these houses, endless houses… And the houses are filled with people and more people… So many of them, there’s no end to them and they all hate each other. All right, let’s say I think up something which will make me happy. Well? I get a divorce, Karenin gives up Seryozha to me and I get married to Vronsky.” At the thought of Karenin, an extraordinarily vivid picture of him rose up before her eyes, very true to life with his meek, lifeless, dull eyes, blue veins on white hands, tone of voice and cracking of fingers, and the recollection of the feeling which had existed between them and which had also been called love, made her shudder with revulsion. “All right then, I’ll get my divorce and shall become Vronsky’s wife. And so Kitty will no longer look at me the way she looked at me today? No. And will Seryozha no longer ask or think about my two husbands? And what sort of new emotion will I think up between me and Vronsky? Is anything possible – which will not be happiness, of course, but will not be agony either? No, no and no!” she answered herself without the slightest hesitation now. “It is not possible. Life itself is drawing us apart, and I’m the cause of his unhappiness and he of mine; he can’t be changed and nor can I. We’ve tried everything but the screw has worn smooth. Oh yes, there’s a beggar woman with her child. She thinks people are sorry for her. Aren’t we all thrown out into the world only in order to hate each other and therefore to torment ourselves and others? Schoolboys walking out there, laughing. Seryozha?” she thought. “I also thought I loved him and admired my own tenderness. But I did, after all, live without him, did give him up in exchange for another love, and did not complain about the exchange, so long as I was satisfied with that other love.” And she remembered with revulsion what she called that other love. And the clarity with which she now saw her own and other people’s lives made her glad. “That’s how I am, and Pyotr, and Fyodor the coachman, and that tradesman, and all those people who live along the Volga where those advertisements invite us to, and everywhere and always,” she thought as she drove up to the low building of the Nizhny Novgorod station and the porters ran out to meet her.

“Shall I get a ticket to Obiralovka?” said Pyotr.

She had quite forgotten where to and why she was travelling and understood the question only with great effort.

“Yes,” she said, handing him her purse and, taking a small red bag in her hand, she stepped out of the carriage.

As she made her way through the crowd to the first-class waiting room, she remembered little by little all the details of her situation and the various choices she was hesitating between. And again hope and despair in turn touched the old sore places and rubbed salt into the wounds of her aching, her terribly fluttering heart. Sitting on the star-shaped sofa waiting for the train and looking with loathing at the people coming in and out (they all seemed repulsive to her), she thought of how she would arrive at the station and would write a note to him and of what she would write; she thought of how, in his inability to understand her sufferings, he was now complaining to his mother of the situation he found himself in, and of how she would come into the room, and of what she would say to him. Then she thought of how life might still be happy, and of how agonizingly she loved and hated him and of how terrible was the pounding of her heart.


…


The bell rang, some young men went hurriedly by, ugly and insolent and yet careful of the impression they were creating; Pyotr, in his livery and gaiters, with his vacuous, brutish face, also crossed the hall and came up to her in order to see her to her railway carriage. The noisy men became quiet when she passed them on the platform and one of them whispered something about her to another – something horrid, naturally. She climbed up the high step of the carriage and sat down in an empty compartment on the dirty well-sprung seat which had once been white. The springs of the seat made her bag bounce once before it lay still. Pyotr, with an inane smile raised his gold-braided hat by way of saying goodbye to her, and an insolent guard slammed the door and banged down the catch. A lady, ugly and wearing a bustle (Anna mentally undressed the woman and was appalled at her hideousness), and a little girl ran past the carriage window laughing affectedly.

“Katerina Andreyevna’s got it, she’s got it all, ma tante,” shouted the girl.

“Even the girl is unnatural and affected,” thought Anna. To avoid seeing anyone she quickly got up and sat down at the opposite window of the empty compartment. A grimy, ugly peasant with strands of matted hair sticking out from under his cap went past the window, stooping down to the carriage wheels. “There is something familiar about that hideous peasant,” Anna thought. Then she remembered her dream and went over to the opposite door trembling with fear. The guard was opening the door to let in a man and his wife.

“Are you getting out, madam?”

Anna did not reply. Neither the conductor nor the passengers coming in noticed the terror on her face under her veil. The couple sat down opposite her, and examined her dress with some attention, though trying not to show it. Both husband and wife seemed repulsive to Anna. The husband asked her for permission to smoke, obviously not in order to smoke but in order to start a conversation with her. On receiving her permission, he began to speak to his wife in French about something he had even less need to speak about than he had to smoke. Pretending to talk, they spoke nonsense only so that she should hear. Anna saw clearly how sick they were of each other and how much they hated one another. Indeed, it was impossible not to hate such pathetic monsters.

The second bell rang, followed by luggage being moved, by noise, shouting and laughter. It seemed so clear to Anna that no one had anything to rejoice about that the laughter irritated her to the point of physical pain and she wanted to stop her ears so as not to hear it. The third bell rang at last, the engine whistled and screeched, the coupling chain jerked and the husband crossed himself. “It would be interesting to ask him what he means by this,” thought Anna, glancing up at him with hatred. She was looking past the lady, out of the window, at the people seeing the train off, who were standing on the platform and appeared to be gliding backwards. Jerking rhythmically over the rail joints the carriage in which Anna was sitting rolled past the platform, past a stone wall, past the signals, past other carriages; the wheels with a movement ever more oily-smooth, gave a slight ringing sound as they rolled on the rails, the window was lit up by the bright evening sun, and a light breeze played with the blind. Anna forgot about her fellow-passengers and, rocked gently by the movement of the train, breathed in the fresh air and resumed her thoughts.

“Oh yes, what was it I was thinking of? Of the fact that I couldn’t conceive of a situation in which life would not be a torment, that we are all created in order to suffer, and that we all know this and are all busy thinking up different ways of self-deception. But when you see the truth what are you to do?”

“Man is given reason to be rid of his worries,” said the lady in French, obviously pleased with her phrase and saying it in an affected accent.

Those words seemed to answer Anna’s thought.

“To be rid of worries,” repeated Anna. And glancing at the ruddy-faced husband and his thin wife she realized that the sickly wife believed herself to be a misunderstood woman and the husband was unfaithful to her and encouraged her in her belief. By turning her searchlight on them, Anna seemed to know their history and all the nooks and crannies of their souls. But there was nothing of any interest there and she resumed her train of thought.

“Yes, I am very worried and reason is given to man to be rid of worries; therefore I must get rid of them. Why not snuff out the candle when there’s nothing more to look at, when all is loathsome to see? But how? Why did that guard run along the footboard? Why do they shout, those young men in that carriage? Why do they talk, why do they laugh? It is all lies, all falsehood, all deceit, all evil…”

When the train stopped at a station Anna came out in a crowd of other passengers and, shunning them like lepers, stood on the platform trying to remember why she had come there and what she had intended doing. Everything that before seemed possible to her was now so difficult to grasp, particularly in all that noisy crowd of ugly people who never left her in peace. The porters were running up and offering their services; young men, tapping the wooden floor of the platform with their heels, were talking in loud voices and looking her up and down; people trying to get out of her way dodged the wrong way. Recollecting that she had meant to continue her journey if there was no answer, she stopped a porter and asked whether there was a coachman there with a note from Count Vronsky.

“Count Vronsky? Someone from him has just been here. Meeting Princess Sorokin and her daughter. What’s the coachman like?”

While she was speaking to the porter, the coachman, Mikhail, pink-cheeked and cheerful, dressed in a smart blue coat with a watch chain, evidently proud of having carried out his errand so well, came up to her and handed her a note. She unsealed the envelope and felt a pang in her heart even before she had read it.

“Very sorry your note did not catch me. I’ll be back at ten,” Vronsky had written in a careless hand.

“There! That’s what I expected!” she said to herself with a contemptuous little laugh.

“All right, go home then,” she said softly, turning to Mikhail. She spoke softly because the rapid pounding of her heart interfered with her breathing. “No, I shan’t let you torment me,” she thought, directing her threat not at him, not at herself, but at whoever it was made her suffer, and went along the platform past the station building.

Two servant-girls walking up and down the platform turned their heads round to look at her and commented on her dress: “Real,” they said about the lace she was wearing. The young men would not leave her in peace. They went past her again, peering into her face, laughing and shouting out something in unnatural voices. The station master asked her, as he walked by, whether she was going on in the train. A boy selling rye beer never took his eyes off her. “Oh God, where am I to go?” she thought going further and further along the platform. At the end of it she stopped. A few ladies and children who had come to meet a bespectacled gentleman, and had been laughing and talking in loud voices, fell silent and stared at her when she drew even with them. A goods train was approaching. The platform shook and she had the impression she was going in the train again.

And suddenly she remembered the man crushed by the train the day she had first met Vronsky, and realized what she had to do. With a swift, light tread she went down the steps leading from the water tank to the rails and stopped close to the passing train. She was looking at the underside of the trucks, at the screws and chains, and at the tall iron wheels of the first truck slowly rolling forwards, and tried to estimate the point midway between the front and back wheels and the precise moment at which that midway point would be opposite her.

“There!” she said to herself, looking in the shadow of the truck at the mixture of sand and slag which covered the sleepers, “there, right in the middle, and I’ll punish him and escape from them all and from myself.”

She wanted to fall under the first truck, the middle portion of which was now directly opposite her. But the little red bag, which she began to take off her arm, delayed her and it was too late: the middle of the truck had already passed her. She had to wait for the next truck. A feeling similar to the one she used to have, when about to enter the water bathing, seized her and she made the sign of the cross. The familiar gesture of crossing herself evoked within her a whole series of memories of her childhood and youth, and suddenly the darkness that had shrouded everything for her was torn apart and life appeared before her for a moment, radiant with all its past joys. But she did not take her eyes off the wheels of the second truck, which was now approaching. And at precisely the moment when the midpoint between the wheels drew level with her, she threw aside the little red bag and, drawing her head in between her shoulders, dropped on her hands under the truck and with a light movement, as if about to rise at once, she sank to her knees. And at that same instant, she was horror-struck at what she was doing. “Where am I? What am I doing? Why?” She tried to rise, to throw herself aside; but something huge and inexorable struck her on the head and dragged her along by her back. “God, forgive me everything!” she murmured, feeling the impossibility of struggling. A little peasant, muttering something, was working over some iron. And the candle by which she had read the book filled with anxiety, deceit, sorrow and evil flared up with a brighter light than ever, lit up for her all that before had been in darkness, spluttered, grew dim and went out for ever.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKZRcIGnaqE




p. 462-76 (Pt. 5, Ch. 21-25):

Once Karenin realized, from his talks with Betsy and Oblonsky, that all that was required of him was that he should leave his wife in peace and not trouble her with his presence and that his wife herself desired this, he felt so lost that he could not decide anything himself, did not himself know what he wanted and, putting himself in the hands of those who took such pleasure in looking after his affairs, he agreed to everything. Only when Anna had actually left the house and the English governess sent to enquire whether she should dine with him or separately, did he for the first time clearly realize his position and was appalled by it.

The most difficult thing about his situation was that he was quite unable to find a link or reconcile his past with what was taking place now. It was not the past, during which he had lived happily with his wife, that disturbed him. He had already lived through the agony of transition from the past to the knowledge of his wife’s infidelity; that state had been painful to him but he found it comprehensible. If his wife had left him then, after confessing to her infidelity, he would have been grieved and unhappy but he would not have been in the same hopeless, to him incomprehensible, situation in which he now felt himself to be. He was quite unable to reconcile his recent forgiveness of her, his emotion of tenderness, his love for his sick wife and for another man’s child, with what was happening now: with the fact that his reward was to find himself now alone, disgraced, ridiculed, not wanted by anyone and despised by all.

During the first two days after his wife’s departure Karenin received petitioners, saw his private secretary, went to committee meetings, and had dinner in the dining room as usual. Without realizing why he was doing so, during these two days he stretched every nerve and thought with the sole aim of appearing calm and even indifferent. When replying to the servants’ enquiries as to what should be done with Anna’s rooms and belongings, he made a supreme effort to appear like a man for whom the event which had taken place had not been unforeseen and had nothing out of the ordinary about it, and he achieved his aim: no one could have discerned in him any signs of despair. But on the third day after Anna’s departure, when Korney handed him a bill from a milliner’s shop which she had forgotten to pay and informed him that the manager had come in person, Karenin had him shown up.

“Forgive me, sir, for being so bold as to trouble you. But if you would like us to send the bill to madam, then would you be good enough to let us have madam’s address?”

Karenin seemed to the shopkeeper to be pondering, and then suddenly turned around and sat down at the table. His head sunk in his hands, he sat there in that position for a long while, several times attempting to say something and stopping short.

Korney, who had understood his master’s feelings, asked the shopkeeper to call another time. Left alone once more, Karenin realized that he was no longer capable of keeping up the appearance of firmness and calm. He gave orders for the carriage, which was waiting, to be unharnessed, said that he would receive no one, and did not appear at dinner.

He felt he would not be able to endure that general pressure of contempt and harshness, which he had clearly seen on the face of the shopkeeper and of Korney, and of everyone, without exception, whom he had met during those two days. He felt that he could not avert people’s hatred from himself, for the hatred was there not because he was bad (for then he could have tried to be better) but because he was shamefully and repulsively unhappy. He knew for that very reason – because his heart was torn to shreds – they would be merciless to him. He felt that people would destroy him like dogs who tear out the throat of some poor maimed dog whining in pain. He knew that the only hope of escape from people was to hide his wounds from them and he had unconsciously tried to do this for two days, but now he felt that it was beyond him to carry on this unequal struggle any longer.

His despair was further increased by the consciousness that he was entirely alone in his grief. It was not just that there was not a single person in Petersburg to whom he could tell everything he was experiencing, who might pity him not as a high-ranking civil servant, not as a member of society, but just as a suffering human being; it was that he had no such friend anywhere.

Karenin had grown up an orphan, together with his only brother. They did not remember their father; their mother had died when Karenin was ten years old. They had small means. They had been brought up by Karenin’s uncle, an important civil servant and sometime favourite of the late Emperor.

Having finished school and university with distinction, Karenin, with the help of his uncle, had at once embarked on a distinguished civil service career and, from then on, had entirely devoted himself to professional ambition. Neither at school nor at university, nor later at work, had Karenin made close ties of friendship with anyone. His brother had been the person closest to his heart, but he had been in the diplomatic service and had always lived abroad where, indeed, he had died, shortly after Karenin’s marriage.

It was when Karenin had been Governor of a province that an aunt of Anna’s, a rich provincial lady, had introduced him – no longer a young man, though a young Governor – to her niece, and had manoeuvred him into such a position that he either had to propose to her, or leave the town. Karenin had hesitated for a long time. There were, at the time, just as many reasons for this step as there were against it, and there was no decisive reason to make him change his rule: when in doubt, refrain. But Anna’s aunt had intimated to him through a mutual acquaintance that he had already compromised the girl and that he was in honour bound to propose to her. He did so, and bestowed upon his bride and wife all the feeling of which he was capable.

His attachment to Anna excluded from his heart any vestige of a need he may have felt for affectionate relations with other people. And now, among all his acquaintances, he had not a single close friend. He had many so-called social connections; but no friends at all. Karenin knew a great many people whom he could invite to dinner, whom he could ask to take part in a project which interested him or whose influence he could use on behalf of a petitioner, or with whom he could frankly discuss the activities of other people and of the government; but his relations with these people were limited to one sphere, sharply defined by custom and habit, beyond which it was impossible to go. He did have one acquaintance from his university days with whom he had later become close friends and with whom he could have talked about his personal grief; but this friend was now Chief Education Officer in a remote part of the country. Of the people he knew in Petersburg the closest to him and the most likely were his private secretary and his doctor.

Mikhail Vasilyevich Slyudin, his private secretary, was a simple, intelligent, kindly and upright man, and Karenin felt that he was well disposed towards him personally; but their five years of official relationship had set up a barrier in the way of heart-to-heart talks.

Having finished signing some papers, Karenin remained silent for a long time, occasionally glancing up at Slyudin, and several times made an attempt to say something but could not bring himself to do so. He had a phrase all ready prepared: “Have you heard about my misfortune?” But he ended up by saying, as usual: “Then you’ll get this ready for me, won’t you?” and with that, let him go.

The other person was the doctor, who was also well disposed towards him; but a tacit agreement had long ago been reached between them that they were both overwhelmed with work, and both in a hurry.

Of his women friends, including the principal one, Countess Lidia Ivanovna, Karenin did not think at all. All women, simply as women, terrified and repelled him.

…

Karenin had forgotten about Countess Lidia Ivanovna, but she had not forgotten about him. At that most painful moment of lonely despair, she had come to see him and entered his study unannounced. She found him sitting with his head in his hands.

“J’ai forcé la consigne,” [“I’ve forced my way in”] she said, coming in with rapid steps and breathing heavily from emotion and her rapid movements. “I’ve heard all about it, Alexei Alexandrovich! My friend!” she continued, firmly pressing his hand in both of hers and looking with her lovely dreamy eyes into his.

Karenin got up with a frown and, freeing his hand from hers, gave her a chair.

