Anna Karenina quotes

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house.

The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him.

Stepan Arkadyevitch was a truthful man in his relations with himself.

He was incapable of deceiving himself and persuading himself that he repented of his conduct.

… he firmly held those views on all these subjects which were held by the majority and by his paper, and he only changed them when the majority changed them—or, more strictly speaking, he did not change them, but they imperceptibly changed of themselves within him.

Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn.

And for him, living in a certain society—owing to the need, ordinarily developed at years of discretion, for some degree of mental activity—to have views was just as indispensable as to have a hat.

And with all this, Stepan Arkadyevitch, who liked a joke, was fond of puzzling a plain man by saying that if he prided himself on his origin, he ought not to stop at Rurik and disown the first founder of his family—the monkey.

And so Liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s, and he liked his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it diffused in his brain.

He read the leading article, in which it was maintained that it was quite senseless in our day to raise an outcry that radicalism was threatening to swallow up all conservative elements, and that the government ought to take measures to crush the revolutionary hydra;

He walked on a few steps, and the skating-ground lay open before his eyes, and at once, amidst all the skaters, he knew her.

He knew she was there by the rapture and the terror that seized on his heart.

She was standing talking to a lady at the opposite end of the ground. There was apparently nothing striking either in her dress or her attitude. But for Levin she was as easy to find in that crowd as a rose among nettles.

He knew she was there by the rapture and the terror that seized on his heart. She was standing talking to a lady at the opposite end of the ground. There was apparently nothing striking either in her dress or her attitude.

But for Levin she was as easy to find in that crowd as a rose among nettles.

Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light on all round her. “Is it possible I can go over there on the ice, go up to her?” he thought.

He had to make an effort to master himself, and to remind himself that people of all sorts were moving about her, and that he too might come there to skate.

He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as one does the sun, without looking.

On that day of the week and at that time of day people of one set, all acquainted with one another, used to meet on the ice.

“

Well, if that’s its aim, I’d rather be a savage.

”

“

And so you are a savage. All you Levins are savages.

”

You want a man’s work, too, always to have a defined aim, and love and family life always to be undivided—and that’s not how it is.

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.

”

“Oh, no,” said the countess, taking her hand. “I could go all around the world with you and never be dull.

You are one of those delightful women in whose company it’s sweet to be silent as well as to talk.

Now please don’t fret over your son; you can’t expect never to be parted.”

… on the work that lay before him in the village, and staring at the side-horse, that had been his saddle-horse, past his prime now, but a spirited beast from the Don, he began to see what had happened to him in quite a different light.

He felt himself, and did not want to be anyone else.

All he wanted now was to be better than before.

“If it had not been for you, God knows what would have happened! How happy you are, Anna!” said Dolly. “Everything is clear and good in your heart.”

“Every heart has its own skeletons, as the English say.”

“You have no sort of skeleton, have you? Everything is so clear in you.”

Annushka was already dozing, the red bag on her lap, clutched by her broad hands, in gloves, of which one was torn. Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was distasteful to her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives.

She had too great a desire to live herself.

If she read that the heroine of the novel was nursing a sick man, she longed to move with noiseless steps about the room of a sick man;

If he had indeed on previous occasions struck and impressed people who did not know him by his air of unhesitating composure, he seemed now more haughty and self-possessed than ever.

He looked at people as if they were things.

A nervous young man, a clerk in a law court, sitting opposite him, hated him for that look.

Alexey Alexandrovitch’s manner of walking, with a swing of the hips and flat feet, particularly annoyed Vronsky.

He could recognize in no one but himself an indubitable right to love her.

But she was still the same, and the sight of her affected him the same way, physically reviving him, stirring him, and filling his soul with rapture.

She glanced at her husband to find out whether he knew Vronsky. Alexey Alexandrovitch looked at Vronsky with displeasure, vaguely recalling who this was.

Vronsky’s composure and self-confidence here struck, like a scythe against a stone, upon the cold self-confidence of Alexey Alexandrovitch.

“Ah! We are acquainted, I believe,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch indifferently, giving his hand.

When the doctor came in she flushed crimson, and her eyes filled with tears. All her illness and treatment struck her as a thing so stupid, ludicrous even!

Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken.

Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders? But she could not grieve her mother, especially as her mother considered herself to blame.

It seemed as though some piece of good fortune had come to pass after the doctor had gone. The mother was much more cheerful when she went back to her daughter, and Kitty pretended to be more cheerful.

She had often, almost always, to be pretending now.

“Really, I’m quite well, mamma. But if you want to go abroad, let’s go!” she said, and trying to appear interested in the proposed tour, she began talking of the preparations for the journey.

“I wonder that with her sense—for she’s not a fool, you know—that she doesn’t see how funny she is.”

Everyone had something to say in censure or ridicule of the luckless Madame Maltishtcheva, and the conversation crackled merrily, like a burning faggot-stack.

The husband of Princess Betsy, a good-natured fat man, an ardent collector of engravings, hearing that his wife had visitors, came into the drawing-room before going to his club. Stepping noiselessly over the thick rugs, he went up to Princess Myakaya.

The sensation produced by Princess Myakaya’s speeches was always unique, and the secret of the sensation she produced lay in the fact that though she spoke not always appropriately, as now, she said simple things with some sense in them.

In the society in which she lived such plain statements produced the effect of the wittiest epigram.

Princess Myakaya could never see why it had that effect, but she knew it had, and took advantage of it.

“Yes; he told us about the life in India, most interesting things.”

The conversation, interrupted by her coming in, flickered up again like the light of a lamp being blown out.

“Sir John! Yes, Sir John; I’ve seen him. He speaks well. The Vlassieva girl’s quite in love with him.”

“But by marriages of prudence we mean those in which both parties have sown their wild oats already. That’s like scarlatina—one has to go through it and get it over.”

“Then they ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.”

“I was in love in my young days with a deacon,” said the Princess Myakaya. “I don’t know that it did me any good.”

Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man who, while calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge, should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below.

That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived.

For the first time the question presented itself to him of the possibility of his wife’s loving someone else, and he was horrified at it.

Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife’s loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself.

All his life Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived and worked in official spheres, having to do with the reflection of life. And every time he had stumbled against life itself he had shrunk away from it.

Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man who, while calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge, should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below.

Anna said what came to her lips, and marveled, hearing herself, at her own capacity for lying. How simple and natural were her words, and how likely that she was simply sleepy!

She felt herself clad in an impenetrable armor of falsehood.

She felt that some unseen force had come to her aid and was supporting her.

More than that, he saw from her tone that she was not even perturbed at that, but as it were said straight out to him: “Yes, it’s shut up, and so it must be, and will be in future.”

Now he experienced a feeling such as a man might have, returning home and finding his own house locked up.

“But perhaps the key may yet be found,” thought Alexey Alexandrovitch.

Outwardly everything was the same, but their inner relations were completely changed. Alexey Alexandrovitch, a man of great power in the world of politics, felt himself helpless in this.

Like an ox with head bent, submissively he awaited the blow which he felt was lifted over him.

