Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy

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Levin did not notice how time was passing. If he had
been asked how long he had been working he would have
said half an hour— and it was getting on for dinner time.
As they were walking back over the cut grass, the old man
called Levin’s attention to the little girls and boys who
were coming from different directions, hardly visible
through the long grass, and along the road towards the
mowers, carrying sacks of bread dragging at their little
hands and pitchers of the sour rye-beer, with cloths
wrapped round them.
‘Look’ee, the little emmets crawling!’ he said, pointing
to them, and he shaded his eyes with his hand to look at
the sun. They mowed two more rows; the old man
stopped.
‘Come, master, dinner time!’ he said briskly. And on
reaching the stream the mowers moved off across the lines
of cut grass towards their pile of coats, where the children
who had brought their dinners were sitting waiting for
them. The peasants gathered into groups—those further
away under a cart, those nearer under a willow bush.
Levin sat down by them; he felt disinclined to go away.
All constraint with the master had disappeared long
ago. The peasants got ready for dinner. Some washed, the
young lads bathed in the stream, others made a place
comfortable for a rest, untied their sacks of bread, and
uncovered the pitchers of rye-beer. The old man
crumbled up some bread in a cup, stirred it with the
handle of a spoon, poured water on it from the dipper,
broke up some more bread, and having seasoned it with
salt, he turned to the east to say his prayer.
‘Come, master, taste my sop,’ said he, kneeling down
before the cup.
The sop was so good that Levin gave up the idea of
going home. He dined with the old man, and talked to
him about his family affairs, taking the keenest interest in
them, and told him about his own affairs and all the
circumstances that could be of interest to the old man. He
felt much nearer to him than to his brother, and could not
help smiling at the affection he felt for this man. When the
old man got up again, said his prayer, and lay down under
a bush, putting some grass under his head for a pillow,
Levin did the same, and in spite of the clinging flies that
were so persistent in the sunshine, and the midges that
tickled his hot face and body, he fell asleep at once and
only waked when the sun had passed to the other side of
the bush and reached him. The old man had been awake a
long while, and was sitting up whetting the scythes of the
younger lads.
Levin looked about him and hardly recognized the
place, everything was so changed. The immense stretch of
meadow had been mown and was sparkling with a
peculiar fresh brilliance, with its lines of already sweetsmelling
grass in the slanting rays of the evening sun. And
the bushes about the river had been cut down, and the
river itself, not visible before, now gleaming like steel in
its bends, and the moving, ascending peasants, and the
sharp wall of grass of the unmown part of the meadow,
and the hawks hovering over the stripped meadow—all
was perfectly new. Raising himself, Levin began
considering how much had been cut and how much more
could still be done that day.
The work done was exceptionally much for forty-two
men. They had cut the whole of the big meadow, which
had, in the years of serf labor, taken thirty scythes two days
to mow. Only the corners remained to do, where the
rows were short. But Levin felt a longing to get as much
mowing done that day as possible, and was vexed with the
sun sinking so quickly in the sky. He felt no weariness; all
he wanted was to get his work done more and more
quickly and as much done as possible.
‘Could you cut Mashkin Upland too?—what do you
think?’ he said to the old man.
‘As God wills, the sun’s not high. A little vodka for the
lads?’
At the afternoon rest, when they were sitting down
again, and those who smoked had lighted their pipes, the
old man told the men that ‘Mashkin Upland’s to be cut—
there’ll be some vodka.’
‘Why not cut it? Come on, Tit! We’ll look sharp! We
can eat at night. Come on!’ cried voices, and eating up
their bread, the mowers went back to work.
‘Come, lads, keep it up!’ said Tit, and ran on ahead
almost at a trot.
‘Get along, get along!’ said the old man, hurrying after
him and easily overtaking him, ‘I’ll mow you down, look
out!’
And young and old mowed away, as though they were
racing with one another. But however fast they worked,
they did not spoil the grass, and the rows were laid just as
neatly and exactly. The little piece left uncut in the corner
was mown in five minutes. The last of the mowers were
just ending their rows while the foremost snatched up
their coats onto their shoulders, and crossed the road
towards Mashkin Upland.
The sun was already sinking into the trees when they
went with their jingling dippers into the wooded ravine of
Mashkin Upland. The grass was up to their waists in the
middle of the hollow, soft, tender, and feathery, spotted
here and there among the trees with wild heart’s-ease.
After a brief consultation—whether to take the rows
lengthwise or diagonally—Prohor Yermilin, also a
renowned mower, a huge, black-haired peasant, went on
ahead. He went up to the top, turned back again and
started mowing, and they all proceeded to form in line
behind him, going downhill through the hollow and
uphill right up to the edge of the forest. The sun sank
behind the forest. The dew was falling by now; the
mowers were in the sun only on the hillside, but below,
where a mist was rising, and on the opposite side, they
mowed into the fresh, dewy shade. The work went
rapidly. The grass cut with a juicy sound, and was at once
laid in high, fragrant rows. The mowers from all sides,
brought closer together in the short row, kept urging one
another on to the sound of jingling dipper and clanging
scythes, and the hiss of the whetstones sharpening them,
and good-humored shouts.
Levin still kept between the young peasant and the old
man. The old man, who had put on his short sheepskin
jacket, was just as good-humored, jocose, and free in his
movements. Among the trees they were continually
cutting with their scythes the so-called ‘birch mushrooms,’
swollen fat in the succulent grass. But the old man bent
down every time he came across a mushroom, picked it
up and put it in his bosom. ‘Another present for my old
woman,’ he said as he did so.
Easy as it was to mow the wet, soft grass, it was hard
work going up and down the steep sides of the ravine. But
this did not trouble the old man. Swinging his scythe just
as ever, and moving his feet in their big, plaited shoes with
firm, little steps, he climbed slowly up the steep place, and
though his breeches hanging out below his smock, and his
whole frame trembled with effort, he did not miss one
blade of grass or one mushroom on his way, and kept
making jokes with the peasants and Levin. Levin walked
after him and often thought he must fall, as he climbed
with a scythe up a steep cliff where it would have been
hard work to clamber without anything. But he climbed
up and did what he had to do. He felt as though some
external force were moving him.
Chapter 6
Mashkin Upland was mown, the last row finished, the
peasants had put on their coats and were gaily trudging
home. Levin got on his horse and, parting regretfully from
the peasants, rode homewards. On the hillside he looked
back; he could not see them in the mist that had risen
from the valley; he could only hear rough, good-humored
voices, laughter, and the sound of clanking scythes.
Sergey Ivanovitch had long ago finished dinner, and
was drinking iced lemon and water in his own room,
looking through the reviews and papers which he had
only just received by post, when Levin rushed into the
room, talking merrily, with his wet and matted hair
sticking to his forehead, and his back and chest grimed and
moist.
‘We mowed the whole meadow! Oh, it is nice,
delicious! And how have you been getting on?’ said Levin,
completely forgetting the disagreeable conversation of the
previous day.
‘Mercy! what do you look like!’ said Sergey Ivanovitch,
for the first moment looking round with some
dissatisfaction. ‘And the door, do shut the door!’ he cried.
‘You must have let in a dozen at least.’
Sergey Ivanovitch could not endure flies, and in his
own room he never opened the window except at night,
and carefully kept the door shut.
‘Not one, on my honor. But if I have, I’ll catch them.
You wouldn’t believe what a pleasure it is! How have you
spent the day?’
‘Very well. But have you really been mowing the
whole day? I expect you’re as hungry as a wolf. Kouzma
has got everything ready for you.’
‘No, I don’t feel hungry even. I had something to eat
there. But I’ll go and wash.’
‘Yes, go along, go along, and I’ll come to you directly,’
said Sergey Ivanovitch, shaking his head as he looked at
his brother. ‘Go along, make haste,’ he added smiling, and
gathering up his books, he prepared to go too. He, too,
felt suddenly good-humored and disinclined to leave his
brother’s side. ‘But what did you do while it was raining?’