“Won’t you sit down, Countess? I’m not receiving anyone today because I’m not well, Countess,” he said, and his lips quivered.

“My friend!” Countess Lidia repeated, without taking her eyes off him, and suddenly the inside corners of her eyebrows went up, forming a triangle on her forehead; her plain, sallow face became even plainer; but Karenin felt that she was sorry for him and on the verge of tears. He was overwhelmed with emotion; he seized her puffy hand and began kissing it.

“My friend!” she said, in a voice breaking with emotion. “You must not abandon yourself to grief. Your grief is great, but you must find consolation.”

“I am shattered, crushed, I’m no longer a human being!” said Karenin, letting go of her hand, but continuing to gaze into her eyes, which were full of tears. “What is so terrible about my situation is that nowhere, not even in myself, can I find any point of support.”

“You will find support, but don’t look for it in me, although I ask you to believe in my friendship,” she said with a sigh. “Our support is love, the love which He bequeathed to us. His yoke is light,” she said, with that ecstatic look which Karenin knew so well. “He will suport you and help you.”

Although these words were tinged with the Countess’s emotion at her own lofty feelings as well as with that ecstatic mystical attitude which had lately spread through Petersburg* and which, to Karenin, seemed excessive, he nevertheless was now pleased to hear them.

“I’m weak. I’m reduced to nothing. I did not foresee anything and, now, I don’t understand anything.”

“My friend,” repeated Countess Lidia.

“It’s not the loss of what now no longer exists, it’s not that,” Karenin went on. “I don’t regret that. But I can’t help feeling ashamed in front of people because of the situation I’m in now. It’s wrong, but I can’t help it, I can’t help it.”

“It was not you who accomplished that lofty act of forgiveness that I and everyone admires, but He who dwells in your heart,” said Countess Lidia, raising her eyes ecstatically, “and therefore you cannot be ashamed of your action.”

Karenin frowned and, bending back his hands, began making his fingers crack.

“One must know all the details,” he said, in a high-pitched voice. “There are limits to a man’s strength, Countess, and I’ve reached the limits of mine. The whole day today I’ve had to make arrangements, domestic arrangements arising” (he stressed the word arising) “from my new, solitary situation. The servants, the governess, the bills… These petty flames have burnt me up, I couldn’t stand it any longer. At dinner… yesterday I very nearly left the table. I couldn’t bear the way my son was looking at me. He didn’t ask me what was the meaning of it all, but he wanted to, and I couldn’t stand the look in his eyes. He was afraid to look at me, but that’s not all…”

Karenin was going to mention the bill which had been brought to him, but his voice shook and he fell silent. He could not recall that bill on blue paper for a hat and some ribbons without feeling sorry for himself.

“My friend, I understand,” said Countess Lidia. “I understand everything. It is not in me that you will find help and consolation but I have, all the same, come here only to help you if I can. If only I could relieve you of all these petty, humiliating cares… I understand that what is needed is a woman’s word, a woman’s authority. Will you entrust it to me?”

Karenin pressed her hand in silent gratitude.

“We’ll look after Seryozha together. I’m not very good at practical matters. But I’ll tackle it; I’ll be your housekeeper. Don’t thank me. I’m doing it myself…”

“I can’t but thank you.”

“But, my friend, you mustn’t surrender yourself to that feeling of which you were speaking – of being ashamed of what is, for a Christian, the very summit: ‘He that humbleth himself shall be exalted.’ And you cannot thank me. You must thank Him and ask Him for help. In Him alone shall we find tranquility, consolation, salvation, and love,” she said and, raising her eyes to heaven she began, so Karenin gathered from her silence, to pray.

Karenin listened to her now, and as he did so those phrases which had formerly seemed to him, if not unpleasant, at least superfluous now seemed natural and comforting. Karenin did not like this new, ecstatic spirit. He was a believer, interested in religion mainly from a political point of view; but the new teaching, which ventured certain new interpretations, he disliked on principle precisely because it opened the door to argument and analysis. In the past his attitude to this new teaching had been cold and even hostile and he had never argued with Countess Lidia, who was carried away by it, but had studiously evaded her challenges in silence. But now, for the first time, he listened to her words with pleasure and without any mental reservations.

“I’m very, very grateful to you both for your deeds and for your words,” he said, when she had finished praying.

Once again Countess Lidia pressed both her friend’s hands.

“Now I must set to work,” she said with a smile after a moment’s silence, and wiping the traces of tears from her face. “I’m going to Seryozha now. I shall only apply to you as a last resort.” And she got up and left the rom.

Countess Lidia went to Seryozha’s part of the house and there, spilling tears all over the frightened boy’s cheeks, she told him that his father was a saint and that his mother had died.

…


Countess Lidia fulfilled her promise. She really did take over all the cares of the arrangement and running of Karenin’s house. But she had not exaggerated when she had said that she was not good at practical matters. All her instructions had to be changed as they were impossible to carry out, and they were changed by Korney, Karenin’s valet, who was now, without anyone noticing it, running the whole of Karenin’s house and who, while helping his master to dress, would quietly and warily report to him what he thought he ought to know. But Countess Lidia’s help was, nevertheless, highly effective: she gave Karenin moral support by imparting to him the consciousness of her affection and respect and, more especially (so she comforted herself in her imagination), by almost converting him to Christianity – that is, she turned him from being an indifferent and lazy believer into an ardent and steadfast supporter of that new interpretation of Christian teaching which had latterly spread in Petersburg. It was not difficult to convince Karenin about this. Karenin, like Countess Lidia, and the other people who shared their point of view, was quite devoid of any depths of imagination, of that spiritual capacity thanks to which ideas provoked by imagination become so real that they demand conformity with other ideas and with reality. He saw nothing impossible or incongruous in the idea that death, which existed for unbelievers, did not exist for him and that, since he had complete faith (of the completeness of which he himself was the judge), there was no longer any sin in his soul and he was already experiencing full salvation here on earth.

It is true that Karenin was dimly aware that this faith was both shallow and erroneous and he knew that when, without thinking that his forgiveness was the act of a Higher Power, he had surrendered himself to the spontaneous emotion of forgiveness, he had experienced more happiness than when, as now, he thought constantly that Christ was living in his soul and that, when signing papers, he was fulfilling His Will. But it was essential for Karenin to think this; in his humiliation it was so essential for him to occupy that higher, if spurious, level from which he, despised by all, could despise others, that he clung to his imaginary salvation as if it really was salvation.


*The main agent of [this religious movement’s] spread through high society in St Petersburg was the third Baron Radstock (1833-1913), who preached a version of the doctrine of Salvation by Grace alone.


…


As a very young and ecstatically minded girl, Countess Lidia had been married off to a rich, aristocratic, very good-natured, jovial and profligate man. Not quite two months later, her husband had abandoned her, and responded to her rapturous assurances of affection merely with mockery and even animosity, which those who knew the Count’s kind heart and could see no shortcomings in the ecstatic Lidia were quite unable to explain. Since then, although they had not been divorced, they had lived apart and, whenever they did meet, her husband always treated her with unvarying and venomous mockery, the reason for which it was impossible to understand.

Countess Lidia had long ago ceased to be in love with her husband, but since then had never ceased being in love with someone or other. She would be in love with several people at the same time, both men and women; she would be in love with almost anyone who was in any way particularly distinguished. She was in love with all new princes and princesses who became connected by marriage with the Imperial family; she was in love with a Metropolitan, a bishop, and a parish priest. She was in love with a journalist, three Slavs and with Komisarov; with a cabinet minister, a doctor, an English missionary, and Karenin. All these loves, now waxing, now waning, did not prevent her from keeping up the most widespread and complex relationships at Court and in society. But ever since she had taken Karenin under her special protection after the misfortune which had befallen him, ever since she had been helping in his house, looking after his welfare, she had felt that none of her other loves were true loves and that now she was genuinely in love with Karenin only. The feeling which she now felt towards him seemed to her stronger than any previous feelings. Analysing that feeling and comparing it with those she had had before, she saw clearly that she would not have been in love with Komisarov if he had not saved the Emperor’s life, that she would not have been in love with Ristić-Kudžicki* if there had been no Slav question, but that she loved Karenin for himself, for his lofty, misunderstood soul, for the high-pitched sound of his voice with its drawling intonation which, to her, was sweet, for his tired gaze, for his character, for his soft white hands with swollen veins. She not only found joy in meeting him but she searched his face for signs of the impression she was making on him. She wanted to attract him not only by what she said but by her whole person. For him she now paid more attention to her clothes than she ever had before. She caught herself dreaming of what might have been, if she had not been married and if he had been free. She blushed from excitement when he entered the room and she could not restrain a smile of delight when he said something pleasant to her.

For the past few days Countess Lidia had been in a state of extreme agitation. She had learnt that Anna and Vronsky were in Petersburg. Karenin must be saved from meeting her, must be saved even from the agonizing knowledge that the dreadful woman was in the same town and that at any moment he might meet her.

Through her acquaintances Countess Lidia reconnoitred to find out what those abominable people, as she referred to Anna and Vronsky, were intending to do and, during those days, tried to direct all her friend’s movements so that he should not meet them. A friend of Vronsky’s, a young equerry through whom she had her information and who hoped, through the Countess, to obtain a concession, had told her that they had concluded their business and were leaving the next day. Countess Lidia was just beginning to breathe freely again when, the next morning, she was brought a note and was appalled to recognize the handwriting. The handwriting was Anna’s. The paper of which the envelope was made was as thick as parchment; the oblong yellow page bore a huge monogram, and the letter exuded a delicious smell.

“Who brought it?”

“A commissionaire from the hotel.”

For a long time, Countess Lidia was unable to sit down and read the letter. Her agitation brought on a fit of asthma, to which she was subject. When she had composed herself she read the following letter, which was written in French:


Madame la Comtesse,

The Christian sentiments which fill your heart give me what, I feel, is the unpardonable boldness of writing to you. I am unhappy at being parted from my son. I beg you to allow me to see him once before my departure. Forgive me for reminding you of myself. I am addressing myself to you, rather than to Alexei Alexandrovich only because I do not wish to make that magnanimous man suffer by reminding him of myself. Knowing your friendship for him, I feel you will understand me. Will you send Seryozha to me, or shall I come to the house at some prearranged time or will you let me know when and where I can see him away from the house? I do not anticipate a refusal, knowing the magnanimity of the person on whom it depends. You cannot imagine the yearning I have to see him, and therefore you cannot imagine the gratitude your assistance will awaken in me.

Anna


Everything in this letter irritated Countess Lidia: its contents, the allusion to magnanimity and, especially, its tone, which seemed to her too familiar.

“Say there’s no answer,” said the Countess, and then, opening her blotter, she immediately wrote a note to Karenin saying that she hoped to see him just before one o’clock at the Birthday Reception in the Palace.

“I must discuss an important and distressing matter with you. We can arrange there where to meet. It would be best of all at my house, where I will have your tea prepared for you. It is essential. He gives us a cross, but He gives us strength to bear it,” she added, so as to prepare him a little.

Countess Lidia usually wrote two or three notes a day to Karenin. She liked this means of communication with him, since it had elegance and mystery about it, elements lacking in her personal relations with him.


…


The reception was drawing to an end. Those who were leaving chatted as they met each other about the latest news of the day, newly acquired honours and changes in appointments for high officials.

“If we could only have Countess Marya Borisovna as Minister of War, and Princess Vatkovsky as Chief of Staff,” said a little white-haired old man in a gold-embroidered uniform, addressing a tall and beautiful lady-in-waiting, who had asked him about the changes.

“And me as a new equerry,” replied the lady-in-waiting, smiling.

“You have already been appointed – to the Ecclesiastical Department, with Karenin as your assistant.”

“How are you, Prince?” said the little old man, shaking the hand of a man who had just come up to him.

“What were you saying about Karenin?” said the Prince.

“He and Putyatov both got the Order of Alexander Nevsky.”

“I thought he’d already got it.”

“No. Just you look at him,” said the old man, pointing with his embroidered hat at Karenin who, wearing Court uniform with the red ribbon of his new order over his shoulder, was standing in the doorway of the hall with one of the influential members of the State Council. “He’s as pleased and merry as a cricket,” he added, breaking off to shake hands with a handsome, athletic Court Chamberlain.

“No,” said the Court Chamberlain, “he’s aged.”

“From worry. He’s drafting government projects all the time. He won’t let the wretched man go now until he has expounded it all point by point.”

“What d’you mean, he’s aged? Il fait des passions. [He makes people fall in love with him.] I think Countess Lidia must be jealous of his wife now.”

“Oh come! Please don’t say anything bad about Countess Lidia.”

“But is there anything bad about her being in love with Karenin?”

“Is it true that Mrs Karenin is here?”

“Well, she isn’t here in the Palace, but she is in Petersburg. I met her yesterday with Alexei Vronsky, bras dessus, bras dessous [arm in arm], in Morskaya Street.”

“C’est un homme qui n’a pas… [He’s a man who’s not…]” the Court Chamberlain began, but broke off to make way and bow to a member of the Imperial family who was passing.

So people went on talking incessantly about Karenin, blaming him and laughing at him, while he, barring the way to the member of the State Council whom he had cornered and never for a moment breaking off his exposition for fear of letting him escape, was expounding his financial project point by point.

At almost the same time that his wife had left him, an event had occurred in Karenin’s life which was the bitterest that could happen to a civil servant – his official advancement had come to a stop. It had come to a stop, and everyone clearly saw this, but Karenin himself did not yet realize that his career was over. Whether it was because of his clash with Stremov, or because of his misfortune with his wife, or simply because Karenin had reached the limit he was destined to reach, it had become obvious to everyone that year that his civil service career was over. He still occupied an important post, he was a member of many commissions and committees; but he was a man who had given all he had to give and from whom no one expected anything more. No matter what he said, no matter what he proposed, people listened to him as if what he was proposing had already been thought of long ago and was the very thing that was not needed.

But Karenin did not sense this and, on the contrary, being excluded from taking a direct part in government activities, he could now see, more clearly than before, shortcomings and mistakes in the activity of others, and considered it his duty to point out ways of correcting them. Soon after his separation from his wife he began to write a memorandum on the new legal procedure, the first of an innumerable number of useless memoranda which he was destined to write on all branches of administration.

Karenin not only failed to notice the hopelessness of his position in the administrative world – and was far from being distressed by it – but was more pleased with his activities than ever.

“He that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife… but he that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, and how to please the Lord,” — says the Apostle Paul, and Karenin, now guided in all his affairs by the scriptures, often remembered this text. It seemed to him that ever since he had been left without a wife, he had been serving the Lord with these memoranda better than ever before.

The obvious impatience of the State Councillor who wanted to get away from him did not disturb Karenin; he stopped holding forth only when the State Councillor, seizing the opportunity when a member of the Imperial family went past, slipped away from him.

Left alone, Karenin bowed his head, collecting his thoughts, then looked round absentmindedly and went towards the door where he hoped to meet Countess Lidia.

“And how strong and healthy they all are physically,” thought Karenin, looking at a powerfully built Court Chamberlain with well-combed and scented side-whiskers and at the red neck, encased in uniform, of a prince, in front of whom he had to pass. “How truly it is said that everything in the world is evil,” he thought, giving another sidelong glance at the Court Chamberlain’s calves.

Walking unhurriedly, with his habitual air of weariness and dignity, Karenin bowed to these gentlemen who had been talking about him and looked at the door, trying to find Countess Lidia.

“Ah, Alexei Alexandrovich!” said the little old man, with a malevolent gleam in his eye, just as Karenin drew level with him and nodded coldly to him. “I have not congratulated you yet,” he said, indicating Karenin’s newly-acquired order.

“Thank you,” Karenin replied. “What a fine day it is today,” he added, particularly stressing, as was his habit, the word “fine”.

That they laughed at him, he knew; but he never expected anything from them but hostility; he was used to this by now.

Catching sight of Countess Lidia’s sallow shoulders arising out of her corset, and her lovely dreamy beckoning eyes, Karenin smiled, revealing his perfectly white teeth, and went up to her.

Countess Lidia’s dress had cost her a great deal of trouble, as had all her dresses of late. Her aim in dressing was now quite the opposite to the one she had pursued thirty years earlier. Then she had wanted somehow to dress herself up and the more the better. Now, on the contrary, she was obliged to adorn herself in a way so out of keeping with her years and figure that she was concerned only that the contrast between these adornments and her looks should not be too appalling. And, so far as Karenin was concerned, she had achieved this and she seemed to him to be attractive. For him she was the only island not only of kindly feeling but of love in the sea of hostility and mockery which surrounded him.

As he ran the gauntlet of mocking glances, he was drawn to her amorous gaze as naturally as a plant to the light.

“I congratulate you,” she said, indicating his order.

Restraining a smile of pleasure, he shrugged his shoulders and closed his eyes, as if to say that such a thing could not gladden him. Countess Lidia knew well that it was one of his principal joys, although he would never admit to it.

“How is our angel?” said Countess Lidia, referring to Seryozha.