Every time he began to think about it, he felt that he must try once more, that by kindness, tenderness, and persuasion there was still hope of saving her, of bringing her back to herself, and every day he made ready to talk to her.

and as now there was no one in her life but him, to him she addressed her prayer for forgiveness. Looking at him, she had a physical sense of her humiliation, and she could say nothing more.

He felt what a murderer must feel, when he sees the body he has robbed of life.

That body, robbed by him of life, was their love, the first stage of their love. There was something awful and revolting in the memory of what had been bought at this fearful price of shame.

but the memory of these evil actions was far from causing him so much suffering as those trivial but humiliating reminiscences.

These wounds never healed.

And with these memories was now ranged his rejection and the pitiful position in which he must have appeared to others that evening. But time and work did their part.

… the first time, a cloth jacket, instead of his fur cloak, and went out to look after his farm, stepping over streams of water that flashed in the sunshine and dazzled his eyes, and treading one minute on ice and the next into sticky mud.

Spring is the time of plans and projects.

And, as he came out into the farmyard, Levin, like a tree in spring that knows not what form will be taken by the young shoots and twigs imprisoned in its swelling buds, hardly knew what undertakings he was going to begin upon now in …

“No, we’d better drive,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting into the trap. He sat down, tucked the tiger-skin rug round him, and lighted a cigar. “How is it you don’t smoke?

A cigar is a sort of thing, not exactly a pleasure, but the crown and outward sign of pleasure.

Come, this is life! How splendid it is! This is how I should like to live!”

“No, you’re a lucky man! You’ve got everything you like. You like horses—and you have them; dogs—you have them; shooting—you have it; farming—you have it.”

“Perhaps because I rejoice in what I have, and don’t fret for what I haven’t,”

said Levin, thinking of Kitty.

Levin scowled. The humiliation of his rejection stung him to the heart, as though it were a fresh wound he had only just received.

But he was at home, and the walls of home are a support.

“Stay, stay,” he began, interrupting Oblonsky. “You talk of his being an aristocrat. But allow me to ask what it consists in, that aristocracy of Vronsky or of anybody else, beside which I can be looked down upon?

Her clean-cut head, with prominent, bright, spirited eyes, broadened out at the open nostrils, that showed the red blood in the cartilage within. About all her figure, and especially her head, there was a certain expression of energy, and, at the same time, of softness.

She was one of those creatures which seem only not to speak because the mechanism of their mouth does not allow them to.

To Vronsky, at any rate, it seemed that she understood all he felt at that moment, looking at her.

“No, they must needs teach us how to live. They haven’t an idea of what happiness is; they don’t know that without our love, for us there is neither happiness nor unhappiness—no life at all,” he thought.

He was angry with all of them for their interference just because he felt in his soul that they, all these people, were right.

He felt that the love that bound him to Anna was not a momentary impulse, which would pass, as worldly intrigues do pass, leaving no other traces in the life of either but pleasant or unpleasant memories.

… from the right one, but that to arrest his motion is not in his power, that every instant is carrying him further and further away, and that to admit to himself his deviation from the right direction is the same as admitting his certain ruin.

This child, with his innocent outlook upon life, was the compass that showed them the point to which they had departed from what they knew, but did not want to know.

This time Seryozha was not at home, and she was completely alone. She was sitting on the terrace waiting for the return of her son, who had gone out for his walk and been caught in the rain.

And he will calmly and punctually act in accordance with his words. That’s what will happen.

He’s not a man, but a machine, and a spiteful machine when he’s angry

,” she added, recalling Alexey Alexandrovitch as she spoke, with all the peculiarities of his figure and manner of speaking, and reckoning against him every defect she could find in him, softening nothing for the great wrong she herself was doing him.

“I unhappy?” she said, coming closer to him, and looking at him with an ecstatic smile of love. “

I am like a hungry man who has been given food. He may be cold, and dressed in rags, and ashamed, but he is not unhappy.

I unhappy? No, this is my unhappiness. …”

For this reason there positively came into Alexey Alexandrovitch’s face a look of haughtiness and severity whenever anyone inquired after his wife’s health.

Alexey Alexandrovitch did not want to think at all about his wife’s behavior, and he actually succeeded in not thinking about it at all.

Alexey Alexandrovitch’s permanent summer villa was in Peterhof, and the Countess Lidia Ivanovna used as a rule to spend the summer there, close to Anna, and constantly seeing her.

Seryozha came in preceded by his governess. If Alexey Alexandrovitch had allowed himself to observe he would have noticed the timid and bewildered eyes with which Seryozha glanced first at his father and then at his mother.

But he would not see anything, and he did not see it.

“Ah, the young man! He’s grown. Really, he’s getting quite a man. How are you, young man?”

“No, you were not mistaken,” she said deliberately, looking desperately into his cold face. “You were not mistaken. I was, and I could not help being in despair. I hear you, but I am thinking of him.

I love him, I am his mistress; I can’t bear you; I’m afraid of you, and I hate you.

… You can do what you like to me.”

She would have been a good figure, too, if it had not been for her extreme thinness and the size of her head, which was too large for her medium height. But she was not likely to be attractive to men.

She was like a fine flower, already past its bloom and without fragrance, though the petals were still unwithered.

Moreover, she would have been unattractive to men also from the lack of just what Kitty had too much of—of the suppressed fire of vitality, and the consciousness of her own attractiveness.

Kitty answered perfectly truly. She did not know the reason Anna Pavlovna had changed to her, but she guessed it. She guessed at something which she could not tell her mother, which she did not put into words to herself.

It was one of those things which one knows but which one can never speak of even to oneself, so terrible and shameful would it be to be mistaken.

Again and again she went over in her memory all her relations with the family. She remembered the simple delight expressed on the round, good-humored face of Anna Pavlovna at their meetings;

“

Time, indeed, that depends! Why, there’s time one would give a month of for sixpence, and time you wouldn’t give half an hour of for any money.

Isn’t that so, Katinka? What is it? why are you so depressed?”

To Konstantin Levin the country was good first because it afforded a field for labor, of the usefulness of which there could be no doubt.

To Sergey Ivanovitch the country was particularly good, because there it was possible and fitting to do nothing.

Moreover, Sergey Ivanovitch’s attitude to the peasants rather piqued Konstantin.

If he had been asked whether he liked or didn’t like the peasants, Konstantin Levin would have been absolutely at a loss what to reply.

He liked and did not like the peasants, just as he liked and did not like men in general.

Of course, being a good-hearted man, he liked men rather than he disliked them, and so too with the peasants.

Konstantin Levin did not like talking and hearing about the beauty of nature.

Words for him took away the beauty of what he saw.

He assented to what his brother said, but he could not help beginning to think of other things.

“

Not a bit of it, sir; mow in the rain, and you’ll rake in fine weather!

” said the old man.

But by now this lodge was old and dilapidated. When Stepan Arkadyevitch had gone down in the spring to sell the forest, Dolly had begged him to look over the house and order what repairs might be needed.

Stepan Arkadyevitch, like all unfaithful husbands indeed, was very solicitous for his wife’s comfort

, and he had himself looked over the house, and given instructions about everything that he considered necessary.

