18

Levin could not look at his brother calmly, could not himself be natural and calm in his presence. When he was coming into the sick man’s room, his eyes and attention unconsciously clouded over, and he neither saw nor distinguished the details of his brother’s situation. He smelled a horrible odor, saw the filth, disorder, and agonizing situation, and heard the moans, and felt he could do nothing to help. It never crossed his mind to examine all the details of the sick man’s condition, think about how his body was lying there, under the blanket, how these wasted knees, hips, and back were bent, and whether there wasn’t some better way to position them, or to do something that would make things, if not better, then at least less bad. A chill ran down his back when he began thinking about all these details. He was convinced beyond a doubt that nothing could be done either to prolong his life or to ease his suffering. But the awareness that he considered any aid impossible was felt by the sick man and irritated him, and this made it even harder for Levin. Being in the sick man’s room was agony for him; not being there, even worse. He was constantly going out and coming back in under various pretexts, being incapable of remaining alone.

Kitty, however, thought, felt, and acted altogether differently. At the sight of the sick man, she felt pity for him, and the pity in her womanly heart produced not the horror and loathing that it did in her husband but rather the need to act, to learn all the details of his condition, and to help him. Since she had not the slightest doubt that she should help him, she did not doubt that she could, and so she immediately set about doing so. The very details, the mere thought of which horrified her husband, immediately drew her attention. She sent for the doctor, sent to the pharmacy, and instructed the maid who had accompanied her and Marya Nikolaevna to sweep, dust, and wash, and she herself washed and scrubbed and spread something under the blanket. On her instruction they brought something in and took something out of the sick man’s room. She herself made several trips to her room, paying no attention to the gentlemen she passed in the hall, and found and brought sheets, pillowcases, towels, and shirts.

The waiter, who was serving dinner to some engineers in the dining room, answered her summons several times with an angry face but could not help but carry out her orders, since she gave them with such kind insistence that no one could turn away from her. Levin did not approve of all this; he did not believe any good would come of it for the sick man. More than anything, he feared the sick man would get angry. But the sick man, though he seemed indifferent to all this, was not angry but only embarrassed and in general seemed to take an interest in what she was doing for him. After returning from the doctor, to whom Kitty had sent him, Levin opened the door and found the sick man at the very moment when, following Kitty’s instructions, they were changing his linens. The long white skeleton of his back, with its large protruding shoulder blades and jutting ribs and vertebrae, was bared, and Marya Nikolaevna and the servant were tangled up in the sleeve of his shirt and could not get the long, dangling arm into it. Kitty, hastily shutting the door behind Levin, was not looking in that direction; but the sick man began to moan, and she quickly went to him.

“Quickly,” she said.

“Oh, don’t come,” the sick man said angrily, “I’ll do it myself.”

“What’s that?” Marya Nikolaevna asked.

But Kitty heard him and realized that he felt ashamed and unhappy to be naked in front of her.

“I’m not looking, I’m not looking!” she said, adjusting his arm. “Marya Nikolaevna, come over from that side and straighten this,” she added.

“Go, please, I have a flask in my small bag,” she turned to her husband, “you know, in the side pocket, bring it, please, and in the meantime they’ll clean everything up here.”

Returning with the flask, Levin now found the sick man tucked in and everything around him completely changed. The heavy odor had been replaced by the smell of aromatic vinegar, which Kitty had sprayed through a little tube, her lips pouting and her rosy cheeks puffed out. There was no dust to be seen anywhere, and there was a rug under the bed. Arranged neatly on the table were vials and decanters, the needed linens folded, and Kitty’s broderie anglaise. On the other table by the sick man’s bed was something to drink, a candle, and his powders. The sick man himself, washed and combed, lay on clean sheets, on plumped pillows, wearing a clean shirt with a white collar around his unnaturally thin neck and with a new expression of hope. He did not take his eyes off Kitty.

The doctor, whom Levin had found at the club and brought, was not the one who had been treating Nikolai Levin and with whom he had been dissatisfied. The new doctor took out his stethoscope and listened to the patient, shook his head, prescribed medicine, and in special detail explained, first, how to take the medicine and, then, what diet to follow. He advised raw or lightly boiled eggs and soda water with fresh milk at a certain temperature. When the doctor had left, the sick man said something to his brother; but Levin heard only the last words, “your Katya,” and from the look with which he looked at her, Levin realized he was praising her. He beckoned to Katya, as he called Kitty.

“I’m a good deal better now,” he said. “You know, with you I would have been all better long ago. How fine!” He took her hand and drew it to his lips, but as if afraid she would find this unpleasant, thought better of the idea, and released and merely stroked it. Kitty took this hand in both of hers and pressed it.

“Now you’ll turn me over on my left side and go to bed,” he said.

No one could make out what he had said, Kitty alone understood. She understood because she had been constantly thinking about and keeping track of his needs.

“On the other side,” she told her husband. “He always sleeps on that side. Turn him over. He doesn’t like calling the servant. I can’t do it. Can you?” she turned to Marya Nikolaevna.

“I’m afraid,” Marya Nikolaevna replied.

Regardless of how awful it was for Levin to take this terrible body in his arms, and hold on, under the blanket, to places about which he had no desire to know, nonetheless, yielding to his wife’s influence, Levin made the determined face which his wife knew, and lowering his arms, grabbed hold, but despite his strength, he was amazed at the eerie weight of those wasted limbs. As he was turning him over, feeling his own neck embraced by the large wasted arm, Kitty, quickly and silently, turned the pillow, plumped it, and tidied the sick man’s head and his thinning hair, which had again stuck to his temple.

The sick man held his brother’s hand in his own. Levin sensed that he wanted to do something with his hand and was pulling it somewhere. Levin surrendered with a sinking heart. Yes, he was pulling it toward his mouth and kissing it. Levin was wracked by sobs, and unable to utter a word, he left the room.

19

“Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes and the foolish.”¹⁹ So thought Levin about his wife as he talked with her that evening.

Levin was thinking about the Gospel saying not because he considered himself wise. He didn’t consider himself wise, but he couldn’t help knowing that he was smarter than his wife and Agafya Mikhailovna, could not help knowing that when he thought about death he thought with all the powers of his soul. He knew too that the minds of many great men whose ideas about this he read had thought about this and did not know one hundredth part of what his wife and Agafya Mikhailovna knew. However different these two women were, Agafya Mikhailovna and Katya, as his brother Nikolai called her and as it now pleased Levin to call her, were absolutely alike in this. Both knew without a doubt what life was and what death was, and although they had no way to answer and would not even have understood the questions Levin was asking himself, neither had any doubt of the significance of this phenomenon and looked on it in precisely the same way not only as each other but as millions of other people. The proof that they firmly knew what death was lay in the fact that, without doubting for a second, they knew how one should act with the dying and were not afraid of them. Levin and others like him, although they could say a great deal about death, obviously did not know this, because they were afraid of death and decidedly did not know what to do when people were dying. Had Levin now been alone with his brother Nikolai, he would have looked at him with horror and waited with still greater terror, and would not have known what else to do.

Not only that, he did not know what to say, where to look, or how to walk. To speak about something else seemed insulting and impossible; speaking about death, about something gloomy, also impossible. Saying nothing was also impossible. “If I look at him, I’m afraid he’ll think I’m studying him; if I don’t, he’ll think I’m thinking about something else. If I walk on tiptoe he’ll be displeased; tread hard and I’ll feel ashamed.” Kitty obviously wasn’t thinking about herself, had no time to think about herself; she was thinking about him because she knew something, and everything came out well. She told him about herself and her wedding, smiled, pitied and comforted him, and talked about cases of recovery, and everything came out well; so she had to know. The proof of the fact that her actions and Agafya Mikhailovna’s were not instinctive, animal, and unconscious was that besides physical care and easing of his sufferings, both Agafya Mikhailovna and Kitty demanded for the dying something else more important than physical care, something that had nothing to do with physical conditions. Agafya Mikhailovna, talking about an old man who had died, said, “What’s so bad? Thank God, he took the sacrament and received extreme unction. God grant everyone might die like that.” Katya in exactly the same way, apart from all her concerns about linens, bedsores, and drink, on the very first day managed to convince the sick man of the necessity of taking the sacrament and receiving extreme unction.

Returning from the sick man’s room to their two rooms for the night, Levin sat, his head hanging, not knowing what to do. Not to mention the fact that he needed to eat supper, get settled for the night, and think over what they were going to do, he could not even talk to his wife because he felt ashamed. Kitty, on the contrary, was more energetic than usual. She was even more animated than usual. She ordered supper brought in, sorted out their things herself, helped smooth the sheets out herself, and did not forget to sprinkle them with insect powder. There was an alertness to her, the quick wit that comes to men before combat or battle, at dangerous and decisive moments in life, those moments when a man shows his mettle once and for all and that his entire past has not been spent in vain but as preparation for these moments.

Everything went well with her, and it was not even twelve when all their things had been arranged in such a clean, neat, and somehow special way that their room began to look like a home, like her own rooms: the beds were made, the brushes, combs, and mirrors set out, the doilies smoothed flat.

Levin found it unforgivable to eat, sleep, or talk even now; each movement he made seemed indecent. She arranged the brushes but did everything in such a way that there was nothing offensive in it.

They could not eat a thing, however, and for a long time could not fall asleep and for a long time did not even go to bed.

“I’m very glad I talked him into receiving extreme unction tomorrow,” she said, sitting in her bed jacket in front of her folding mirror and combing her soft, fragrant hair with a fine-tooth comb. “I’ve never seen it, but I know, Mama told me, that there are prayers in it about healing.”

“Do you really think he might recover?” said Levin, looking at the narrow part on the back of her round head that was constantly being covered up as soon as she brought the comb forward.

“I asked the doctor. He said he couldn’t live more than a few days. But can they really know? I’m still very glad I talked him into it,” she said, looking sideways at her husband from behind her hair. “Anything can happen,” she added with that special, rather sly expression her face always had when she was talking about religion.

Since their conversation about religion, when they were still only engaged, neither he nor she had ever initiated a conversation about it, but she performed all the rituals of churchgoing and prayers, always with the identical calm awareness that this was how it should be. Despite his assurances to the contrary, she was firmly convinced that he was just as good or even better a Christian than she was and that everything he said about this was one of his silly masculine whims, like what he said about her broderie anglaise: good people darn holes, while she intentionally cut them out, and so forth.

“Yes, this woman here, Marya Nikolaevna, she didn’t know how to arrange all this,” said Levin. “And … I must admit, I’m very, very pleased that you came. You’re such purity that …” He took her hand and did not kiss it (kissing her hand in this proximity to death seemed to him indecent) but merely pressed it with a guilty expression, gazing into her brightened eyes.

“It would have been such agony for you alone,” she said, and raising her hands, which were covering her cheeks, red from pleasure, she twisted her braids at her nape and pinned them there. “No,” she continued, “she didn’t. Fortunately, I learned a lot at Soden.”

“You mean there were people just as ill there?”

“Worse.”

“What’s awful for me is the fact that I keep seeing him the way he was when he was young. You can’t believe what a splendid young man he was, but I didn’t understand him then.”

“I believe it, I do, and I can tell we would have been good friends with him,” she said and, taking fright at what she had said, looked around at her husband. Tears welled up in her eyes.

“Yes, would have,” he said sadly. “Here is one of those people they say aren’t meant for this world.”

“We have many days ahead of us though, and we must go to bed,” said Kitty, glancing at her tiny watch.

20

DEATH

The next day the sick man received communion and extreme unction.²⁰ During the rite, Nikolai Levin prayed fervently. His big eyes, which were aimed at the icon placed on the card table, which had been covered with a colored cloth, expressed such fervent prayer and hope that it was awful for Levin to gaze upon. Levin knew that this fervent prayer and hope would only make it that much harder for him to part with the life he so loved. Levin knew his brother and the progression of his thoughts; he knew that his disbelief had come about not because it was easier for him to live without faith but because, step by step, modern scientific explanations for the phenomena of the world had crowded out belief, and so he knew that the present return of his faith was not a legitimate one, accomplished by means of the same thought, but was merely temporary and selfish, a mad hope for recovery. Levin knew also that Kitty had been reinforcing this hope with stories about unusual healings she had heard of. All this Levin knew, and it was agonizing and painful for him to look at the prayerful, hope-filled look and at the wasted hand straining to rise and make the sign of the cross on the tautly stretched brow, at those jutting shoulders and that wheezing, hollow chest, which could no longer find room inside for the life the sick man was asking for. During the sacrament Levin prayed, too, and did what he, an unbeliever, had done a thousand times. He said, addressing God, “If Thou dost exist, make this man whole (for that very thing had repeatedly happened), and Thou wilt save him and me.”

After extreme unction, the sick man suddenly felt much better. He stopped coughing for the space of an hour, smiled, kissed Kitty’s hand, thanking her with tears and saying that he felt fine, didn’t hurt anywhere, and had an appetite and strength. He even sat up himself when they brought him soup and asked for a cutlet as well. So hopeless was he, so obvious was it at one look that he could not recover, Levin and Kitty passed that hour in the same happy and timid excitement, as if they feared being mistaken.

“Is he better?” “Yes, much.” “Amazing.” “Nothing amazing about it.” “All the same, he’s better,” they said in a whisper, smiling at one another.

This delusion was not long-lasting. The sick man fell asleep peacefully, but half an hour later coughing awakened him. Suddenly all hopes evaporated both in those around him and in the sick man himself. Without a doubt, the reality of suffering, even without memories of hopes past, destroyed them in Levin and Kitty and in the sick man himself.

Without even mentioning what he had believed half an hour before, as if he would be ashamed to bring it up, he demanded they give him iodine to inhale in a flask covered with perforated paper. Levin handed him the bottle, and the same look of fervent hope with which he had taken the sacrament was now aimed at his brother, demanding from him confirmation of the doctor’s words about how inhaling iodine would work miracles.