“I cannot say that I am wholly satisfied with him,” said Karenin, raising his eyebrows and opening his eyes. “And Sitnikov is not satisfied with him either.” (Sitnikov was the teacher to whom Seryozha’s secular education had been entrusted.) “As I’ve said before, there is in him a certain coolness to those questions which are the most important of all and which should touch the heart of every man and every child,” began Karenin, explaining his ideas on the only subject, apart from his work, which interested him – his son’s education.

When Karenin, with the help of Countess Lidia, had returned once more to life and to work, he had felt it his duty to concern himself with the education of the son who had been left on his hands. Never before having been concerned with questions of education, Karenin had devoted some time to a theoretical study of the subject. And having read several books on anthropology, pedagogy and didactics, Karenin had drawn up for himself a plan of education and, having invited the best educationalist in Petersburg to supervise it, he had set to work. And this work kept him constantly occupied.

“Yes, but what about his heart? I see in him his father’s heart and with such a heart the child can’t be bad,” said Countess Lidia with rapture.

“Yes, perhaps… So as far as I am concerned, I am fulfilling my duty. That is all I can do.”

“Come to my house,” said Countess Lidia, after a moment’s silence, “we must have a talk about what is, for you, a sad business. I would give anything to spare you certain memories, but others do not think in the same way. I have received a letter from her. She is here, in Petersburg.”

Karenin winced at the mention of his wife, but immediately his face assumed that absolute immobility which expressed his complete helplessness in this matter.

“I expected it,” he said.

Countess Lidia looked at him rapturously and her eyes filled with tears of admiration at the loftiness of his soul.


. . .


When Karenin entered Countess Lidia’s cosy little study, decorated with old china and hung with portraits, the lady of the house was not yet there. She was changing her dress.

The round table was covered with a cloth, and on it stood a Chinese tea service and a silver kettle with a spirit lamp. Karenin looked round absentmindedly at the innumerable and familiar portraits which decorated the study and, sitting down at the table, opened the New Testament which was lying on it. The rustle of the Countess’s silk dress diverted his attention.

“Well, now we can sit down peacefully,” said Countess Lidia with an uneasy smile, squeezing herself in between the table and the sofa, “and have a talk over our tea.”

After a few words of preparation Countess Lidia, breathing heavily and blushing, handed over the letter which she had received to Karenin.

When he had read the letter he remained silent for a long time.

“I don’t suppose I have the right to refuse her,” he said timidly, looking up.

“My friend! You don’t see evil in anyone!”

“On the contrary, I see that everything is evil. But is this right?...”

His face expressed indecision and a search for advice, support and guidance in a matter which was, to him, incomprehensible.

“No,” interrupted the Countess, “there’s a limit to everything. I understand immorality,” she said, not quite sincerely since she had never been able to understand what led women to immorality, “but cruelty I don’t understand, and cruelty to whom? To you! How can she stay in the same town as you? Oh yes, ‘live and learn’. And I am learning to understand your high-mindedness and her low character.”

“But who will throw a stone?” said Karenin, obviously pleased with the part he was playing. “I have forgiven everything, and therefore cannot deprive her of what her love – her love for her son – needs…”

“But is that love, my friend? Is it sincere? Suppose you have forgiven, that you do forgive… But have we the right to treat our angel’s heart like that? He thinks she is dead. He prays for her and asks God to forgive her her sins… And it’s better that way. Otherwise what will he think?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Karenin, evidently agreeing.

Countess Lidia covered her face with her hands and was silent for a moment. She was praying.

“If you ask my advice,” she said, having finished praying, and uncovering her face, “I don’t advise you to do this. As if I did not see how you are suffering, how this has opened up your wounds! But suppose that you, as always, forget about yourself. What, then, can this lead to? To fresh suffering on your side, to torment for the child? If she has any human feeling left in her, she should not want this herself. No, I have no hesitation in advising against it and, if you allow me, I will write to her.”

And Karenin agreed, and Countess Lidia wrote the following letter in French:


Madame,

To remind your son of you might lead to questions on his part to which it would be impossible to reply without inducing in the child’s heart a spirit of condemnation of what should, for him, be sacred; and I therefore ask you to accept your husband’s refusal in a spirit of Christian charity. I pray to the Most High to have mercy on you.

Countess Lidia.


This letter achieved the hidden aim which Countess Lidia had not even admitted to herself. It offended Anna to the very depths of her soul.

Karenin, too, returning home from Countess Lidia, was unable that day to devote himself to his usual occupations or to find the spiritual peace of mind, which he had felt before, of a believer who had found Salvation.

The memory of his wife who was so guilty towards him, and to whom he had been so saintly, as Countess Lidia used so justly to tell him, should not have disturbed him; but he was not easy in his mind: he could not understand the book he was reading, could not drive away agonizing memories of his relations with her, of those mistakes which, it now seemed to him, he had committed in regard to her. The recollection of how he had received her confession of infidelity, on the way back from the races (and, in particular, of his insistence that she should keep up merely the outward appearances, and of his failure to challenge Vronsky to a duel), tormented him like remorse. The memory of the letter which he had written her also tormented him; in particular, his forgiveness, which no one wanted, and his care for another man’s child seared his heart with shame and remorse.

And he now experienced an exactly similar feeling of shame and remorse, as he went over his past with her in his mind and recalled the clumsy words with which, after long hesitation, he had proposed to her.

“But how am I to blame?” he kept saying to himself. And this question always evoked another question: did those other people, those Vronskys, those Oblonskys… those Court Chamberlains with fat calves, did they feel differently, did they love differently, did they marry differently? And he visualized a whole row of these vigorous, strong, self-confident people, who always and everywhere automatically attracted his inquisitive attention. He tried to drive away these thoughts, tried to convince himself that he was not living for this transient life but for life eternal, and that he had peace and love in his soul. But the fact that in this transient, insignificant life he had committed, so it seemed to him, a few trivial mistakes, tormented him as if the eternal life in which he believed did not exist. But this temptation did not last long and, soon, the serenity and high-mindedness, thanks to which he was able to forget what he did not want to remember, were restored to his heart.




p. 666-673 (Pt. 7, Ch. 20-22):

Princess Betsy Tverskoy and Oblonsky had long been on a very odd footing with each other. Oblonsky always flirted with her in a bantering way and told her, also in joke, the most improper things, knowing that that was what she liked most. The day after his conversation with Karenin, Oblonsky went to see her and felt himself so young that in this bantering talk and flirtation got carried away beyond the limits within which he knew how to extricate himself as, unfortunately, he found her not only unattractive but actually repulsive. But initially this bantering relationship between them had been established because she found him very attractive. He was, therefore, very glad when Princess Myakhky came and put an end to their tête-à-tête.

“Ah, you’re here, too,” she said when she saw him. “Well, and how’s your poor sister? Don’t you look at me like that,” she added. “Ever since everyone’s started attacking her – and they’re all a hundred thousand times worse than she is – I’ve thought she did a very fine thing. I can’t forgive Vronsky for not letting me know when she was in Petersburg. I would have called on her and would have taken her everywhere with me. Please give her my love. Now tell me all about her.”

“Oh indeed, her situation is very difficult, she…” began Oblonsky who, in the simplicity of his heart, mistook Princess Myakhky’s words for sterling coin!

“Tell me all about your sister.” Princess Myakhky immediately interrupted him, as she generally did, and started speaking herself. “She did what everyone does except me – only they hide it but she did not want to deceive anyone and did a very fine thing. And did even better by throwing up that half-witted brother-in-law of yours. You must forgive me. Everybody said he was so clever, so clever, only I said he was a fool. Now that he’s struck up that friendship with Countess Lidia and Landau they all say he is half-witted, and I would be glad not to agree with them all, but this time I can’t.”

“Do explain, please,” said Oblonsky, “what does it all mean? I saw him yesterday in connection with my sister and asked for a definite answer. He did not give me an answer, but said he would think it over, and this morning instead of an answer I got an invitation from Countess Lidia for this evening.”

“Ah, there you are!” said Princess Myakhky with glee. “They’ll ask Landau what he thinks.”

“What do you mean – Landau? Who’s Landau?”

“What? You don’t know Jules Landau, ‘le fameux Jules Landau, le clairvoyant’ [the famous Jules Landau, the clairvoyant]? He is another half-wit, but on him depends your sister’s fate. That’s what comes of living in the provinces, you don’t know anything. Landau, you see, was a ‘commis’ [shop assistant] in Paris, and went to see a doctor. In the doctor’s waiting room he fell asleep and in his sleep started to give advice to all the patients. And remarkable advice it was. Then Yury’s wife – you know, that man who is always an invalid? – heard about that fellow Landau and brought him to see her husband. He is treating him now. And hasn’t done him any good, I consider, because he is just as weak as ever, but they believe in him and take him with them everywhere. And they’ve brought him to Russia. Here he has become all the rage and has taken to treating everyone. He’s cured Countess Bezzubov and she became so fond of him that she adopted him.”

“How do you mean – adopted him?”

“She just did. He’s not Landau any longer, but Count Bezzubov. But this is not the point, but Lidia – I love her dearly but she hasn’t got her head screwed on in the right place – is naturally all over Landau now and neither she nor Karenin take any decisions without him and, therefore your sister’s fate is now in the hands of that man Landau, alias Count Bezzubov.”

…

After an excellent lunch and a great quantity of cognac at Bartnyansky’s, Oblonsky arrived at Countess Lidia’s only slightly later than the time appointed.

“Who else is here? The Frenchman?” Oblonsky asked the porter, looking at Karenin’s familiar coat and an odd, rather artless-looking coat with clasps.

“Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin and Count Bezzubov,” replied the porter sternly.

“Princess Myakhky has guessed right,” thought Oblonsky as he went up the stairs. “Strange! However, it might be as well to get on friendly terms with her. She has enormous influence. If she drops a hint to Pomorsky, the thing’s in the bag.”

It was still quite light outside, but in Countess Lidia’s little drawing room the blinds were drawn and the lamps lit.

At a round table, under a lamp sat the Countess and Alexei Alexandrovich discussing something in low tones. A shortish, lean man with hips like a woman’s, knock-kneed, very pale, handsome, with beautiful shining eyes and long hair that fell over the collar of his frock coat, stood at the other end of the room, examining portraits on the wall. After greeting his hostess and Karenin, Oblonsky could not help casting another glance at the stranger.

“Monsieur Landau,” said the Countess, turning to him with a gentleness and caution that impressed Oblonsky.

Landau hastily looked round, came up with a smile and put a clammy, flaccid hand into the hand that Oblonsky stretched out to greet him, and then immediately went back to look at the portraits.

“I am very glad to see you, particularly today,” said Countess Lidia, motioning Oblonsky to a seat next to Karenin.

“I’ve introduced him to you as Landau,” she said in a low voice, glancing at the Frenchman and then back to Karenin, “but he is really Count Bezzubov, as you probably know. Only he doesn’t like the title.”

“Yes, I have heard,” replied Oblonsky. “They say he completely cured Countess Bezzubov.”

“She came to see me today, she is so pathetic!” said the Countess, turning to Karenin. “For her this separation is terrible. It’s such a blow for her.”

“And he is definitely going?” asked Karenin.

“Yes, he is going to Paris. He heard a voice yesterday,” said Countess Lidia, looking at Oblonsky.

“Ah, a voice!” repeated Oblonsky, feeling that he had to be as circumspect as possible in that company where something special, to which he had as yet no key, was either happening or about to happen.

There was a minute’s silence, after which Countess Lidia said to Oblonsky with a subtle smile, as if about to broach the main topic of conversation:

“I have known you for a long time and am delighted at this opportunity of getting to know you better. ‘Les amis de nos amis sont nos amis’ [‘Our friend’s friends are our friends’]. But to be a friend one must try to understand one’s friend’s spiritual state, and I’m afraid you are not doing this in the case of Alexei Alexandrovich. You understand what I mean,” she said raising her beautiful, dreamy eyes.

“In a way, Countess, I realize that the position of Alexei Alexandrovich…” said Oblonsky who did not quite understand what it was all about and was therefore keen to keep to generalities.

“The change is not in the external circumstances,” said Countess Lidia sternly, while her love-sick eyes followed Karenin who had got up and gone across to Landau, “his heart has changed, he has been given a new heart and I am afraid you have not sufficiently tried to understand the change that has occurred within him.”

“Well, in a general sort of way I can imagine the change. We have always been friendly, and now…” said Oblonsky, responding with a tender glance to the glance of Countess Lidia, and considering which of the two ministers she was more friendly with, so as to know which of the two he would have to ask her to use her influence on.

“The change that has taken place in him cannot weaken his feeling of love for his neighbour; on the contrary, the change that has taken place in him must strengthen this love. But I’m afraid you don’t follow me. Would you like some tea,” she said indicating with her eyes a servant who was handing tea round on a tray.

“Not entirely, Countess. Naturally, his misfortune…”

“Yes, a misfortune which became the highest happiness, when his heart was made new and was filled with Him,” she said casting love-sick glances at Karenin.

“I daresay I can ask her to speak to both of them,” thought Oblonsky.

“Oh certainly, Countess,” he said, “but I should imagine these changes are so intimate that no one, not even the closest of friends, likes to talk about it.”

“On the contrary, we must talk about these things and help each other.”

“Yes, of course, but people can differ so much in their convictions, and besides…” said Oblonsky with a gentle smile.

“There can be no difference when it is a matter of Holy Truth.”

“Oh no, naturally not, but…” and Oblonsky stopped short. He realized she was talking of religion.

“I think he will be falling asleep soon,” said Karenin in a significant whisper, coming up to Countess Lidia.

Oblonsky looked round. Landau was sitting at a window, leaning against the back and an arm of an armchair, his head drooping. On becoming aware of all the glances directed at him he raised his head and smiled a childishly naïve smile.

“Don’t pay any attention,” said Countess Lidia, and deftly moved up a chair for Karenin. “I have noticed…” she began, when the servant came into the room with a letter. Countess Lidia quickly ran her eyes over the note, excused herself and with extraordinary speed wrote a reply, gave it to the servant and came back to the table. “I have noticed,” she continued where she had left off, “that Muscovites, particularly the men, are of all people the most indifferent to religion.”

“Oh, no, Countess, the Muscovites seem to me to have the reputation of being the firmest upholders of it,” replied Oblonsky.

“But, so far as I understand, you, unfortunately, belong to those who are indifferent,” said Karenin, turning to him with a weary smile.

“How can one be indifferent!” said Countess Lidia.

“In this respect it is not so much that I am indifferent, but I suspend judgment,” said Oblonsky with his most appeasing smile. “I don’t think the time for these questions has come for me yet.”

Karenin and Countess Lidia exchanged glances.

“We can never tell whether the time has come for us or not,” said Karenin sternly. “We must not think of whether we are ready or not ready; Grace is not amenable to human consideration; sometimes it fails to descend on those who labour for it but descends on those who are unprepared, as in the case of Saul.”

“No, I don’t think it’ll be just yet,” said Countess Lidia, who had been watching the Frenchman’s movement.

Landau got up and walked over to them.

“May I listen?” he asked.

“Oh, yes; I didn’t want to disturb you,” said Countess Lidia looking at him tenderly. “Sit here with us.”

“All one must do is not close one’s eyes to the light,” continued Karenin.

“Ah, if you knew the happiness we feel, sensing His constant presence in our hearts!” said Countess Lidia with a beatific smile.

“But a man may sometimes feel unable to rise to such heights,” said Oblonsky, conscious that he was not being entirely honest in acknowledging the existence of religious heights, yet not daring to confess to his free-thinking tendencies in the presence of one who, by dropping a single word to Pomorsky, could obtain for him the coveted appointment.

“In other words you mean to say that he may be prevented by sin?” said Countess Lidia. “But this is a wrong conviction. There is no sin for those who have faith, sin has been atoned. Pardon,” she added, with a glance at the servant who had come in again with another note. She read it and answered verbally: “tomorrow, at the Grand Duchess’s, tell him.” “For those who have faith there is no sin,” she said, continuing the conversation.

“Yes, but faith without works is dead,” said Oblonsky, having suddenly remembered this phrase out of the catechism [of the Orthodox Church], and maintaining his independence now by a mere smile.

“There it is – straight out of the Epistle of St James,” said Karenin, addressing Countess Lidia somewhat reproachfully, and as if it was a subject they had discussed many a time before. “How much harm the wrong interpretation of this passage has done! Nothing turns people away from faith as much as does this interpretation: ‘I have no works, I cannot have faith.’ Yet this is not said anywhere but just the opposite.”

“To labour for God with works and save one’s soul with fasting,” said Countess Lidia with fastidious disdain, “those are the primitive ideas of our monks… Yet this is not said anywhere. It is all far, far simpler and easier,” she added, looking at Oblonsky with the same encouraging smile with which she tried to put heart into young maids of honour, embarrassed by the unfamiliar surroundings at Court.

“We are saved through Christ who suffered for us. We are saved by faith,” said Karenin in confirmation of her words, giving her an approving look.

“Vous comprenez l’anglais? [You do understand English?]” asked Countess Lidia and receiving an affirmative answer, got up and began examining the books on a shelf.