And besides, hard though it was for the mother to bear the dread of illness, the illnesses themselves, and the grief of seeing signs of evil propensities in her children—the children themselves were even now repaying her in small joys for her sufferings.

Those joys were so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but sand; but there were good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but gold.

Now in the solitude of the country, she began to be more and more frequently aware of those joys.

… little, and could not remember when they had seen him, but they experienced in regard to him none of that strange feeling of shyness and hostility which children so often experience towards hypocritical, grown-up people, and for which they are so often and miserably punished.

Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.

Whatever faults Levin had, there was not a trace of hypocrisy in him, and so the children showed him the same friendliness that they saw in their mother’s face.

Ivan directed her how to fasten the cord to the crosspiece, and at something she said he laughed aloud.

In the expressions of both faces was to be seen vigorous, young, freshly awakened love.

All that was drowned in a sea of merry common labor.

God gave the day, God gave the strength.

And the day and the strength were consecrated to labor, and that labor was its own reward. For whom the labor? What would be its fruits? These were idle considerations—beside the point.

The peasants who remained for the night in the meadow scarcely slept all the short summer night. At first there was the sound of merry talk and laughing all together over the supper, then singing again and laughter.

All the long day of toil had left no trace in them but lightness of heart.

Before the early dawn all was hushed. Nothing was to be heard but the night sounds of the frogs that never ceased in the marsh, and the horses snorting in the mist that rose over the meadow before the morning.

“How exquisite it all is in this exquisite night! And when was there time for that cloud-shell to form? Just now I looked at the sky, and there was nothing in it—only two white streaks.

Yes, and so imperceptibly too my views of life changed!

”

At the very instant when this apparition was vanishing, the truthful eyes glanced at him. She recognized him, and her face lighted up with wondering delight.

He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the world.

There was only one creature in the world that could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty. He understood that she was driving to Ergushovo from the railway station.

He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the world.

There was only one creature in the world that could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life.

It was she. It was Kitty. He understood that she was driving to Ergushovo from the railway station. And everything that had been stirring Levin during that sleepless night, all the resolutions he had made, all vanished at once.

But when he was all alone in the carriage Alexey Alexandrovitch, to his surprise and delight, felt complete relief both from this pity and from the doubts and agonies of jealousy.

He experienced the sensations of a man who has had a tooth out after suffering long from toothache.

After a fearful agony and a sense of something huge, bigger than the head itself, being torn out of his jaw, the sufferer, hardly able to believe in his own good luck, feels all at once that what has so long poisoned his existence and …

“No, it’s out of the question, out of the question!” he said again, twisting his rug about him again. “

I cannot be unhappy, but neither she nor he ought to be happy.

”

“Yes, time will pass; time, which arranges all things, and the old relations will be reestablished,” Alexey Alexandrovitch told himself; “so far reestablished, that is, that I shall not be sensible of a break in the continuity of my life.

She is bound to be unhappy, but I am not to blame, and so I cannot be unhappy.

”

He read the letter through and felt pleased with it, and especially that he had remembered to enclose money: there was not a harsh word, not a reproach in it, nor was there undue indulgence.

Most of all, it was a golden bridge for return.

Folding the letter and smoothing it with a massive ivory knife, and putting it in an envelope with the money, he rang the bell with the gratification it always afforded him to use the well arranged appointments of his writing-table.

What will it be now? And he knows all that; he knows that I can’t repent that I breathe, that I love; he knows that it can lead to nothing but lying and deceit; but he wants to go on torturing me.

I know him; I know that he’s at home and is happy in deceit, like a fish swimming in the water.

No, I won’t give him that happiness. I’ll break through the spiderweb of lies in which he wants to catch me, come what may. Anything’s better than lying and deceit.”

“Ah!” said Anna indifferently, as though not greatly interested in the matter, and she went on smiling: “How can you or your friends compromise anyone?”

This playing with words, this hiding of a secret, had a great fascination for Anna, as, indeed, it has for all women.

And it was not the necessity of concealment, not the aim with which the concealment was contrived, but the process of concealment itself which attracted her.

“It’s a new manner,” she said. “They’ve all adopted that manner.

They’ve flung their caps over the windmills. But there are ways and ways of flinging them.

”

“The husband? Liza Merkalova’s husband carries her shawl, and is always ready to be of use. But anything more than that in reality, no one cares to inquire.

You know in decent society one doesn’t talk or think even of certain details of the toilet. That’s how it is with this.

”

“

To sleep well one ought to work, and to enjoy oneself one ought to work too.

”

This code of principles covered only a very small circle of contingencies, but then the principles were never doubtful, and Vronsky, as he never went outside that circle, had never had a moment’s hesitation about doing what he ought to do.

These principles laid down as invariable rules: that one must pay a cardsharper, but need not pay a tailor; that one must never tell a lie to a man, but one may to a woman; that one must never cheat anyone, but one may a husband; that one must never pardon an insult, but one may give one and so on.

These principles were possibly not reasonable and not good, but they were of unfailing certainty, and so long as he adhered to them, Vronsky felt that his heart was at peace and he could hold his head up.

that one must never tell a lie to a man, but one may to a woman; that one must never cheat anyone, but one may a husband; that one must never pardon an insult, but one may give one and so on.

These principles were possibly not reasonable and not good, but they were of unfailing certainty, and so long as he adhered to them, Vronsky felt that his heart was at peace and he could hold his head up.

Only quite lately in regard to his relations with Anna, Vronsky had begun to feel that his code of principles did not fully cover all possible contingencies, and to foresee in the future difficulties and perplexities for which he could find no guiding clue.

“And here’s my opinion for you.

Women are the chief stumbling block in a man’s career. It’s hard to love a woman and do anything.

There’s only one way of having love conveniently without its being a hindrance—that’s marriage. How, how am I to tell you what I mean?” said Serpuhovskoy, who liked similes. “Wait a minute, wait a minute!

“Perhaps. But you remember what I’ve said to you. And another thing, women are all more materialistic than men.

We make something immense out of love, but they are always terre-à-terre.

”

“But as I told you then, and have written to you,” he said in a thin, shrill voice, “I repeat now, that I am not bound to know this. I ignore it.

Not all wives are so kind as you, to be in such a hurry to communicate such agreeable news to their husbands.

” He laid special emphasis on the word “agreeable.” “I shall ignore it so long as the world knows nothing of it, so long as my name is not disgraced.

“I want you not to meet that man here, and to conduct yourself so that neither the world nor the servants can reproach you … not to see him. That’s not much, I think.

And in return you will enjoy all the privileges of a faithful wife without fulfilling her duties.

That’s all I have to say to you. Now it’s time for me to go. I’m not dining at home.” He got up and moved towards the door.

Long before, Levin had felt dissatisfaction with his own position in regard to the land.

He saw where his boat leaked, but he did not look for the leak, perhaps purposely deceiving himself.

(Nothing would be left him if he lost faith in it.) But now he could deceive himself no longer.

The Sviazhskys’ home-life was exceedingly pleasant, and Sviazhsky himself, the best type of man taking part in local affairs that Levin knew, was very interesting to him.