“Has Katya gone?” he wheezed, looking around, when Levin reluctantly confirmed the doctor’s words. “If she has, I can tell you … I went through that farce for her. She is so sweet, but you and I shouldn’t fool ourselves. This, here, I believe in,” he said, and clutching the flask in his bony hand, he began breathing over it.

Between seven and eight that evening, Levin and his wife were drinking tea in their room when Marya Nikolaevna, breathless, ran into their room. She was pale, and her lips were trembling.

“He’s dying!” she whispered. “I’m afraid he’ll die any minute.”

They both ran to his room. He had sat up and was leaning on his elbow, on the bed, his long spine bent and his head hanging low.

“What do you feel?” Levin asked in a whisper after a moment’s silence.

“I feel I’m on my way out,” Nikolai uttered with difficulty but extraordinary firmness, slowly squeezing the words out. He did not raise his head but only aimed his eyes upward but not as high as his brother’s face. “Katya, go away!” he added.

Levin jumped up and in an admonitory whisper forced her to leave.

“I’m on my way out,” he said again.

“Why do you think so?” said Levin, just to say something.

“Because I’m on my way out,” he repeated, as if having taken a liking to the expression. “This is the end.”

Marya Nikolaevna came up to him.

“You should lie down. You’ll feel better,” she said.

“I’ll be lying quietly soon enough,” he went on, “a dead man,” he said wryly, angrily. “Well, lay me down if you like.”

Levin laid his brother down on his back, sat beside him, and, not breathing, gazed at his face. The dying man lay with his eyes closed, but the muscles on his forehead twitched from time to time, as if he were someone thinking deeply and intensely. Levin found himself thinking along with him about what was taking place in him right now, but despite all his efforts to think and follow his thoughts, he saw from the expression of this calm stern face and the play of the muscle on his forehead that what was becoming clearer and clearer for the dying man remained as obscure as ever for Levin.

“Yes, yes. That’s so,” the dying man spoke slowly, with pauses. “Wait.” Again he was silent. “That’s so!” he suddenly drawled reassuringly, as if all had been resolved for him. “Oh Lord!” he said, and he sighed deeply.

Marya Nikolaevna felt his feet.

“Getting cold,” she whispered.

For a long time, a very long time, or so it seemed to Levin, the sick man lay motionless. But he was still alive, and from time to time he took a breath. Levin was tired from the strain of thinking. He felt that, despite the mental strain, he could not understand what was so. He felt he had long since fallen behind the dying man. He could no longer think about the question of death itself, but without his will thoughts came to him about what he would have to do now, right now: close his eyes, dress him, order the coffin. It was a strange thing, but he felt utterly indifferent and experienced neither grief nor loss, and still less so pity for his brother. If he had any feeling for his brother, then it was more like envy for the knowledge that the dying man now had but he could not.

He sat over him like that for a long time, constantly expecting the end. But the end did not come. The door opened, and Kitty appeared. Levin rose to stop her. But while he was rising he heard the dead man move.

“Don’t go,” said Nikolai, and he reached out. Levin gave him his hand and angrily waved at his wife to leave.

He sat holding the dead man’s hand in his own for half an hour, an hour, another hour. Now he was not thinking about death at all. He was thinking about what Kitty was doing, about who was staying in the next room, about whether the doctor had his own house. He was hungry and sleepy. He cautiously freed his hand and felt his brother’s feet. His feet were cold, but the sick man was breathing. Levin once again tried to leave on tiptoe, but the sick man stirred once again and said:

“Don’t go.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Dawn broke; the sick man’s situation was the same. Levin, having freed his hand little by little, without looking at the dying man, went to his room and fell asleep. When he awoke, instead of the news he was expecting of his brother’s death, he learned that the sick man had regained his former condition. He was again sitting up and coughing, again starting to eat and talk, and again had ceased to talk about death, again started to express hope of recovery and to become even more irritable and gloomy than before. No one, neither his brother nor Kitty, could console him. He was angry at everyone and said unkind words to everyone. He reproached everyone for his sufferings and demanded that they bring him a famous doctor from Moscow. To all the questions he was asked about how he felt, he replied identically with an expression of malice and reproach.

“I’m suffering horribly, unbearably!”

The sick man was suffering more and more, especially from bedsores, which could no longer be treated, and getting angrier and angrier at the people around him, reproaching them for everything and especially for not bringing him the doctor from Moscow. Kitty tried everything she could to help and reassure him; but it was all in vain, and Levin saw that she herself was tormented both physically and morally, although she would not admit to it. The sense of death that had been evoked in everyone by his farewell to life the night he had summoned his brother was destroyed. Everyone knew he would die, inevitably and soon, that he was half-dead already. Everyone wished but one thing—for him to die as quickly as possible, and everyone, while trying to hide this, kept giving him medicine from bottles, looking for medicines and doctors, and deceiving him, and themselves, and one another. It was all a lie, a filthy, insulting, and blasphemous lie, and this lie, both due to the quality of its nature and because he loved the dying man more than anyone else, Levin felt especially keenly.

Levin, who had long been preoccupied by the thought of reconciling his brothers at least before death, had written to his brother Sergei Ivanovich, and having received a reply from him had read this letter to the sick man. Sergei Ivanovich wrote that he could not come himself, but in touching phrases he begged his brother’s forgiveness.

The sick man said nothing.

“What should I write him?” asked Levin. “I hope you’re not angry with him.”

“No, not a bit!” Nikolai replied to the question with annoyance. “Write him to send me a doctor.”

Three more agonizing days passed; the sick man remained in the same condition. The sense of desiring his death was now felt by everyone who had occasion to see him: the waiter from the hotel, its owner, all the guests, the doctor, Marya Nikolaevna, Levin, Kitty. The sick man alone did not express this sense but, on the contrary, was angry that they had not brought the doctor, and he continued to take his medicine and speak of life. Only in rare moments, when the opium made him forget his unrelenting sufferings for an instant, half-asleep, did he sometimes say what was in his soul more powerfully than in everyone else’s, “Oh, if only this were the end!” or, “When will this end?”

His sufferings, which were steadily intensifying, were doing their work and preparing him for death. There was not a position in which he did not suffer, not a minute when he forgot himself, not a place or a limb on his body that did not hurt or torment him. Even the memories, impressions, and thoughts of this body now evoked the same revulsion in him as did his body itself. The sight of other people, their conversations, and his own memories—all this was sheer agony for him. Those around him felt this and unconsciously would not permit themselves to move freely, talk, or express their wishes in his presence. His entire life had been merged into the single sense of suffering and the desire to be rid of it.

He was, obviously, beginning to experience the revulsion that would force him to look at death as the gratification of his desires, as good fortune. In the past, each separate desire evoked by suffering or privation, such as hunger, weariness, and thirst, had been satisfied by some bodily function that gave him pleasure; now, however, privation and suffering could have no relief, and any attempt at relief evoked new suffering. And so all desires were merged into one: the desire to be rid of all sufferings and their source, the body. However, he had no words to express this desire for liberation, and so he did not speak of it but out of habit demanded satisfaction of those desires which could no longer be satisfied. “Turn me on my other side,” he said, and then immediately afterward demanded that he be placed as before. “Give me some broth. Take the broth away. Tell me something, why don’t you speak?” As soon as they began talking, he would shut his eyes and express weariness, indifference, and revulsion.

On the tenth day after their arrival in the town Kitty fell ill. She came down with a headache and vomiting, and for an entire morning she could not get out of bed.

The doctor explained that her sickness was due to exhaustion and agitation and prescribed rest.

After dinner, however, Kitty rose and took her work, as always, to the sick man’s room. He gave her a stern look when she entered and smiled contemptuously when she said she had been sick. That day he was constantly blowing his nose and moaning plaintively.

“How do you feel?” she asked him.

“Worse,” he said with difficulty. “It hurts!”

“Where does it hurt?”

“Everywhere.”

“It’ll all be over today, you’ll see,” said Marya Nikolaevna, and although she had whispered, she had done so in such a way that the sick man, who was very sensitive, as Levin had noticed, must have heard her. Levin hushed at her and looked around at the sick man. Nikolai had heard, but these words had made no impression on him whatsoever. His look was as reproachful and tense as ever.

“What makes you think so?” Levin asked her when she had followed him out into the hall.

“He’s started to pick at himself,” said Marya Nikolaevna.

“What do you mean pick at?”

“Like this,” she said, tugging at the folds of her woolen dress.

Indeed, he had noticed that all that day the sick man had been grabbing at himself as if trying to pull something off.

Marya Nikolaevna’s prediction was accurate. By nightfall the sick man was already too weak to raise his arms and only looked straight ahead, not changing his intently focused expression. Even when his brother or Kitty leaned over him so that he could see them, he kept looking the same way. Kitty sent for the priest to read the prayer for the dying.

While the priest was reading the prayer, the dying man betrayed no signs of life; his eyes were shut. Levin, Kitty, and Marya Nikolaevna stood by the bed. Before the priest had finished the prayer, the dying man stretched, sighed, and opened his eyes. The priest finished the prayer, placed his cross on the cold forehead, and then slowly wrapped it in his stole, and after standing in silence another few minutes, touched the large bloodless hand grown cold.

“It’s over,” said the priest and was about to move away; but suddenly the dead man’s matted mustache moved, and clearly in the silence, from the depths of his chest, they heard precise, sharp sounds:

“Not quite. … Soon.”

A minute later his face cleared, a smile appeared under his mustache, and the women who had gathered became preoccupied with laying out the body.

The sight of his brother and the proximity of death revived in Levin’s soul a deep horror before the insolvability and at the same time the proximity and inevitability of death which had seized him that autumn evening when his brother had come to visit. This sense was now even stronger than before; even less than before did he feel capable of understanding the meaning of death, and even more horrible did its inevitability present itself to him; but now, thanks to his wife’s nearness, this sense did not lead him to despair. In spite of death, he felt the necessity of living and loving. He felt that love had saved him from despair and that, threatened by despair, this love had grown even stronger and purer.

No sooner had the still insolvable mystery of death arisen before his very eyes than another mystery, just as enigmatic, arose, summoning him to love and life.

The doctor confirmed his surmises about Kitty. Her indisposition was a pregnancy.

21

From the moment Alexei Alexandrovich realized from his interviews with Betsy and Stepan Arkadyevich that all that was demanded of him was that he leave his wife in peace, without troubling her with his presence, and that his wife herself desired this, he felt so lost that he was unable to decide anything himself, did not know himself what he now wanted, and placing himself in the hands of those who took such pleasure in managing his affairs, he consented to everything. Only when Anna had left his house and the English governess had sent to inquire whether she should dine with him, or separately, did he for the first time clearly understand his position, and it horrified him.

Hardest of all in this situation was the fact that he simply could not connect and reconcile his past with what now was. It was not the past when he had lived happily with his wife that bothered him. He was still suffering grievously through the transition from that past to the knowledge of his wife’s infidelity; this condition was hard, but understandable. If his wife then, declaring her infidelity, had left him, he would have been grieved and unhappy, but he would not have been in the hopeless and incomprehensible position in which he now felt himself to be. He could not now in any way reconcile his recent act of forgiveness, his tenderness, and his love for his ailing wife and another man’s child with what was now the case, that, as if in reward for all this, he now found himself alone, disgraced, ridiculed, unneeded, and despised by all.

For the first two days after his wife’s departure, Alexei Alexandrovich received petitioners and his private secretary, went to his committee, and went down for dinner in the dining room, as usual. Without admitting to himself why he was doing so, he mustered all his inner strength in those two days just to maintain a calm and even indifferent appearance. While answering questions about how to dispose of Anna Arkadyevna’s belongings and rooms, he made the greatest effort to maintain the look of someone for whom what happened had not been unforeseen and did not entail anything that departed from the category of ordinary events, and he achieved his goal. No one could have noticed the signs of despair in him. But on the second day after her departure, when Kornei handed him a bill from a fashionable shop that Anna had forgotten to pay and informed him that the shop manager himself was there, Alexei Alexandrovich told him to call the manager in.

“Forgive me, Your Excellency, for making so bold as to disturb you. But if you are going to tell me to apply to Her Excellency, then would you please be so kind as to inform me of her address?”

Alexei Alexandrovich lapsed into thought, as it seemed to the manager, and suddenly, turning around, sat down at his desk. Dropping his head in his hands, he sat in that position for a long time, made several attempts to speak, and each time halted.

Understanding his master’s feelings, Kornei asked the manager to come another time. Left alone once again, Alexei Alexandrovich realized that he did not have the strength to keep up his role of firmness and calm any more. He canceled the waiting carriage, instructed that no one be received, and did not go down for dinner.

He felt he could not withstand the pressure of universal contempt and hard-heartedness which he clearly saw on the face of this manager, and Kornei, and everyone without exception whom he encountered in these two days. He felt he could not avert people’s hatred because this hatred derived not from the fact that he was bad (in which case he might try to be better) but because he was shamefully and repulsively unhappy. He felt it was because of this, precisely because his heart was lacerated, that they would be pitiless toward him. He felt that people would destroy him, the way dogs suffocate a dog lacerated and howling from pain. He knew that the sole salvation from people was to hide his wounds from them, and that is what he unconsciously had attempted to do for two days, but now he felt he no longer had the strength to pursue this unequal combat.

His despair was intensified as well by the awareness that he was utterly alone in his grief. Not only did he not have anyone in Petersburg to whom he could tell everything he was experiencing, who might take pity on him not for his high position or as a member of society but simply as a suffering man; he did not have anyone like that anywhere.