‘Rain? Why, there was scarcely a drop. I’ll come
directly. So you had a nice day too? That’s first-rate.’ And
Levin went off to change his clothes.
Five minutes later the brothers met in the dining room.
Although it seemed to Levin that he was not hungry, and
he sat down to dinner simply so as not to hurt Kouzma’s
feelings, yet when he began to eat the dinner struck him as
extraordinarily good. Sergey Ivanovitch watched him with
a smile.
‘Oh, by the way, there’s a letter for you,’ said he.
‘Kouzma, bring it down, please. And mind you shut the
doors.’
The letter was from Oblonsky. Levin read it aloud.
Oblonsky wrote to him from Petersburg: ‘I have had a
letter from Dolly; she’s at Ergushovo, and everything
seems going wrong there. Do ride over and see her,
please; help her with advice; you know all about it. She
will be so glad to see you. She’s quite alone, poor thing.
My mother-in-law and all of them are still abroad.’
‘That’s capital! I will certainly ride over to her,’ said
Levin. ‘Or we’ll go together. She’s such a splendid
woman, isn’t she?’
‘They’re not far from here, then?’
‘Twenty-five miles. Or perhaps it is thirty. But a capital
road. Capital, we’ll drive over.’
‘I shall be delighted,’ said Sergey Ivanovitch, still
smiling. The sight of his younger brother’s appearance had
immediately put him in a good humor.
‘Well, you have an appetite!’ he said, looking at his
dark-red, sunburnt face and neck bent over the plate.
‘Splendid! You can’t imagine what an effectual remedy
it is for every sort of foolishness. I want to enrich medicine
with a new word: Arbeitskur.’
‘Well, but you don’t need it, I should fancy.’
‘No, but for all sorts of nervous invalids.’
‘Yes, it ought to be tried. I had meant to come to the
mowing to look at you, but it was so unbearably hot that I
got no further than the forest. I sat there a little, and went
on by the forest to the village, met your old nurse, and
sounded her as to the peasants’ view of you. As far as I can
make out, they don’t approve of this. She said: ‘It’s not a
gentleman’s work.’ Altogether, I fancy that in the people’s
ideas there are very clear and definite notions of certain, as
they call it, ‘gentlemanly’ lines of action. And they don’t
sanction the gentry’s moving outside bounds clearly laid
down in their ideas.’
‘Maybe so; but anyway it’s a pleasure such as I have
never known in my life. And there’s no harm in it, you
know. Is there?’ answered Levin. ‘I can’t help it if they
don’t like it. Though I do believe it’s all right. Eh?’
‘Altogether,’ pursued Sergey Ivanovitch, ‘you’re
satisfied with your day?’
‘Quite satisfied. We cut the whole meadow. And such
a splendid old man I made friends with there! You can’t
fancy how delightful he was!’
‘Well, so you’re content with your day. And so am I.
First, I solved two chess problems, and one a very pretty
one—a pawn opening. I’ll show it you. And then—I
thought over our conversation yesterday.’
‘Eh! our conversation yesterday?’ said Levin, blissfully
dropping his eyelids and drawing deep breaths after
finishing his dinner, and absolutely incapable of recalling
what their conversation yesterday was about.
‘I think you are partly right. Our difference of opinion
amounts to this, that you make the mainspring selfinterest,
while I suppose that interest in the common weal
is bound to exist in every man of a certain degree of
advancement. Possibly you are right too, that action
founded on material interest would be more desirable.
You are altogether, as the French say, too primesautiere a
nature; you must have intense, energetic action, or
nothing.’
Levin listened to his brother and did not understand a
single word, and did not want to understand. He was only
afraid his brother might ask him some question which
would make it evident he had not heard.
‘So that’s what I think it is, my dear boy,’ said Sergey
Ivanovitch, touching him on the shoulder.
‘Yes, of course. But, do you know? I won’t stand up
for my view,’ answered Levin, with a guilty, childlike
smile. ‘Whatever was it I was disputing about?’ he
wondered. ‘Of course, I’m right, and he’s right, and it’s all
first-rate. Only I must go round to the counting house and
see to things.’ He got up, stretching and smiling. Sergey
Ivanovitch smiled too.
‘If you want to go out, let’s go together,’ he said,
disinclined to be parted from his brother, who seemed
positively breathing out freshness and energy. ‘Come,
we’ll go to the counting house, if you have to go there.’
‘Oh, heavens!’ shouted Levin, so loudly that Sergey
Ivanovitch was quite frightened.
‘What, what is the matter?’
‘How’s Agafea Mihalovna’s hand?’ said Levin, slapping
himself on the head. ‘I’d positively forgotten her even.’
‘It’s much better.’
‘Well, anyway I’ll run down to her. Before you’ve time
to get your hat on, I’ll be back.’
And he ran downstairs, clattering with his heels like a
spring-rattle.
Chapter 7
Stephan Arkadyevitch had gone to Petersburg to
perform the most natural and essential official duty—so
familiar to everyone in the government service, though
incomprehensible to outsiders— that duty, but for which
one could hardly be in government service, of reminding
the ministry of his existence—and having, for the due
performance of this rite, taken all the available cash from
home, was gaily and agreeably spending his days at the
races and in the summer villas. Meanwhile Dolly and the
children had moved into the country, to cut down
expenses as much as possible. She had gone to Ergushovo,
the estate that had been her dowry, and the one where in
spring the forest had been sold. It was nearly forty miles
from Levin’s Pokrovskoe. The big, old house at
Ergushovo had been pulled down long ago, and the old
prince had had the lodge done up and built on to. Twenty
years before, when Dolly was a child, the lodge had been
roomy and comfortable, though, like all lodges, it stood
sideways to the entrance avenue, and faced the south. But
by now this lodge was old and dilapidated. When Stepan
Arkadyevitch had gone down in the spring to sell the
forest, Dolly had begged him to look over the house and
order what repairs might be needed. Stepan Arkadyevitch,
like all unfaithful husbands indeed, was very solicitous for
his wife’s comfort, and he had himself looked over the
house, and given instructions about everything that he
considered necessary. What he considered necessary was to
cover all the furniture with cretonne, to put up curtains,
to weed the garden, to make a little bridge on the pond,
and to plant flowers. But he forgot many other essential
matters, the want of which greatly distressed Darya
Alexandrovna later on.
In spite of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s efforts to be an
attentive father and husband, he never could keep in his
mind that he had a wife and children. He had bachelor
tastes, and it was in accordance with them that he shaped
his life. On his return to Moscow he informed his wife
with pride that everything was ready, that the house
would be a little paradise, and that he advised her most
certainly to go. His wife’s staying away in the country was
very agreeable to Stepan Arkadyevitch from every point of
view: it did the children good, it decreased expenses, and
it left him more at liberty. Darya Alexandrovna regarded
staying in the country for the summer as essential for the
children, especially for the little girl, who had not
succeeded in regaining her strength after the scarlatina, and
also as a means of escaping the petty humiliations, the little
bills owing to the wood-merchant, the fishmonger, the
shoemaker, which made her miserable. Besides this, she
was pleased to go away to the country because she was
dreaming of getting her sister Kitty to stay with her there.
Kitty was to be back from abroad in the middle of the
summer, and bathing had been prescribed for her. Kitty
wrote that no prospect was so alluring as to spend the
summer with Dolly at Ergushovo, full of childish
associations for both of them.

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The first days of her existence in the country were very
hard for Dolly. She used to stay in the country as a child,
and the impression she had retained of it was that the
country was a refuge from all the unpleasantness of the
town, that life there, though not luxurious—Dolly could
easily make up her mind to that—was cheap and
comfortable; that there was plenty of everything,
everything was cheap, everything could be got, and
children were happy. But now coming to the country as
the head of a family, she perceived that it was all utterly
unlike what she had fancied.