Sviazhsky was one of those people, always a source of wonder to Levin, whose convictions, very logical though never original, go one way by themselves, while their life, exceedingly definite and firm in its direction, goes its way quite apart and almost always in direct contradiction to their convictions.

Sviazhsky was an extremely advanced man. He despised the nobility, and believed the mass of the nobility to be secretly in favor of serfdom, and only concealing their views from cowardice.

“

To educate the people three things are needed: schools, and schools, and schools.

”

Levin saw that he was not to discover the connection between this man’s life and his thoughts.

Obviously he did not care in the least what his reasoning led him to; all he wanted was the process of reasoning.

And he did not like it when the process of reasoning brought him into a blind alley. That was the only thing he disliked, and avoided by changing the conversation to something agreeable and amusing.

His brother listened, but evidently he was not interested by it.

These two men were so akin, so near each other, that the slightest gesture, the tone of voice, told both more than could be said in words.

Both of them now had only one thought—the illness of Nikolay and the nearness of his death—which stifled all else. But neither of them dared to speak of it, and so whatever they said—not uttering the one thought that filled their minds—was all falsehood.

Never with any outside person, never on any official visit had he been so unnatural and false as he was that evening. And the consciousness of this unnaturalness, and the remorse he felt at it, made him even more unnatural.

He wanted to weep over his dying, dearly loved brother, and he had to listen and keep on talking of how he meant to live.

As the house was damp, and only one bedroom had been kept heated, Levin put his brother to sleep in his own bedroom behind a screen.

Sometimes when he was choking he muttered angrily, “Ah, the devil!” Levin could not sleep for a long while, hearing him. His thoughts were of the most various, but the end of all his thoughts was the same—death.

Death, the inevitable end of all, for the first time presented itself to him with irresistible force.

And death, which was here in this loved brother, groaning half asleep and from habit calling without distinction on God and the devil, was not so remote as it had hitherto seemed to him. It was in himself too, he felt that.

Levin said what he had genuinely been thinking of late. He saw nothing but death or the advance towards death in everything. But his cherished scheme only engrossed him the more. Life had to be got through somehow till death did come.

Darkness had fallen upon everything for him; but just because of this darkness he felt that the one guiding clue in the darkness was his work, and he clutched it and clung to it with all his strength.

The Karenins, husband and wife, continued living in the same house, met every day, but were complete strangers to one another.

Alexey Alexandrovitch made it a rule to see his wife every day, so that the servants might have no grounds for suppositions, but avoided dining at home.

The chief reason why the prince was so particularly disagreeable to Vronsky was that he could not help seeing himself in him. And what he saw in this mirror did not gratify his self-esteem.

He was a very stupid and very self-satisfied and very healthy and very well-washed man, and nothing else.

He was a gentleman—that was true, and Vronsky could not deny it. He was equable and not cringing with his superiors, was free and ingratiating in his behavior with his equals, and was contemptuously indulgent with his inferiors.

“

Brainless beef! can I be like that?

” he thought.

Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. She had broadened out all over, and in her face at the time when she was speaking of the actress there was an evil expression of hatred that distorted it.

He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it.

And in spite of this he felt that then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love out of his heart;

“It’s an utterly different culture—their culture.

He’s cultivated, one sees, simply to be able to despise culture, as they despise everything but animal pleasures.

”

“He’s not a man, not a human being—he’s a doll! No one knows him; but I know him. Oh, if I’d been in his place, I’d long ago have killed, have torn to pieces a wife like me. I wouldn’t have said, ‘Anna, ma chère’!

He’s not a man, he’s an official machine.

He doesn’t understand that I’m your wife, that he’s outside, that he’s superfluous. … Don’t let’s talk of him! …”

… never come singly, and the affairs of the reorganization of the native tribes, and of the irrigation of the lands of the Zaraisky province, had brought such official worries upon Alexey Alexandrovitch that he had been of late in a continual condition of extreme irritability.

He did not sleep the whole night, and his fury, growing in a sort of vast, arithmetical progression, reached its highest limits in the morning.

He dressed in haste, and as though carrying his cup full of wrath, and fearing to spill any over, fearing to lose with his wrath the energy necessary for the interview with his wife, he went into her room directly he heard she was up.

He did not sleep the whole night, and his fury, growing in a sort of vast, arithmetical progression, reached its highest limits in the morning.

He dressed in haste, and as though carrying his cup full of wrath, and fearing to spill any over, fearing to lose with his wrath the energy necessary for the interview with his wife, he went into her room directly he heard she was up.

Anna, who had thought she knew her husband so well, was amazed at his appearance when he went in to her. His brow was lowering, and his eyes stared darkly before him, avoiding her eyes; his mouth was tightly and contemptuously shut.

“

Yes, I have lost even my affection for my son, because he is associated with the repulsion I feel for you.

But still I shall take him. Goodbye!”

He sat down himself, and, rubbing his little hands with short fingers covered with white hairs, he bent his head on one side. But as soon as he was settled in this position a moth flew over the table.

The lawyer, with a swiftness that could never have been expected of him, opened his hands, caught the moth, and resumed his former attitude.

“Before beginning to speak of my business,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, following the lawyer’s movements with wondering eyes, “I ought to observe that the business about which I have to speak to you is to be strictly private.”

On his way back he caught unobserved another moth. “

Nice state my rep curtains will be in by the summer!

” he thought, frowning.

the new head of his department, who had just been promoted to that position, and had come on a tour of revision to Moscow; and his brother-in-law, Karenin, whom he must see, so as to be sure of bringing him to dinner.

Stepan Arkadyevitch liked dining, but still better he liked to give a dinner, small, but very choice, both as regards the food and drink and as regards the selection of guests.

He particularly liked the program of that day’s dinner. There would be fresh perch, asparagus, and la pièce de resistance—first-rate, but quite plain, roast beef, and wines to suit: so much for the eating and drinking.

The thought that the new chief might not tender him a warm reception was the other unpleasant thing. But Stepan Arkadyevitch instinctively felt that everything would come round all right. “

They’re all people, all men, like us poor sinners; why be nasty and quarrelsome?

” he thought as he went into the hotel.

“

And do you know, there’s less charm in life, when one thinks of death, but there’s more peace.

”

“

On the contrary, the finish is always the best.

But I must be going,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting up for the tenth time.

Alexey Alexandrovitch had thought to pass at once into those frigid relations in which he ought to stand with the brother of a wife against whom he was beginning a suit for divorce.

But he had not taken into account the ocean of kindliness brimming over in the heart of Stepan Arkadyevitch.

Stepan Arkadyevitch opened wide his clear, shining eyes.

Darya Alexandrovna, in her best gray silk gown, obviously worried about the children, who were to have their dinner by themselves in the nursery, and by her husband’s absence, was not equal to the task of making the party mix without him.

All were sitting like so many priests’ wives on a visit (so the old prince expressed it), obviously wondering why they were there, and pumping up remarks simply to avoid being silent.

Turovtsin—good, simple man—felt unmistakably a fish out of water, and the smile with which his thick lips greeted Stepan Arkadyevitch said, as plainly as words: “Well, old boy, you have popped me down in a learned set!