Alexei Alexandrovich had grown up an orphan. There were two brothers. Their father they did not remember, and their mother died when Alexei Alexandrovich was ten years old. Their inheritance was small. His Uncle Karenin, an important official and once a favorite of the late emperor, had raised them.

When he had completed his courses at high school and university with medals, Alexei Alexandrovich, with the help of his uncle, immediately began a prominent official career and had ever since devoted himself exclusively to his official ambition. Alexei Alexandrovich had never entered into close friendship with anyone, not in high school, not at the university, and not afterward, at the ministry. His brother was the person closest to his heart, but he had served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and had always lived abroad, where he had died soon after Alexei Alexandrovich’s marriage.

During his governorship, Anna’s aunt, a wealthy provincial lady, had introduced this no longer young man, who was nevertheless young for a governor, to her niece and placed him in such a position that he either had to propose or leave town. Alexei Alexandrovich hesitated for a long time. There were just as many arguments in favor of this step as there were against it, and there was no decisive reason compelling him to alter his rule: when in doubt, refrain.²¹ But Anna’s aunt suggested to him through a mutual acquaintance that he had already compromised the young lady and that honor required him to propose. He proposed and bestowed upon his betrothed and wife all the feeling of which he was capable.

The attachment he felt for Anna eliminated in his heart any remaining need for intimate relations with others. And now among all his acquaintances he had not one close friend. He had a great many of what are called connections, but he had no friendships. Alexei Alexandrovich knew a great many people whom he could invite to his home for dinner or ask to participate in a matter of interest to him, or to give protection to some petitioner, or with whom he could discuss candidly the actions of other individuals and affairs of state. But his relations toward these individuals had been confined to one sphere, which was firmly defined by custom and habit and to which they were bound. He had one university classmate with whom he had been close afterward and with whom he might have spoken about his personal grief; but this classmate was the administrator of a distant school district. Of those in Petersburg, closest and likeliest of all were his chief secretary and his doctor.

Mikhail Vasilyevich Slyudin, his chief secretary, was a simple, clever, good, and moral man, and in him Alexei Alexandrovich sensed personal goodwill toward himself. But five years of official work had placed between them a barrier to heart-to-heart talks.

Alexei Alexandrovich finished signing papers and was silent for a long time, glancing at Mikhail Vasilyevich, and several times he tried but could not bring himself to begin speaking. He had already prepared something to say, “You’ve heard of my sorrow?” But he ended up saying just what he ordinarily did—“So, you can prepare this for me”—and with that dismissed him.

The other person was his doctor, who was also well disposed toward him. But between them a tacit agreement had long been recognized that both were inundated with their own affairs and both were pressed for time.

Of his women friends, Countess Lydia Ivanovna chief among them, Alexei Alexandrovich never thought. He found all women, simply as women, terrifying and repellent.

22

Alexei Alexandrovich had forgotten about Countess Lydia Ivanovna, but she had not forgotten about him. In his most trying moment of lonely despair, she came to see him and without further ado entered his study. She found him in the same position in which he had been sitting, his head resting in both hands.

“J’ai forcé la consigne,” she said, entering with a rapid step and breathing heavily from her agitation and rapid movement.²² “I’ve heard everything! Alexei Alexandrovich! My friend!” she continued, firmly pressing his hand with both of hers and gazing into his eyes with her beautiful, pensive eyes.

Alexei Alexandrovich, frowning, rose, and freeing his hand from hers, pulled up a chair for her.

“Won’t you, Countess? I have not been receiving because I’ve been ill, Countess,” he said, and his lips began to tremble.

“My friend!” repeated Countess Lydia Ivanovna, not taking her eyes off him, and suddenly the inner corners of her eyebrows lifted to form a triangle on her forehead, and her unattractive, yellow face became even more unattractive, but Alexei Alexandrovich felt that she pitied him and was about to cry. And he too was moved. He seized her puffy hand and began to kiss it.

“My dear friend!” she said, her voice cracking from emotion. “You must not surrender to sorrow. Your sorrow is great, but you must find consolation.”

“I’m broken, crushed. I’m not a man anymore!” said Alexei Alexandrovich, dropping her hand but continuing to look into her tear-filled eyes. “My situation is all the worse because nowhere, not even in myself, can I find any support.”

“You will find support. Look for it not in me, although I beg of you to believe in my friendship,” she said with a sigh. “Our support is love, the love which He has bestowed upon us. His burden is light,” she said with that ecstatic gaze Alexei Alexandrovich knew so well.²³ “He will support you and succor you.”

Even though these words expressed a tenderness for her own lofty feelings, as well as that new, ecstatic, mystical mood that had lately spread in Petersburg and that seemed to Alexei Alexandrovich excessive, Alexei Alexandrovich now found them pleasant to hear.

“I’m weak. I’m destroyed. I foresaw nothing and now understand nothing.”

“My friend,” Lydia Ivanovna repeated.

“It is not the loss of what is now gone, not that,” Alexei Alexandrovich continued. “I have no regrets. But I can’t help being ashamed before people for the position I find myself in. That’s bad, but I can’t help it. I can’t.”

“It wasn’t you who performed that noble deed of forgiveness which I and everyone admire but He, who abides in your heart,” said Countess Lydia Ivanovna, raising her eyes ecstatically, “and so you cannot be ashamed of your action.”

Alexei Alexandrovich frowned and, bending his hands back, cracked his knuckles.

“One must know all the details,” he said in a thin voice. “There are limits to a man’s powers, Countess, and I have found the limit of mine. All day today I was supposed to be giving instructions, instructions about the house pursuant (he stressed the word ‘pursuant’) to my new, solitary situation. The servants, the governess, the bills. … These petty flames burned me, and I was too weak to withstand it. At dinner … yesterday I nearly had to leave the table. I couldn’t stand the way my son was looking at me. He didn’t ask me the meaning of it all, but he wanted to ask, and I couldn’t withstand that look. He was afraid to look at me, but that is the least of it.”

Alexei Alexandrovich was about to mention the bill that had been brought to him, but his voice began to tremble and he stopped. He could not recall that bill, on blue paper, for a hat and ribbons, without feeling sorry for himself.

“I understand, my friend,” said Countess Lydia Ivanovna. “I understand everything. Succor and consolation you will not find in me, but I have come all the same only to help you, if I can. If I could unburden you of all these petty, demeaning cares … I understand, you need a woman’s word, a woman’s direction. You will entrust this to me?”

Silently, gratefully, Alexei Alexandrovich pressed her hand.

“Together we will care for Seryozha. I’m not strong in practical matters. However I shall undertake them, I shall be your housekeeper. Do not thank me. It’s not I who am doing it …”

“I cannot help but thank you.”

“But my friend, do not surrender to the feeling of which you were speaking—being ashamed of the supreme height of a Christian: He that shall humble himself shall be exalted.²⁴ And you cannot thank me. You must thank Him and ask Him for succor. In Him alone do we find serenity, consolation, salvation, and love,” she said, and lifting her eyes to heaven, she began praying, as Alexei Alexandrovich understood from her silence.

Alexei Alexandrovich listened to her now, and those expressions which he previously had found, if not distasteful then at least excessive, now seemed natural and comforting. Alexei Alexandrovich did not like this new, ecstatic spirit. He was a believer interested in religion primarily in its political sense, but the new teaching, which permitted several new interpretations and for precisely that reason opened the door to argument and analysis, he found distasteful in principle. He previously had been cold and even hostile toward this new teaching and with Countess Lydia Ivanovna, who had been carried away by it, he never argued and assiduously passed over her appeals in silence. Now, for the first time, he listened to her words with pleasure and did not object to them inwardly.

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

Countess Lydia Ivanovna once again pressed both of her friend’s hands.

“Now I’ll enter upon my duties,” she said with a smile after a moment’s silence and wiping the last of the tears from her face. “I’ll go see Seryozha. Only as a last resort will I turn to you.” She rose and went out.

Countess Lydia Ivanovna went to Seryozha’s part of the house and there, drenching the frightened boy’s cheeks with tears, told him that his father was a saint and his mother was dead.

Countess Lydia Ivanovna kept her promise. She did indeed take on all the cares of arranging and running Alexei Alexandrovich’s household. But she was not exaggerating when she said that she was not strong in practical matters. All her instructions had to be changed, since they were impossible to execute, and they were changed by Kornei, Alexei Alexandrovich’s valet, who, imperceptibly to everyone, was now running Karenin’s entire household and while the master was dressing calmly and carefully reported to him what he needed to know. But Lydia Ivanovna’s assistance was nonetheless highly effective: she gave Alexei Alexandrovich moral support in the awareness of her love and respect for him and especially, as it comforted her to think, almost turning him toward Christianity. That is, from an indifferent and lazy believer she had turned him into an ardent and firm supporter of that new interpretation of the Christian doctrine which had spread of late in Petersburg. Alexei Alexandrovich was easily convinced of this. Like Lydia Ivanovna and other people who shared their views, Alexei Alexandrovich was utterly lacking in any depth of imagination, that spiritual capacity thanks to which the conceptions called forth by the imagination become so compelling that they demand to be brought into accord with other conceptions and with reality. He saw nothing impossible or incompatible in the notion that death, which exists for nonbelievers, did not exist for him, and that since he possessed the fullest faith, the judge of whose measure was he himself, then there was no sin in his soul now, and he was already experiencing complete salvation here, on earth.

True, Alexei Alexandrovich vaguely sensed the facileness and error of this conception about his faith; and he knew that when he had surrendered to this direct emotion, without any thought that his forgiveness was an act of a higher power, had surrendered to this direct emotion, he had experienced a greater happiness than when, as now, he thought every minute that Christ was living in his heart and that, by signing papers, he was doing His will. But Alexei Alexandrovich needed so much to think this way, so needed in his humiliation to have that loftiness, however fabricated, from which he, despised by all, might despise others, that he clung to this salvation, this mock salvation.

23

Countess Lydia Ivanovna had been married as a very young and ecstatic girl to a wealthy, distinguished, most good-natured, and most debauched bon vivant. The second month, her husband abandoned her and responded to her ecstatic avowals of tenderness only with ridicule and even hostility, which people who knew the count’s good heart and had not seen any shortcomings in the ecstatic Lydia simply could not explain. Ever since, although they were not divorced, they had lived apart, and when the husband encountered the wife, he always treated her with invariable and venomous ridicule, the reason for which was incomprehensible.

Countess Lydia Ivanovna had long since ceased to be in love with her husband, but ever since had not ceased being in love with someone. She had been in love with several people at once, both men and women; she had been in love with nearly everyone who was in some way especially prominent. She had been in love with all the new princesses and princes who had married into the tsar’s family, she had been in love with one metropolitan, one vicar, and one priest. She had been in love with one journalist, three Slavs, and Komisarov; one minister, one doctor, one English missionary, and Karenin.²⁵ All these loves, waning and waxing, had not gotten in the way of the most extensive and complex relations at court and in society. Ever since misfortune had befallen Karenin and she had taken him under her special protection, ever since she had labored in Karenin’s household, looking after his well-being, she had felt that all her other loves had not been genuine and that now she was truly in love with Karenin alone. The feeling she now experienced for him seemed to her stronger than all her former feelings. Analyzing her feelings and comparing them with those before, she clearly saw that she would not have been in love with Komisarov had he not saved the sovereign’s life and would not have been in love with Ristić-Kudzhitsky had it not been for the Slavic question, but that she loved Karenin for himself, for his lofty, misunderstood soul, for the reedy sound of his voice, which she found so sweet, with its drawn out intonations, for his weary look, for his character and his soft white hands with the swollen veins.²⁶ Not only did she rejoice at their meeting, she sought in his face signs of the impression she was making on him. She wanted him to like her not only for her speeches but for her entire person. For him she now took greater care with her attire than ever before. She caught herself daydreaming about what might have been had she not been married and he were free. She blushed from agitation when he entered the room, and she could not restrain a smile of ecstasy when he had a kind word for her.

For several days, Countess Lydia Ivanovna had been in the most powerful state of agitation. She had learned that Anna and Vronsky were in Petersburg. She had to save Alexei Alexandrovich from a meeting with her; she had to save him even from the agonizing knowledge that this horrible woman was in the same city as he and that he might encounter her at any moment.

Lydia Ivanovna investigated through acquaintances what these disgusting people, as she called Anna and Vronsky, intended to do, and during those days tried to guide all her friend’s movements so that he would not encounter them. A young adjutant, a friend of Vronsky, through whom she had acquired information and who had hopes of obtaining a concession through Countess Lydia Ivanovna, told her that they had completed their business and were leaving the next day. Lydia Ivanovna had already begun to calm down when the next morning she was brought a note whose handwriting she recognized with horror. It was the handwriting of Anna Karenina. The envelope was made of paper as thick as a strip of bast; on the oblong yellow paper was a large monogram, and the letter smelled beautiful.

“Who brought this?”

“A commissionaire from the hotel.”

For a long time Countess Lydia Ivanovna could not sit down to read the letter. She had an attack of shortness of breath, to which she was susceptible, brought on by agitation. When she calmed down, she read the following letter in French:

“Madame la Comtesse, The Christian feelings that fill your heart have given me what is, I feel, the unforgivable boldness to write you. I am unhappy over the separation from my son. I beg your permission to see him once before my departure. Forgive me for reminding you of myself. I am turning to you rather than to Alexei Alexandrovich only because I do not want to make this magnanimous man suffer at the mention of myself. Knowing your friendship for him, I know you will understand me. Will you send Seryozha to see me, or shall I come to the house at a specific, appointed hour, or will you let me know when and where I might see him outside the house? I do not contemplate a refusal, knowing the magnanimity of the person on whom it depends. You cannot imagine the craving I feel to see him and so cannot imagine the gratitude your help will arouse in me. Anna.”