“I want to read Safe and Happy or Under the Wing,” she said with a look of enquiry at Karenin. And having found the book [by Lord Radstock], she went back to her seat, and opened it. “It’s very short. It describes the way in which faith is acquired and the happiness, above all earthly bliss, which thereby fills the soul. A man who has faith cannot be unhappy because he is not alone. But you will see for yourself.” She was about to start reading when the servant came in again. “Madame Borozdin? Say tomorrow at two. Yes,” she said with a sigh, keeping the place in the book with a finger and looking straight in front of her with her beautiful, dreamy eyes. “That’s how true faith acts. You know Marie Sanin? You know her tragedy? She lost her only child. She was in despair. And then what happened? She found this friend and now she thanks God for the death of her child. Such is the happiness faith can give.”

“Oh yes, this is very…” said Oblonsky delighted that she was going to read and give him time to come back to reality. “No, obviously better not to ask her about anything today,” he thought. “If only I can get away from here without putting my foot in it.”

“You’ll be bored,” said Countess Lidia, turning to Landau, “you don’t know English, but this is short.”

“Oh, I’ll understand,” said Landau with the same smile and closed his eyes.

Karenin and Countess Lidia exchanged significant glances and the reading started.


…

Oblonsky was completely baffled by all this strange new talk to which he had been listening. In general, the complexity of Petersburg life had a stimulating effect on him, taking him out of Moscow’s stagnant pool; but this complexity he liked and understood in spheres congenial and familiar to him; but in this alien set he was baffled, stunned and unable to grasp the meaning of it all. Listening to Countess Lidia and feeling Landau’s beautiful eyes – naïve or sly, he was not sure which – fixed upon him, Oblonsky was overcome with a peculiar heaviness in his head.

The most varied thoughts jostled each other in his head. “Marie Sanin is glad her child has died… wish I could have a smoke now… to be saved you must have faith and monks don’t know how it must be done but Countess Lidia does… why does my head feel so heavy? Because of the cognac or because it’s all so very strange? I don’t think I’ve done anything improper, as yet anyway. But all the same, I can’t ask her. I’ve heard they make you pray. Suppose they make me do it? This would really be too silly. And what rot she is reading, but she’s got a good accent. Landau is Bezzubov. Why is he Bezzubov?” Suddenly Oblonsky felt his lower jaw twisting itself irresistibly into a yawn. He smoothed his whiskers to hide the yawn and sat up. But immediately afterwards he felt he was already asleep and was about to snore. He came to at the precise instant when Countess Lidia’s voice said “He is asleep.”

Oblonsky came to with a guilty start, feeling himself caught out. But he was relieved to see that the words “he is asleep” were addressed not to him, but to Landau. The Frenchman had fallen asleep, just as he had done. But Oblonsky’s sleep would have offended them, he thought (though, as a matter of fact, he did not even think that, so odd did everything seem to him), while Landau’s sleep delighted them extremely, particularly Countess Lidia.

“ ‘Mon ami’ [‘My friend’],” said Countess Lidia, carefully holding the folds of her silk dress so as not to let it rustle, and in her excitement now calling Karenin ‘mon ami’ instead of Alexei Alexandrovich, “donnez lui la main. Vous voyez? [give him your hand. You see?] Sh-sh,” she hissed at the servant who came in again. “I’m not at home.”

The Frenchman was sleeping or pretending to sleep, with his head against the back of the armchair, and his clammy hand resting on his knee was making feeble gestures as if in an attempt to catch something. Karenin got up, knocking against the table as he did so in spite of efforts to be careful, and went and put his hand in the Frenchman’s. Oblonsky got up, too, and, with his eyes wide open to wake himself up in case he was asleep, looked alternately from one to the other. It was all quite real. Oblonsky felt his head going from bad to worse.

“Que la personne qui est arrivée la dernière, celle qui demande, qu’elle sorte! Qu’elle sorte! [The person who came last, the one who is asking, must leave! Must leave!]” muttered the Frenchman without opening his eyes.

“Vous m’excuserez, mais vous voyez… Revenez vers dix heures, encore mieux demain.” [“You must forgive me, but you see… Come back at ten; better still tomorrow.”]

“Qu’elle sorte! [Must leave!]” repeated the Frenchman impatiently.

“C’est moi, n’est-ce pas? [It’s me, isn’t it?]”

And on getting an affirmative answer, Oblonsky tiptoed out, and forgetting what he had wanted to ask Countess Lidia, forgetting, too, his sister’s interests, and impelled only by the desire to get away from the place as quickly as possible, he rushed out into the street, as if out of a pest house, and chatted and joked with the cab driver for a long time to recover his spirits.

In the congenial atmosphere of the French Theatre where he was just in time for the last act, and later in the Tartar restaurant, Oblonsky came to a little over his champagne. However, throughout that evening he did not feel quite himself.

On his return home to Pyotr Oblonsky’s house, where he was staying while in Petersburg, Oblonsky found a note from Betsy. She very much wanted, she wrote, to finish the interrupted conversation and would like him to call on her tomorrow. No sooner had he had time to read the note, and make a wry face over it, then he heard the ponderous tread of men carrying something heavy.

Oblonsky went out to have a look. It was the rejuvenated Pyotr Oblonsky. He was so drunk that he was unable to get up the stairs; but on seeing Stiva Oblonsky he ordered the men to put him on his feet and, clinging on to Stiva, he went to his room, started telling him how he had spent the evening and fell asleep then and there.

Oblonsky was in low spirits, which rarely happened to him, and took a long time to go to sleep. Whatever he recalled seemed to him horrible but the most horrible, shameful even, was the memory of Countess Lidia’s evening.

The following day he received from Karenin a definite refusal to grant Anna a divorce and realized that that decision was based on what the Frenchman had said the day before in his genuine or feigned sleep.










https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v08OlwjqmwA

p. 76-9 (Pt. 1, Ch. 23):

Vronsky and Kitty waltzed round the ballroom a few times. When the waltz was over Kitty went up to her mother, and scarcely had time to say a few words to Countess Nordston before Vronsky came to fetch her for the first quadrille. During the quadrille nothing of any significance was said; now they carried on a desultory conversation about the Korsunskys, husband and wife, whom Vronsky described very amusingly as nice, forty-year-old children, now about the projected people’s theatre, and only once did the conversation touch a sensitive nerve in Kitty – when he asked whether Levin was there or not and added that he had liked him very much. But Kitty had not expected more of the quadrille. It was the mazurka she was waiting for with bated breath. It seemed to her that it would be during the mazurka that all would be decided. The fact that, during the quadrille, he did not ask her for the mazurka, did not worry her. She was convinced that she would dance the mazurka with him, as she had done at previous balls, and she refused the mazurka to five other partners, saying that she was already engaged for it. For Kitty the whole ball up to the last quadrille was an enchanted dream of joyful colours, sounds and movement. She only stopped dancing when she felt too tired, and begged for a rest. But, while she was dancing the last quadrille with one of the boring youths whom it was impossible to refuse, she happened to come face to face with Vronsky and Anna. She had not run into Anna again since the beginning of the evening and now, suddenly, she saw her in a completely new and unexpected light. She saw in her a characteristic – which she knew so well in herself – of being excited by success. She saw Anna drunk with the wine of the admiration which she was arousing. Kitty knew this feeling, knew its symptoms, and she saw them in Anna – she saw the tremulous, flashing glitter in her eyes, the smile of happiness and excitement naturally curling her lips, and the graceful precision, the sureness and lightness of her movements.

“Who is it?” she asked herself. “Everyone, or just one person?” And without helping her agonized partner with the conversation, the thread of which he had lost and could not pick up again, and outwardly obeying the glad cries and imperious yells of Korsunsky as he launched everyone now into a ‘grand rond’ [‘big circle’], now into a ‘chaîne’ [‘chain’], Kitty watched, and her heart contracted more and more. “No, it is not the admiration of the crowd that has intoxicated her, but the admiration of one man. And who is that one man? Can it really be he?” Every time he spoke to Anna, her eyes lit up with a joyous sparkle and a smile of happiness curved her rosy lips. She seemed to be making an effort not to show these signs of joy but they broke out on her face of their own accord. “But what about him?” Kitty looked at him, and was appalled. What she saw in his face was so clearly mirrored in Anna’s. What had become of the calm, firm manner, and the light-hearted calm expression which were invariably his? Now, every time he turned to Anna, he slightly inclined his head, as if he wanted to fall down at her feet, and his eyes expressed nothing but submission and fear. “I don’t want to hurt you,” his glance seemed to say each time, “but I want to save myself, and I don’t know how to do it.” His face bore an expression which Kitty had never seen before.

They were talking about acquaintances they had in common, carrying on the most insignificant conversation, but it seemed to Kitty that every word they said was deciding their fate, and hers. And strangely enough, although they were, in fact, talking about how ridiculous Ivan Ivanovich was when he spoke French, and how a better match might have been found for the Eletsky girl, the words they were saying held a significance for them, and they felt this, just as Kitty did. The whole ball, the whole world indeed, was shrouded in fog in Kitty’s heart. Only the strict school of upbringing which she had gone through sustained her and forced her to do what was expected of her, that is, to dance, to answer questions, to talk, even to smile. But before the mazurka began, when the chairs were already being arranged in readiness for it, and a few couples had moved into the main ballroom from the smaller rooms, Kitty had a moment of despair and terror. She had refused five partners, and now had no one with whom to dance the mazurka. There was not even any hope that someone would ask her for it, precisely because she was too much of a success in society, and it would never occur to anyone that she had not a partner already. She would have to tell her mother that she was feeling ill, and go home, but she had not the strength to do so. She felt completely crushed.

She went into the furthest recess of a little drawing room and sank into an armchair. The gossamer-like skirt of her dress billowed up in a cloud around her slender figure; one thin, bare, delicate girlish arm, hanging down listlessly, sank in the folds of her pink skirt; in the other hand she held her fan, and with short, quick movements was fanning her burning face. But, despite the fact that she looked like a butterfly which had just alighted on a blade of grass, ready at any moment to spread its rainbow wings and fly away, her heart was aching with terrible despair.

“But perhaps I was mistaken, perhaps it didn’t really happen?”

And once more she recalled everything that she had seen.

“Kitty, what’s all this?” said Countess Nordston, coming up to her silently over the carpet. “I don’t understand it.”

Kitty’s lower lip trembled; she stood up quickly.

“Kitty, aren’t you dancing the mazurka?”

“No, no,” said Kitty, in a voice quivering with tears.

“I heard him ask her for the mazurka,” said Countess Nordston, knowing that Kitty would understand whom she meant by ‘him’ and ‘her’. “She said: ‘But aren’t you dancing with Princess Kitty Shcherbatsky?’”

“Oh, I don’t care!” replied Kitty.

Nobody but she herself understood her position, nobody knew that a few days before she had refused a man whom, perhaps, she loved, and had refused him because she had put her faith in another.

Countess Nordston sought out Korsunsky, who was her partner for the mazurka, and told him to ask Kitty for it.

Kitty danced in the first pair and, fortunately for her, did not have to talk, as Korsunsky was rushing about all the time, giving instructions and carrying out his duties. Vronsky and Anna were sitting almost opposite her. She saw them with her long-sighted eyes, indeed saw them close to as well, when they came face to face as couples in the dance, and the more she saw of them, the more convinced she became that her misfortune was indeed all too real. She saw that they felt they were all alone together, in that ballroom full of people. And on Vronsky’s face, usually so firm and independent, she saw the lost, docile expression she had noticed before – the expression of an intelligent dog when it feels guilty.

When Anna smiled, he too caught her smile. If she was thoughtful, he too became pensive. Some sort of supernatural force drew Kitty’s eyes to Anna’s face. She was lovely in her simple black dress; lovely were her plump arms with their bracelets; lovely was her firm neck with its string of pearls around it; lovely her straying curls; lovely the graceful, light movements of her small hands and feet and lovely, too, was her beautiful face in its animation. But there was something terrible and cruel in her loveliness.

Kitty was looking at her with even greater admiration than before – and was suffering more and more. She felt crushed, and her face showed it. When Vronsky caught sight of her, as he bumped into her during the mazurka, he did not recognize her at once, so greatly had she changed.

“What a delightful ball!” he said to her, in order to say something.

“Yes,” she replied.

Half-way through the mazurka, while they were repeating a complicated figure which Korsunsky had just devised, Anna stepped into the centre of the circle, taking two men with her, and beckoned to another woman and to Kitty to join them. Kitty gave Anna a scared look as she approached her. Anna looked at her through slightly narrowed eyes, and smiled as she pressed Kitty’s hand. But seeing that Kitty’s face only responded to her smile with a look of despair and amazement, she turned away from her and began to talk gaily to the other lady.

“Yes,” said Kitty to herself, “there’s something alien, diabolical and fascinating about her.”

[HERO]

Lyov Nikolayevich Tolstoy: ESI-Fi or LIE-Ni; or IEE-Fi or LII



From Gender and Sexuality in Russian Civilisation; pages 239-40 (“Dostoevskii’s Homophilia/Homophobia” by Michael Katz):

“Realists endorsed Gogol’s taboo-lifting work—the admission to the freedom of fiction of the vulgar, base, unprepossessing, and unedifying aspects of life. But no further taboos were lifted by them—the physical side of sex… continued to be concealed…. (Mirsky 1958, 179).

If, as Igor Kon, maintained, “the history of sexuality in Russia is complex and contradictory”, then the history of homosexuality in Russia is even more complex and more contradictory. In his pioneering study The Sexual Revolution in Russia from the Age of the Czars to Today, Kon begins with a discussion of sexuality and homosexuality in Ancient Rus. The concept of “sodomy”, he argues, was even vaguer there than it was in the West. In Russia the term was used to designate both homosexual relations, as well as any deviation from “normal” heterosexual roles and partners. On the other hand, many foreign travellers and diplomats visiting or living in Russia from the 15th-17th centuries remarked on the widespread occurrence of homosexuality in all social milieus, and the surprisingly tolerant attitude of Russians towards it.

But, by the end of the 18th century, the growth of “civilization” and the extended contact with Europe had led to growing uneasiness with the subject. Although most Russian doctors, like their European counterparts, considered homosexuality to be a “perversion of sexual feeling” and debated the possibility of treating and “curing” it, many other people turned a blind eye to it. Intellectuals were able to practice their proclivities in private and rarely suffered any persecution. [Kon, The Sexual Revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Czars to Today, 11-45)]

However, if society was more or less tolerant and free to follow its own inclinations, Russian letters were not. Classical literature of the 19th century created vivid and profound images of (heterosexual) romantic love, but sensuality was virtually inadmissible, and eroticism in any form was unacceptable. Prince Mirsky’s use of the word “taboo” in his account of the origin and character of the Russian realistic novel is absolutely appropriate when applied to sexuality in general, and all the more so when applied to the subject of homosexuality.

In a pioneering and illuminating article entitled “Russia’s Gay Literature and History”, Simon Karlinsky contrasts the attitudes of Russia’s two “literary giants” Tolstoi and Dostoevskii to sexuality and homosexuality. He cites Tolstoi’s own personal experience of falling in love with both boys and girls as recorded in his early trilogy of autobiographical novels Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854), and Youth (1857), as well as the strong attraction he felt for his fellow soldiers during his years of army service in the Caucasus.

In a diary entry dated 29 November 1851 Tolstoi expresses this feeling clearly: “I have very often been in love with men;… Of all these people I still love only Dyakov…. I fell in love with men before I had the idea of the possibility of pederasty; but even when I knew about it, the idea of the possibility of coitus never occurred to me….” (Tolstoi’s Diaries, ed. and trans. By R. F. Christian, 1985, I, 39). In a similar vein Tolstoi’s wife Sofya Andreevna recorded in her “Memorandum before Death” on 23 June 1910 the following observation about her dying husband: “He has a repulsive, senile love for Chertkov (in his youth he used to fall in love with men), and he is completely subject to his will…. I am insanely jealous of Leo Nikolayevich’s intimacy with Chertkov….” (Simmons, E. J., 1960. Leo Tolstoi, II: 464).

As opposed to these explicitly homophilic impulses, Tolstoi elsewhere depicts characters who express their strong disapproval of male homosexuality. In Part II, chapter xix of Anna Karenina (1872), two army officers enter the club where Vronskii is dining alone. A plump older officer, whose “small eyes are sunk in his bloated face”, sports a bracelet on his wrist. He is clearly “courting” a younger officer with a “weak, thin face” who had just joined the regiment and who nervously fingers his budding moustache. Vronskii rejects the older officer’s attempts to engage him in conversation, frowns at them repeatedly, and further reveals his own feelings with a “grimace of disgust”. When his friend Yashvin enters the club, he first greets Vronskii, then throws a “contemptuous backward nod” and an “ironic glance” at the two officers, and finally mutters with disapproval: “There go the inseparables [nerazluchnye]”.