The day after their arrival there was a heavy fall of rain
and in the night the water came through in the corridor
and in the nursery, so that the beds had to be carried into
the drawing room. There was no kitchen maid to be
found; of the nine cows, it appeared from the words of the
cowherd-woman that some were about to calve, others
had just calved, others were old, and others again harduddered;
there was not butter nor milk enough even for
the children. There were no eggs. They could get no
fowls; old, purplish, stringy cocks were all they had for
roasting and boiling. Impossible to get women to scrub
the floors—all were potato-hoeing. Driving was out of the
question, because one of the horses was restive, and bolted
in the shafts. There was no place where they could bathe;
the whole of the river-bank was trampled by the cattle and
open to the road; even walks were impossible, for the
cattle strayed into the garden through a gap in the hedge,
and there was one terrible bull, who bellowed, and
therefore might be expected to gore somebody. There
were no proper cupboards for their clothes; what
cupboards there were either would not close at all, or
burst open whenever anyone passed by them. There were
no pots and pans; there was no copper in the washhouse,
nor even an ironing-board in the maids’ room.
Finding instead of peace and rest all these, from her
point of view, fearful calamities, Darya Alexandrovna was
at first in despair. She exerted herself to the utmost, felt
the hopelessness of the position, and was every instant
suppressing the tears that started into her eyes. The bailiff,
a retired quartermaster, whom Stepan Arkadyevitch had
taken a fancy to and had appointed bailiff on account of
his handsome and respectful appearance as a hall-porter,
showed no sympathy for Darya Alexandrovna’s woes. He
said respectfully, ‘nothing can be done, the peasants are
such a wretched lot,’ and did nothing to help her.
The position seemed hopeless. But in the Oblonskys’
household, as in all families indeed, there was one
inconspicuous but most valuable and useful person, Marya
Philimonovna. She soothed her mistress, assured her that
everything would come round (it was her expression, and
Matvey had borrowed it from her), and without fuss or
hurry proceeded to set to work herself. She had
immediately made friends with the bailiff’s wife, and on
the very first day she drank tea with her and the bailiff
under the acacias, and reviewed all the circumstances of
the position. Very soon Marya Philimonovna had
established her club, so to say, under the acacias, and there
it was, in this club, consisting of the bailiff’s wife, the
village elder, and the counting house clerk, that the
difficulties of existence were gradually smoothed away,
and in a week’s time everything actually had come round.
The roof was mended, a kitchen maid was found—a
crony of the village elder’s—hens were bought, the cows
began giving milk, the garden hedge was stopped up with
stakes, the carpenter made a mangle, hooks were put in
the cupboards, and they ceased to burst open
spontaneously, and an ironing-board covered with army
cloth was placed across from the arm of a chair to the
chest of drawers, and there was a smell of flatirons in the
maids’ room.
‘Just see, now, and you were quite in despair,’ said
Marya Philimonovna, pointing to the ironing-board. They
even rigged up a bathing-shed of straw hurdles. Lily began
to bathe, and Darya Alexandrovna began to realize, if only
in part, her expectations, if not of a peaceful, at least of a
comfortable, life in the country. Peaceful with six children
Darya Alexandrovna could not be. One would fall ill,
another might easily become so, a third would be without
something necessary, a fourth would show symptoms of a
bad disposition, and so on. Rare indeed were the brief
periods of peace. But these cares and anxieties were for
Darya Alexandrovna the sole happiness possible. Had it
not been for them, she would have been left alone to
brood over her husband who did not love her. And
besides, hard though it was for the mother to bear the
dread of illness, the illnesses themselves, and the grief of
seeing signs of evil propensities in her children—the
children themselves were even now repaying her in small
joys for her sufferings. Those joys were so small that they
passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments
she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but sand; but
there were good moments too when she saw nothing but
the joy, nothing but gold.
Now in the solitude of the country, she began to be
more and more frequently aware of those joys. Often,
looking at them, she would make every possible effort to
persuade herself that she was mistaken, that she as a
mother was partial to her children. All the same, she could
not help saying to herself that she had charming children,
all six of them in different ways, but a set of children such
as is not often to be met with, and she was happy in them,
and proud of them.
Chapter 8
Towards the end of May, when everything had been
more or less satisfactorily arranged, she received her
husband’s answer to her complaints of the disorganized
state of things in the country. He wrote begging her
forgiveness for not having thought of everything before,
and promised to come down at the first chance. This
chance did not present itself, and till the beginning of June
Darya Alexandrovna stayed alone in the country.
On the Sunday in St. Peter’s week Darya Alexandrovna
drove to mass for all her children to take the sacrament.
Darya Alexandrovna in her intimate, philosophical talks
with her sister, her mother, and her friends very often
astonished them by the freedom of her views in regard to
religion. She had a strange religion of transmigration of
souls all her own, in which she had firm faith, troubling
herself little about the dogmas of the Church. But in her
family she was strict in carrying out all that was required
by the Church—and not merely in order to set an
example, but with all her heart in it. The fact that the
children had not been at the sacrament for nearly a year
worried her extremely, and with the full approval and
sympathy of Marya Philimonovna she decided that this
should take place now in the summer.
For several days before, Darya Alexandrovna was busily
deliberating on how to dress all the children. Frocks were
made or altered and washed, seams and flounces were let
out, buttons were sewn on, and ribbons got ready. One
dress, Tanya’s, which the English governess had
undertaken, cost Darya Alexandrovna much loss of
temper. The English governess in altering it had made the
seams in the wrong place, had taken up the sleeves too
much, and altogether spoilt the dress. It was so narrow on
Tanya’s shoulders that it was quite painful to look at her.
But Marya Philimonovna had the happy thought of
putting in gussets, and adding a little shoulder-cape. The
dress was set right, but there was nearly a quarrel with the
English governess. On the morning, however, all was
happily arranged, and towards ten o’clock—the time at
which they had asked the priest to wait for them for the
mass—the children in their new dresses, with beaming
faces stood on the step before the carriage waiting for their
mother.
To the carriage, instead of the restive Raven, they had
harnessed, thanks to the representations of Marya
Philimonovna, the bailiff’s horse, Brownie, and Darya
Alexandrovna, delayed by anxiety over her own attire,
came out and got in, dressed in a white muslin gown.
Darya Alexandrovna had done her hair, and dressed
with care and excitement. In the old days she had dressed
for her own sake to look pretty and be admired. Later on,
as she got older, dress became more and more distasteful to
her. She saw that she was losing her good looks. But now
she began to feel pleasure and interest in dress again. Now
she did not dress for her own sake, not for the sake of her
own beauty, but simply that as the mother of those
exquisite creatures she might not spoil the general effect.
And looking at herself for the last time in the looking-glass
she was satisfied with herself. She looked nice. Not nice as
she would have wished to look nice in old days at a ball,
but nice for the object which she now had in view.
In the church there was no one but the peasants, the
servants and their women-folk. But Darya Alexandrovna
saw, or fancied she saw, the sensation produced by her
children and her. The children were not only beautiful to
look at in their smart little dresses, but they were charming
in the way they behaved. Aliosha, it is true, did not stand
quite correctly; he kept turning round, trying to look at
his little jacket from behind; but all the same he was
wonderfully sweet. Tanya behaved like a grownup person,
and looked after the little ones. And the smallest, Lily, was
bewitching in her naive astonishment at everything, and it
was difficult not to smile when, after taking the sacrament,
she said in English, ‘Please, some more.’
On the way home the children felt that something
solemn had happened, and were very sedate.
Everything went happily at home too; but at lunch
Grisha began whistling, and, what was worse, was
disobedient to the English governess, and was forbidden to
have any tart. Darya Alexandrovna would not have let
things go so far on such a day had she been present; but
she had to support the English governess’s authority, and
she upheld her decision that Grisha should have no tart.
This rather spoiled the general good humor. Grisha cried,
declaring that Nikolinka had whistled too, and he was not
punished, and that he wasn’t crying for the tart—he didn’t
care—but at being unjustly treated. This was really too
tragic, and Darya Alexandrovna made up her mind to
persuade the English governess to forgive Grisha, and she
went to speak to her. But on the way, as she passed the
drawing room, she beheld a scene, filling her heart with
such pleasure that the tears came into her eyes, and she
forgave the delinquent herself.