Everything in this letter irritated Countess Lydia Ivanovna: the content, the suggestion of her magnanimity, and especially what seemed to her its unduly familiar tone.

“Say there will be no reply,” said Countess Lydia Ivanovna and immediately, opening the blotting pad, wrote Alexei Alexandrovich that she hoped to see him between twelve and one for the congratulations at the palace.

“I need to discuss an important and sad matter with you. There we will settle on where. Best would be at my home, where I will have your tea waiting. This is essential. He lays His cross. He gives strength as well,” she added, in order to prepare him at least somewhat.

Countess Lydia Ivanovna ordinarily wrote Alexei Alexandrovich two or three notes a day. She loved this process of communication with him, which had an elegance and mystery that was lacking in her personal dealings.

24

The congratulations were drawing to a close. As they left, people discussed the latest news of the day, the newly received honors, and the reappointments of important public servants.

“You would think Countess Marya Borisovna had been given the war ministry and Princess Vatkovskaya were chief of staff,” said an old man wearing a gold-embroidered uniform, addressing a tall beauty, a lady in waiting who had asked him about a transfer.

“And I’d been made adjutant,” replied the lady in waiting, smiling.

“You already have an appointment. You for the ecclesiastical department, and for your aide—Karenin.”

“How do you do, Prince!” said the old man, shaking the hand of the man who had walked up to him.

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

“He and Putyatov received the Alexander Nevsky.”²⁷

“I thought he already had it.”

“No. Just look at him,” said the old man, pointing with his embroidered hat to Karenin, who had stopped in the doorway of the hall with an influential member of the State Council and was wearing his court uniform with his new red sash across the shoulder. “As happy and content as a brass kopek,” he added, stopping to shake the hand of the handsome and athletically built chamberlain.

“No, he’s aged,” said the chamberlain.

“From work. He writes all his projects now. He won’t let a poor fellow go until he has set everything out point by point.”

“What do you mean aged? Il fait des passions.²⁸ I think Countess Lydia Ivanovna is jealous of his wife now.”

“Come, come! Kindly do not speak ill of Countess Lydia Ivanovna.”

“But is it really so bad that she’s in love with Karenin?”

“And is it true that Madame Karenina is here?”

“I don’t mean here, at the palace, but in Petersburg. I met her yesterday, with Alexei Vronsky, bras dessus, bras dessous, on Morskaya.”²⁹

“C’est un homme qui n’a pas—”³⁰ The chamberlain was about to go on but stopped, making way for and bowing to a member of the tsar’s family who was just passing through.

In this way they talked incessantly about Alexei Alexandrovich, judging and laughing at him, while he, having blocked the way of a member of the State Council he had captured, and not stopping his explanation for a moment so as not to lose him, was explaining his financial plan point by point.

At almost exactly the same time his wife had left Alexei Alexandrovich, the bitterest event for a public servant had befallen him—a cessation in his career advancement. This cessation had come about, and everyone could see it clearly, but Alexei Alexandrovich himself would still not admit that his career was over. Whether it was his confrontation with Stremov, the misfortune with his wife, or simply that Alexei Alexandrovich had reached his predetermined limit, this year it had become obvious to everyone that his public career was over. He still occupied an important position, and he sat on several commissions and committees; but he was someone who was used up and from whom no more was expected. No matter what he said, no matter what he proposed, he was listened to as if what he were proposing had been known for a long time and was precisely what was not needed.

Alexei Alexandrovich did not sense this, however. On the contrary, removed as he was from direct participation in government activity, he now saw more clearly than ever the shortcomings and errors in the activities of others and considered it his duty to point out the means for correcting them. Soon after his separation from his wife, he began writing his first memorandum about the new court, the first of countless useless memoranda he was destined to write on every branch of administration.

Alexei Alexandrovich not only did not notice his hopeless position in the political world and not only was not pained by it but more than ever he was satisfied with his career.

“He that is unmarried cares for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But he that is married cares for the things that are of the world,” says the Apostle Paul, and Alexei Alexandrovich, who was now guided by Scripture in all his affairs, often recalled this text.³¹ It seemed to him that ever since he had been left without a wife he had with these projects served the Lord more than ever.

The obvious impatience of the Council member, who wished to get away from him, did not perturb Alexei Alexandrovich; he stopped holding forth only when the member, taking advantage of the arrival of a member of the tsar’s family, slipped away.

Left alone, Alexei Alexandrovich dropped his head, gathering his thoughts, then looked around distractedly and started toward the door, where he hoped to meet Countess Lydia Ivanovna.

“How strong and healthy they all are physically,” thought Alexei Alexandrovich, looking at the chamberlain, powerful with his combed and perfumed whiskers, and at the red neck of the snugly uniformed prince, whom he had to walk by. “Rightly it is said that all in the world is evil,” he thought, squinting once more at the chamberlain’s calves.

Moving his feet at a leisurely pace, with his usual look of weariness and dignity, Alexei Alexandrovich bowed to the gentlemen who had been talking about him and, glancing at the door, looked for Countess Lydia Ivanovna.

“Ah! Alexei Alexandrovich!” said the little old man, his eyes glittering maliciously, when Karenin drew even with him and nodded to him with a cold gesture. “I have yet to congratulate you,” he said, pointing to his newly received ribbon.

“I thank you,” replied Alexei Alexandrovich. “What a marvelous day today has been,” he added, leaning especially on the word “marvelous,” as was his wont.

The fact that they were laughing at him, he knew very well, but he did not expect anything other than hostility from them; he was already used to that.

Seeing yellow shoulders rising out of the bodice of Countess Lydia Ivanovna, who had emerged in the doorway, and her beautiful pensive eyes beckoning, Alexei Alexandrovich smiled, revealing his unfading white teeth, and went toward her.

Lydia Ivanovna’s gown had cost her much effort, as had all her gowns of late. The goal of her gown was now utterly opposite to that which she had pursued thirty years before. Then, she had wanted to adorn herself with something, and the more the better. Now, on the contrary, she was necessarily adorned so inconsistently with her years and figure that she troubled only to make the contrast between these adornments and her appearance not too dreadful. With respect to Alexei Alexandrovich, she achieved this and seemed to him attractive. For him she was the sole island not only of good will toward him but even of love, in that sea of hostility and ridicule surrounding him.

Passing through the ranks of mocking glances, he was naturally drawn toward her enamored gaze, like a plant to the light.

“I congratulate you,” she told him, indicating the ribbon with her eyes.

Restraining a smile of satisfaction, he closed his eyes and shrugged, as if to say that it could not gladden him. Countess Lydia Ivanovna well knew that this was one of his chief joys, although he would never admit to it.

“How is our angel?” said Countess Lydia Ivanovna, meaning Seryozha.

“I cannot say I have been entirely satisfied with him,” said Alexei Alexandrovich, raising his eyebrows and opening his eyes. “Nor is Sitnikov. (Sitnikov was the tutor to whom Seryozha’s secular education had been entrusted.) As I have told you, he has a kind of coldness toward all the most important questions that ought to touch the heart of every man and every child.” Alexei Alexandrovich began setting forth his thoughts on the one issue that interested him other than public service—his son’s education.

When Alexei Alexandrovich, with Lydia Ivanovna’s help, had once again returned to life and activity, he had felt it his duty to occupy himself with the education of the son left on his hands. Never before having studied issues of education, Alexei Alexandrovich devoted a certain period of time to a theoretical study of the subject. After reading several books of anthropology, pedagogy, and didactics, Alexei Alexandrovich composed a plan of education, invited the best Petersburg pedagogue to supervise it, and got down to work, and this work kept him continually engaged.

“Yes, but what of his heart? I see in him his father’s heart, and with a heart like that a child cannot be bad,” said Countess Lydia Ivanovna ecstatically.

“Yes, that may be. As for myself, I am doing my duty. That is all I can do.”

“You must come see me,” said Countess Lydia Ivanovna after a moment’s silence. “We need to talk over a matter grievous to you. I would give anything to free you of certain memories, but others do not think the same way. I received a letter from her. She is here, in Petersburg.”

Alexei Alexandrovich shuddered at the mention of his wife, but his face immediately assumed a deathlike immobility that expressed his utter helplessness in the matter.

“I was expecting this,” he said.

Countess Lydia Ivanovna looked at him ecstatically, and tears of admiration at the magnificence of his soul welled up in her eyes.

25

When Alexei Alexandrovich walked into Countess Lydia Ivanovna’s small and cozy sitting room, which was decorated with antique porcelain and hung with portraits, the mistress herself was not yet there. She was changing her clothes.

On a round table a cloth had been laid and there was a Chinese tea service and a silver spirit teapot. Alexei Alexandrovich looked around absentmindedly at the innumerable familiar portraits that decorated her sitting room and, sitting down at the table, opened the Gospels that lay on it. The sound of the countess’s silk dress distracted him.

“Well there, now we can sit calmly,” said Countess Lydia Ivanovna, slipping hurriedly, with an agitated smile, between table and sofa, “and have a talk over our tea.”

After a few words’ preparation, Countess Lydia Ivanovna, breathing hard and blushing, handed Alexei Alexandrovich the letter she had received.

Reading the letter through, he did not say anything for a long time.

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

“My friend! You see evil in no one!”

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

His face held indecision and a plea for advice, support, and guidance in a matter he found incomprehensible.

“No,” Countess Lydia Ivanovna interrupted him. “There is a limit to everything. I understand immorality,” she said, not quite sincerely, since she never had been able to understand what led women to immorality, “but I do not understand cruelty, and against whom? Against you! How can she stay in the same city where you are? No, you live and learn, and I’m learning to understand how high you stand and how low she has fallen.”

“But who is throwing stones?” said Alexei Alexandrovich, obviously pleased with his role. “I have forgiven everything and so cannot deprive her of what is a demand of love for her—her love for her son.”

“But is this love, my friend? Is it sincere? Let us say you have forgiven her … but do we have the right to act on this angel’s heart? He believes her dead. He prays for her and asks God to forgive her her sins. It is better this way. But what is he going to think now?”

“I had not thought of that,” said Alexei Alexandrovich, obviously agreeing.

Countess Lydia Ivanovna covered her face with her hands and did not speak. She was praying.

“If you are asking my advice,” she said, after she had finished praying and uncovered her face, “then I am advising you not to do this. Don’t I see how you are suffering, how this has reopened your wounds? No, let us say you, as always, forget about yourself. To what can this lead? New sufferings on your part and agony for the child? If she had a drop of human kindness left in her, she herself would not wish it. No, without hesitation, I do not advise it, and if you will allow me, I shall write to her.”

Alexei Alexandrovich agreed, and Countess Lydia wrote the following letter in French:

“Madam,

“For your son, your reminder could lead to questions on his part that cannot be answered without placing the spirit of condemnation in the child’s heart for what should for him be sacred, and so I beg of you to understand your husband’s refusal in the spirit of Christian love. I pray to the Almighty to have mercy on you.

“Countess Lydia.”

This letter achieved the desired goal, which Countess Lydia Ivanovna had been concealing even from herself. She had insulted Anna to the depths of her soul.

For his part, Alexei Alexandrovich, after returning home from Lydia Ivanovna’s, could not that day devote himself to his usual occupations and find the spiritual serenity of the believing and saved man which he had felt formerly.

The memory of his wife, who was guilty of so much before him and to whom he had been so saintly, as Countess Lydia Ivanovna had rightly told him, should not have upset him; but he could not be calm. He could not understand the book he was reading, could not drive out the agonizing memories of his relations with her or of the mistakes which he, as it now seemed to him, had made in regard to her. The memory of how, returning from the races, he had accepted her admission of infidelity (the fact in particular that he had demanded of her merely outward decency and not sent a challenge) tormented him like remorse. He was also tormented by the memory of the letter he had written her; especially its forgiveness, which no one needed, and his concerns about the other man’s child made his heart burn with shame and remorse.

He experienced the exact same feeling of shame and remorse now in sorting through his entire past with her and recalling the awkward words with which he, after long hesitation, had proposed to her.

“But what am I guilty of?” he told himself. This question always led to another question—about whether these other men felt differently, did their loving differently, did their marrying differently—these Vronskys and Oblonskys … these chamberlains with thick calves. He pictured an entire series of these juicy, vigorous men who did not doubt themselves and who could not help but attract his curious attention no matter when or where. He tried to drive away these thoughts; he tried to convince himself that he was living not for earthly, temporary life but for life everlasting, that his spirit held peace and love. But the fact that he had in this temporary and insignificant life committed, as it seemed to him, several insignificant mistakes tormented him, as if that eternal salvation in which he believed did not exist. But this temptation did not last long, and soon there was restored in Alexei Alexandrovich’s soul that serenity and high-mindedness thanks to which he could forget about whatever it was he did not wish to remember.

26

“Well, Kapitonych?” said Seryozha, rosy-cheeked and cheerful upon his return from his walk the day before his birthday, handing his light, fitted coat to the tall old doorman, who was smiling down at the little man from his considerable height. “What, has the bundled-up official been here today? Did Papa see him?”

“He did. As soon as the secretary came out, I announced him,” said the doorman, winking merrily. “Allow me sir, I’ll take it.”

“Seryozha!” said his Slav tutor, who was standing in the doorway leading to the inner rooms. “Take it off yourself.”

But Seryozha, although he did hear his tutor’s weak voice, paid no attention to it. He stood, holding onto the doorman’s shoulder strap, and looked into his face.

“Well, did Papa do what he was supposed to?”

The doorman nodded affirmatively.

The bundled-up official, who had come seven times before to ask Alexei Alexandrovich about something, had intrigued both Seryozha and the doorman. Seryozha had found him once in the front hall and heard him piteously asking the doorman to announce him, saying that he and his children were on the brink of death.

Ever since, Seryozha, who met the official once more in the hall, had taken an interest in him.