Thus, it is clear both from biographical accounts and literary evidence that Tolstoi experienced homoerotic attractions in his youth and old age and that he was consciously aware of the nature of his own feelings. It also seems apparent that the author had typically conflicting feelings about the subject and expressed strong, conventionally homophobic prejudices in his fiction. [Karlinsky also mentions Tolstoi’s late novel Resurrection (1899) where tolerant treatment for homosexuals figures as one of the symptoms of Russia’s moral decay.]



from Lectures on Russian Literature by Nabokov; pages 137-48 [LEO TOLSTOY (Anna Karenin)]:

Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction. Leaving aside his precursors Pushkin and Lermontov, we might list the greatest artists in Russian prose thus: first, Tolstoy; second, Gogol; third, Chekhov; fourth, Turgenev. This is rather like grading students’ papers and no doubt Dostoevski and Saltykov are waiting at the door of my office to discuss their low marks.

The ideological poison, the message—to use a term invented by quack reformers—began to affect the Russian novel in the middle of the last century, and has killed it by the middle of this one [i.e. the 20th century]. It would seem at first glance that Tolstoy’s fiction is heavily infected with his teachings. Actually, his ideology was so tame and so vague and so far from politics, and, on the other hand, his art was so powerful, so tiger bright, so original and universal that it easily transcends the sermon. In the long run what interested him as a thinker were Life and Death, and after all no artist can avoid treating these themes.


Count Leo (in Russian Lev or Lyov) Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a robust man with a restless soul, who all his life was torn between his sensual temperament and his supersensitive conscience. His appetites constantly led him astray from the quiet country road that the ascetic in him craved to follow as passionately as the rake in him craved for the city pleasures of the flesh.

In his youth, the rake had a better chance and took it. Later, after his marriage in 1862, Tolstoy found temporary peace in family life divided between the wise management of his fortune—he had rich lands in the Volga region—and the writing of his best prose. It is then, in the sixties and early seventies, that he produced his immense War and Peace (1869) and his immortal Anna Karenin. Still later, beginning in the late seventies, when he was over forty, his conscience triumphed: the ethical overcame both the esthetical and the personal and drove him to sacrifice his wife's happiness, his peaceful family life, and his lofty literary career to what he considered a moral necessity: living according to the principles of rational Christian morality—the simple and stern life of generalized humanity, instead of the colorful adventure of individual art. And when in 1910 he realized that by continuing to live on his country estate, in the bosom of his stormy family, he still was betraying his ideal of a simple, saintly existence, he, a man of eighty, left his home and wandered away, heading for a monastery he never reached, and died in the waiting room of a little railway station.

I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers and I hate Tom-peeping over the fence of those lives—I hate the vulgarity of "human interest," I hate the rustle of skirts and giggles in the corridors of time—and no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life; but this I must say. Dostoevski's gloating pity for people—pity for the humble and the humiliated—this pity was purely emotional and his special lurid brand of the Christian faith by no means prevented him from leading a life extremely removed from his teachings. On the other hand, Leo Tolstoy like his representative Lyovin was organically unable to allow his conscience to strike a bargain with his animal nature—and he suffered cruelly whenever this animal nature temporarily triumphed over his better self.

And when he discovered his new religion and in the logical development of this new religion—a neutral blend between a kind of Hindu Nirvana and the New Testament, Jesus minus the Church—he reached the conclusion that art was ungodly because it was founded on imagination, on deceit, on fancy-forgery, he ruthlessly sacrificed the giant of an artist that he was to a rather pedestrian and narrow minded though well-meaning philosopher that he had chosen to become. Thus when he had just reached the uppermost peaks of creative perfection with Anna Karenin, he suddenly decided to stop writing altogether, except for essays on ethics. Fortunately he was not always able to maintain in chains that gigantic creative need of his and, succumbing once in a while, added to his output a few exquisite stories untainted by deliberate moralizing among which is that greatest of great short stories, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich."

Many people approach Tolstoy with mixed feelings. They love the artist in him and are intensely bored by the preacher; but at the same time it is rather difficult to separate Tolstoy the preacher from Tolstoy the artist—it is the same deep slow voice, the same robust shoulder pushing up a cloud of visions or a load of ideas. What one would like to do, would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under his sandalled feet and then lock him up in a stone house on a desert island with gallons of ink and reams of paper—far away from the things, ethical and pedagogical, that diverted his attention from observing the way the dark hair curled above Anna's white neck. But the thing cannot be done: Tolstoy is homogeneous, is one, and the struggle which, especially in the later years, went on between the man who gloated over the beauty of black earth, white flesh, blue snow, green fields, purple thunderclouds, and the man who maintained that fiction is sinful and art immoral—this struggle was still confined within the same man. Whether painting or preaching, Tolstoy was striving, in spite of all obstacles, to get at the truth. As the author of Anna Karenin, he used one method of discovering truth; in his sermons, he used another; but somehow, no matter how subtle his art was and no matter how dull some of his other attitudes were, truth which he was ponderously groping for or magically finding just around the corner, was always the same truth — this truth was he and this he was an art.

What troubles one, is merely that he did not always recognize his own self when confronted with truth. I like the story of his picking up a book one dreary day in his old age, many years after he had stopped writing novels, and starting to read in the middle, and getting interested and very much pleased, and then looking at the title—and seeing: Anna Karenin by Leo Tolstoy.

What obsessed Tolstoy, what obscured his genius, what now distresses the good reader, was that, somehow, the process of seeking the Truth seemed more important to him than the easy, vivid, brilliant discovery of the illusion of truth through the medium of his artistic genius. Old Russian Truth was never a comfortable companion; it had a violent temper and a heavy tread. It was not simply truth, not merely everyday pravda but immortal istina—not truth but the inner light of truth. When Tolstoy did happen to find it in himself, in the splendor of his creative imagination, then, almost unconsciously, he was on the right path. What does his tussle with the ruling Greek-Catholic Church matter, what importance do his ethical opinions have, in the light of this or that imaginative passage in any of his novels?

Essential truth, istina, is one of the few words in the Russian language that cannot be rhymed. It has no verbal mate, no verbal associations, it stands alone and aloof, with only a vague suggestion of the root "to stand" in the dark brilliancy of its immemorial rock. Most Russian writers have been tremendously interested in Truth's exact whereabouts and essential properties. To Pushkin it was of marble under a noble sun; Dostoevski, a much inferior artist, saw it as a thing of blood and tears and hysterical and topical politics and sweat; and Chekhov kept a quizzical eye upon it, while seemingly engrossed in the hazy scenery all around. Tolstoy marched straight at it, head bent and fists clenched, and found the place where the cross had once stood, or found—the image of his own self.


One discovery that he made has curiously enough never been noticed by critics. He discovered—and certainly never realized his discovery—he discovered a method of picturing life which most pleasingly and exactly corresponds to our idea of time. He is the only writer I know of whose watch keeps time with the numberless watches of his readers. All the great writers have good eyes, and the "realism," as it is called, of Tolstoy's descriptions, has been deepened by others; and though the average Russian reader will tell you that what seduces him in Tolstoy is the absolute reality of his novels, the sensation of meeting old friends and seeing familiar places, this is neither here nor there. Others were equally good at vivid description. What really seduces the average reader is the gift Tolstoy had of endowing his fiction with such time-values as correspond exactly to our sense of time. It is a mysterious accomplishment which is not so much a laudable feature of genius as something pertaining to the physical nature of that genius. This time balance, absolutely peculiar to Tolstoy alone, is what gives the gentle reader that sense of average reality which he is apt to ascribe to Tolstoy's keen vision. Tolstoy's prose keeps pace with our pulses, his characters seem to move with the same swing as the people passing under our window while we sit reading his book.

The queer thing about it is that actually Tolstoy was rather careless when dealing with the objective idea of time. In War and Peace attentive readers have found children who grow too fast or not fast enough, just as in Gogol's Dead Souls, despite Gogol's care in clothing his characters, we find that Chichikov wore a bearskin overcoat in midsummer. In Anna Karenin, as we shall see, there are terrific skiddings on the frozen road of time. But such slips on Tolstoy's part have nothing to do with the impression of time he conveys, the idea of time which corresponds so exactly with the reader's sense of time. There are other great writers who were quite consciously fascinated by the idea of time and quite consciously tried to render its movement; this Proust does when his hero in the novel In Search of Lost Time arrives at a final party where he sees people he used to know now for some reason wearing gray wigs, and then realizes that the gray wigs are organic gray hairs, that they have grown old while he had been strolling through his memories; or notice how James Joyce regulates the time element in Ulysses by the slow gradual passing of a crumpled bit of paper down the river from bridge to bridge down the Liffy to Dublin Bay to the eternal sea. Yet these writers who actually dealt in time values did not do what Tolstoy quite casually, quite unconsciously, does: they move either slower or faster than the reader's grandfather clock; it is the time by Proust or the time by Joyce, not the common average time, a kind of standard time which Tolstoy somehow manages to convey.

No wonder, then, that elderly Russians at their evening tea talk of Tolstoy's characters as of people who really exist, people to whom their friends may be likened, people they see as distinctly as if they had danced with Kitty and Anna or Natasha at that ball or dined with Oblonski at his favorite restaurant* . . . Readers call Tolstoy a giant not because other writers are dwarfs but because he remains always of exactly our own stature,† exactly keeping pace with us instead of passing by in the distance, as other authors do.

And in this connection it is curious to note that although Tolstoy, who was constantly aware of his own personality, constantly intruding upon the lives of his characters, constantly addressing the reader—it is curious to note that nevertheless in those great chapters that are his masterpieces the author is invisible so that he attains that dispassionate ideal of authors which Flaubert so violently demanded of a writer: to be invisible, and to be everywhere as God in His universe is. We have thus the feeling now and then that Tolstoy's novel writes its own self, is produced by its matter, by its subject, not by a definite person moving a pen from left to right, and then coming back and erasing a word, and pondering, and scratching his chin through his beard.

The intrusion of the teacher into the artist's domain is, as I have remarked already, not always clearly defined in Tolstoy's novels. The rhythm of the sermon is difficult to disentangle from the rhythm of this or that character's personal meditations. But sometimes, rather often in fact, when pages and pages follow which are definitely in the margin of the story, telling us what we ought to think, what Tolstoy thinks about war or marriage or agriculture — then the charm is broken and the delightful familiar people who had been sitting all round us, joining in our life, are now shut off from us, the door is locked not to be opened until the solemn author has quite, quite finished that ponderous period in which he explains and reexplains his ideas about marriage, or Napoleon, or farming, or his ethical and religious views.

As an example, the agrarian problems discussed in the book, especially in relation to Lyovin's farming, are extremely tedious to foreign-language readers, and I do not expect you to study the situation with any degree of penetration. Artistically Tolstoy made a mistake in devoting such a number of pages to these matters, especially as they tend to become obsolete and are linked up with a certain historical period and with Tolstoy's own ideas that changed with time. Agriculture in the seventies does not have the eternal thrill of Anna's or Kitty's emotions and motives. Several chapters are devoted to the provincial elections of various administrators. The landowners through an organization called zemstvo tried to get into touch with the peasants and to help the peasants (and themselves) by setting up more schools, better hospitals, better machinery, et cetera. There were various participating landowners: conservative, reactionary landowners still looked upon the peasants as slaves—though officially the slaves had been liberated more than ten years before—while liberal, progressive landowners were really eager to improve conditions by having peasants share the landlord's interests and thus helping the peasants become richer, healthier, better educated.

*“Those very particular sensations of reality, of flesh and blood, of characters really living, of living on their own behalf, the main reason for this vividness is due to the fact of Tolstoy’s possessing the unique capacity of keeping time with us; so that if we imagine a creature from some other solar system who would be curious about our time conception, the best way to explain matters to him would be to give him to read a novel by Tolstoy—in Russian, or at least in my translation with my commentaries.” VN [Vladimir Nabokov] deleted passage from the section.

†“The Russian writer Bunin told me that when he visited Tolstoy for the first time and sat waiting for him, he was almost shocked to see suddenly emerge from a small door a little old man instead of the giant he had involuntarily imagined. And I have also seen myself that little old man. I was a child and I faintly remember my father shaking hands with someone at a street corner, then telling me as we continued our walk, ‘That was Tolstoy.’ ” VN deleted passage from the section.


It is not my custom to speak of plots but in the case of Anna Karenin I shall make an exception since the plot of it is essentially a moral plot, a tangle of ethical tentacles, and this we must explore before enjoying the novel on a higher level than plot.

One of the most attractive heroines in international fiction, Anna is a young, handsome, and fundamentally good woman, and a fundamentally doomed woman. Married off as a very young girl by a well-meaning aunt to a promising official with a splendid bureaucratic career, Anna leads a contented life within the most sparkling circle of St. Petersburg society. She adores her little son, respects her husband who is twenty years her senior, and her vivid, optimistic nature enjoys all the superficial pleasures offered her by life.

When she meets Vronski on a trip to Moscow, she falls deeply in love with him. This love transforms everything around her; everything she looks at she sees in a different light. There is that famous scene at the railway station in St. Petersburg when Karenin comes to meet her on her way back from Moscow and she suddenly notices the size and vexing convexity of his huge homely ears. She had never noticed those ears before because she had never looked at him critically; he had been for her one of the accepted things of life included in her own accepted life. Now everything has changed. Her passion for Vronski is a flood of white light in which her former world looks like a dead landscape on a dead planet.

Anna is not just a woman, not just a splendid specimen of womanhood, she is a woman with a full, compact, important moral nature: everything about her character is significant and striking, and this applied as well to her love. She cannot limit herself as another character in the book, Princess Betsy, does, to an undercover affair. Her truthful and passionate nature makes disguise and secrecy impossible. She is not Emma Bovary, a provincial dreamer, a wistful wench creeping along crumbling walls to the beds of interchangeable paramours. Anna gives Vronski her whole life, consents to a separation from her adored little son—despite the agony it costs her not to see the child—and she goes to live with Vronski first abroad in Italy, and then on his country place in central Russia, though this “open” affair brands her an immoral woman in the eyes of her immoral circle. (In a way she may be said to have put into action Emma’s dream of escaping with Rodolphe, but Emma would have experienced no wrench from parting with her child, and neither were there any moral complications in that little lady’s case.) Finally Anna and Vronski return to city life. She scandalizes hypocritical society not so much with her love affair as with her open defiance of society’s conventions.

While Anna bears the brunt of society’s anger, is snubbed and snobbed, insulted and “cut,” Vronski, being a man—a not very deep man, not a gifted man by any means, but a fashionable man, say—Vronski is spared by scandal: he is invited, he goes places, meets his former friends, is introduced to seemingly decent women who would not remain a second in the same room with disgraced Anna. He still loves Anna, but sometimes he is pleased to be back in the world of sport and fashion, and he begins occasionally to avail himself of its favors. Anna misconstrues trivial unloyalties as a drop in the temperature of his love. She feels that her affection alone is no longer enough for him, that she may be losing him.

Vronski, a blunt fellow, with a mediocre mind, gets impatient with her jealousy and thus seems to confirm her suspicions. Driven to despair by the muddle and mud in which her passion flounders, Anna one Sunday evening in May throws herself under a freight train. Vronski realizes too late what he has lost. Rather conveniently for him and for Tolstoy, war with Turkey is brewing—this is 1876—and he departs for the front with a battalion of volunteers. This is probably the only unfair device in the novel, unfair because too easy, too pat.

A parallel story which develops on seemingly quite independent lines is that of the courtship and marriage of Lyovin and Princess Kitty Shcherbatski. Lyovin, in whom more than in any other of his male characters Tolstoy has portrayed himself, is a man of moral ideals, of Conscience with a capital C. Conscience gives him no respite. Lyovin is very different from Vronski. Vronski lives only to satisfy his impulses. Vronski, before he meets Anna, has lived a conventional life: even in love, Vronski is content to substitute for moral ideals the conventions of his circle. But Lyovin is a man who feels it his duty to understand intelligently the surrounding world and to work out for himself his place within it. Therefore Lyovin’s nature moves on in constant evolution, spiritually growing throughout the novel, growing toward those religious ideals which at the time Tolstoy was evolving for himself.

Around these main characters a number of others move. Steve Oblonski, Anna’s lighthearted good-for-nothing brother; his wife Dolly, born Shcherbatski, a kindly, serious, long-suffering woman, in a way one of Tolstoy’s ideal women, for her life is selflessly devoted to her children and to her shiftless husband; there is the rest of the Shcherbatski family, one of Moscow’s old aristocratic families; Vronski’s mother; and a whole gallery of people of St. Petersburg high society. Petersburg society was very different from the Moscow kind, Moscow being the kindly, homey, flaccid, patriarchal old town, and Petersburg the sophisticated, cold, formal, fashionable, and relatively young capital where some thirty years later I was born. Of course there is Karenin himself, Karenin the husband, a dry righteous man, cruel in his theoretical virtue, the ideal civil servant, the philistine bureaucrat who willingly accepts the pseudo-morality of his friends, a hypocrite and a tyrant. In his rare moments he is capable of a good movement, of a kind gesture, but this is too soon forgotten and sacrificed to considerations of his career. At Anna’s bedside, when she is very sick after bearing Vronski’s child and certain of her impending death (which, however, does not come), Karenin forgives Vronski and takes his hand with a true feeling of Christian humility and generosity. He will change back later to his chilly unpleasant personality, but at the moment the proximity of death illumes the scene and Anna in a subconscious way loves him as much as she loves Vronski: both are called Aleksey, both as loving mates share her in her dream. But this feeling of sincerity and kindliness does not last long, and when Karenin makes an attempt at securing a divorce—a matter of not much consequence to him but which would make all the difference to Anna—and is faced with the necessity of submitting to unpleasant complications in the course of obtaining it, he simply gives up and refuses ever to try again, no matter what this refusal may mean to Anna. Moreover, he manages to find satisfaction in his own righteousness.