The culprit was sitting at the window in the corner of
the drawing room; beside him was standing Tanya with a
plate. On the pretext of wanting to give some dinner to
her dolls, she had asked the governess’s permission to take
her share of tart to the nursery, and had taken it instead to
her brother. While still weeping over the injustice of his
punishment, he was eating the tart, and kept saying
through his sobs, ‘Eat yourself; let’s eat it
together...together.’
Tanya had at first been under the influence of her pity
for Grisha, then of a sense of her noble action, and tears
were standing in her eyes too; but she did not refuse, and
ate her share.
On catching sight of their mother they were dismayed,
but, looking into her face, they saw they were not doing
wrong. They burst out laughing, and, with their mouths
full of tart, they began wiping their smiling lips with their
hands, and smearing their radiant faces all over with tears
and jam.
‘Mercy! Your new white frock; Tanya! Grisha!’ said
their mother, trying to save the frock, but with tears in her
eyes, smiling a blissful, rapturous smile.
The new frocks were taken off, and orders were given
for the little girls to have their blouses put on, and the
boys their old jackets, and the wagonette to be harnessed;
with Brownie, to the bailiff’s annoyance, again in the
shafts, to drive out for mushroom picking and bathing. A
roar of delighted shrieks arose in the nursery, and never
ceased till they had set off for the bathing-place.
They gathered a whole basketful of mushrooms; even
Lily found a birch mushroom. It had always happened
before that Miss Hoole found them and pointed them out
to her; but this time she found a big one quite of herself,
and there was a general scream of delight, ‘Lily has found a
mushroom!’

!’
Then they reached the river, put the horses under the
birch trees, and went to the bathing-place. The coachman,
Terenty, fastened the horses, who kept whisking away the
flies, to a tree, and, treading down the grass, lay down in
the shade of a birch and smoked his shag, while the neverceasing
shrieks of delight of the children floated across to
him from the bathing-place.
Though it was hard work to look after all the children
and restrain their wild pranks, though it was difficult too
to keep in one’s head and not mix up all the stockings,
little breeches, and shoes for the different legs, and to
undo and to do up again all the tapes and buttons, Darya
Alexandrovna, who had always liked bathing herself, and
believed it to be very good for the children, enjoyed
nothing so much as bathing with all the children. To go
over all those fat little legs, pulling on their stockings, to
take in her arms and dip those little naked bodies, and to
hear their screams of delight and alarm, to see the
breathless faces with wide-open, scared, and happy eyes of
all her splashing cherubs, was a great pleasure to her.
When half the children had been dressed, some peasant
women in holiday dress, out picking herbs, came up to the
bathing-shed and stopped shyly. Marya Philimonovna
called one of them and handed her a sheet and a shirt that
had dropped into the water for her to dry them, and
Darya Alexandrovna began to talk to the women. At first
they laughed behind their hands and did not understand
her questions, but soon they grew bolder and began to
talk, winning Darya Alexandrovna’s heart at once by the
genuine admiration of the children that they showed.
‘My, what a beauty! as white as sugar,’ said one,
admiring Tanitchka, and shaking her head; ‘but thin..’
‘Yes, she has been ill.’
‘And so they’ve been bathing you too,’ said another to
the baby.
‘No; he’s only three months old,’ answered Darya
Alexandrovna with pride.
‘You don’t say so!’
‘And have you any children?’
‘I’ve had four; I’ve two living—a boy and a girl. I
weaned her last carnival.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Why, two years old.’
‘Why did you nurse her so long?’
‘It’s our custom; for three fasts..’
And the conversation became most interesting to Darya
Alexandrovna. What sort of time did she have? What was
the matter with the boy? Where was her husband? Did it
often happen?
Darya Alexandrovna felt disinclined to leave the peasant
women, so interesting to her was their conversation, so
completely identical were all their interests. What pleased
her most of all was that she saw clearly what all the
women admired more than anything was her having so
many children, and such fine ones. The peasant women
even made Darya Alexandrovna laugh, and offended the
English governess, because she was the cause of the
laughter she did not understand. One of the younger
women kept staring at the Englishwoman, who was
dressing after all the rest, and when she put on her third
petticoat she could not refrain from the remark, ‘My, she
keeps putting on and putting on, and she’ll never have
done!’ she said, and they all went off into roars.

Chapter 9
On the drive home, as Darya Alexandrovna, with all
her children round her, their heads still wet from their
bath, and a kerchief tied over her own head, was getting
near the house, the coachman said, ‘There’s some
gentleman coming: the master of Pokrovskoe, I do
believe.’
Darya Alexandrovna peeped out in front, and was
delighted when she recognized in the gray hat and gray
coat the familiar figure of Levin walking to meet them.
She was glad to see him at any time, but at this moment
she was specially glad he should see her in all her glory.
No one was better able to appreciate her grandeur than
Levin.
Seeing her, he found himself face to face with one of
the pictures of his daydream of family life.
‘You’re like a hen with your chickens, Darya
Alexandrovna.’
‘Ah, how glad I am to see you!’ she said, holding out
her hand to him.
‘Glad to see me, but you didn’t let me know. My
brother’s staying with me. I got a note from Stiva that you
were here.’
‘From Stiva?’ Darya Alexandrovna asked with surprise.
‘Yes; he writes that you are here, and that he thinks
you might allow me to be of use to you,’ said Levin, and
as he said it he became suddenly embarrassed, and,
stopping abruptly, he walked on in silence by the
wagonette, snapping off the buds of the lime trees and
nibbling them. He was embarrassed through a sense that
Darya Alexandrovna would be annoyed by receiving from
an outsider help that should by rights have come from her
own husband. Darya Alexandrovna certainly did not like
this little way of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s of foisting his
domestic duties on others. And she was at once aware that
Levin was aware of this. It was just for this fineness of
perception, for this delicacy, that Darya Alexandrovna
liked Levin.
‘I know, of course,’ said Levin, ‘that that simply means
that you would like to see me, and I’m exceedingly glad.
Though I can fancy that, used to town housekeeping as
you are, you must feel in the wilds here, and if there’s
anything wanted, I’m altogether at your disposal.’
‘Oh, no!’ said Dolly. ‘At first things were rather
uncomfortable, but now we’ve settled everything
capitally— thanks to my old nurse,’ she said, indicating
Marya Philimonovna, who, seeing that they were speaking
of her, smiled brightly and cordially to Levin. She knew
him, and knew that he would be a good match for her
young lady, and was very keen to see the matter settled.
‘Won’t you get in, sir, we’ll make room this side!’ she
said to him.
‘No, I’ll walk. Children, who’d like to race the horses
with me?’ The children knew Levin very little, and could
not remember when they had seen him, but they
experienced in regard to him none of that strange feeling
of shyness and hostility which children so often experience
towards hypocritical, grown-up people, and for which
they are so often and miserably punished. Hypocrisy in
anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most
penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children
recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it
may be disguised. Whatever faults Levin had, there was
not a trace of hypocrisy in him, and so the children
showed him the same friendliness that they saw in their
mother’s face. On his invitation, the two elder ones at
once jumped out to him and ran with him as simply as
they would have done with their nurse or Miss Hoole or
their mother. Lily, too, began begging to go to him, and
her mother handed her to him; he sat her on his shoulder
and ran along with her.
‘Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, Darya Alexandrovna!’
he said, smiling good-humoredly to the mother; ‘there’s
no chance of my hurting or dropping her.’
And, looking at his strong, agile, assiduously careful and
needlessly wary movements, the mother felt her mind at
rest, and smiled gaily and approvingly as she watched him.
Here, in the country, with children, and with Darya
Alexandrovna, with whom he was in sympathy, Levin was
in a mood not infrequent with him, of childlike lightheartedness
that she particularly liked in him. As he ran
with the children, he taught them gymnastic feats, set Miss
Hoole laughing with his queer English accent, and talked
to Darya Alexandrovna of his pursuits in the country.