“Well, was he very pleased?” he asked.

“How could he not be! He went out of here practically leaping.”

“Did they bring anything?” asked Seryozha after a short pause.

“Well, sir,” said the doorman in a whisper, shaking his head, “there is something from the countess.”

Seryozha immediately understood that what the doorman was talking about was a birthday present from Countess Lydia Ivanovna.

“Really? Where?”

“Kornei brought it to your Papa. Must be something fine!”

“How big? Like this?”

“A little smaller, but a fine thing.”

“A book?”

“No, something else. Go on, go on, Vasily Lukich is calling you,” said the doorman, hearing the tutor’s approaching steps and cautiously disengaging the little hand in its half-removed glove from his shoulder strap, and winking, he indicated Vunich with a nod.

“Vasily Lukich, right this minute!” replied Seryozha with the cheerful and loving smile that always vanquished the conscientious Vasily Lukich.

Seryozha was too cheerful, everything was too delightful, to keep from sharing with his friend the doorman the family joy about which he had learned on his walk in the Summer Garden from Countess Lydia Ivanovna’s niece. This joy seemed especially important to him because it coincided with the joy of the official and his own joy that toys had been brought. It seemed to Seryozha that today was the kind of day when everyone should be happy and cheerful.

“Do you know Papa was given the Alexander Nevsky?”

“How could I not! People have been coming by to congratulate him.”

“Well, is he pleased?”

“How could he not be pleased at the tsar’s favor! That means he earned it,” said the doorman sternly and gravely.

Seryozha thought about that, gazing into the doorman’s face, which he had studied down to its tiniest details, especially the chin, which hung between his gray whiskers, a chin no one ever saw except Seryozha, who never looked at him any other way than from below.

“Well, and has your daughter been to see you lately?”

The doorman’s daughter was a ballerina.

“When can she come on weekdays? They have their lessons, too. And you have your lessons, sir. Run along.”

Arriving at his room, Seryozha, instead of sitting down to his lessons, recounted to his teacher his guess that what the carriage brought must be a machine. “What do you think?” he asked.

But Vasily Lukich was thinking only of the grammar lesson Seryozha needed to learn for the teacher, who was coming at two o’clock.

“No, just tell me, Vasily Lukich,” he asked suddenly, when he was already sitting at his desk and had the book in his hands, “what’s above the Alexander Nevsky? Do you know Papa was given the Alexander Nevsky?”

Vasily Lukich said that more than the Alexander Nevsky was the Vladimir.

“And higher?”

“And highest of all is the Andrei the First-Called.”³²

“And higher even than the Andrei?”

“I don’t know.”

“What, even you don’t know?” And Seryozha propped his head up on his hands, lost in reflection.

His reflections were very complicated and diverse. He was imagining his father being suddenly given both the Vladimir and the Andrei and how as a result he would be much kinder at his lesson, and how he himself, when he was big, would be given all the orders and whatever they might invent that was higher than the Andrei. As soon as they invented it, he would earn it. When they invented one even higher, he would earn it right away.

The time passed in these reflections, and when his teacher arrived, the lesson on the adverbial modifiers of time and place and manner of action was not prepared and the teacher was not only dissatisfied but grieved. This grief of the teacher’s touched Seryozha. He did not feel guilty for not learning the lesson; but no matter how much he tried, he absolutely couldn’t do it. As long as the teacher was explaining it to him, he believed him and seemingly understood, but as soon as he was left to himself, he absolutely could not remember or understand that the short and very understandable word “suddenly” was an adverb of manner of action. But he was still sorry that he had grieved his teacher, and he wanted to console him.

He chose a moment when his teacher was looking silently at the book.

“Mikhail Ivanovich, when is your name day?”³³ he asked suddenly.

“You’d be better off thinking about your work. Name days have no importance for a rational being. They are days like every other day, when one has to work.”

Seryozha took a careful look at his teacher, at his sparse beard, his eyeglasses, which had dropped below the notch he had on his nose, and became lost in thought so that he now heard nothing his teacher explained to him. He understood that the teacher did not believe what he said; he sensed it from the tone in which he said it. “But why have they all agreed to say the most tedious and useless things in the very same manner? Why is he pushing me away? Why doesn’t he like me?” he asked himself with sadness, and could think of no answer.

27

After his teacher was the lesson with his father. Before his father came, Seryozha sat down at his desk, playing with his penknife, and started thinking. Among Seryozha’s favorite activities was searching for his mother during his walk. He did not believe in death in general and in her death in particular, in spite of what Lydia Ivanovna had told him, and his father had confirmed, and so even after they told him she had died, he kept looking for her during his walk. Any full-figured, graceful woman with dark hair was his mother. At the sight of such a woman a feeling of tenderness arose inside him that made him gasp and tears well up in his eyes. At any moment he expected her to walk up to him and lift her veil. Her whole face would be visible, she would smile and embrace him, he would smell her scent, feel the softness of her hand, and start crying happily, as he had one evening lain at her feet and she had tickled him, and he had giggled and bit her white beringed hand. Later, when he had learned by accident from his nurse that his mother had not died, and his father and Lydia Ivanovna had explained to him that she had died for him, because she was bad (something he simply could not believe, because he loved her), he kept searching and waiting for her. Today in the Summer Garden there was one lady in a violet veil whom he had followed, his heart sinking, expecting it to be her, while she was walking toward him down the path. This lady did not walk up to them but disappeared from view. Today, more strongly than ever, Seryozha felt a surge of love for her, and now, oblivious, waiting for his father, he carved the entire edge of his desk with his penknife, looking straight ahead with glittering eyes and thinking of her.

“Your papa’s coming!” Vasily Lukich distracted him.

Seryozha jumped up, went up to his father, and kissing his hand, looked at him intently, searching for signs of joy at receiving the Alexander Nevsky.

“Did you have a good walk?” said Alexei Alexandrovich, sitting in his comfortable chair, bringing the Old Testament closer, and opening it. Although Alexei Alexandrovich more than once told Seryozha that any Christian must firmly know Scripture, he himself often looked things up in the Old Testament, and Seryozha had noticed this.

“Yes, it was great fun, Papa,” said Seryozha, sitting sideways on his chair and rocking it, which was forbidden. “I saw Nadenka. (Nadenka was Lydia Ivanovna’s niece and ward.) She told me you were given a new star. Are you happy, Papa?”

“First of all, don’t rock, please,” said Alexei Alexandrovich. “And second, what’s valuable is not the reward but the work. I would like you to understand that. Now if you labor and study in order to receive a reward, then the labor will seem hard to you; but when you labor,” said Alexei Alexandrovich, recalling how he had supported himself with the awareness of duty during the tedious labor of this morning, which had consisted of signing one hundred eighteen documents, “if you love your labor, you will find your reward in it.”

Seryozha’s eyes, which glittered with tenderness and good cheer, became lackluster and looked down under his father’s gaze. This was the same, long-familiar tone in which his father had always addressed him and which Seryozha had already learned how to imitate. His father always spoke with him—as Seryozha felt—as if he were addressing some boy he had imagined, one of those whom you find in books but not at all resembling Seryozha. With his father, Seryozha always tried to pretend to be that boy in the book.

“You understand this, I hope?” said his father.

“Yes, Papa,” answered Seryozha, pretending to be the imagined boy.

The lesson consisted of learning a few verses from the Gospels by heart and repeating the opening of the Old Testament. Seryozha knew the verses from the Gospels quite well, but at the moment he was saying them, he could not take his eyes off his father’s bony forehead, which curved back so steeply at his temple, and so he got confused and transposed the end of one verse and the beginning of the next. It was obvious to Alexei Alexandrovich that he did not understand what he was saying, and this irritated him.

He frowned and began explaining what Seryozha had heard many times before and could never remember because he understood all too well—somewhat like the fact that “suddenly” was an adverb of manner of action. Seryozha gave his father a frightened look and thought of only one thing: whether his father would make him repeat what he had said, as sometimes happened, or not. This thought so frightened Seryozha that he could not remember anything. However, his father did not make him repeat it and moved on to the lesson from the Old Testament. Seryozha did a good job of relating the events themselves, but when it came to answering questions about what several events prefigured, he knew nothing, even though he had already been punished for this lesson. The place where he could not say anything and hemmed and hawed, and carved the desk, and rocked in his chair, was the one where he was supposed to talk about the patriarchs before the Flood. He did not know any of them except Enoch, who was taken live up to heaven.³⁴ He had once remembered the names, but now he had forgotten completely, in particular because Enoch was his favorite character from the entire Old Testament, and in his mind the taking of Enoch live up to heaven was connected to a long train of thoughts to which he now succumbed, his eyes fixed on his father’s watch chain and the half-fastened button of his vest.

Death, about which people spoke to him so often, Seryozha did not believe in at all. He did not believe that the people he loved could die, and above all that he himself would die. This was for him utterly impossible and incomprehensible. But they told him that everyone dies; he even asked people he trusted, and they confirmed this as well; his nurse said so, too, although reluctantly. But Enoch did not die, so probably not everyone died. “Why couldn’t anyone serve God the same way and be taken live up to heaven?” thought Seryozha. Bad people, that is, those whom Seryozha did not like, “they could die, but all the good people can be like Enoch.”

“Well, so who are the patriarchs?”

“Enoch, Enos.”

“Yes, you said that already. This is bad, Seryozha, very bad. If you don’t make an effort to find out what is most necessary of all for a Christian,” said his father, standing, “then what could interest you? I’m dissatisfied with you, and Peter Ignatyevich (this was his principal teacher) is dissatisfied with you. … I must punish you.”

Father and teacher were both dissatisfied with Seryozha, and indeed he studied very badly. But by no means could it be said that he was not a capable boy. On the contrary, he was a great deal more capable than those boys whom the teacher set as an example for Seryozha. From the standpoint of his father, he did not want to learn what he was being taught. In essence, he could not learn this. He could not because his soul had demands more pressing for him than those declared by his father and teacher. Those demands were contradictory, and he struggled directly with his educators.

He was nine years old, he was a child; but he knew his soul and it was precious to him, he guarded it as an eyelid guards an eye, and without the key of love let no one into his soul. His teachers complained that he did not want to study, but his soul was overflowing with the thirst for knowledge, and he did study, with Kapitonych, his nurse, Nadenka, and Vasily Lukich, but not with his teachers. The water which father and teacher were expecting to see on their wheels had dried up long since and was doing its work elsewhere.

His father punished Seryozha by not letting him visit Nadenka, Lydia Ivanovna’s niece; but this punishment proved for the best for Seryozha. Vasily Lukich was in good spirits and showed him how to make windmills. He spent an entire evening over this work and his dreams about how you might make a windmill you could spin on: grab onto the blades with your hands or tie yourself to it—and spin. Seryozha did not think about his mother all evening, but when he went to bed, he suddenly remembered her and prayed in his own words that tomorrow, for his birthday, his mother would stop hiding and come to see him.

“Vasily Lukich, do you know what extra I prayed for?”

“To study better?”

“No.”

“Toys?”

“No. You can’t guess. It’s excellent, but a secret! When it comes true, I’ll tell you. You haven’t guessed?”

“No, I haven’t guessed. You’ll tell me,” said Vasily Lukich, smiling, something that happened rarely with him. “Well, go to bed, I’ll put out the candle.”

“Without a candle I can see what I’m seeing and what I was praying for better. There, I nearly told you the secret!” said Seryozha, bursting into merry laughter.

When they took the candle away, Seryozha heard and felt his mother. She was standing over him and caressing him with her loving gaze. But then windmills appeared, and a penknife, all was confusion, and he fell asleep.

28

When they arrived in Petersburg, Vronsky and Anna stayed at one of the best hotels. Vronsky separately, on the lower floor, and Anna upstairs with the baby, the nurse, and the maid, in a large suite of four rooms.

On the very first day of their arrival Vronsky went to see his brother. There he found his mother, who had come from Moscow on sundry matters. His mother and sister-in-law greeted him in the usual way; they asked him questions about his trip abroad and spoke of mutual acquaintances, but did not say a word about his liaison with Anna. His brother, who went to see Vronsky the next morning, asked him about her himself, and Alexei Vronsky told him frankly that he regarded his liaison with Madame Karenina as a marriage and that he hoped to arrange for a divorce and then marry her, but until then he considered her as much his wife as he would any other wife and asked him to tell his mother and his own wife so.

“If society doesn’t approve, I don’t care,” said Vronsky, “but if my family wants to maintain familial relations with me, then they must have the same relations with my wife.”

His older brother, who had always respected his younger brother’s opinions, did not quite know whether he was right or not until society decided the matter. For his part, he had nothing against it, and went with Alexei to see Anna.

In his brother’s presence, Vronsky used the formal “you” with Anna, as he did in front of everyone, and treated her like a close acquaintance, but it was understood that his brother knew their relationship, and they spoke of the fact that Anna was going to Vronsky’s estate.

In spite of all his worldly experience, Vronsky was, as a result of the new situation in which he now found himself, strangely deluded. One would have thought he would have to understand that society was closed to him and Anna. But now vague notions were born in his mind that it was only that way in the old days and that now, given rapid progress (without himself noticing it, he had now become a supporter of any kind of progress), society’s view had changed and that the issue of whether or not they would be accepted in society was not yet decided. “Naturally,” he thought, “she will not be received at court, but the people close to me can and should take the proper view of this.”

You can sit for a few hours in a row, legs crossed in the same position, if you know nothing is preventing you from changing your position; but if a man knows that he has to sit like that, with crossed legs, then he will suffer cramps, his legs will twitch and strain to where he would like to stretch them. That is exactly what Vronsky was experiencing with respect to society. Although deep down he knew that society was closed to them, he was testing whether society might not change now and accept them. But he very quickly noticed that although society was open to him personally, it was closed to Anna. As in a game of cat and mouse, the arms that lifted for him immediately dropped in front of Anna.