Though one of the greatest love stories in world literature, Anna Karenin is of course not just a novel of adventure. Being deeply concerned with moral matters, Tolstoy was eternally preoccupied with issues of importance to all mankind at all times. Now, there is a moral issue in Anna Karenin, though not the one that a casual reader might read into it. This moral is certainly not that having committed adultery, Anna had to pay for it (which in a certain vague sense can be said to be the moral at the bottom of the barrel in Madame Bovary). Certainly not this, and for obvious reasons: had Anna remained with Karenin and skillfully concealed from the world her affair, she would not have paid for it first with her happiness and then with her life. Anna was not punished for her sin (she might have got away with that) nor for violating the conventions of a society, very temporal as all conventions are and having nothing to do with the eternal demands of morality. What was then the moral “message” Tolstoy has conveyed in his novel? We can understand it better if we look at the rest of the book and draw a comparison between the Lyovin-Kitty story and the Vronski-Anna story. Lyovin’s marriage is based on a metaphysical, not only physical, concept of love, on willingness for self-sacrifice, on mutual respect. The Anna-Vronski alliance was founded only in carnal love and therein lay its doom.

It might seem, at first blush, that Anna was punished by society for falling in love with a man who was not her husband. Now such a “moral” would be of course completely “immoral,” and completely inartistic, incidentally, since other ladies of fashion, in that same society, were having as many love-affairs as they liked but having them in secrecy, under a dark veil. (Remember Emma’s blue veil on her ride with Rodolphe and her dark veil in her rendezvous at Rouen with Leon.) But frank unfortunate Anna does not wear this veil of deceit. The decrees of society are temporary ones; what Tolstoy is interested in are the eternal demands of morality. And now comes the real moral point that he makes: Love cannot be exclusively carnal because then it is egotistic, and being egotistic it destroys instead of creating. It is thus sinful. And in order to make his point as artistically clear as possible, Tolstoy in a flow of extraordinary imagery depicts and places side by side, in vivid contrast, two loves: the carnal love of the Vronski-Anna couple (struggling amid their richly sensual but fateful and spiritually sterile emotions) and on the other hand the authentic, Christian love, as Tolstoy termed it, of the Lyovin-Kitty couple with the riches of sensual nature still there but balanced and harmonious in the pure atmosphere of responsibility, tenderness, truth, and family joys.

A biblical epigraph: Vengeance is mine; I will repay (saith the Lord).
(Romans XII, verse 19)

What are the implications? First, Society had no right to judge Anna; second, Anna had no right to punish Vronski by her revengeful suicide.



Joseph Conrad, a British novelist of Polish descent, writing to Edward Garnett, a writer of sorts, in a letter dated the 10th of June, 1902, said: “Remember me affectionately to your wife whose translation of Karenina is splendid. Of the thing itself I think but little, so that her merit shines with the greater lustre.” I shall never forgive Conrad this crack. Actually the Garnett translation is very poor.

We may look in vain among the pages of Anna Karenin for Flaubert’s subtle transitions, within chapters, from one character to another. The structure of Anna Karenin is of a more conventional kind, although the book was written twenty years later than Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Conversation between characters mentioning other characters, and the maneuvers of intermediate characters who bring about the meetings of main participants—these are the simple and sometimes rather blunt methods used by Tolstoy. Even simpler are his abrupt switches from chapter to chapter in changing his stage sets.

Tolstoy’s novel consists of eight parts and each part on the average consists of about thirty short chapters of four pages. He sets himself the task of following two main lines—the Lyovin-Kitty one and the Vronski-Anna one, although there is a third line, subordinate and intermediary, the Oblonski-Dolly one that plays a very special part in the structure of the novel since it is present to link up in various ways the two main lines. Steve Oblonski and Dolly are there to act as go-betweens in the affairs of Lyovin and Kitty and in those of Anna and her husband.



From War and Peace by Tolstoy (translated by Anthony Briggs); pages 5-6:

‘Well, Prince, Genoa and Lucca are now nothing more than estates taken over by the Buonaparte family.* No, I give you fair warning. If you won’t say this means war, if you will allow yourself to condone all the ghastly atrocities perpetrated by that Antichrist – yes, that’s what I think he is – I shall disown you. You’re no friend of mine – not the “faithful slave” you claim to be . . . But how are you? How are you keeping? I can see I’m intimidating you. Do sit down and talk to me.’

These words were spoken (in French) one evening in July 1805 by the well-known Anna Pavlovna Scherer, maid of honour and confidante of the Empress Maria Fyodorovna, as she welcomed the first person to arrive at her soiree, Prince Vasily Kuragin, a man of high rank and influence. Anna Pavlovna had had a cough for the last few days and she called it la grippe – grippe being a new word not yet in common currency. A footman of hers in scarlet livery had gone around that morning delivering notes written in French, each saying precisely the same thing:


"If you have nothing better to do, Count (or Prince), and if the prospect of spending an evening with a poor sick lady is not too unnerving, I shall be delighted to see you at my residence between seven and ten. ANNETTE SCHERER"


'My goodness, what a violent attack!' replied the prince, who had only just come in and was not in the least put out by this welcome. Dressed in his embroidered court uniform with knee-breeches, shoes and stars across his chest, he looked at her with a flat face of undisturbed serenity. His French was the elegant tongue of our grandparents, who used it for thought as well as speech, and it carried the soft tones of condescension that come naturally to an eminent personage grown old in high society and at court. He came up to Anna Pavlovna and kissed her hand, presenting to her a perfumed and glistening bald pate, and then seated himself calmly on the sofa.


'First things first,' he said. 'How are you, my dear friend? Put my mind at rest.' His voice remained steady, and his tone, for all its courtesy and sympathy, implied indifference and even gentle mockery.


'How can one feel well when one is . . . suffering in a moral sense? Can any sensitive person find peace of mind nowadays?' said Anna Pavlovna. 'I do hope you're staying all evening.'


'Well, there is that reception at the English Ambassador's. It's Wednesday. I must show my face,' said the prince. 'My daughter is coming to take me there.'


'I thought tonight's festivities had been cancelled. I must say all these celebrations and fireworks are becoming rather tedious.'


'If they had known you wanted the celebration cancelled, it would have been,' said the prince with the predictability of a wound-up clock. Sheer habit made him say things he didn't even mean.

*Genoa and Lucca . . . Buonaparte family: Genoa and Lucca were territories recently annexed by France. Napoleon’s Corsican name was Napoleone Buonaparte; the original version (with a ‘u’) is used here as a deliberate insult.



'Stop teasing me. Come on, tell me what's been decided about Novosiltsev's dispatch?* You know everything.'


'What is there to tell?' replied the prince in a cold, bored tone. 'What's been decided? They've decided that Bonaparte has burnt his boats, and I rather think we're getting ready to burn ours.'


Prince Vasily always spoke languidly, like an actor declaiming a part from an old play. Anna Pavlovna Scherer was just the opposite – all verve and excitement, despite her forty years. To be an enthusiast had become her special role in society, and she would sometimes wax enthusiastic when she didn't feel like it, so as not to frustrate the expectations of those who knew her. The discreet smile that never left her face, though it clashed with her faded looks, gave her the appearance of a spoilt child with a charming defect that she was well aware of, though she neither wished nor felt able to correct it, nor even thought it necessary to do so.

*Novosiltsev’s dispatch: N. N. Novosiltsev was a special ambassador sent to Paris by Emperor Alexander to assist with (ultimately abortive) peace negotiations.



Then suddenly in the middle of this political discussion Anna Pavlovna launched forth in great excitement. 'Oh, don't talk to me about Austria!* Perhaps it's all beyond me, but Austria has never wanted war and she still doesn't want war. She's betraying us. Russia alone must be Europe's saviour. Our benefactor is aware of his exalted calling and he'll live up to it. That's the one thing I do believe in. The noblest role on earth awaits our good and wonderful sovereign, and he is so full of decency and virtue that God will not forsake him. He will do what has to be done and scotch the hydra of revolution, which has become more dreadful than ever . . . .

*‘Oh, don’t talk to me about Austria!’: Only a few weeks earlier (in April 1805) the Third Coalition had been formed between Great Britain, Austria and Russia. Their plan was to defeat Napoleon by means of a three-pronged attack. The Russians had been let down before by the Austrians, and there were many who believed they could not be relied on now.



- Pages 14-7 (Ch. 3):

The 'charming' Hippolyte bore a close resemblance to his beautiful sister; it was even more remarkable that in spite of the similarity he was a very ugly man. His features were like his sister's, but whereas she glowed with joie de vivre, classical beauty and the smiling self-assurance of youth, her brother's face was just the opposite - dim with imbecility, truculent and peevish – and his body was thin and feeble. His eyes, nose and mouth – all his features seemed to twist themselves into a vague kind of obtuse snarl, while his arms and legs were always in an awkward tangle.


'It's not a ghost story, is it?' he asked, settling down next to the princess and jerking his lorgnette up to his eyes, as if he needed this instrument before he could say anything.


'Why no, my dear fellow,' said the astonished viscount with a shrug.


'It's just that I can't abide ghost stories,' said Prince Hippolyte, his tone implying that he had blurted all this out before realizing what it meant. Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he had said was very clever or very stupid. He was dressed in a dark green frock-coat, stockings, light shoes and knee-breeches of a colour he referred to as 'the thigh of a startled nymph'.

The viscount then gave a nice rendition of a story that was doing the rounds. Apparently the Duke of Enghien had driven to Paris for a secret assignation with a young woman, Mlle George, only to run into Bonaparte, who was also enjoying the favours of the same famous actress. On meeting the duke, Napoleon had fallen into one of his fainting fits and had been completely at the duke's mercy. The duke had not taken advantage of this, but Bonaparte had later rewarded his magnanimity by having him put to death.


This was a very charming and interesting story, especially the bit when the rivals suddenly recognized each other, and it seemed to excite the ladies. 'Delightful!' said Anna Pavlovna, with an inquiring glance at the little princess. 'Delightful!' whispered the little princess, stabbing her needle into her sewing to show that the interest and charm of the story were getting in the way of her work. With a grateful smile of appreciation at this silent tribute, the viscount resumed his narrative, but Anna Pavlovna, who never took her eyes off the dreadful young man who was worrying her so much, could hear him holding forth with the abbe too forcefully and too heatedly, so she sped across into the danger zone on a rescue mission. Sure enough, Pierre had managed to get into a political conversation with the abbe about the balance of power, and the abbe, evidently taken by [the] young man's naive passion, was expounding to him his cherished idea. Both men were listening too earnestly and talking too bluntly, and Anna Pavlovna didn't like it.


'You do it by means of the balance of power in Europe and the rights of the people,' the abbe was saying. 'If one powerful state like Russia – despite its reputation for barbarity – were to take a disinterested stand as the head of an alliance aimed at guaranteeing the balance of power in Europe, it would save the world!'


'But how are you going to get such a balance of power?' Pierre was gathering himself to say, but at that moment Anna Pavlovna came across, glowered at Pierre and asked the Italian how he was surviving the local climate. His face changed instantly and assumed the sickly sweet, patronizing air which he obviously reserved for conversations with women. 'I am so enchanted by the delightful wit and culture of the society people – especially the ladies – by whom I have had the good fortune to be received, that I have not yet had time to think about the climate,' he said. Determined not to let go of the abbe and Pierre, Anna Pavlovna steered them into the larger group, where it would be easier to keep an eye on them.


At this point in walked another guest, the young Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, husband of the little princess. He was quite short, but a very handsome young man, with sharp, clear-cut features. Everything about him, from his languid, bored expression to his slow and steady stride, stood in stark contrast to his vivacious little wife. He made it obvious that he knew everybody in the room, and was so fed up with the whole lot that just looking at them and listening to them drove him to distraction. And of all the wearisome faces it was the face of his own pretty wife that seemed to bore him most. With a snarl distorting his handsome face he turned away from her. He kissed Anna Pavlovna's hand, screwed up his eyes and scanned the whole company.


'Are you enlisting for the war, Prince?' said Anna Pavlovna.


'General Kutuzov has been kind enough to want me as an aide,' said Bolkonsky, saying 'Kutuzov', like a Frenchman, rather than 'Kutuzov'.


'And what about Lise, your wife?'


'She's going into the country.'


'Shame on you, depriving us of your charming wife!'


'Andre!' said his wife, addressing her husband in the flirtatious tone that she normally reserved for other men. 'The viscount has just told us a wonderful story about Mlle George and Bonaparte!'

Prince Andrey scowled and turned away. Pierre had been looking at this man with a joyful, affectionate gaze since the moment he walked in, and now he went over and took him by the arm. Before looking round, Prince Andrey gave a pained look of irritation as he felt the touch, but the moment he saw Pierre's smiling face he smiled back in an unusually sweet and pleasant way.


'It's you! . . . Out in society!' he said to Pierre.


'I knew you'd be here,' answered Pierre. 'I'm coming to dine with you,' he added in a low voice, so as not to interrupt the viscount, who was going on with his story. 'Is that all right?'


'Of course it isn't!' laughed Prince Andrey, but his handshake told Pierre he had no need to ask. He was about to go on, but at that moment Prince Vasily and his daughter stood up and the two young men rose to let them go by.



- Pages 21-22 (Ch. 4):

'The execution of the Duke of Enghien,' said Pierre, 'was a political necessity, and in my opinion it was a measure of Napoleon's true greatness that he didn't baulk at assuming total responsibility for it.'


'Merciful heaven!' Anna Pavlovna intoned in a horrified whisper.


'So Monsieur Pierre! You think murder is the measure of true greatness,' said the little princess, smiling and drawing in her work.


Ohs and ahs came from all sides.


'Capital!' said Prince Hippolyte, using the English word, and he began slapping his knee. The viscount merely shrugged.

Pierre looked solemnly over his spectacles at his audience.


'The reason I say this,' he carried on in some despair, 'is that the Bourbons were running away from the Revolution, leaving the people to anarchy, and Napoleon was the only one capable of understanding the Revolution, and transcending it, and that was why, for the public good, he couldn't baulk at the taking of one man's life.'


'Would you like to come over to this other table?' asked Anna Pavlovna. But Pierre didn't answer; he was in full flow.


'Oh no,' he said, warming to his task, 'Napoleon is great because he towered above the Revolution, he stopped its excesses and he preserved all its benefits – equality, free speech, a free press. That was his only reason for assuming supreme power.'


'Yes, if only he had transferred it to the lawful king once he had obtained power, instead of using it to commit murder,' said the viscount, 'then I might have called him a great man.'


'He couldn't have done that. The people had given him power to get rid of the Bourbons, that was all, and also because they thought he was a great man. The Revolution was a splendid achievement,' Monsieur Pierre insisted, his desperate and challenging pronouncement betraying extreme youth and a desire to blurt everything out at once.


'Revolution and regicide are splendid achievements? . . . Well, whatever next? . . . Are you sure you wouldn't like to come over to this table?' repeated Anna Pavlovna.


'Ah, the Social Contract,'* said the viscount with a pinched smile. 'I'm not talking about regicide. I'm talking about ideas.'


'Yes, ideas. Robbery, murder, regicide!' an ironical voice put in.


'These were the extremes, of course, but they weren't the meaning of the whole Revolution. That was in human rights, freedom from prejudice, equality . . . Those were the strong ideas that Napoleon stood up for.'


'Liberty and equality,' said the viscount contemptuously. He seemed at last to have made up his mind to take this young man seriously and demonstrate how silly his outpourings had been. 'Nothing but loud slogans, long compromised. Which of us does not love liberty and equality? Our Saviour himself preached liberty and equality. Have the people been any happier since the Revolution? Quite the reverse. We wanted liberty, but Bonaparte has destroyed it.'


Prince Andrey smiled at them all, Pierre, viscount and hostess.


Just for a moment following Pierre's outburst Anna Pavlovna had been taken aback, for all her social skills, but when she saw that the viscount was not greatly put out by Pierre's sacrilegious way of speaking, and realized there was no stopping it, she rallied, came in on the viscount's side and attacked the other speaker.


'But my dear Monsieur Pierre,' she said, 'how do you account for a great man being capable of executing a duke, a human being after all, who was innocent and untried?'

*the Social Contract: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Contrat Social (1762), a treatise on government and citizenship, was regarded by some people as a cause of the violent excesses of the French Revolution of 1789.