After dinner, Darya Alexandrovna, sitting alone with
him on the balcony, began to speak of Kitty.
‘You know, Kitty’s coming here, and is going to spend
the summer with me.’
‘Really,’ he said, flushing, and at once, to change the
conversation, he said: ‘Then I’ll send you two cows, shall
I? If you insist on a bill you shall pay me five roubles a
month; but it’s really too bad of you.’
‘No, thank you. We can manage very well now.’
‘Oh, well, then, I’ll have a look at your cows, and if
you’ll allow me, I’ll give directions about their food.
Everything depends on their food.’
And Levin, to turn the conversation, explained to
Darya Alexandrovna the theory of cow-keeping, based on
the principle that the cow is simply a machine for the
transformation of food into milk, and so on.
He talked of this, and passionately longed to hear more
of Kitty, and, at the same time, was afraid of hearing it. He
dreaded the breaking up of the inward peace he had
gained with such effort.
‘Yes, but still all this has to be looked after, and who is
there to look after it?’ Darya Alexandrovna responded,
without interest.
She had by now got her household matters so
satisfactorily arranged, thanks to Marya Philimonovna, that
she was disinclined to make any change in them; besides,
she had no faith in Levin’s knowledge of farming. General
principles, as to the cow being a machine for the
production of milk, she looked on with suspicion. It
seemed to her that such principles could only be a
hindrance in farm management. It all seemed to her a far
simpler matter: all that was needed, as Marya
Philimonovna had explained, was to give Brindle and
Whitebreast more food and drink, and not to let the cook
carry all the kitchen slops to the laundry maid’s cow. That
was clear. But general propositions as to feeding on meal
and on grass were doubtful and obscure. And, what was
most important, she wanted to talk about Kitty.
Chapter 10
‘Kitty writes to me that there’s nothing she longs for so
much as quiet and solitude,’ Dolly said after the silence
that had followed.
‘And how is she—better?’ Levin asked in agitation.
‘Thank God, she’s quite well again. I never believed
her lungs were affected.’
‘Oh, I’m very glad!’ said Levin, and Dolly fancied she
saw something touching, helpless, in his face as he said this
and looked silently into her face.
‘Let me ask you, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,’ said Darya
Alexandrovna, smiling her kindly and rather mocking
smile, ‘why is it you are angry with Kitty?’
‘I? I’m not angry with her,’ said Levin.
‘Yes, you are angry. Why was it you did not come to
see us nor them when you were in Moscow?’
‘Darya Alexandrovna,’ he said, blushing up to the roots
of his hair, ‘I wonder really that with your kind heart you
don’t feel this. How it is you feel no pity for me, if
nothing else, when you know..’
‘What do I know?’
‘You know I made an offer and that I was refused,’ said
Levin, and all the tenderness he had been feeling for Kitty
a minute before was replaced by a feeling of anger for the
slight he had suffered.
‘What makes you suppose I know?’
‘Because everybody knows it..’
‘That’s just where you are mistaken; I did not know it,
though I had guessed it was so.’
‘Well, now you know it.’
‘All I knew was that something had happened that
made her dreadfully miserable, and that she begged me
never to speak of it. And if she would not tell me, she
would certainly not speak of it to anyone else. But what
did pass between you? Tell me.’
‘I have told you.’
‘When was it?’
‘When I was at their house the last time.’
‘Do you know that,’ said Darya Alexandrovna, ‘I am
awfully, awfully sorry for her. You suffer only from
pride...’
‘Perhaps so,’ said Levin, ‘but..’
She interrupted him.
‘But she, poor girl...I am awfully, awfully sorry for her.
Now I see it all.’
‘Well, Darya Alexandrovna, you must excuse me,’ he
said, getting up. ‘Good-bye, Darya Alexandrovna, till we
meet again.’
‘No, wait a minute,’ she said, clutching him by the
sleeve. ‘Wait a minute, sit down.’
‘Please, please, don’t let us talk of this,’ he said, sitting
down, and at the same time feeling rise up and stir within
his heart a hope he had believed to be buried.
‘If I did not like you,’ she said, and tears came into her
eyes; ‘if I did not know you, as I do know you . . .’
The feeling that had seemed dead revived more and
more, rose up and took possession of Levin’s heart.
‘Yes, I understand it all now,’ said Darya Alexandrovna.
‘You can’t understand it; for you men, who are free and
make your own choice, it’s always clear whom you love.
But a girl’s in a position of suspense, with all a woman’s or
maiden’s modesty, a girl who sees you men from afar, who
takes everything on trust,— a girl may have, and often has,
such a feeling that she cannot tell what to say.’
‘Yes, if the heart does not speak..’
‘No, the heart does speak; but just consider: you men
have views about a girl, you come to the house, you make
friends, you criticize, you wait to see if you have found
what you love, and then, when you are sure you love her,
you make an offer...’
‘Well, that’s not quite it.’
‘Anyway you make an offer, when your love is ripe or
when the balance has completely turned between the two
you are choosing from. But a girl is not asked. She is
expected to make her choice, and yet she cannot choose,
she can only answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’’
‘Yes, to choose between me and Vronsky,’ thought
Levin, and the dead thing that had come to life within
him died again, and only weighed on his heart and set it
aching.
‘Darya Alexandrovna,’ he said, ‘that’s how one chooses
a new dress or some purchase or other, not love. The
choice has been made, and so much the better.... And
there can be no repeating it.’
‘Ah, pride, pride!’ said Darya Alexandrovna, as though
despising him for the baseness of this feeling in comparison
with that other feeling which only women know. ‘At the
time when you made Kitty an offer she was just in a
position in which she could not answer. She was in doubt.
Doubt between you and Vronsky. Him she was seeing
every day, and you she had not seen for a long while.
Supposing she had been older...I, for instance, in her place
could have felt no doubt. I always disliked him, and so it
has turned out.’
Levin recalled Kitty’s answer. She had said: ‘No, that
cannot be..’
‘Darya Alexandrovna,’ he said dryly, ‘I appreciate your
confidence in me; I believe you are making a mistake. But
whether I am right or wrong, that pride you so despise
makes any thought of Katerina Alexandrovna out of the
question for me,— you understand, utterly out of the
question.’
‘I will only say one thing more: you know that I am
speaking of my sister, whom I love as I love my own
children. I don’t say she cared for you, all I meant to say is
that her refusal at that moment proves nothing.’
‘I don’t know!’ said Levin, jumping up. ‘If you only
knew how you are hurting me. It’s just as if a child of
yours were dead, and they were to say to you: He would
have been like this and like that, and he might have lived,
and how happy you would have been in him. But he’s
dead, dead, dead!..’
‘How absurd you are!’ said Darya Alexandrovna,
looking with mournful tenderness at Levin’s excitement.
‘Yes, I see it all more and more clearly,’ she went on
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musingly. ‘So you won’t come to see us, then, when
Kitty’s here?’
‘No, I shan’t come. Of course I won’t avoid meeting
Katerina Alexandrovna, but as far as I can, I will try to
save her the annoyance of my presence.’
‘You are very, very absurd,’ repeated Darya
Alexandrovna, looking with tenderness into his face. ‘Very
well then, let it be as though we had not spoken of this.
What have you come for, Tanya?’ she said in French to
the little girl who had come in.
‘Where’s my spade, mamma?’
‘I speak French, and you must too.’
The little girl tried to say it in French, but could not
remember the French for spade; the mother prompted
her, and then told her in French where to look for the
spade. And this made a disagreeable impression on Levin.
Everything in Darya Alexandrovna’s house and
children struck him now as by no means so charming as a
little while before. ‘And what does she talk French with
the children for?’ he thought; ‘how unnatural and false it
is! And the children feel it so: Learning French and
unlearning sincerity,’ he thought to himself, unaware that
Darya Alexandrovna had thought all that over twenty
times already, and yet, even at the cost of some loss of
sincerity, believed it necessary to teach her children
French in that way.

.
‘But why are you going? Do stay a little.’
Levin stayed to tea; but his good-humor had vanished,
and he felt ill at ease.