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

“At long last!” she greeted him joyously. “And Anna? I’m so pleased! Where are you staying? I can imagine that after your splendid travels you must find our Petersburg simply dreadful; I can imagine your honeymoon in Rome. What about the divorce? Has all that been taken care of?”

Vronsky noted that Betsy’s enthusiasm diminished when she learned there had still been no divorce.

“They’ll be throwing stones at me, I know,” she said, “but I shall come to see Anna. Yes, I definitely shall. Will you be here long?”

Indeed, that very same day she went to see Anna, but her tone was quite different from before. She evidently took pride in her daring and wanted Anna to appreciate the loyalty of her friendship. She stayed no more than ten minutes, chatting about society news, and upon her departure said:

“You haven’t told me when the divorce is to be. Even if I toss my cap over the windmill, you will get the cold shoulder from the other starched collars until you marry, and it is so simple now. Ça se fait.³⁵ So you’re leaving on Friday? Such a pity we won’t see each other again.”

From Betsy’s tone, Vronsky might have understood what society had in store for him; nonetheless he made another attempt in his own family. He was not counting on his mother. He knew that his mother, who had admired Anna so during their first acquaintance, was now unpardoning toward her for being the ruination of her son’s career. But he placed greater hope on Varya, his brother’s wife. He did not think she would throw stones and would simply and decisively visit Anna and receive her.

The day after his arrival, Vronsky went to see her and, finding her alone, frankly expressed his wish.

“Alexei,” she said after listening to him, “you know how I love you and how willing I am to do anything for you, but I was silent because I knew I could not be useful to you and Anna Arkadyevna,” she said, putting especial emphasis on “Anna Arkadyevna.” “Please do not think I judge her. Never. In her place I might have done the same. I will not and cannot go into details,” she said, gazing timidly at his dark face, “but one must call things by their name. You want me to go see her, accept her, and by doing so rehabilitate her in society; but you have to understand that I cannot do that. I have daughters growing up, and I have to live in society for my husband. Well, suppose I pay Anna Arkadyevna a visit; she would understand that I cannot invite her to my house or must do so in such a way that she does not meet anyone who views things differently, and this would insult her. I cannot raise her up—”

“But I do not believe she has fallen any more than hundreds of women whom you do receive!” Vronsky interrupted her even more gloomily and stood up in silence, realizing that his sister-in-law’s decision was inalterable.

“Alexei! Don’t be angry with me. Please, understand, I’m not to blame,” Varya began, looking at him with a timid smile.

“I’m not angry with you,” he said just as gloomily, “but this pains me doubly. It pains me also because this breaches our friendship. Or perhaps not breaches, but does weaken it. You must understand that for me it cannot be otherwise.”

And with that, he left her.

Vronsky realized that further attempts were futile and that he must spend these few days in Petersburg as if it were a foreign city, avoiding all dealings with his former world in order to avoid being subjected to unpleasant and insulting treatment, which would be agonizing for him. One of the most unpleasant aspects of his situation in Petersburg was the fact that Alexei Alexandrovich and his name seemed to be everywhere. You could not begin talking about anything without the conversation turning to Alexei Alexandrovich; you could not go anywhere without encountering him. Or so at least it seemed to Vronsky, as it seems to someone with a sore toe that he is constantly stubbing this same sore toe, as if on purpose.

Vronsky found their stay in Petersburg even more difficult because all the while he saw in Anna a new and to him incomprehensible mood. At one time she acted as if she were in love with him, at another she became cold, irritable, and impenetrable. She was in agony over something and hiding something from him and did not seem to notice the insults which were poisoning his life and which for her, with her subtle understanding, ought to have been an agony still greater.

29

One of Anna’s reasons for returning to Russia was to meet with her son. Since the day she had left Italy, the thought of this meeting had not ceased to agitate her. The closer she drew to Petersburg, the greater and greater the joy and significance she ascribed to this meeting. She did not ask herself how she would arrange this meeting. It seemed natural and simple to see her son when she was in the same city. But upon her arrival in Petersburg she suddenly pictured clearly her present position in society, and she realized that arranging a meeting would be difficult.

She had already been in Petersburg for two days. The thought of her son had not left her for a moment, but she had yet to see her son. She felt she did not have the right to go straight to the house, where she might encounter Alexei Alexandrovich. They might not let her in and might insult her. Just the thought of writing to and dealing with her husband was agony: she could be calm only when she did not think about her husband. Seeing her son on his walk, having found out where and when he went out, was not enough for her. She had prepared so much for this meeting, there was so much she needed to tell him, and she wanted so badly to hug and kiss him. Seryozha’s old nurse could have helped and shown her what to do, but the nurse was no longer in Alexei Alexandrovich’s household. Two days passed in these hesitations and in seeking out the nurse.

Having learned of Alexei Alexandrovich’s close relations with Countess Lydia Ivanovna, on the third day Anna decided to write her a letter that cost her great effort and in which she intentionally said that permission to see her son would depend on her husband’s magnanimity. She knew that if the letter were shown to her husband, he, continuing in his role of magnanimity, would not refuse her.

The commissionaire who brought the letter conveyed to her the cruelest and most unexpected reply—that there would be no reply. She had never felt so humiliated as at that moment when, summoning the commissionaire, she heard his detailed story about how he had been kept waiting and how he had then been told, “There will be no reply.” Anna felt humiliated and insulted, but she saw that from her point of view Countess Lydia Ivanovna was right. Her grief was all the stronger because it was solitary. She could not and did not want to share it with Vronsky. She knew that for him, even though he was the chief cause of her misfortune, the issue of her meeting with her son would seem completely unimportant. She knew that he would never be able to understand the full depth of her suffering; she knew that his cold tone at any allusion to this would make her hate him, and she feared this more than anything in the world and so hid from him everything that concerned her son.

Having spent the entire day at home, she kept thinking of ways to meet with her son and settled on the solution of writing her husband. She was already composing this letter when she was brought a letter from Lydia Ivanovna. The countess’s silence had restrained and subdued her, but the letter, everything that she read between its lines, so irritated her, this malice seemed to her so outrageous in comparison with her passionate and legitimate tenderness for her son, that she became incensed at others and ceased to blame herself.

“This indifference, this pretense of feeling,” she told herself. “All they want is to insult me and torture my child, and I will not let myself be subdued by them! Not for anything! She is worse than me. At least I don’t lie!” Then she decided that the very next day, on Seryozha’s birthday, she would go straight to her husband’s house, bribe the staff, be deceitful, but no matter what happened she would see her son and destroy the hideous deceit with which they had surrounded her unlucky child.

She went to a toy store, bought toys, and contemplated a plan of action. She would arrive early in the morning, at eight o’clock, before Alexei Alexandrovich had gotten up. She would have money in hand, which she would give the doorman and the footman, so that they would let her in, and without lifting her veil she would say she had come from Seryozha’s godfather to congratulate him and that she had been instructed to put the toys at the child’s bedside. The only thing she hadn’t prepared was what she would say to her son. No matter how much she thought about this, she could think of nothing.

The next day, at eight o’clock in the morning, Anna emerged alone from a hired sleigh and rang at the main entrance of her former home.

“Go see what they want. It’s some lady,” said Kapitonych, who was not yet dressed and was wearing coat and galoshes, having seen out the window a lady covered with a veil and standing right by the door.

The doorman’s helper, a young lad Anna did not know, had just opened the door for her when she walked in and taking a three-ruble note from her muff hurriedly slipped it into his hand.

“Seryozha … Sergei Alexeyevich,” she said, and was about to walk ahead. The assistant looked at the note and stopped her at the other glass door.

“Whom did you wish to see?” he asked.

She did not hear his words and did not say anything in reply.

Noticing the stranger’s confusion, Kapitonych himself went out to see her, let her in, and asked what she needed.

“From Prince Skorodumov for Sergei Alexeyevich,” she said.

“He is not up yet,” said the doorman, looking at her closely.

Anna had never anticipated that the furnishings of the front hall of the house where she had lived for nine years, which had not changed at all, would have such a powerful effect on her. One after another, memories, both joyous and agonizing, rose up in her soul, and for a moment she forgot why she was here.

“Would you please wait?” said Kapitonych, removing her coat.

Removing her coat, Kapitonych looked into her face, recognized her, and bowed low in silence.

“If you please, Your Excellency,” he said to her.

She wanted to say something, but her voice refused to produce any sounds whatsoever; looking at the old man with a guilty entreaty, she walked to the staircase with quick light steps. Hunched over completely and catching his galoshes on the steps, Kapitonych ran after her, trying to overtake her.

“The tutor is there and may not be dressed. I’ll tell him.”

Anna continued walking up the familiar staircase, understanding nothing of what the old man was saying.

“Here, to the left, please. Forgive me, it’s not clean. They’re in the old sitting room now,” said the doorman, gasping. “Kindly wait a moment, Your Excellency, I’ll take a look,” he said, and overtaking her, he opened the tall door and was hidden from view. Anna stopped, waiting. “He just woke up,” said the doorman, coming out the door again.

The moment the doorman said this, Anna heard the sound of a child yawning. From the voice of this yawning alone she recognized her son and saw him before her as if alive.

“Let me in, let me in, go!” she began, and she went through the tall door. To the right of the door was a bed, and on the bed, sitting up, was her son, in his unbuttoned nightshirt, and arching his little body, stretching, he was finishing his yawn. The moment his lips came together, they formed a blissfully sleepy smile, and with this smile he again collapsed backward, slowly and sweetly.

“Seryozha!” she whispered, noiselessly walking up to him.

During her separation from him, and during the flood of love she had recently been feeling for him all the time, she had imagined him as a four-year-old boy, as she had loved him most of all. Now he was not even the same as she had left him; even farther from being a four-year-old, he was taller and thinner. What was this! How thin his face, how short his hair! How long his arms! How he had changed since she had left him! But it was he, the same shape of his head, his lips, his soft cheek, and his broad little shoulders.

“Seryozha!” she repeated right above the child’s ear.

He raised himself back up on an elbow, turned his tousled head from side to side, as if searching for something, and opened his eyes. Quietly and quizzically he looked for several seconds at his mother standing stock-still in front of him, then suddenly smiled blissfully, and once again shutting his sleepy eyes, collapsed, but not backward, rather toward her, into her arms.

“Seryozha! My sweet boy!” she said, gasping and hugging his soft body.

“Mama!” he said, moving under her arms so that different parts of his body would touch her arms.

Smiling sleepily, his eyes still shut, he let go of the back of the bed with his soft little hands and grabbed her by the shoulders, collapsed onto her, bathing her in the sweet sleepy scent and warmth that only children have and began rubbing his face into her neck and shoulders.

“I knew it,” he said, opening his eyes. “Today’s my birthday. I knew you’d come. I’ll get up right away.”

And saying that, he fell asleep.

Anna surveyed him hungrily; she saw how he had grown and changed in her absence. She did and did not recognize his bare feet, now so big, which had freed themselves from the blanket, recognized the thinner cheeks, the short clipped curls at the nape of his neck, which she had kissed so often. She touched all this and could not speak; tears were choking her.

“What are you crying for, Mama?” he said, thoroughly awake now. “Mama, what are you crying for?” he exclaimed in a tearful voice.

“Me? I won’t cry. … I’m crying from joy. It’s been so long since I’ve seen you. I won’t. I’m not,” she said, swallowing her tears and turning away. “Come, it’s time for you to get dressed now,” she added after she had recovered, and after a moment’s silence, not letting go his hands, sat down by his bed on the chair where his clothes had been laid out.

“How do you get dressed without me? How—” she was about to begin talking simply and cheerfully, but she couldn’t, and again she turned away.

“I don’t bathe in cold water, Papa told me not to. Have you seen Vasily Lukich? He’s coming. Oh, you sat down on my clothes!” and Seryozha burst out laughing.

She looked at him and smiled.

“Mama, darling, dear Mama!” he exclaimed, rushing toward her again and hugging her. It was as if only now, seeing her smile, that he clearly realized what had happened. “You don’t need this,” he said, removing her hat. As if seeing her for the first time without her hat all over again, he again rushed toward her and kissed her.

“But what have you been thinking about me? Did you think I was dead?”

“I never believed it.”

“You didn’t, my sweet boy?”

“I knew it, I knew it!” he repeated his favorite phrase, and seizing her hand, which was caressing his hair, began pressing the palm of her hand to his mouth and kissing it.

30

Vasily Lukich, meanwhile, not realizing at first who this lady was, and learning from the conversation that this was the very mother who had abandoned her husband and whom he did not know, since he had joined the household after she left it, was in doubt as to whether or not he should enter or inform Alexei Alexandrovich. Reflecting at last that his responsibility consisted in getting Seryozha up at a specific hour and that it was therefore not up to him to sort out who was sitting there, his mother or someone else, but that he must do his duty, he got dressed, went to the door, and opened it.

But the caresses of mother and son, the sounds of their voices, and what they were saying—all this made him change his mind. He shook his head, sighed, and shut the door. “I’ll wait another ten minutes,” he told himself, clearing his throat and wiping his tears.

There was a great uproar among the household servants all this time. Everyone had learned that the lady of the house had arrived, that Kapitonych had let her in, that she was now in the nursery, while the master himself always stopped by the nursery between eight and nine o’clock, and everyone realized that a meeting of the spouses was impossible and must be prevented. Kornei, the valet, walking into the doorman’s room, asked who had let her in and how, and when he learned that Kapitonych had received and escorted her, he reprimanded the old man. The doorman maintained a stubborn silence, but when Kornei told him that he should be fired for this, Kapitonych jumped up, and waving his arms in front of Kornei’s face, began saying:

“Oh yes, you wouldn’t have let her in! Ten years of service, and nothing from her but kindness, oh yes, you’d go now and say, ‘If you please,’ you’d say, ‘Get out!’ That’s how you’d show what a clever politician you are! That’s you, all right! You’d just be thinking of how to fleece the master and pinch raccoon coats!”