Slapping Turovtsin on the shoulder, he whispered something comic in his ear, and set him down by his wife and the old prince. Then he told Kitty she was looking very pretty that evening, and presented Shtcherbatsky to Karenin.

In a moment he had so kneaded together the social dough that the drawing-room became very lively, and there was a merry buzz of voices.

Konstantin Levin was the only person who had not arrived.

Sergey Ivanovitch, while he kept up a conversation with their hostess, had one ear for his brother, and he glanced askance at him. “What is the matter with him today? Why such a conquering hero?” he thought.

He did not know that Levin was feeling as though he had grown wings.

Levin knew she was listening to his words and that she was glad to listen to him. And this was the only thing that interested him.

“

And I’m oppressed and humiliated that they won’t engage me at the Foundling,

” the old prince said again, to the huge delight of Turovtsin, who in his mirth dropped his asparagus with the thick end in the sauce.

“Darya Alexandrovna,” he said, now looking straight into Dolly’s kindly, troubled face, and feeling that his tongue was being loosened in spite of himself, “

I would give a great deal for doubt to be still possible. When I doubted, I was miserable, but it was better than now.

When I doubted, I had hope; but now there is no hope, and still I doubt of everything. I am in such doubt of everything that I even hate my son, and sometimes do not believe he is my son. I am very unhappy.”

I left everything as of old. I gave her a chance to reform, I tried to save her. And with what result? She would not regard the slightest request—that she should observe decorum,” he said, getting heated. “

One may save anyone who does not want to be ruined; but if the whole nature is so corrupt, so depraved, that ruin itself seems to be her salvation, what’s to be done?

”

“

Love those that hate you, but to love those one hates is impossible.

Forgive me for having troubled you. Everyone has enough to bear in his own grief!” And regaining his self-possession, Alexey Alexandrovitch quietly took leave and went away.

“No; we only came to fetch you and thank you,” she said, rewarding him with a smile that was like a gift, “for coming.

What do they want to argue for? No one ever convinces anyone, you know.

”

“

With me? Happiness is the matter with me!

” said Levin, letting down the window of the carriage they were driving in. “You don’t mind?—it’s so stifling. It’s happiness is the matter with me! Why is it you have never married?”

He was convinced he could fly upwards or lift the corner of the house, if need be. He spent the remainder of the time in the street, incessantly looking at his watch and gazing about him.

And what he saw then, he never saw again after.

The children especially going to school, the bluish doves flying down from the roofs to the pavement, and the little loaves covered with flour, thrust out by an unseen hand, touched him. Those loaves, those doves, and those two boys were not earthly creatures.

the dove, with a whir of her wings, darted away, flashing in the sun, amid grains of snow that quivered in the air, while from a little window there came a smell of fresh-baked bread, and the loaves were put out.

All of this together was so extraordinarily nice that Levin laughed and cried with delight.

Going a long way round by Gazetny Place and Kislovka, he went back again to the hotel, and putting his watch before him, he sat down to wait for twelve o’clock.

The princess went up to her husband, kissed him, and would have gone away, but he kept her, embraced her, and, tenderly as a young lover, kissed her several times, smiling.

The old people were obviously muddled for a moment, and did not quite know whether it was they who were in love again or their daughter.

When the prince and the princess had gone, Levin went up to his betrothed and took her hand. He was self-possessed now and could speak, and he had a great deal he wanted to tell her.

All these acquaintances he observed with difficulty concealing their mirth at something; the same mirth that he had perceived in the lawyer’s eyes, and just now in the eyes of this groom.

Everyone seemed, somehow, hugely delighted, as though they had just been at a wedding.

When they met him, with ill-disguised enjoyment they inquired after his wife’s health. The presence of Princess Tverskaya was unpleasant to Alexey Alexandrovitch from the memories associated with her, and also because he disliked her, and he went straight to the nursery.

I can’t, I can’t live with him. What am I to do? I have been unhappy, and used to think one couldn’t be more unhappy, but the awful state of things I am going through now, I could never have conceived.

Would you believe it, that knowing he’s a good man, a splendid man, that I’m not worth his little finger, still I hate him.

I hate him for his generosity. And there’s nothing left for me but. …”

but in his smile there was so much of sweetness and almost feminine tenderness that his smile did not wound, but softened and soothed.

His gentle, soothing words and smiles were as soothing and softening as almond oil.

And Anna soon felt this.

“No, Stiva,” she said, “I’m lost, lost! worse than lost! I can’t say yet that all is over; on the contrary, I feel that it’s not over.

I’m an overstrained string that must snap.

But it’s not ended yet … and it will have a fearful end.”

And turning away so that his brother-in-law could not see him, he sat down on a chair at the window.

There was bitterness, there was shame in his heart, but with bitterness and shame he felt joy and emotion at the height of his own meekness.

Stepan Arkadyevitch was touched. He was silent for a space.

But he felt that he could not do that either. Levin found himself, like the majority of his contemporaries, in the vaguest position in regard to religion.

Believe he could not, and at the same time he had no firm conviction that it was all wrong.

And consequently, not being able to believe in the significance of what he was doing nor to regard it with indifference as an empty formality, during the whole period of preparing for the sacrament he was conscious of a feeling of discomfort and shame at …

“

Doubt is natural to the weakness of mankind, but we must pray that God in His mercy will strengthen us.

What are your special sins?” he added, without the slightest interval, as though anxious not to waste time.

“

The cuttlefish is no hindrance. The wife is the hindrance.

”

“

Of course there is, but it isn’t confessed,

” said Katavasov, and he broke into loud laughter.

When the princess came into the room five minutes later, she found them completely reconciled. Kitty had not simply assured him that she loved him, but had gone so far—in answer to his question, what she loved him for—as to explain what for.

She told him that she loved him because she understood him completely, because she knew what he would like, and because everything he liked was good.

And this seemed to him perfectly clear.

“

Was ever a man in such a fearful fool’s position?

” he said.

…”

Levin felt more and more that all his ideas of marriage, all his dreams of how he would order his life, were mere childishness, and that it was something he had not understood hitherto, and now understood less than ever, though it was being performed upon him.

The lump in his throat rose higher and higher, tears that would not be checked came into his eyes.

“Well, we shall see which of them will step on the rug first. I warned Kitty.”

“It will make no difference,” said Madame Lvova; “we’re all obedient wives; it’s in our family.”

“Oh, I stepped on the rug before Vassily on purpose. And you, Dolly?”

The thought of the harm caused to her husband aroused in her a feeling like repulsion, and akin to what a drowning man might feel who has shaken off another man clinging to him. That man did drown.

It was an evil action, of course, but it was the sole means of escape, and better not to brood over these fearful facts.

One consolatory reflection upon her conduct had occurred to her at the first moment of the final rupture, and when now she recalled all the past, she remembered that one reflection. “I have inevitably made that man wretched,” she thought;

I am losing what I prized above everything—I am losing my good name and my son. I have done wrong, and so I don’t want happiness, I don’t want a divorce, and shall suffer from my shame and the separation from my child.”