After tea he went out into the hall to order his horses
to be put in, and, when he came back, he found Darya
Alexandrovna greatly disturbed, with a troubled face, and
tears in her eyes. While Levin had been outside, an
incident had occurred which had utterly shattered all the
happiness she had been feeling that day, and her pride in
her children. Grisha and Tanya had been fighting over a
ball. Darya Alexandrovna, hearing a scream in the nursery,
ran in and saw a terrible sight. Tanya was pulling Grisha’s
hair, while he, with a face hideous with rage, was beating
her with his fists wherever he could get at her. Something
snapped in Darya Alexandrovna’s heart when she saw this.
It was as if darkness had swooped down upon her life; she
felt that these children of hers, that she was so proud of,
were not merely most ordinary, but positively bad, ill-bred
children, with coarse, brutal propensities—wicked
children.
She could not talk or think of anything else, and she
could not speak to Levin of her misery.
Levin saw she was unhappy and tried to comfort her,
saying that it showed nothing bad, that all children fight;
but, even as he said it, he was thinking in his heart: ‘No, I
won’t be artificial and talk French with my children; but
my children won’t be like that. All one has to do is not
spoil children, not to distort their nature, and they’ll be
delightful. No, my children won’t be like that.’
He said good-bye and drove away, and she did not try
to keep him.
Chapter 11
In the middle of July the elder of the village on Levin’s
sister’s estate, about fifteen miles from Pokrovskoe, came
to Levin to report on how things were going there and on
the hay. The chief source of income on his sister’s estate
was from the riverside meadows. In former years the hay
had been bought by the peasants for twenty roubles the
three acres. When Levin took over the management of the
estate, he thought on examining the grasslands that they
were worth more, and he fixed the price at twenty-five
roubles the three acres. The peasants would not give that
price, and, as Levin suspected, kept off other purchasers.
Then Levin had driven over himself, and arranged to have
the grass cut, partly by hired labor, partly at a payment of a
certain proportion of the crop. His own peasants put every
hindrance they could in the way of this new arrangement,
but it was carried out, and the first year the meadows had
yielded a profit almost double. The previous year—which
was the third year—the peasants had maintained the same
opposition to the arrangement, and the hay had been cut
on the same system. This year the peasants were doing all
the mowing for a third of the hay crop, and the village
elder had come now to announce that the hay had been
cut, and that, fearing rain, they had invited the countinghouse
clerk over, had divided the crop in his presence, and
had raked together eleven stacks as the owner’s share.
From the vague answers to his question how much hay
had been cut on the principal meadow, from the hurry of
the village elder who had made the division, not asking
leave, from the whole tone of the peasant, Levin perceived
that there was something wrong in the division of the hay,
and made up his mind to drive over himself to look into
the matter.
Arriving for dinner at the village, and leaving his horse
at the cottage of an old friend of his, the husband of his
brother’s wet-nurse, Levin went to see the old man in his
bee-house, wanting to find out from him the truth about
the hay. Parmenitch, a talkative, comely old man, gave
Levin a very warm welcome, showed him all he was
doing, told him everything about his bees and the swarms
of that year; but gave vague and unwilling answers to
Levin’s inquiries about the mowing. This confirmed Levin
still more in his suspicions. He went to the hay fields and
examined the stacks. The haystacks could not possibly
contain fifty wagon-loads each, and to convict the peasants
Levin ordered the wagons that had carried the hay to be
brought up directly, to lift one stack, and carry it into the
barn. There turned out to be only thirty-two loads in the
stack. In spite of the village elder’s assertions about the
compressibility of hay, and its having settled down in the
stacks, and his swearing that everything had been done in
the fear of God, Levin stuck to his point that the hay had
been divided without his orders, and that, therefore, he
would not accept that hay as fifty loads to a stack. After a
prolonged dispute the matter was decided by the peasants
taking these eleven stacks, reckoning them as fifty loads
each. The arguments and the division of the haycocks
lasted the whole afternoon. When the last of the hay had
been divided, Levin, intrusting the superintendence of the
rest to the counting-house clerk, sat down on a haycock
marked off by a stake of willow, and looked admiringly at
the meadow swarming with peasants.
In front of him, in the bend of the river beyond the
marsh, moved a bright-colored line of peasant women,
and the scattered hay was being rapidly formed into gray
winding rows over the pale green stubble. After the
women came the men with pitchforks, and from the gray
rows there were growing up broad, high, soft haycocks.
To the left, carts were rumbling over the meadow that had
been already cleared, and one after another the haycocks
vanished, flung up in huge forkfuls, and in their place
there were rising heavy cartloads of fragrant hay hanging
over the horses’ hind-quarters.
‘What weather for haying! What hay it’ll be!’ said an
old man, squatting down beside Levin. ‘It’s tea, not hay!
It’s like scattering grain to the ducks, the way they pick it
up!’ he added, pointing to the growing haycocks. ‘Since
dinnertime they’ve carried a good half of it.’
‘The last load, eh?’ he shouted to a young peasant, who
drove by, standing in the front of an empty cart, shaking
the cord reins.
‘The last, dad!’ the lad shouted back, pulling in the
horse, and, smiling, he looked round at a bright, rosychecked
peasant girl who sat in the cart smiling too, and
drove on.
‘Who’s that? Your son?’ asked Levin.
‘My baby,’ said the old man with a tender smile.
‘What a fine fellow!’
‘The lad’s all right.’
‘Married already?’
‘Yes, it’s two years last St. Philip’s day.’
‘Any children?’
‘Children indeed! Why, for over a year he was
innocent as a babe himself, and bashful too,’ answered the
old man. ‘Well, the hay! It’s as fragrant as tea!’ he
repeated, wishing to change the subject.
Levin looked more attentively at Ivan Parmenov and
his wife. They were loading a haycock onto the cart not
far from him. Ivan Parmenov was standing on the cart,
taking, laying in place, and stamping down the huge
bundles of hay, which his pretty young wife deftly handed
up to him, at first in armfuls, and then on the pitchfork.
The young wife worked easily, merrily, and dexterously.
The close-packed hay did not once break away off her
fork. First she gathered it together, stuck the fork into it,
then with a rapid, supple movement leaned the whole
weight of her body on it, and at once with a bend of her
back under the red belt she drew herself up, and arching
her full bosom under the white smock, with a smart turn
swung the fork in her arms, and flung the bundle of hay
high onto the cart. Ivan, obviously doing his best to save
her every minute of unnecessary labor, made haste,
opening his arms to clutch the bundle and lay it in the
cart. As she raked together what was left of the hay, the
young wife shook off the bits of hay that had fallen on her
neck, and straightening the red kerchief that had dropped
forward over her white brow, not browned like her face
by the sun, she crept under the cart to tie up the load.
Ivan directed her how to fasten the cord to the crosspiece,
and at something she said he laughed aloud. In the
expressions of both faces was to be seen vigorous, young,
freshly awakened love.
Chapter 12
The load was tied on. Ivan jumped down and took the
quiet, sleek horse by the bridle. The young wife flung the
rake up on the load, and with a bold step, swinging her
arms, she went to join the women, who were forming a
ring for the haymakers’ dance. Ivan drove off to the road
and fell into line with the other loaded carts. The peasant
women, with their rakes on their shoulders, --- with
bright flowers, and chattering with ringing, merry voices,
walked behind the hay cart. One wild untrained female
voice broke into a song, and sang it alone through a verse,
and then the same verse was taken up and repeated by half
a hundred strong healthy voices, of all sorts, coarse and
fine, singing in unison.
The women, all singing, began to come close to Levin,
and he felt as though a storm were swooping down upon
him with a thunder of merriment. The storm swooped
down, enveloped him and the haycock on which he was
lying, and the other haycocks, and the wagon-loads, and
the whole meadow and distant fields all seemed to be
shaking and singing to the measures of this wild merry
song with its shouts and whistles and clapping. Levin felt
envious of this health and mirthfulness; he longed to take
part in the expression of this joy of life. But he could do
nothing, and had to lie and look on and listen. When the
peasants, with their singing, had vanished out of sight and
hearing, a weary feeling of despondency at his own
isolation, his physical inactivity, his alienation from this
world, came over Levin.