“Soldier!” Kornei said contemptuously, and he turned to the nurse, who had come in. “You judge, Marya Efimovna. He let her in without telling anyone,” Kornei addressed her. “Alexei Alexandrovich will be down shortly and will go to the nursery.”

“Such goings-on!” said the nurse. “You, Kornei Vasilyevich, you have to stop him somehow, the master, and I’ll run up and somehow get her away. Such goings-on!”

When the nurse entered the nursery, Seryozha was telling his mother about how he and Nadenka had fallen when they sledded down the hill and turned a somersault three times. She was listening to the sounds of his voice, watching his face and the play of expression, and holding his hand, but she was not registering what he was saying. She had to go, she had to leave him—that was all she could think and feel. She heard the steps of Vasily Lukich, who approached the door and coughed, and heard the nurse’s steps approaching; but she sat as if turned to stone, incapable of speaking or standing.

“My lady, my dear!” the nurse began, walking up to Anna and kissing her hands and shoulders. “See how God brought joy to our birthday boy. You haven’t changed the least bit.”

“Oh, nurse, my dear, I didn’t know you were in the house,” said Anna, coming to her senses for a moment.

“I don’t live here, I live with my daughter, I came to congratulate him, Anna Arkadyevna, my dear!” The nurse suddenly burst into tears and again began kissing her hand.

Seryozha, his eyes and smile shining, and holding onto his mother with one hand and his nurse with the other, stamped on the carpet with his pudgy bare feet. His beloved nurse’s tenderness for his mother enraptured him.

“Mama! She comes to see me often and when—” he was about to begin, but he stopped, noticing the nurse whisper something to his mother and fear and something like shame come over his mother’s face, which was so unbecoming to his mother.

She went to him.

“My dearest!” she said.

She could not say good-bye, but the expression on her face said it, and he understood.

“My sweet, sweet Kutik!” she used the name she had called him when he was little. “You won’t forget me? You—” but she could not go on.

How many words she thought of later that she might have said to him! But now she couldn’t think of anything and could say nothing. But Seryozha understood everything she meant to tell him. He understood she was unhappy and loved him. He even understood what the nurse was whispering. He heard the words “Always between eight and nine o’clock,” and he understood that this had been said about his father and that his mother and father could not meet. He understood this, but one thing he could not understand: why was there fear and shame on her face? It wasn’t her fault, yet she was afraid of him and ashamed of something. He wanted to ask a question that would explain away this doubt for him, but he didn’t dare. He saw she was suffering and he felt sorry for her. He silently pressed close to her and whispered, “Don’t go yet. He won’t come right away.”

She held him away from herself to see whether he was thinking about what he was saying, and in the frightened expression on his face she read that he was not only talking about his father but trying to ask her how he ought to think about his father.

“Seryozha, my sweet boy,” she said, “love him. He is much better and nobler than me, and I am guilty before him. When you grow up, you will decide.”

“There’s no one better than you!” he exclaimed desperately through tears, and grabbing her around the shoulders, squeezed her as hard as he could with his arms, which trembled from the exertion.

“Dear heart, my little boy!” Anna said, and she began crying just as softly and childishly as he.

At that moment the door opened and Vasily Lukich walked in. Steps were heard at the other door, and the nurse said in a frightened whisper:

“He’s coming,” and she handed Anna her hat.

Seryozha dropped onto his bed and began sobbing, covering his face with his hands. Anna pulled away those hands, kissed his wet face once again, and with quick steps walked out the door. Alexei Alexandrovich was walking toward her. When he saw her, he stopped and bowed his head.

Despite what she had just said, that he was better and nobler than she, in the quick glance she cast at him, taking in his entire person in all its detail, feelings of revulsion and anger for him and envy over her son gripped her. She lowered her veil with a rapid motion and picking up her pace, nearly ran out of the room.

She had not managed to unwrap them and so brought home those toys which she had selected in the shop with such love and sorrow the day before.

31

No matter how powerfully Anna had desired the meeting with her son, no matter how long she had been thinking about it and preparing for it, she could not have anticipated the powerful effect this meeting would have on her. Returning to her lonely suite in the hotel, for a long time she could not understand why she was here. “Yes, it’s all over, and I am alone once again,” she told herself, and without removing her hat, she sat down on a chair by the hearth. Staring with unblinking eyes at the bronze clock on the table between the windows, she began thinking.

The French maid she had brought from abroad came in and suggested that she dress. She looked at her with amazement and said, “Later.”

The footman suggested coffee.

“Later.”

The Italian nurse, after taking the baby out, came in with her and brought her to Anna. The chubby, well-fed little girl, as always, upon seeing her mother, turned her little bare arms, which looked as if strings had been tied around her wrists, palms down, and smiling a toothless little grin, began, like a fish with its fins, to row with her little arms, rustling them over the starched folds of her embroidered skirt. It was impossible not to smile and kiss the little girl, it was impossible not to extend her finger and let her latch on, shrieking and bouncing with her whole body; impossible not to stick out her lip, which she, by way of a kiss, took into her little mouth. Anna did all this, and took her in her arms, and bounced her, and kissed her fresh little cheek and bared little elbows; but at the sight of this child it was even clearer to her that the emotion she felt for her was not even love in comparison with what she felt for Seryozha. Everything about this little girl was dear, but for some reason all this had not made a claim on her heart. To her first child, though by a man she did not love, she had given all the power of love that had not been satisfied; her little girl had been born in the most difficult conditions, yet not a hundredth of the care had been lavished on her as had been on her first. Moreover, in the little girl everything was still expectation, whereas Seryozha was nearly a person already, and a beloved person; thoughts and feelings already contended inside him; he understood, he loved, he judged her, she thought, recalling his words and looks. She had been torn from him not only physically but spiritually, forever, and nothing she could do would fix that.

She gave the little girl back to the nurse, let her go, and opened the locket in which she kept Seryozha’s portrait from when he was almost the same age as her daughter. She rose, removed her hat, and picked up from the small table an album of photographs of her son at different ages. She wanted to sort the photographs and began taking them out of the album. She took them all out. One remained, the last and best photograph. He was wearing a white shirt and sitting astride a chair, his eyes frowning and his mouth smiling. This was his best, most characteristic expression. With her small, deft hands, her slender white fingers moving with unusual intensity, she flicked the corner of the photograph, but the photograph kept getting away, and she couldn’t get hold of it. There was no paper knife on the table, so she took out a photograph that was nearby (it was a card of Vronsky done in Rome, in a round hat and with long hair) and coaxed out the photograph of her son. “Yes, here he is!” she said, glancing at the photograph of Vronsky, and suddenly she remembered who the cause was of her present grief. She had not thought of him once all this morning. But now, suddenly, seeing this brave and noble face, so familiar and dear to her, she felt an unexpected surge of love for him.

“Oh, where is he? How can he leave me alone with my sufferings?” she thought suddenly with a sense of reproach, forgetting that she herself had been hiding from him everything that concerned her son. She sent to ask him to come see her right away; with a sinking heart, considering the words with which she would tell him everything, and those expressions of his love which would console her, she waited for him. The messenger returned with the reply that he had a guest but that he would come right away and had instructed him to ask her whether she could receive him and Prince Yashvin, who had arrived in Petersburg. “He won’t come alone, though he hasn’t seen me since dinner yesterday,” she thought. “He won’t come so I could tell him everything but is coming with Yashvin.” Suddenly a strange thought occurred to her: What if he had stopped loving her?

Sorting through the events of recent days, she seemed to see in everything confirmation of this terrifying thought: he had not dined at home yesterday, he had insisted that they take separate rooms in Petersburg, and even now he wasn’t coming to see her alone, as if to avoid meeting her one-on-one.

“But he ought to tell me this. I need to know it. If I know it, then I know what I shall do,” she told herself, unable to imagine the position she would be in once convinced of his indifference. She thought that he had stopped loving her, she felt close to despair, and as a result was particularly agitated. She rang for her maid and went to her dressing room. As she was dressing, she took more care dressing than she had all these days, as if, having stopped loving her, he might start loving her again because she was wearing that dress or had done her hair in a more becoming way.

She heard his ring before she was ready.

When she came out into the drawing room, not he but Yashvin met her gaze. Vronsky was examining the photographs of her son, which she had left on the table, and did not hurry to look up at her.

“We are acquainted,” she said, placing her small hand in the large hand of a flustered Yashvin (which was so strange given his huge size and coarse face). “Acquainted since last year, at the races. Give me those,” she said, with a quick motion taking from Vronsky the photographs of her son, which he had been looking at, and looking at him significantly with flashing eyes. “Were the races good this year? Instead of them I watched the races at the Corso in Rome. You don’t like life abroad, though,” she said, smiling kindly. “I know you and I know all your tastes, though you and I have met very little.”

“I am truly sorry about that, because my tastes are mostly bad,” said Yashvin, biting the left side of his mustache.

After they had talked a little while, Yashvin noticed Vronsky glancing at his watch and asked whether she would be staying in Petersburg for long, and bowing his large figure, he picked up his peaked cap.

“Not long, I think,” she said in confusion, glancing at Vronsky.

“So, we won’t see each other again?” said Yashvin, standing and turning toward Vronsky. “Where are you dining?”

“Come dine with me,” said Anna decisively, as if angry at herself for her embarrassment, but blushing, as always when she revealed her position to someone new. “The dinner here is not very good, but at least you will be able to see each other. Alexei doesn’t care for any of his regimental friends as much as you.”

“I would be most pleased,” said Yashvin with a smile, from which Vronsky could see that he liked Anna very much.

Yashvin bowed and exited, and Vronsky stayed behind.

“Are you going, too?” she told him.

“I’m already late,” he replied. “Go on! I’ll catch up with you in a minute!” he shouted to Yashvin.

She took him by the hand and, not lowering her eyes, looked at him, searching her thoughts for something to say to make him stay.

“Wait, there’s something I need to say.” Taking his stubby hand, she pressed it to her neck. “Is it all right that I invited him to dine?”

“You did wonderfully,” he said with a serene smile, revealing his close-set teeth and kissing her hand.

“Alexei, you haven’t changed toward me, have you?” she said, pressing his hand with both of hers. “Alexei, I’m in utter agony here. When will we leave?”

“Soon, soon. You can’t believe how hard our life is here for me, too,” he said, and he extended his hand.

“Well, go on, go on!” she said, hurt, and she moved quickly away from him.

32

When Vronsky returned, Anna was not yet home. Soon after he left, they told him, some lady came to see her and they had gone out together. The fact that she went out without saying where, the fact that she was still not back, the fact that she had also gone somewhere that morning without telling him anything—all this, along with the strangely agitated expression on her face this morning and the memory of the hostile tone with which she had nearly torn her son’s photographs out of his hands when Yashvin was there, gave him pause. He decided he must have a talk with her, and he waited for her in her drawing room. But Anna did not return alone; she brought her aunt, an old maid, Princess Oblonskaya. This was the same lady who had come in the morning and with whom Anna had gone out to make her purchases. Anna seemed not to notice the preoccupied and perplexed expression on Vronsky’s face and cheerfully recounted to him what she had bought that morning. He saw that there was something peculiar going on in her: in her flashing eyes, when they rested for an instant on him, was a strained attention, and her speech and movements had that nervous quickness and grace which at the start of their intimacy had so enticed him but now alarmed and frightened him.

Dinner was laid for four. Everyone had gathered in order to go into the small dining room when Tushkevich arrived with a message for Anna from Princess Betsy. Princess Betsy asked her to forgive her for not coming to say good-bye; she was unwell, but asked Anna to come see her between half past six and nine o’clock. Vronsky looked at Anna when the time was specified, which showed her that measures had been taken so that she would not meet anyone; but Anna seemed not to notice it.

“I’m so sorry, but I can’t between half past six and nine,” she said, smiling faintly.

“The princess will be very sorry.”

“And I as well.”

“You are doubtless going to hear Patti?” said Tushkevich.³⁶

“Patti? You’ve given me an idea. I would go if I could get a box.”

“I can get one,” Tushkevich responded.

“I would be very, very grateful to you,” said Anna. “Wouldn’t you like to dine with us?”

Vronsky gave a barely perceptible shrug. He decidedly did not understand what Anna was doing. Why had she brought this old princess, why had she kept Tushkevich to dine, and most astonishing of all, why had she sent him out for a box? Could she really think that in her position she could attend the Patti subscription, where she would find all the society she knew? He gave her a grave look, but she answered him with the same provocative look, partly cheerful and partly desperate, whose significance he could not discern. At dinner, Anna was aggressively cheerful: she seemed to be flirting with both Tushkevich and Yashvin. When they rose from dinner and Tushkevich had gone for the box, Yashvin, joined by Vronsky, went to Vronsky’s rooms to smoke. After sitting for a short while, he ran back upstairs. Anna was already dressed in a light-colored silk and velvet dress, which she had had made in Paris, with an open neckline and expensive white lace on her head framing her face and setting off her vivid beauty to particular advantage.

“Are you sure you want to go to the theater?” he said, trying not to look at her.

“Why do you sound so frightened?” she said, offended once more that he would not look at her. “Why shouldn’t I?”

She seemed not to understand the meaning of his words.

“Oh, no reason whatsoever,” he said, frowning.

“That is exactly what I’ve been saying,” she said, intentionally refusing to see the irony in his tone and calmly rolling up her long, fragrant glove.

“Anna, for God’s sake! What’s wrong with you?” he said, as if to wake her up in precisely the same way her husband had once spoken to her.