But, however sincerely Anna had meant to suffer, she was not suffering.

Shame there was not.

He soon felt that the realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand out of the mountain of happiness he had expected.

It showed him the mistake men make in picturing to themselves happiness as the realization of their desires.

For a time after joining his life to hers, and putting on civilian dress, he had felt all the delight of freedom in general of which he had known nothing before, and of freedom in his love—and he was content, but not for long.

It was only then, for the first time, that he clearly understood what he had not understood when he led her out of the church after the wedding.

He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.

He felt this from the agonizing sensation of division that he experienced at that instant. He was offended for the first instant, but the very same second he felt that he could not be offended by her, that she was himself.

Another feeling, even stronger, impelled him as quickly as possible to smooth over the rupture without letting it grow greater. To remain under such undeserved reproach was wretched, but to make her suffer by justifying himself was worse still.

Like a man half-awake in an agony of pain, he wanted to tear out, to fling away the aching place, and coming to his senses, he felt that the aching place was himself.

He could do nothing but try to help the aching place to bear it, and this he tried to do.

She’s not to blame in any way. I ought myself to be firmer, to maintain my masculine independence of action; or else I shall get into such ways, and she’ll get used to them too. … Of course she’s not to blame,” he told himself.

But it is hard for anyone who is dissatisfied not to blame someone else, and especially the person nearest of all to him, for the ground of his dissatisfaction.

And it vaguely came into Levin’s mind that she herself was not to blame (she could not be to blame for anything), but what was to blame was her education, too superficial and frivolous. (“That fool Tcharsky:

even less than before did he feel capable of apprehending the meaning of death, and its inevitability rose up before him more terrible than ever. But now, thanks to his wife’s presence, that feeling did not reduce him to despair.

In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love.

He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer.

He knew that for this, for the very fact that his heart was torn with grief, they would be merciless to him.

He felt that men would crush him as dogs strangle a torn dog yelping with pain.

He knew that his sole means of security against people was to hide his wounds from them, and instinctively he tried to do this for two days, but now he felt incapable of keeping up the unequal struggle.

“Now I will enter upon my duties,” she said with a smile after a pause, as she wiped away the traces of tears. “I am going to Seryozha. Only in the last extremity shall I apply to you.” And she got up and went out.

Countess Lidia Ivanovna went into Seryozha’s part of the house, and dropping tears on the scared child’s cheeks, she told him that his father was a saint and his mother was dead.

Countess Lidia Ivanovna kept her promise. She did actually take upon herself the care of the organization and management of Alexey Alexandrovitch’s household. But she had not overstated the case when saying that practical affairs were not her strong point.

Though they were divorced and lived apart, yet whenever the husband met the wife, he invariably behaved to her with the same malignant irony, the cause of which was incomprehensible.

Countess Lidia Ivanovna had long given up being in love with her husband, but from that time she had never given up being in love with someone.

She was in love with several people at once, both men and women; she had been in love with almost everyone who had been particularly distinguished in any way.

He could not, because the claims of his own soul were more binding on him than those claims his father and his teacher made upon him. Those claims were in opposition, and he was in direct conflict with his education.

He was nine years old; he was a child; but he knew his own soul, it was precious to him, he guarded it as the eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love he let no one into his soul.

His teachers complained that he would not learn, while his soul was brimming over with thirst for knowledge. And he learned from Kapitonitch, from his nurse, from Nadinka, from Vassily Lukitch, but not from his teachers.

His teachers complained that he would not learn, while his soul was brimming over with thirst for knowledge. And he learned from Kapitonitch, from his nurse, from Nadinka, from Vassily Lukitch, but not from his teachers.

The spring his father and his teachers reckoned upon to turn their mill-wheels had long dried up at the source, but its waters did their work in another channel.

His father punished Seryozha by not letting him go to see Nadinka, Lidia Ivanovna’s niece; but this punishment turned out happily for Seryozha. Vassily Lukitch was in a good humor, and showed him how to make windmills.

But he very quickly perceived that though the world was open for him personally, it was closed for Anna.

Just as in the game of cat and mouse, the hands raised for him were dropped to bar the way for Anna.

One of the first ladies of Petersburg society whom Vronsky saw was his cousin Betsy.

He could not say that to her. “But how can she fail to see it, and what is going on in her?” he said to himself.

He felt at the same time that his respect for her was diminished while his sense of her beauty was intensified.

He went back scowling to his rooms, and sitting down beside Yashvin, who, with his long legs stretched out on a chair, was drinking brandy and seltzer water, he ordered a glass of the same for himself.

“

A wife is a care, but it’s worse when she’s not a wife

,” thought Yashvin, as he walked out of the hotel.

But he felt utterly different towards her beauty now.

In his feeling for her now there was no element of mystery, and so her beauty, though it attracted him even more intensely than before, gave him now a sense of injury.

She was not looking in his direction, but Vronsky felt that she had seen him already.

“Oh, if you loved me, as I love, if you were tortured as I am! …” she said, looking at him with an expression of terror.

He was sorry for her, and angry notwithstanding.

He assured her of his love because he saw that this was the only means of soothing her, and he did not reproach her in words, but in his heart he reproached her.

He was sorry for her, and angry notwithstanding.

He assured her of his love because he saw that this was the only means of soothing her, and he did not reproach her in words, but in his heart he reproached her.

And the asseverations of his love, which seemed to him so vulgar that he was ashamed to utter them, she drank in eagerly, and gradually became calmer. The next day, completely reconciled, they left for the country.

“You imagine, I dare say, that you invented something quite new?

It’s always just the same: it was settled by the eyes, by smiles.

…”

“

The birch mushroom’s stalk suggests a dark man’s chin after two days without shaving,

” said Sergey Ivanovitch, speaking quite calmly now.

“You must understand that I’m not jealous, that’s a nasty word. I can’t be jealous, and believe that. … I can’t say what I feel, but this is awful. …

I’m not jealous, but I’m wounded, humiliated that anybody dare think, that anybody dare look at you with eyes like that.

”

On his head there was a wreck of a hat of indefinite form, but his gun of a new patent was a perfect gem, and his game bag and cartridge belt, though worn, were of the very best quality.

Vassenka Veslovsky had had no notion before that it was truly chic for a sportsman to be in tatters, but to have his shooting outfit of the best quality.

He saw it now as he looked at Stepan Arkadyevitch, radiant in his rags, graceful, well-fed, and joyous, a typical Russian nobleman. And he made up his mind that next time he went shooting he would certainly adopt the same getup.

“No, that’s another question; I am prepared to admit that they’re useful.

But all profit that is out of proportion to the labor expended is dishonest.

”

“It’s just this, my dear boy.

One must do one of two things: either admit that the existing order of society is just, and then stick up for one’s rights in it; or acknowledge that you are enjoying unjust privileges, as I do, and then enjoy them and be satisfied.

”

He was coming along with the face she knew so well, though the eyes were always terrible to her. He stumbled over the stump as he came, and moved, as she thought, extraordinarily slowly.

She thought he came slowly, but he was running.