Some of the very peasants who had been most active in
wrangling with him over the hay, some whom he had
treated with contumely, and who had tried to cheat him,
those very peasants had greeted him goodhumoredly, and
evidently had not, were incapable of having any feeling of
rancor against him, any regret, any recollection even of
having tried to deceive him. All that was drowned in a sea
of merry common labor. God gave the day, God gave the
strength. And the day and the strength were consecrated
to labor, and that labor was its own reward. For whom the
labor? What would be its fruits? These were idle
considerations— beside the point.
Often Levin had admired this life, often he had a sense
of envy of the men who led this life; but today for the first
time, especially under the influence of what he had seen in
the attitude of Ivan Parmenov to his young wife, the idea
presented itself definitely to his mind that it was in his
power to exchange the dreary, artificial, idle, and
individualistic life he was leading for this laborious, pure,
and socially delightful life.
The old man who had been sitting beside him had long
ago gone home; the people had all separated. Those who
lived near had gone home, while those who came from far
were gathered into a group for supper, and to spend the
night in the meadow. Levin, unobserved by the peasants,
still lay on the haycock, and still looked on and listened
and mused. The peasants who remained for the night in
the meadow scarcely slept all the short summer night. At
first there was the sound of merry talk and laughing all
together over the supper, then singing again and laughter.
All the long day of toil had left no trace in them but
lightness of heart. Before the early dawn all was hushed.
Nothing was to be heard but the night sounds of the frogs
that never ceased in the marsh, and the horses snorting in
the mist that rose over the meadow before the morning.
Rousing himself, Levin got up from the haycock, and
looking at the stars, he saw that the night was over.
‘Well, what am I going to do? How am I to set about
it?’ he said to himself, trying to express to himself all the
thoughts and feelings he had passed through in that brief
night. All the thoughts and feelings he had passed through
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fell into three separate trains of thought. One was the
renunciation of his old life, of his utterly useless education.
This renunciation gave him satisfaction, and was easy and
simple. Another series of thoughts and mental images
related to the life he longed to live now. The simplicity,
the purity, the sanity of this life he felt clearly, and he was
convinced he would find in it the content, the peace, and
the dignity, of the lack of which he was so miserably
conscious. But a third series of ideas turned upon the
question how to effect this transition from the old life to
the new. And there nothing took clear shape for him.
‘Have a wife? Have work and the necessity of work?
Leave Pokrovskoe? Buy land? Become a member of a
peasant community? Marry a peasant girl? How am I to set
about it?’ he asked himself again, and could not find an
answer. ‘I haven’t slept all night, though, and I can’t think
it out clearly,’ he said to himself. ‘I’ll work it out later.
One thing’s certain, this night has decided my fate. All my
old dreams of home life were absurd, not the real thing,’
he told himself. ‘It’s all ever so much simpler and better..’
‘How beautiful!’ he thought, looking at the strange, as
it were, mother-of-pearl shell of white fleecy cloudless
resting right over his head in the middle of the sky. ‘How
exquisite it all is in this exquisite night! And when was
there time for that cloud-shell to form? Just now I looked
at the sky, and there was nothing in it—only two white
streaks. Yes, and so imperceptibly too my views of life
changed!’
He went out of the meadow and walked along the
highroad towards the village. A slight wind arose, and the
sky looked gray and sullen. The gloomy moment had
come that usually precedes the dawn, the full triumph of
light over darkness.
Shrinking from the cold, Levin walked rapidly, looking
at the ground. ‘What’s that? Someone coming,’ he
thought, catching the tinkle of bells, and lifting his head.
Forty paces from him a carriage with four horses harnessed
abreast was driving towards him along the grassy road on
which he was walking. The shaft-horses were tilted against
the shafts by the ruts, but the dexterous driver sitting on
the box held the shaft over the ruts, so that the wheels ran
on the smooth part of the road.
This was all Levin noticed, and without wondering
who it could be, he gazed absently at the coach.
In the coach was an old lady dozing in one corner, and
at the window, evidently only just awake, sat a young girl
holding in both hands the ribbons of a white cap. With a
face full of light and thought, full of a subtle, complex
inner life, that was remote from Levin, she was gazing
beyond him at the glow of the sunrise.
At the very instant when this apparition was vanishing,
the truthful eyes glanced at him. She recognized him, and
her face lighted up with wondering delight.
He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes
like those in the world. There was only one creature in
the world that could concentrate for him all the brightness
and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty. He
understood that she was driving to Ergushovo from the
railway station. And everything that had been stirring
Levin during that sleepless night, all the resolutions he had
made, all vanished at once. He recalled with horror his
dreams of marrying a peasant girl. There only, in the
carriage that had crossed over to the other side of the road,
and was rapidly disappearing, there only could he find the
solution of the riddle of his life, which had weighed so
agonizingly upon him of late.
She did not look out again. The sound of the carriagesprings
was no longer audible, the bells could scarcely be
heard. The barking of dogs showed the carriage had
reached the village, and all that was left was the empty
fields all round, the village in front, and he himself isolated
and apart from it all, wandering lonely along the deserted
highroad.
He glanced at the sky, expecting to find there the cloud
shell he had been admiring and taking as the symbol of the
ideas and feelings of that night. There was nothing in the
sky in the least like a shell. There, in the remote heights
above, a mysterious change had been accomplished. There
was no trace of shell, and there was stretched over fully
half the sky an even cover of tiny and ever tinier cloudlets.
The sky had grown blue and bright; and with the same
softness, but with the same remoteness, it met his
questioning gaze.
‘No,’ he said to himself, ‘however good that life of
simplicity and toil may be, I cannot go back to it. I love
HER.’
Chapter 13
None but those who were most intimate with Alexey
Alexandrovitch knew that, while on the surface the
coldest and most reasonable of men, he had one weakness
quite opposed to the general trend of his character. Alexey
Alexandrovitch could not hear or see a child or woman
crying without being moved. The sight of tears threw him
into a state of nervous agitation, and he utterly lost all
power of reflection. The chief secretary of his department
and his private secretary were aware of this, and used to
warn women who came with petitions on no account to
give way to tears, if they did not want to ruin their
chances. ‘He will get angry, and will not listen to you,’
they used to say. And as a fact, in such cases the emotional
disturbance set up in Alexey Alexandrovitch by the sight
of tears found expression in hasty anger. ‘I can do nothing.
Kindly leave the room!’ he would commonly cry in such
cases.

.
When returning from the races Anna had informed him
of her relations with Vronsky, and immediately afterwards
had burst into tears, hiding her face in her hands, Alexey
Alexandrovitch, for all the fury aroused in him against her,
was aware at the same time of a rush of that emotional
disturbance always produced in him by tears. Conscious of
it, and conscious that any expression of his feelings at that
minute would be out of keeping with the position, he
tried to suppress every manifestation of life in himself, and
so neither stirred nor looked at her. This was what had
caused that strange expression of deathlike rigidity in his
face which had so impressed Anna.
When they reached the house he helped her to get out
of the carriage, and making an effort to master himself,
took leave of her with his usual urbanity, and uttered that
phrase that bound him to nothing; he said that tomorrow
he would let her know his decision.
His wife’s words, confirming his worst suspicions, had
sent a cruel pang to the heart of Alexey Alexandrovitch.
That pang was intensified by the strange feeling of physical
pity for her set up by her tears. But when he was all alone
in the carriage Alexey Alexandrovitch, to his surprise and
delight, felt complete relief both from this pity and from
the doubts and agonies of jealousy.
He experienced the sensations of a man who has had a
tooth out after suffering long from toothache. After a
fearful agony and a sense of something huge, bigger than
the head itself, being torn out of his jaw, the sufferer,
hardly able to believe in his own good luck, feels all at
once that what has so long poisoned his existence and
enchained his attention, exists no longer, and that he can
live and think again, and take interest in other things
besides his tooth. This feeling Alexey Alexandrovitch was
experiencing. The agony had been strange and terrible,
but now it was over; he felt that he could live again and
think of something other than his wife.