“I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

“You know you can’t go.”

“Why? I’m not going alone. Princess Varvara has gone to dress, she will come with me.”

He shrugged his shoulders with a look of perplexity and despair.

“But do you really not know—” he began.

“But I don’t want to know!” she nearly shouted. “I don’t! Do I repent of what I have done? No, no, and no. If it were all to do over again, it would happen the same. For us, for me and for you, only one thing is important: whether we love each other. There are no other considerations. Why are we living apart here and not seeing each other? Why can’t I go? I love you, and I don’t care”—she said it in Russian and looked at him with an unusual gleam in her eyes that he did not understand—“as long as you have not changed. Why don’t you look at me?”

He looked at her. He saw all the beauty of her face and gown, which was always so becoming to her. But now this beauty and elegance of hers was the very thing that irritated him.

“My feelings cannot change, you know that. But I’m asking you not to go. I beg of you,” he said again in French with a gentle supplication in his voice but a coldness in his look.

She did not hear the words but she did see the coldness of his look and replied with irritation, “And I’m asking you to say why I shouldn’t go.”

“Because it could cause you—” he stopped short.

“I don’t understand anything. Yashvin n’est pas compromettant, and Princess Varvara is no worse than anyone else.³⁷ And here she is.”

33

For the first time, Vronsky experienced annoyance bordering on anger at Anna for her intentional refusal to understand her position. This feeling was intensified by the fact that he could not express the reason for his annoyance. Had he told her frankly what he was thinking, then he would have said, “In this gown, with a princess only too well known, to appear at the theater would mean not only admitting your position as a fallen woman but also throwing down the gauntlet to society, that is to say, renouncing it forever.”

He could not tell her this. “But how can she fail to understand it, and what is going on inside her?” he said to himself. He felt his respect for her diminishing and his awareness of her beauty increasing at one and the same time.

Scowling, he returned to his room, and sitting beside Yashvin, who had stretched his long legs out on a chair and was drinking cognac with soda water, ordered himself served the same thing.

“You were saying, Lankovsky’s Mighty. A good horse and I advise that you buy him,” said Yashvin, looking at his friend’s dark face. “He has a sloping croup, but his legs and head—you couldn’t wish for better.”

“I think I’ll take him,” Vronsky replied.

The discussion of horses interested him, but not for a moment did he forget Anna, nor could he keep from listening for the sound of steps along the hall and looking at the clock on the mantel.

“Anna Arkadyevna ordered me to report that they have left for the theater.”

Yashvin, tipping another shot of cognac into the fizzing water, tossed it back and rose, buttoning his coat.

“Well then? Let’s go,” he said, smiling faintly under his mustache and showing with this smile that he understood the reason for Vronsky’s gloom but was ascribing no importance to it.

“I’m not going,” Vronsky replied gloomily.

“But I must, I promised. Well, good-bye. Or else come to the orchestra, take Krasinsky’s stall,” Yashvin added as he was walking out.

“No, I have business to attend to.”

“A wife is a worry, but a non-wife is even worse,” thought Yashvin as he left the hotel.

Vronsky, left alone, rose from his chair and began pacing around the room.

“What’s today? It’s the fourth subscription. Egor and his wife are there, and his mother, likely. That means all Petersburg is there. Now she’s walked in, removed her coat, and come out into the light. Tushkevich, Yashvin, and Princess Varvara,” he was picturing it to himself. “What about me? Either I’m afraid or I put her under Tushkevich’s protection. No matter how you look at it, it’s foolish, foolish. Why is she putting me in this position?” he said, with a wave of his arm.

With this gesture he caught the table where the soda water and decanter of cognac were standing and nearly knocked it over. He tried to catch it, dropped it, and with annoyance kicked at the table and rang.

“If you care to be in my service,” he told the entering valet, “then remember your duties. This should not happen. You should have cleared it away.”

The valet, feeling himself innocent, wanted to defend himself, but he took one look at his master, realized from his face that the only thing to do was keep silent, and hurriedly bending over, got down on the carpet and began sorting out the whole and broken glasses and bottles.

“That’s not your job. Send in the footman to clean it up and ready my evening coat.”

Vronsky entered the theater at half past eight. The performance was well under way. The box keeper, a kind old fellow, removed Vronsky’s coat, and recognizing him, called him “Your Excellency” and suggested that he not take a number but simply call for Fyodor. There was no one in the brightly lit corridor but the box keeper and two footmen holding coats and listening at the door. Through the closed door he could hear the orchestra’s cautious staccato accompaniment and a single female voice, which was distinctly articulating a musical phrase. The door opened, allowing the box keeper to slip in, and the phrase, which was coming to its end, clearly struck Vronsky’s ear. The door shut immediately, and Vronsky did not hear the end of the phrase or cadenza, but he understood from the thunderous applause through the door that the cadenza was over. When he entered the hall, which was brightly illuminated by chandeliers and bronze gas jets, the noise was continuing. On stage the singer, gleaming with bared shoulders and diamonds, bowing and smiling, was collecting, with the help of the tenor, who was holding her by the arm, the bouquets that were clumsily flying over the footlights; she walked toward a gentleman with a part down the middle of his glossy, pomaded hair who was stretching his long arms across the footlights holding out something to her, and the entire audience in the orchestra, as well as in the boxes, buzzed and leaned forward, shouting and clapping. The conductor on his podium was helping with the transfer and straightening his white tie. Vronsky walked to the middle of the orchestra, stopped, and began to look around. Today he paid less attention than ever to the familiar, habitual surroundings, to the stage, to this noise, to all this familiar, uninteresting, motley herd of spectators in the packed theater.

The same sort of ladies as always were with the same sort of officers as usual at the back of the boxes; the same, God knows who, colorful women, and uniforms, and frock coats; the same filthy mob in the balcony, and in this entire crowd, in the boxes and the first rows, there were about forty of the real men and women. It was to these oases that Vronsky immediately turned his attention and began to interact.

The act was ending when he entered, and so without stopping at his brother’s box he passed through to the first row and by the footlights stopped beside Serpukhovskoi, who, knee bent and heel tapping, caught sight of him from far off and called him over with a smile.

Vronsky had not yet seen Anna; he was intentionally not looking in her direction. But he knew from the direction of people’s glances where she was. He looked around surreptitiously but did not look for her; expecting the worst, he looked for Alexei Alexandrovich. To his good fortune, Alexei Alexandrovich was not at the theater this time.

“How little there is of the military left in you!” Serpukhovskoi told him. “A diplomat, an artist, something along those lines.”

“Yes, as soon as I came home, I put on my evening coat,” Vronsky replied, smiling and slowly taking out his opera glasses.

“Now in this, I admit, I envy you. When I come back from abroad and put on this one”—he touched his epaulettes—“I regret my freedom.”

Serpukhovskoi had given up on Vronsky’s political career long ago, but he still liked him and now was especially gracious with him.

“It’s too bad you were late for the first act.”

Vronsky, listening with one ear, swept his opera glasses from the baignoires to the dress circle and surveyed the boxes.³⁸ Alongside a lady in a turban and a bald old man blinking angrily into the moving opera glasses, Vronsky suddenly caught sight of Anna’s head, proud, stunningly beautiful, and smiling in its lace frame. She was in the fifth baignoire, twenty paces from him. She was sitting toward the front and had turned slightly to say something to Yashvin. The set of her head on her beautiful broad shoulders and the excited but checked radiance of her eyes and her entire face reminded him of her exactly as he had first seen her at the ball in Moscow. Now, though, he experienced this beauty in a completely different way. There was nothing mysterious in his emotion for her now, and so her beauty, although it attracted him even more strongly than before, at the same time now offended him. She was not looking in his direction, but Vronsky could sense that she had seen him.

When Vronsky again turned his opera glasses in that direction, he noted that Princess Varvara, especially red-faced, was laughing unnaturally and constantly looking around at the next box; Anna, tapping her folded fan against the red velvet, was looking off somewhere but not seeing and evidently not wanting to see what was going on in the next box. The expression on Yashvin’s face was the one he wore when he was losing at cards. Scowling, he was sucking the left half of his mustache in deeper and deeper and casting sidelong glances at the next box.

In that box, to the left, were the Kartasovs. Vronsky knew them and knew that they and Anna were acquainted. Madame Kartasova, a thin, small woman, was standing in her box and, her back turned toward Anna, was putting on her wrap, which her husband was holding for her. Her face was pale and angry, and she was saying something in an agitated voice. Kartasov, a fat, bald gentleman, constantly looking around at Anna, was trying to calm his wife. When his wife had gone out, her husband dawdled for a long time, trying to catch Anna’s eye and evidently wishing to bow to her. But Anna, obviously not noticing him on purpose, had turned away and was saying something to Yashvin, who had inclined his cropped head toward her. Kartasov went out without bowing, and the box was left empty.

Vronsky did not understand what exactly had transpired between the Kartasovs and Anna; but he did understand that something humiliating had happened to Anna. He understood this both from what he saw, and most of all from the face of Anna, who, he knew, had summoned her last strength to maintain the role she had taken on. And this role of outward calm was succeeding quite well for her. Anyone who did not know her and her circle, who had not heard all the women’s expressions of sympathy, indignation, and astonishment that she had allowed herself to appear in society and appear so noticeably in her lace and with her beauty, would have admired this woman’s calm and beauty and not suspected that she felt like someone being pilloried.

Knowing that something had occurred, but not knowing precisely what, Vronsky was experiencing agonizing alarm. Hoping to learn something, he went to his brother’s box. Intentionally choosing the parterre stairwell on the side opposite to Anna’s box, as he was walking out he bumped into his former regimental commander, who was speaking with two acquaintances. Vronsky heard Madame Karenina’s name spoken and noticed how the regimental commander hastened to call to Vronsky loudly, glancing significantly at those speaking.

“Ah, Vronsky! When are you coming to see us at the regiment? We can’t let you go without a feast. You’re one of us through and through,” said the regimental commander.

“Can’t stop, very sorry, next time,” said Vronsky and he ran up the stairs to his brother’s box.

The old countess, Vronsky’s mother, with her steel opera glasses, was in his brother’s box. Varya and Princess Sorokina met him in the dress circle corridor.

Escorting Princess Sorokina as far as her mother, Varya had put her hand out to her brother-in-law and immediately began talking about what interested him. She was agitated such as he had rarely seen her.

“I find it base and vile, and Madame Kartasova had no right. Madame Karenina …” she began.

“But what is it? I don’t know.”

“What, you didn’t hear?”

“You know I’d be the last to hear of it.”

“Is there a nastier creature than that Madame Kartasova?”

“But what did she do?”

“My husband told me. … She insulted Madame Karenina. Her husband began speaking with her across the box, and Madame Kartasova made a scene. They say she said something insulting very loudly and went out.”

“Count, your maman is asking for you,” said Princess Sorokina, peeking out the box door.

“I have been waiting for you,” his mother said to him, smiling derisively. “You’re never to be seen.”

The son saw that she could not restrain her smile of delight.

“Hello, maman. I was on my way to see you,” he said coldly.

“What? Aren’t you going to faire la cour à Madame Karenine?”³⁹ she added when Princess Sorokina had moved away. “Elle fait sensation. On oublie la Patti pour elle.”⁴⁰

“Maman, I’ve asked you not to speak to me of this,” he answered, frowning.

“I’m just saying what everyone is saying.”

Vronsky made no reply, and after a few words to Princess Sorokina, he went out. In the doorway he met his brother.

“Ah, Alexei!” said his brother. “What vileness! A fool, nothing more. I wanted to go to her straightaway. Let’s go together.”

Vronsky was not listening to him. He had started downstairs with rapid steps; he felt he must do something, but did not know what. Annoyance at her for putting herself and him in such a false position, along with pity for her sufferings, was agitating him. He descended to the orchestra and headed directly for Anna’s baignoire. Stremov was standing by the baignoire and chatting with her, “There are no more tenors. Le moule en est brisé.”⁴¹

Vronsky bowed to her and stopped, exchanging greetings with Stremov.

“You seem to have arrived late and not heard the best aria,” Anna said to Vronsky, glancing at him derisively, as it seemed to him.

“I am a poor judge,” he said, looking sternly at her.

“Like Prince Yashvin,” she said, smiling, “who maintains that Patti sings too loudly.

“Thank you,” she said, her small hand in the long glove taking the program Vronsky had picked up, and suddenly at that instant, her beautiful face shuddered. She rose and stepped to the back of the box.

Noticing that during the next act her box remained empty, Vronsky, provoking hushes from the theater, which had gone quiet at the sounds of the cavatina, left the orchestra and went home.

Anna was already at home. When Vronsky went in to see her she was alone, wearing the same gown she had worn at the theater. She was sitting on the first chair by the wall and looking straight ahead. She glanced at him and immediately resumed her previous position.

“Anna,” he said.

“You! You are to blame for everything!” she screamed with tears of despair and anger in her voice as she rose.

“I asked you, I begged you not to go. I knew it would not be pleasant for you.”

“Unpleasant!” she exclaimed. “It was horrible! No matter how long I live, I shall never forget it. She said it was a disgrace to be sitting next to me.”

“The words of a foolish woman,” he said, “but why risk, arouse—”

“I despise your calm. You should not have brought me to this pass. If you loved me—”

“Anna! What does the question of my love have to do with this?”

“Yes, if you loved me as I do you, if you suffered as I do …” she said, looking at him with an expression of fright.

He felt sorry for her but annoyed nonetheless. He assured her of his love because he saw that this alone could calm her now, and he did not reproach her in words, but in his soul he did.

Those assurances of love which had seemed to him so vulgar that he was ashamed to utter them she drank in and little by little calmed down. They left for the country the next day, perfectly reconciled.