Noticing Laska’s special attitude as she crouched on the ground, as it were, scratching big prints with her hind paws, and with her mouth slightly open, Levin knew she was pointing at grouse, and with an inward prayer for luck, especially with the first bird, …

There was something not nice in Vassenka’s attitude, in his eyes, in his smile. Levin even saw something not nice in Kitty’s attitude and look. And again the light died away in his eyes.

Again, as before, all of a sudden, without the slightest transition, he felt cast down from a pinnacle of happiness, peace, and dignity, into an abyss of despair, rage, and humiliation.

Again everything and everyone had become hateful to him.

“but, Kostya, surely you see I’m not to blame? All the morning I’ve been trying to take a tone … but such people. … Why did he come? How happy we were!” she said, breathless with the sobs that shook her.

Although nothing had been pursuing them, and there was nothing to run away from, and they could not possibly have found anything very delightful on that garden seat, the gardener saw with astonishment that they passed him on their way home with comforted and radiant faces.

“

I had a girl baby, but God set me free; I buried her last Lent.

”

“And they attack Anna. What for? am I any better? I have, anyway, a husband I love—not as I should like to love him, still I do love him, while Anna never loved hers. How is she to blame?

She wants to live. God has put that in our hearts.

Very likely I should have done the same. Even to this day I don’t feel sure I did right in listening to her at that terrible time when she came to me in Moscow.

“You are looking at me,” she said, “and wondering how I can be happy in my position? Well! it’s shameful to confess, but I … I’m inexcusably happy.

Something magical has happened to me, like a dream, when you’re frightened, panic-stricken, and all of a sudden you wake up and all the horrors are no more.

I have waked up. I have lived through the misery, the dread, and now for a long while past, especially since we’ve been here, I’ve been so happy! …” she said, with a timid smile of inquiry looking at Dolly.

“You haven’t told me yet how and what you think about me, and I keep wanting to know. But I’m glad you will see me as I am. The chief thing I shouldn’t like would be for people to imagine I want to prove anything.

I don’t want to prove anything; I merely want to live, to do no one harm but myself.

I have the right to do that, haven’t I? But it is a big subject, and we’ll talk over everything properly later. Now I’ll go and dress and send a maid to you.”

They walked along the path in two couples, Anna with Sviazhsky, and Dolly with Vronsky. Dolly was a little embarrassed and anxious in the new surroundings in which she found herself.

Abstractly, theoretically, she did not merely justify, she positively approved of Anna’s conduct.

As is indeed not unfrequent with women of unimpeachable virtue, weary of the monotony of respectable existence, at a distance she not only excused illicit love, she positively envied it. Besides, she loved Anna with all her heart.

They walked along the path in two couples, Anna with Sviazhsky, and Dolly with Vronsky. Dolly was a little embarrassed and anxious in the new surroundings in which she found herself. Abstractly, theoretically, she did not merely justify, she positively approved of Anna’s conduct.

As is indeed not unfrequent with women of unimpeachable virtue, weary of the monotony of respectable existence, at a distance she not only excused illicit love, she positively envied it.

Besides, she loved Anna with all her heart. But seeing Anna in actual life among these strangers, with this fashionable tone that was so new to Darya Alexandrovna, she felt ill at ease.

But against her own will, here in his own house, he overawed her more than ever, and she could not be at ease with him. She felt with him the same feeling she had had with the maid about her dressing jacket.

Just as with the maid she had felt not exactly ashamed, but embarrassed at her darns, so she felt with him not exactly ashamed, but embarrassed at herself.

Dolly was ill at ease, and tried to find a subject of conversation.

said Darya Alexandrovna, and for some reason she suddenly at that point recalled Anna’s strange new habit of half-closing her eyes. And she remembered that Anna drooped her eyelids just when the deeper questions of life were touched upon. “

Just as though she half-shut her eyes to her own life, so as not to see everything,

” thought Dolly. “Yes, indeed, for my own sake and for hers I will talk to her,” Dolly said in reply to his look of gratitude.

It was strange to Darya Alexandrovna to hear how serenely confident he was of being right at his own table. She thought how Levin, who believed the opposite, was just as positive in his opinions at his own table.

But she loved Levin, and so she was on his side.

“So we can reckon upon you, count, for the coming elections?” said Sviazhsky. “But you must come a little beforehand, so as to be on the spot by the eighth. If you would do me the honor to stop with me.”

But to avoid breaking up the party and to get through the time somehow, after a rest she joined the game again, and pretended to be enjoying it.

All that day it seemed to her as though she were acting in a theater with actors cleverer than she, and that her bad acting was spoiling the whole performance.

She had come with the intention of staying two days, if all went well. But in the evening, during the game, she made up her mind that she would go home next day.

This was the very thing she had been dreaming of, but now learning that it was possible, she was horrified.

She felt that it was too simple a solution of too complicated a problem.

“N’est-ce pas immoral?” was all she said, after a brief pause.

“

What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world!

” She looked at Dolly, but without waiting for a reply she went on:

“

It is only those two creatures that I love, and one excludes the other.

I can’t have them together, and that’s the only thing I want. And since I can’t have that, I don’t care about the rest. I don’t care about anything, anything.

“What are you thinking? What are you thinking about me? Don’t despise me. I don’t deserve contempt.

I’m simply unhappy. If anyone is unhappy, I am

,” she articulated, and turning away, she burst into tears.

“Why, what is there to understand? There’s no meaning in it at all.

It’s a decaying institution that goes on running only by the force of inertia.

Just look, the very uniforms tell you that it’s an assembly of justices of the peace, permanent members of the court, and so on, but not of noblemen.”

“That it may be, but still it ought to be treated a little more respectfully. Snetkov, now. …

We may be of use, or we may not, but we’re the growth of a thousand years.

If we’re laying out a garden, planning one before the house, you know, and there you’ve a tree that’s stood for centuries in the very spot.

“Yes,” Levin answered, with proud satisfaction. “Yes, it’s rather strange,” he went on. “

So we live without making anything, as though we were ancient vestals set to keep in a fire.

”

At this moment Anna was positively admitting to herself that she was a burden to him, that he would relinquish his freedom regretfully to return to her, and in spite of that she was glad he was coming.

Let him weary of her, but he would be here with her, so that she would see him, would know of every action he took.

She was sitting in the drawing-room near a lamp, with a new volume of Taine, and as she read, listening to the sound of the wind outside, and every minute expecting the carriage to arrive.

“Oh, you wouldn’t believe it! I’ve got so out of the way of all this that it makes me feel positively ashamed. It’s such a horrible thing to do!

A complete outsider walks in, sits down, stays on with nothing to do, wastes their time and worries himself, and walks away!

”

And these fragmentary musical expressions, though sometimes beautiful, were disagreeable, because they were utterly unexpected and not led up to by anything.

Gaiety and grief and despair and tenderness and triumph followed one another without any connection, like the emotions of a madman.

And those emotions, like a madman’s, sprang up quite unexpectedly.

“

I think sending him abroad is much the same as punishing a carp by putting it into the water,

” said Levin. Then he recollected that this idea, which he had heard from an acquaintance and uttered as his own, came from a fable of Krilov’s, and that the acquaintance had picked it up from a newspaper article.