- From The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Confession by Tolstoy (translated by Peter Carson); pages 121-6 (“Confession”):

To have the fame and the money for which I was writing I had to conceal the good and display the bad. So I did. How many times under the pretense of indifference and even of slight mockery did I contrive to conceal my aspirations to good, which constituted the meaning of my life? And I achieved my aim: I was praised.

I came to Petersburg at the age of twenty-six after the war and met writers. They accepted me like one of their own and flattered me, and before I had time to look around I had adopted the writer’s professional views on life held by those whom I met, and these completely destroyed in me all my former attempts to become better. Faced with the dissoluteness of my life, these views provided a theory that justified it.

The view of life held by these people, my comrades in writing, consisted of this: life in general moves on by development, and the main part in this development is played by us, people who think, and the main influence among people who think is held by us – artists, poets. Our vocation is to teach people. To avoid the natural question being put to one—what do I know and what can I teach?—the theory made it clear that one didn’t have to know anything except that the artist and poet teach unconsciously. I was thought to be a marvelous artist and poet, and so it was very natural for me to adopt this theory. As an artist, a poet, I wrote, I taught myself without knowing what. I was paid money for that; I had fine food, a house, women, society; I had fame. So it had to be that what I taught was very good.

This belief in the meaning of poetry and the development of life was a religious faith, and I was one of its priests. To be its priest was very profitable and agreeable. And for quite a long time I lived in this faith without doubting its truth. But in the second and especially the third year of this life I began to have doubts in the infallibility of this faith and began to investigate it. The first occasion for doubt was when I started to notice that the priests of this faith didn’t always agree among themselves. Some said, “We are the best and most useful teachers; we teach what is necessary, but others teach wrongly.” But others said, “No, we are the true teachers but you are teaching wrongly.” And they argued, quarreled, cursed, deceived, cheated one another. Furthermore, there were many people among us who didn’t care about who was right and who was not right but were simply after attaining their mercenary aims with the help of our activity. All this made me doubt the truth of our faith.

Furthermore, having had doubts about the truth of the actual writers’ faith, I started to observe its priests more attentively and came to the conclusion that almost all of the priests of this faith, the writers, were immoral and mostly bad people, worthless in character—much lower than the people I had encountered in my previous debauched and military life—but self-confident and pleased with themselves as only truly saintly people can be, or else those who do not know what sanctity is. These people disgusted me; I disgusted myself and I understood that this faith was a fraud.

. . . . From my association with these people I took away a new vice—a morbidly developed pride and crazy certainty that I was called to teach people without myself knowing what I was teaching.

Now when I remember that time and my state of mind then and the state of mind of such people (of whom there are by the way many thousands), I feel it’s pitiful and frightening and absurd—there comes just the feeling you get in a madhouse.

We were all convinced then that we had to talk and talk, write, and publish—as quickly as possible, as much as possible, that all this was necessary for the good of mankind. And thousands of us, contradicting and abusing each other, kept publishing and writing while we taught others. And without noticing that we knew nothing, that we didn’t know how to answer the simplest questions of life—what is good; what is bad? – we all without listening to each other spoke at once, sometimes indulging each other and praising each other, so that I too was indulged and praised; sometimes getting angry and shouting each other down, just like in a madhouse.

Thousands of workmen worked to the limits of their strength day and night, setting type and printing millions of words, and the mail took them all over Russia, and we kept teaching, teaching, teaching more and more and never were able to finish teaching everything and kept getting angry that we weren’t listened to very much.

All horribly strange, but now I understand it. Our real heartfelt reasoning was that we wanted to get as much money and praise as we could. To achieve that aim we could do nothing else but write books and newspapers. So we did that. But in order for us to do such useless work and have the certainty that we were very important people, we needed another piece of reasoning that would justify our activity. And so we thought up the following: everything that exists is reasonable. Everything that exists goes on developing. It goes on developing through education. Education is measured by the dissemination of books and newspapers. And we are paid money and respected because we write books and newspapers, and so we are very useful and good people. This reasoning would have been very good if we had all agreed; but since for every thought pronounced by one there always appeared a thought, diametrically opposite, pronounced by another, that should have made us think again. But we didn’t notice that. We were paid money, and people of our persuasion praised us—so we, each one of us, thought ourselves right.

It is now clear to me that this was no different than a madhouse; I only dimly suspected this then and simply, like all madmen, called everyone mad but myself.


III

I lived like this, given over to this madness, for six years more until my marriage. During this time I traveled abroad. Life in Europe and meeting Europe’s prominent people and scholars confirmed me even more in that belief in general self-perfection by which I lived, because I found that same belief in them too. This belief took in me the usual form it has in the majority of educated people of our time. This belief was expressed by the word “progress.” I thought then that this word did express something. I didn’t yet understand that, tormented like every living man by questions of “how can I live better?,” in answering, “Live in conformity with progress,” I was saying exactly what a man, carried along in a boat by the waves and the wind, will say to the captain when the only question facing him is “Where should I steer for?” if he says without answering the question, “We are being carried along somewhere.”



https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...e-last-station

Like Deryabin, Vladimir Tolstoy admits that his ancestor's reputation is higher in the west than in Russia. This, he says, is due to the political upheaval in Russia since the break-up of the Soviet Union, and the contemporary emphasis on visual, rather than intellectual, culture. Russia's book-reading, scientific middle class has also shrunk compared to communist times.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, shows little interest in Russia's most celebrated novelist. Putin has never mentioned Tolstoy in his speeches. And the writer's criticisms of Orthodox religion and authority make him a dangerous figure for those in power – both in Tsarist Russia and also today, Vladimir believes. "Nobody is trying to throw out the idea that he is the author of great novels. But they [official Russia] don't know what to do with his views," he says.

Tolstoy's lingering feud with Russia's Orthodox church is part of the problem. The church excommunicated him in 1901, unhappy with his novel Resurrection and Tolstoy's espousal of Christian anarchist and pacifist views. In 2001, the church reaffirmed Tolstoy's excommunication, and conservative Russian Orthodox thinkers have even placed Tolstoy's works on a blacklist.

Others whisper that Tolstoy's beliefs make him un-Russian. They also moan about his unwieldy syntax. And it is hard to imagine that Tolstoy would have kind things to say in return about Putin's bureaucratic-authoritarian state, in which black-robed priests wearing clunky gold crosses appear on pro-Kremlin talkshows.

"I feel that Leo Tolstoy needs to be defended. We need to support him morally, intellectually and emotionally," says Ludmilla Saraskina, Russia's foremost expert on Dostoevsky, and an acclaimed scholar of 19th-century Russian literature. She adds that the writer is under attack in modern-day Russia from the same reactionary forces he himself criticised – the state, the army and the church. "He's not in fashion," she says.





- from Anna Karenina (translated by Kyrill Zinovieff & Jenny Hughes); pages 200-1 (Pt. 2, Ch. 21):

He had scarcely driven a few yards before the clouds, which had been threatening rain since morning, broke, and it began to rain in torrents.

“That’s bad,” thought Vronsky, raising the hood of the carriage. “The going was heavy enough anyway; now it’ll be a perfect quagmire.” Sitting in the seclusion of the closed carriage, he took out his mother’s letter and his brother’s note and read them.

Oh, yes, it was the same story over and over again. Everyone, his mother, his brother, all of them found it necessary to interfere in his emotional life. This interference provoked him to anger, a feeling which he rarely experienced. “What business is it of theirs? Why does everyone think it his duty to look after me? And why do they pester me? Because they see that this is something they can’t understand. If it had been the usual banal society liaison they’d have left me in peace. They feel that this is something different, that this isn’t a game, that this woman is dearer to me than life itself. And that’s just what they find incomprehensible, and therefore annoying. Whatever our fate is, or may be, we have made it ourselves and don’t complain about it,” he said, in the word we associating Anna with himself. “But no, they must teach us how to live. They haven’t the slightest idea of what happiness is, they don’t know that without this love of ours there is neither happiness nor unhappiness for us – there would be no life,” he thought.

He was angry with everyone for interfering precisely because he felt, in his heart of hearts, that they were all of them right. He felt that the love which bound him to Anna was not a momentary infatuation which would pass, as worldly liaisons do, leaving no other trace than pleasant or unpleasant memories in the lives of both of them. He felt the full agony of his own and of her position, all the difficulty, exposed as they were to the eyes of the world, of hiding their love, of lying and deceiving; and of having to lie, to deceive, to scheme, and constantly to think about others at a time when the passion binding them was so violent that they both forgot about everything else except their love.

He vividly recalled the numerous occasions when lies and deceit, so repugnant to his nature, had been necessary; he recalled most vividly having observed in her many a time a feeling of shame at having to deceive and lie. And he experienced a strange feeling which, since his love affair with Anna, sometimes came over him. This was a feeling of disgust at something – whether at Karenin, or at himself, or at the whole world, he did not quite know. But he always drove away this strange feeling. Now too, he pulled himself together, and continued with his train of thought.

“Yes, she was unhappy before, but she was proud and had peace of mind; but now she cannot have any peace of mind and dignity, although she doesn’t show that. Yes, this must end,” he decided.

And for the first time he realized clearly that it was essential to put an end to all this falsehood, and the sooner the better. “We must throw up everything, both of us, and go and hide ourselves somewhere alone with our love,” he said to himself.





- p. 733-738 (Pt. 8, Ch. 15-16):

“Do you know, Kostya, who was in the train with Sergei Ivanovich?” said Dolly, after distributing cucumbers and honey among the children. “Vronsky! He’s going to Serbia.”

“And not alone either. He’s taking a whole squadron with him at his own expense!” said Katavasov.

“That is typical of him,” said Levin. “Are the volunteers still going out then?” he added with a glance at Koznyshov.

Koznyshov did not reply. With the blunt edge of a knife he was carefully rescuing a live bee stuck in the running honey from a bowl in which lay a wedge of white honeycomb.

“I should think so! You should have seen what was happening on the railway station yesterday,” said Katavasov, noisily biting off a bit of cucumber.

“But now, what’s the meaning of it? For Christ’s sake, explain to me, Sergei Ivanovich. Where are all these volunteers going to? Whom are they fighting?” asked the old Prince, evidently continuing a conversation which had begun in Levin’s absence.

“The Turks,” replied Koznyshov with a quiet smile, having extricated the bee, all dark with honey and helplessly moving its legs, and removing it from the knife to a stout aspen leaf.

“But who has declared war on the Turks? Ivan Ragozov and Countess Lidia together with Madame Stahl?”

“Nobody has declared war, but people sympathize with the sufferings of their brethren and want to help them,” said Koznyshov.

“But the Prince is speaking not of help, but of war,” said Levin, defending his father-in-law. “The Prince is saying that private individuals cannot take part in a war without the Government’s permission.”

“Kostya, look, it’s a bee. We shall all get stung, we really shall,” said Dolly, waving off a wasp.

“But it’s not even a bee, it’s a wasp,” said Levin.

“Well, well now, what’s your theory?” said Katasov to Levin with a smile, obviously challenging him to an argument. “Why haven’t private individuals got the right to take part?”

“My theory is simply this: on the one hand, war is such a bestial, cruel and terrible thing that no individual, let alone a Christian, can assume a personal responsibility for starting a war; only a government, whose job it is and which is inevitably drawn into war, can assume it. On the other hand, both science and common sense tell us that in matters of state, and particularly in matters of war, citizens renounce their personal will.”

Koznyshov and Katavazov, ready with their counter-arguments, began talking simultaneously.

“But the whole point, my dear fellow, is that there can be cases when the Government does not carry out the will of its citizens, and society then asserts its will.”

But Koznyshov evidently did not approve of this counter-argument. He frowned at Katavasov’s words and said something else:

“You shouldn’t put the problem that way. In this case there’s no declaration of war, but merely the expression of a human, a Christian feeling. Our brethren, people of the same blood and the same faith, are being killed. Or if you like, not even our brethren, not even people of the same faith, but simply children, women and old men; feeling is aroused, and Russians run to help to put an end to these atrocities. Imagine you were walking down a street and saw a drunk beating up a woman or a child; I don’t think you would stop to enquire whether war has or has not been declared on that man; you’d rush at him and defend the victim.”

“But I shouldn’t kill him,” said Levin.

“Oh yes, you would.”

“I don’t know. If I saw this, I would yield to my immediate impulse; but I can’t say in advance. And there isn’t and cannot be any such immediate impulse in the case of the oppression of the Slavs.”

“You haven’t got it, perhaps. But others have,” said Koznyshov with an angry frown. “The memory of Orthodox Christians, suffering under the yoke of ‘the infidel Hagarians’,* is very much alive among the people. ‘The people’ has heard of the sufferings of its brethren and has spoken.”

“Perhaps,” said Levin evasively, “but I don’t see it. I’m one of ‘the people’ myself, but I don’t feel it.”

“Nor do I,” said the Prince. “I was living abroad, I read the newspapers and I must admit that, even before the Bulgarian atrocities, I simply failed to understand why all Russians should suddenly have become so fond of brother Slavs, while I felt no love for them at all. I was very upset, thought I was a monster or that Carlsbad was having that effect on me. But when I came here I ceased to worry – I see that there are other people besides me who are interested only in Russia and not in brother Slavs. Konstantin, for example.”

“Personal opinions mean nothing in this case,” said Koznyshov. “They don’t matter when the whole of Russia – ‘the people’ – has expressed its will.”

“But excuse me – I don’t see this happening. ‘The people’ knows nothing about it at all,” said the Prince.

“Oh no, Papa, how can you say: nothing? What about in church last Sunday?” said Dolly who had been listening to the conversation. “Give me the towel, please,” she said to the old man who was looking at the children with a smile. “It can’t possibly be that all…”

“Well, what about in church on Sunday? The priest had been told to read that. He read it. ‘The people’ understood nothing of it and sighed as they do at any sermon,” continued the Prince. “Then they were told that there was to be a collection in church for a worthy cause, good for their souls, and so they each produced a copeck and gave it. But in aid of what they don’t know themselves.”

“ ‘The people’ cannot help knowing; a consciousness of its destinies always exists in ‘the people’, and in moments such as the present it reveals itself to ‘the people’,” affirmed Koznyshov, with a glance at the old bee-keeper.

The handsome old man, with his black beard streaked with grey and thick silver hair, was standing immobile, holding a bowl of honey, calmly and gently looking down at the gentlefolk from his great height, and quite obviously understood nothing of what was being said and did not want to.

“That’s how it is,” he said, nodding his head with a significant air at Koznyshov’s words.

“Now you ask him. He knows nothing and doesn’t think much,” said Levin. “Have you heard about the war, Mikhailych?” he asked, turning to him. “You know – what they read in church? What do you think then? Should we be fighting for the Christians?”

“What’s there for us to think about? Alexander Nikolayevich, the Emperor, has thought about it for us and he will do so in all things. He knows best. Shall I get some more bread? Give that little fellow a bit more?” he said, turning to Dolly and pointing to Grisha, who was finishing his crust.


*Hagarians: The descendants of Hagar, the concubine of Abraham. A way of referring to Muslims.


“I have no need to ask,” said Koznyshov. “We have seen and still see hundreds and hundreds of men who throw up everything to serve a righteous cause, who come from every part of Russia and express their opinion and aim plainly and clearly. They contribute their coppers or else go themselves and say plainly why. What does this mean?”

“It means, to my mind,” said Levin, becoming excited, “that in a nation of eighty millions you can always find not hundreds as now, but tens of thousands of men, society’s outcasts, reckless ne’er-do-wells who are always ready for anything – to join Pugachev’s* band of robbers, to go to Khiva, to Serbia …”

“I tell you it’s not hundreds and they are not ne’er-do-wells,” said Koznyshov with as much irritation as if he had been defending his last penny.

“And what about donations? There it really is the whole ‘people’ expressing its will.”

“The word ‘people’ is so vague,” said Levin. “Parish clerks, school teachers and perhaps one peasant out of a thousand knows what it’s all about. The rest of the eighty million, like Mikhailych, not only do not express their will, but haven’t got the slightest idea what it is they should be expressing their will about. What right have we got, then, to say that that is the will of ‘the people’?”

…

Koznyshov, experienced in dialectics, did not object, but immediately switched the conversation over to another aspect of the problem.

“Of course, if you want to gauge the spirit of ‘the people’ arithmetically, you’ll be hard put to it to do so. Voting has not been introduced into this country and cannot be introduced, because it does not express the will of ‘the people’; but there are other means. It can be felt in the air, the heart feels it. I needn’t mention the undercurrents which have begun to flow in the stagnant pool of the nation, and which are obvious to every unprejudiced individual; look at society in the narrow sense. All the most diverse parties in the intellectual world, so hostile to each other in the past, have now all merged into one. All differences are over, all organs of public opinion say one and the same thing, all have sensed the elemental force which has gripped them and is sweeping them on in the same direction.”

“Yes, the newspapers do all say the same thing,” said the Prince. “That’s true. So much the same thing, indeed, that they are like frogs before a storm. It’s they who make it impossible to hear anything.”

“Frogs or no frogs – I am not a newspaper editor and don’t want to defend them; but I’m speaking of the unanimity of opinion in the world of the intelligentisa,” said Koznyshov, turning to his brother.