It was not a picture, but a living, charming woman, with black curling hair, with bare arms and shoulders, with a pensive smile on the lips, covered with soft down; triumphantly and softly she looked at him with eyes that baffled him.

She was not living only because she was more beautiful than a living woman can be.

“I am delighted!” He heard suddenly near him a voice, unmistakably addressing him, the voice of the very woman he had been admiring in the portrait.

Every word in his conversation with her had a special significance. And talking to her was pleasant; still pleasanter it was to listen to her.

Anna talked not merely naturally and cleverly, but cleverly and carelessly, attaching no value to her own ideas and giving great weight to the ideas of the person she was talking to.

The conversation turned on the new movement in art, on the new illustrations of the Bible by a French artist. Vorkuev attacked the artist for a realism carried to the point of coarseness.

Levin said that the French had carried conventionality further than anyone, and that consequently they see a great merit in the return to realism.

In the fact of not lying they see poetry.

Never had anything clever said by Levin given him so much pleasure as this remark. Anna’s face lighted up at once, as at once she appreciated the thought. She laughed.

“

There a man speaks. In love there’s no more nor less. I love my daughter with one love, and her with another.

”

“he urged me to take up the school in the village. I visited it several times. The children were very nice, but I could not feel drawn to the work. You speak of energy.

Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there’s no forcing it.

I took to this child—I could not myself say why.”

And Levin saw a new trait in this woman, who attracted him so extraordinarily.

Besides wit, grace, and beauty, she had truth.

She had no wish to hide from him all the bitterness of her position. As she said that she sighed, and her face suddenly taking a hard expression, looked as it were turned to stone.

“Tell your wife that I love her as before, and that if she cannot pardon me my position, then my wish for her is that she may never pardon it.

To pardon it, one must go through what I have gone through, and may God spare her that.

”

She wanted to show him that she was displeased that he had not come home as he had promised—displeased only, and not on any account to let him see her distress, and least of all, her self-pity.

She might pity herself, but he must not pity her.

She did not want strife, she blamed him for wanting to quarrel, but unconsciously put herself into an attitude of antagonism.

And she, remembering the words that had given her the victory, “how I feel on the brink of calamity, how afraid I am of myself,” saw that this weapon was a dangerous one, and that it could not be used a second time.

And she felt that beside the love that bound them together there had grown up between them some evil spirit of strife, which she could not exorcise from his, and still less from her own heart.

There are no conditions to which a man cannot become used, especially if he sees that all around him are living in the same way.

Levin could not have believed three months before that he could have gone quietly to sleep in the condition in which he was that day, that leading an aimless, irrational life, living too beyond his means, after drinking to excess (he could not call what …

All he knew and felt was that what was happening was what had happened nearly a year before in the hotel of the country town at the deathbed of his brother Nikolay. But that had been grief—this was joy.

Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime.

And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.

The princess’s sobs were all the answers she could make. And in the midst of the silence there came in unmistakable reply to the mother’s question, a voice quite unlike the subdued voices speaking in the room.

It was the bold, clamorous, self-assertive squall of the new human being, who had so incomprehensibly appeared.

If Levin had been told before that Kitty was dead, and that he had died with her, and that their children were angels, and that God was standing before him, he would have been surprised at nothing.

Meeting his eyes, her eyes drew him to her. Her face, bright before, brightened still more as he drew near her.

There was the same change in it from earthly to unearthly that is seen in the face of the dead. But then it means farewell, here it meant welcome.

Again a rush of emotion, such as he had felt at the moment of the child’s birth, flooded his heart. She took his hand and asked him if he had slept. He could not answer, and turned away, struggling with his weakness.

What he felt towards this little creature was utterly unlike what he had expected. There was nothing cheerful and joyous in the feeling; on the contrary, it was a new torture of apprehension.

It was the consciousness of a new sphere of liability to pain.

And this sense was so painful at first, the apprehension lest this helpless creature should suffer was so intense, that it prevented him from noticing the strange thrill of senseless joy and even pride that he had felt when the baby sneezed.

“

Honesty is only a negative qualification

,” he said.

Bartnyansky broke into good-humored laughter.

“Oh, lucky fellow!” said he. “My debts mount up to a million and a half, and I’ve nothing, and still I can live, as you see!”

And Stepan Arkadyevitch saw the correctness of this view not in words only but in actual fact. Zhivahov owed three hundred thousand, and hadn’t a farthing to bless himself with, and he lived, and in style too!

Stepan Arkadyevitch felt exactly the difference that Pyotr Oblonsky described.

In Moscow he degenerated so much that if he had had to be there for long together, he might in good earnest have come to considering his salvation; in Petersburg he felt himself a man of the world again.

Between Princess Betsy Tverskaya and Stepan Arkadyevitch there had long existed rather curious relations. Stepan Arkadyevitch always flirted with her in jest, and used to say to her, also in jest, the most unseemly things, knowing that nothing delighted her so much.

“

Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.

And if you don’t love me any more, it would be better and more honest to say so.”

“What can I want? All I can want is that you should not desert me, as you think of doing,” she said, understanding all he had not uttered. “But that I don’t want; that’s secondary.

I want love, and there is none. So then all is over.

”

“

Definiteness is not in the form but the love,

” she said, more and more irritated, not by his words, but by the tone of cool composure in which he spoke. “What do you want it for?”

They want that dirty ice cream, that they do know for certain,” she thought, looking at two boys stopping an ice cream seller, who took a barrel off his head and began wiping his perspiring face with a towel. “

We all want what is sweet and nice. If not sweetmeats, then a dirty ice.

And Kitty’s the same—if not Vronsky, then Levin. And she envies me, and hates me. And we all hate each other. I Kitty, Kitty me. Yes, that’s the truth. ‘Tiutkin, coiffeur.’ Je me fais coiffer par Tiutkin.

Don’t I know that he wouldn’t deceive me, that he has no schemes about Princess Sorokina, that he’s not in love with Kitty, that he won’t desert me! I know all that, but it makes it no better for me.

If without loving me, from duty he’ll be good and kind to me, without what I want, that’s a thousand times worse than unkindness!

That’s—hell! And that’s just how it is. For a long while now he hasn’t loved me. And where love ends, hate begins. I don’t know these streets at all. Hills it seems, and still houses, and houses.

“Impossible! We are drawn apart by life, and I make his unhappiness, and he mine, and there’s no altering him or me. Every attempt has been made, the screw has come unscrewed. Oh, a beggar woman with a baby. She thinks I’m sorry for her.

Aren’t we all flung into the world only to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and each other?

Schoolboys coming—laughing Seryozha?” she thought. “I thought, too, that I loved him, and used to be touched by my own tenderness. But I have lived without him, I gave him up for another love, and did not regret the exchange till that love was satisfied.”

“I am very sorry your note did not reach me. I will be home at ten,” Vronsky had written carelessly. …

“Yes, that’s what I expected!” she said to herself with an evil smile.

“Very good, you can go home then,” she said softly, addressing Mihail. She spoke softly because the rapidity of her heart’s beating hindered her breathing.