Levin wanted to reply, but the old Prince interrupted him.

“Oh, about that unanimity there is something else to be said too,” said the Prince. “Now, I have a son-in-law, Stiva Oblonsky, you know him. He’s getting a job on the committee of a commission of something, I can’t remember. Only there’s nothing to do there – oh well, Dolly, that’s no secret – but there is a salary of eight thousand roubles. You try and ask him whether his job is a useful one – he’ll prove to you that it is absolutely essential. And he is a truthful man, but one can’t really fail to believe in the usefulness of eight thousand roubles.”

“Yes, he asked me to tell Princess Oblonsky that he had got the job,” said Koznyshov crossly, presuming that the Prince was speaking out of turn.

“The same with the unanimity of the newspapers. It has been explained to me: as soon as there is a war, their profits double. How can they help thinking that the destinies of the nation and the Slavs … and all this?...”

“There are many papers I don’t like, but this is unfair,” said Koznyshov.


*Pugachev (1742-75) was a rebel Cossack leader and pretender to the throne in the reign of Catherine the Great.


I’d insist on just one condition,” went on the Prince. “Alphonse Karr* put it admirably before the war with Prussia. ‘You consider that the war is necessary? Very well then. Whoever preaches war – off to a special front-line legion and to the assault, to the attack, in the lead!’”

“The editors would look a fine lot!” said Katavasov as he burst out laughing loudly, picturing the editors he knew in that select legion.

“Oh, they’d just run away,” said Dolly. “They’d only be in the way.”

“If they run, fire grapeshot after them, or post Cossacks behind them with whips,” said the Prince.

“This is a joke and an unkind one at that, if you will forgive me saying so, Prince,” said Koznyshov.

“I don’t see it as a joke, it’s…” began Levin, but Koznyshov interrupted him.

“Every member of society is called upon to perform the task which is proper to him,” he said. “Men of ideas, too, perform their task when they give expression to public opinion. Unanimity and the complete expression of public opinion are the two services performed by the press and they are a welcome phenomenon. Twenty years ago we should have remained silent, but now the voice of the Russian people is heard, ‘the people’ which is ready to rise up like one man and ready to offer up sacrifices for the sake of its oppressed brethren; this is a great step forwards and a token of strength.”

“But it isn’t a matter merely of sacrifice, but of killing Turks,” said Levin with some hesitation. “ ‘The people’ sacrifice themselves and are ready to sacrifice themselves for the souls’ sake and not for the sake of killing,” he added, involuntarily connecting the conversation with the thoughts that preoccupied him.

“How do you mean – their souls’ sake? This, you know, is a puzzling expression for a natural scientist. What is the soul?” said Katavasov with a smile.

“Oh, you know!!”

“Now, I give you my word, I haven’t the slightest idea!” said Katavasov with a loud laugh.

“I have brought not peace, but a sword’, says Christ,” broke in Koznyshov, quoting quite simply, as if it was the easiest thing to understand, the very passage out of the Gospel which had always perplexed Levin more than any other.

“That’s how it is,” again repeated the old man who was standing beside them, in answer to a glance, casually thrown at him.

“No, my dear fellow, you’re beaten, beaten, completely beaten!” cried Katavasov cheerfully.

Levin flushed with annoyance, not because he was beaten, but because he could not restrain himself from arguing.

“No, I can’t argue with them,” he thought, “they wear impenetrable armour, and I am naked.”

He saw that it was not possible to convince either his brother or Katavasov, and saw even less possibility of agreeing with them. What they were advocating was that intellectual pride which had almost been his ruin. He could not even agree that dozens of people, including his brother, had the right, on the basis of what they had been told by hundreds of volunteers with the gift of the gab swarming into Moscow and Petersburg, to say that they and the newspapers expressed the will and ideas of “the people”, especially ideas that found their expression in vengeance and killing. He could not agree with this both because he did not find these ideas expressed by “the people”, in the midst of whom he was living, and because he did not find these ideas within himself (and he could not consider himself as other than one of the individuals making up the Russian people), but mainly because neither he nor “the people” knew or could know what the common good consisted of, though he did know beyond all doubt that the achievement of the common good was possible only through the strict observance of that law of good and evil which has been revealed to every man, and he therefore could neither want war nor advocate it for any general purpose. He spoke with Mikhailych and with the peasants who had expressed their thought in the legend concerning the invitation of the Vikings. [Legend according to which the Vikings were invited by Russian tribal chieftains in the ninth century to come into Russia and bring some order into chaos there.] “Reign and rule over us. We joyfully promise complete obedience. We assume all the toil, all humiliations, all sacrifices; but it is not our task to judge and to decide.” And now, according to Koznyshov, “the people” was giving up that right, bought at such a heavy price.

He also wanted to say that if public opinion was an infallible judge, why, then, were revolution and communes not just as legitimate as the movement in favour of the Slavs? But all these were ideas that could not solve anything. Only one thing was plain beyond a doubt – that the argument was just then irritating Koznyshov and that therefore to argue was bad; and Levin held his peace and drew his guests’ attention to the gathering clouds and to the fact that it was best to go home to escape the rain.


- p. 764-9 (Leo Tolstoy’s Life):

In March 1881 Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by terrorists, and Tolstoy wrote a letter to the new Tsar, Alexander III, asking that the six assassins should be pardoned and spared the death penalty as an act of Christian forgiveness. Not surprisingly, the Tsar refused. Tolstoy began to write more and more on social, religious and political questions, taking on all of them almost an anarchist position based on peace and love. He was now being kept under constant surveillance by the Tsarist Police.

In 1882 Tolstoy bought a large house with grounds in Khamovniki, Moscow, and from then till the end of his life divided his time between his country estate and Moscow. In the city he undertook an assiduous study of Hebrew with a rabbi.

During 1883 he worked intensively on What I Believe, inveighing against personal profit and private property and urging a return to the original message of Christ. Tolstoy’s behaviour was becoming more and more erratic and he was repeatedly threatening to leave his home and family to live the simple life of a peasant or even an itinerant pilgrim. He started to wear peasant garb and to try to learn how to become proficient at various types of manual labour and handicrafts, such as making his own shoes.

In October 1883 he met Vladimir Chertkov, a twenty-nine-year-old wealthy nobleman and fanatical Tolstoy disciple, who had resigned his position as Captain of Horse Guards to live on his own estate improving the lot of the local peasants.

In 1884 Chertkov suggested that Tolstoy should set up the Intermediary (Posrednik) Publishing House to disseminate not only those of Tolstoy’s works that had not been banned, but good literature in general at very low prices. During its first four years, the Intermediary sold over twelve million books. Chertkov laboured to have published abroad the works of Tolstoy which were suppressed or censored in Russia, and Tolstoy worked on translating and editing works for publication in his own country. He now became a vegetarian, and gave up alcohol, hunting and smoking. More and more “disciples” were appearing at Yasnaya Polyana, both from Russia and abroad, and many went back to their own areas to set up communes based on Tolstoyan principles.

However, his wife detested Chertkov’s fanaticism and increasing influence over her husband, and Chertkov returned her animosity. Tolstoy and his family drifted further and further apart. In June 1884 he actually walked out on them, but returned shortly afterwards. By this time, he had seriously alarmed the government and Church, was under police surveillance, and many of his old acquaintances feared he was mad.

In 1885, interestingly for British readers, he recommended for publication by the Intermediary all the works of Dickens, and George Eliot’s Felix Holt, which he described as “outstanding”; he also claimed that Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma agreed with many of his own principles.

In addition to his polemical writings, Tolstoy also at this time wrote a certain amount of fiction, mainly novellas, such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Kreutzer Sonata, all of which, although extremely powerful, were still written to make points in agreement with Tolstoy’s new world view. The Kreutzer Sonata was at first banned because it advocated sexual abstinence even in marriage, and was only finally published in 1891 following a personal interview by Sofya with the Tsar.

Tolstoy began his last full-length novel, Resurrection, in 1889, and completed it only in 1899, when it was published in full after being issued in instalments.

In 1890 Tolstoy criticized the recent persecution of the Jews in Russia, and continued to attract hundreds of idealistic disciples from home and abroad. He was now world-famous as a spiritual leader and social critic. The following year he renounced the rights to most of his works published after 1881, although he still retained the royalties from works issued before this date to maintain his family. He also distributed his wealth (580,000 roubles) in ten lots among Sofya and his nine living children.

In 1892, along with other writers and artists, such as Chekhov, he worked hard to alleviate conditions for those suffering from the catastrophic famine in central Russia, although he had already expressed a belief that organized charity merely perpetuated the division between rich and poor. The government tried to suppress news of the disaster, and were outraged to such a degree at Tolstoy’s efforts to spread awareness of the tragedy abroad that there was a real possibility that the elderly writer would at last be imprisoned or exiled.

Among Tolstoy’s other thunderous denunciations of these years was The Kingdom of God Is within You, published in Berlin in 1894, which excoriated both Church and State for crushing the masses, and advocated mass passive non-resistance to these oppressive powers to achieve change.

Another one of Tolstoy’s children, Ivan, died in February 1895 from scarlet fever, driving Sofya into temporary insanity and almost to suicide. She developed an infatuation at this period with the much younger composer Sergei Taneyev, which continued till 1904, although there is no clear evidence as to how intimate their relationship became. Tolstoy, not surprisingly, was furious and threatened more and more often to leave.

At this period he began to advocate land reform, rejecting the notions of private ownership and centralized government, and extolling the rural village commune as a model for social organization.

In 1895 he undertook a vigorous campaign for the peasant religious sect of the Dukhobors to be allowed to emigrate from Russia. They were being persecuted for refusing to serve in the army and pay taxes and, although not basing their ideas on Tolstoy’s teachings, in their way of life they had much in common with what he was propounding. Tolstoy suggested that the authorities persecute him instead, but they refused, believing this would make a martyr out of him. However, Chertkov and other prominent Tolstoyans who supported the Dukhobors were exiled for five years. Finally, in 1897, the Dukhobors were allowed to emigrate to Canada, with funds raised by Tolstoy, including the advance for his novel Resurrection. He was by now claiming publicly that patriotism was evil, that the Tsar lacked all authority and should abdicate, and that all states are illegitimate and should be dissolved.

He now also began to write on the purpose and aim of art. He commenced What Is Art? in 1896, and finished it in early 1898, when it was published simultaneously in Russia – in a heavily censored version – and in Britain, in English.

The book attracted both praise and censure, and sparked intense debate in the press. In this essay Tolstoy repudiated most of his own early work previous to his new polemical and didactic phase, and derided Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He attacked existing art as elitist and corrupting, and expounded the view that art must be produced to appeal to the masses and to create a brotherhood of humanity. In this work he claimed that Dickens was the greatest novelist of the nineteenth century because of his vivid and accessible style, and descriptions of the social conditions of the poor of the time.

In that year, he visited an exhibition of Impressionist paintings in Moscow and criticized them for lacking any central idea. Around the same time he wrote that Anton Chekhov wrote like a Decadent and Impressionist – possibly a criticism of Chekhov’s lack of a social position in his writing.

Tolstoy now laboured extremely hard to finish Resurrection, which he decided to sell at a greater price than that of the cheap editions of his previous works, so that the profits could be donated to the Dukhobors to finance their continuing emigration. Despite being heavily altered by the censor, the novel was still perceived as mocking the Orthodox Church when it was published in full in volume form, and Tolstoy was promptly excommunicated by an edict accusing him of numerous heresies and urging him to repent – which he refused adamantly to do. Letters of sympathy poured in from all over the world. He then wrote a letter to the Tsar calling for human rights and religious freedom – a demand which was of course ignored. He was still regularly feeling the temptation to leave home, although he did not do so because he was afraid Sofya would commit suicide. Although up until this point he had been very fit and active for his age – now over seventy – and had still done gymnastics and weight-training and played tennis in summer, his health now began to decline following a serious bout of malaria which almost killed him. He drew up a will, in which he stipulated that almost all of the proceeds from his previous works were to be devoted to social causes, and to his publishing company, to further his teachings. Sofya and his children were outraged, and a protracted and bitter struggle over his will began. Tolstoy went down to the Crimea to recover from his illness, and was visited by Gorky and Chekhov, whose most recent plays he disliked, although he admired some of his stories. Tolstoy now suffered in quick succession from typhoid fever and pneumonia, which once again brought him close to death.

He remained in the Crimea from September 1901 to June 1902, and despite his weakness while there, he wrote a long essay entitled ‘What Is Religion?’, and sent a letter beginning “Dear Brother” to Tsar Nicholas II, urging social reforms, and warning him that oppression by Church and State had brought the masses near to insurrection.

Tolstoy continued to produce essays and pamphlets on social questions. In January 1903, he protested vehemently against the massacre of Jews in Kishinyov and wrote three stories to be published for the victims’ financial benefit.

He was now gradually becoming frailer, and his output declined, but he still managed to finish a short novel, Hadji Murat, set in the Caucasus, and in 1904 published his notorious essay ‘Shakespeare and the Drama’, in which he questioned the reputation of King Lear and many of Shakespeare’s other plays, prompting two extremely critical letters to him by George Bernard Shaw.

During this time the Russo-Japanese War broke out and, in 1905, insurrections flared up all over Russia, which were brutally suppressed. Tolstoy issued several articles condemning the use of violence by both sides in the war, and asserting that, although the insurrections were inevitable, the participants should try to achieve results by adopting his own doctrine of non-resistance to evil.

After the upheavals, the Tsar granted a limited degree of civil rights, but Tolstoy was contemptuous, claiming that there was nothing in these reforms for the common masses. He criticized not only violent revolutionaries, but even peaceful social democrats aiming for a liberal democracy, since he believed that all forms of government were evil: he was now in his writings coming to reject civilization altogether, in all its manifestations, and advocating a return to the simple life of the peasantry, with social organization based on the democratic village peasant commune, where everybody had a say. He wrote to influential Russian statesmen urging the abolition of private property, the abandonment of industrialization and city life, and a return to agriculture and rural crafts.

In 1906, Sofya was operated on for a large tumour; the surgery was successful, although it left her debilitated. Tolstoy’s love for her resurfaced, and he looked after her devotedly, in so far as his own weak condition would allow. But in November 1906 his daughter Maria died suddenly of pneumonia, and a few months later his brother-in-law was murdered during a strike in St Petersburg.

This only deepened Tolstoy’s depression, and he renewed his interest in oriental thought. Sofya’s behaviour became erratic, and the arguments over his will increasingly savage. Chertkov had now moved back to Russia from exile, and Sofya accused Tolstoy of having a homosexual relationship with him. The writer began to suffer frequent dizzy spells, and he grew weaker and weaker. In September 1909, he received an admiring letter from Mohandas (later Mahatma) Gandhi, who throughout his life was profoundly influenced by Tolstoy’s social theories and his promotion of peaceful non-resistance to evil. A correspondence began between them which continued till Tolstoy’s death.

In 1909 Tolstoy revised his will, leaving control of his writings after his death to his daughter Alexandra, now twenty-five, who was to supervise their publication along with Chertkov. This was kept secret from Sofya.


- Back cover:

Leo Tolstoy’s most personal work Anna Karenina scrutinizes fundamental ethical and theological questions through the tragic story of its eponymous heroine. Anna is desperately pursuing a good, “moral” life, standing for honesty and sincerity. Passion drives her to adultery, and this flies in the face of the corrupt Russian bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the aristocrat Konstantin Levin is struggling to reconcile reason with passion, espousing a Christian anarchism that Tolstoy himself believed in.

Acclaimed by critics and readers alike, Anna Karenina presents a poignant blend of realism and lyricism that makes it one of the most perfect, enduring novels of all time.

“Anna Karenina is a perfect work of art.”—Fyodor Dostoevsky


- From The Will to Power by Nietzsche (translated by R. Kevin Hill and Michael A Scarpitti); page 561:

“ . . . how are we to classify . . . . [t]he social pessimism of the anarchists (or Shelley’s)? The pessimism of compassion (that of Tolstoy, A. de Vigny)?

Are all these things not also phenomena indicating disease and decay? . . . Attaching excessive importance to moral values, or to ‘otherworldly’ fictions, or to social calamities, or to suffering in general: any such exaggeration of a particular point of view is already a sign of disease. Also the preponderance of negation over affirmation!”


- From The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature by Ayn Rand; page 104:

Tolstoy preached resignation and passive obedience to society’s power. In Anna Karenina, the most evil book in serious literature, he attacked man’s desire for happiness and advocated its sacrifice to conformity.

page 55: . . . I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.

pages 106-7: The essential element of Naturalism—the presentation of “a slice of life” at a specific time and place—cannot be borrowed literally. A writer cannot copy the Russian society of 1812 as presented in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. He has to employ some thought and effort of his own, at least in the sense of using his own observations to present the people of his own time and place. Thus, paradoxically, on its lower levels Naturalism offers a chance for some minimal originality, which Romanticism does not. In this respect, Naturalism would appeal to some writers seeking the possibility of a literary achievement on a modest scale.