‘No honor, no heart, no religion; a corrupt woman. I
always knew it and always saw it, though I tried to deceive
myself to spare her,’ he said to himself. And it actually
seemed to him that he always had seen it: he recalled
incidents of their past life, in which he had never seen
anything wrong before—now these incidents proved
clearly that she had always been a corrupt woman. ‘I made
a mistake in linking my life to hers; but there was nothing
wrong in my mistake, and so I cannot be unhappy. It’s not
I that am to blame,’ he told himself, ‘but she. But I have
nothing to do with her. She does not exist for me..’
Everything relating to her and her son, towards whom
his sentiments were as much changed as towards her,
ceased to interest him. The only thing that interested him
now was the question of in what way he could best, with
most propriety and comfort for himself, and thus with
most justice, extricate himself from the mud with which
she had spattered him in her fall, and then proceed along
his path of active, honorable, and useful existence.
‘I cannot be made unhappy by the fact that a
contemptible woman has committed a crime. I have only
to find the best way out of the difficult position in which
she has placed me. And I shall find it,’ he said to himself,
frowning more and more. ‘I’m not the first nor the last.’
And to say nothing of historical instances dating from the
‘Fair Helen’ of Menelaus, recently revived in the memory
of all, a whole list of contemporary examples of husbands
with unfaithful wives in the highest society rose before
Alexey Alexandrovitch’s imagination. ‘Daryalov,
Poltavsky, Prince Karibanov, Count Paskudin, Dram....
Yes, even Dram, such an honest, capable
fellow...Semyonov, Tchagin, Sigonin,’ Alexey
Alexandrovitch remembered. ‘Admitting that a certain
quite irrational ridicule falls to the lot of these men, yet I
never saw anything but a misfortune in it, and always felt
sympathy for it,’ Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself,
though indeed this was not the fact, and he had never felt
sympathy for misfortunes of that kind, but the more
frequently he had heard of instances of unfaithful wives
betraying their husbands, the more highly he had thought
of himself. ‘It is a misfortune which may befall anyone.
And this misfortune has befallen me. The only thing to be
done is to make the best of the position.’
And he began passing in review the methods of
proceeding of men who had been in the same position
that he was in.
‘Daryalov fought a duel...’
The duel had particularly fascinated the thoughts of
Alexey Alexandrovitch in his youth, just because he was
physically a coward, and was himself well aware of the
fact. Alexey Alexandrovitch could not without horror
contemplate the idea of a pistol aimed at himself, and
never made use of any weapon in his life. This horror had
in his youth set him pondering on dueling, and picturing
himself in a position in which he would have to expose his
life to danger. Having attained success and an established
position in the world, he had long ago forgotten this
feeling; but the habitual bent of feeling reasserted itself,
and dread of his own cowardice proved even now so
strong that Alexey Alexandrovitch spent a long while
thinking over the question of dueling in all its aspects, and
hugging the idea of a duel, though he was fully aware
beforehand that he would never under any circumstances
fight one.
‘There’s no doubt our society is still so barbarous (it’s
not the same in England) that very many’—and among
these were those whose opinion Alexey Alexandrovitch
particularly valued—‘look favorably on the duel; but what
result is attained by it? Suppose I call him out,’ Alexey
Alexandrovitch went on to himself, and vividly picturing
the night he would spend after the challenge, and the
pistol aimed at him, he shuddered, and knew that he never
would do it—‘suppose I call him out. Suppose I am
taught,’ he went on musing, ‘to shoot; I press the trigger,’
he said to himself, closing his eyes, ‘and it turns out I have
killed him,’ Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself, and he
shook his head as though to dispel such silly ideas. ‘What
sense is there in murdering a man in order to define one’s
relation to a guilty wife and son? I should still just as much
have to decide what I ought to do with her. But what is
more probable and what would doubtless occur—I should
be killed or wounded. I, the innocent person, should be
the victim—killed or wounded. It’s even more senseless.
But apart from that, a challenge to fight would be an act
hardly honest on my side. Don’t I know perfectly well
that my friends would never allow me to fight a duel—
would never allow the life of a statesman, needed by
Russia, to be exposed to danger? Knowing perfectly well
beforehand that the matter would never come to real
danger, it would amount to my simply trying to gain a
certain sham reputation by such a challenge. That would
be dishonest, that would be false, that would be deceiving
myself and others. A duel is quite irrational, and no one
expects it of me. My aim is simply to safeguard my
reputation, which is essential for the uninterrupted pursuit
of my public duties.’ Official duties, which had always
been of great consequence in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s
eyes, seemed of special importance to his mind at this
moment. Considering and rejecting the duel, Alexey
Alexandrovitch turned to divorce—another solution
selected by several of the husbands he remembered.
Passing in mental review all the instances he knew of
divorces (there were plenty of them in the very highest
society with which he was very familiar), Alexey
Alexandrovitch could not find a single example in which
the object of divorce was that which he had in view. In all
these instances the husband had practically ceded or sold
his unfaithful wife, and the very party which, being in
fault, had not the right to contract a fresh marriage, had
formed counterfeit, pseudo-matrimonial ties with a selfstyled
husband. In his own case, Alexey Alexandrovitch
saw that a legal divorce, that is to say, one in which only
the guilty wife would be repudiated, was impossible of
attainment. He saw that the complex conditions of the life
they led made the coarse proofs of his wife’s guilt,
required by the law, out of the question; he saw that a
certain refinement in that life would not admit of such
proofs being brought forward, even if he had them, and
that to bring forward such proofs would damage him in
the public estimation more than it would her.
An attempt at divorce could lead to nothing but a
public scandal, which would be a perfect godsend to his
enemies for calumny and attacks on his high position in
society. His chief object, to define the position with the
least amount of disturbance possible, would not be
attained by divorce either. Moreover, in the event of
divorce, or even of an attempt to obtain a divorce, it was
obvious that the wife broke off all relations with the
husband and threw in her lot with the lover. And in spite
of the complete, as he supposed, contempt and
indifference he now felt for his wife, at the bottom of his
heart, Alexey Alexandrovitch still had one feeling left in
regard to her—a disinclination to see her free to throw in
her lot with Vronsky, so that her crime would be to her
advantage. The mere notion of this so exasperated Alexey
Alexandrovitch, that directly it rose to his mind he
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groaned with inward agony, and got up and changed his
place in the carriage, and for a long while after, he sat with
scowling brows, wrapping his numbed and bony legs in
the fleecy rug.
‘Apart from formal divorce, One might still do like
Karibanov, Paskudin, and that good fellow Dram—that is,
separate from one’s wife,’ he went on thinking, when he
had regained his composure. But this step too presented
the same drawback of public scandal as a divorce, and
what was more, a separation, quite as much as a regular
divorce, flung his wife into the arms of Vronsky. ‘No, it’s
out of the question, out of the question!’ he said again,
twisting his rug about him again. ‘I cannot be unhappy,
but neither she nor he ought to be happy.’
The feeling of jealousy, which had tortured him during
the period of uncertainty, had passed away at the instant
when the tooth had been with agony extracted by his
wife’s words. But that feeling had been replaced by
another, the desire, not merely that she should not be
triumphant, but that she should get due punishment for
her crime. He did not acknowledge this feeling, but at the
bottom of his heart he longed for her to suffer for having
destroyed his peace of mind—his honor. And going once
again over the conditions inseparable from a duel, a
divorce, a separation, and once again rejecting them,
Alexey Alexandrovitch felt convinced that there was only
one solution,—to keep her with him, concealing what had
happened from the world, and using every measure in his
power to break off the intrigue, and still more—though
this he did not admit to himself—to punish her. ‘I must
inform her of my conclusion, that thinking over the
terrible position in which she has placed her family, all
other solutions will be worse for both sides than an
external status quo, and that such I agree to retain, on the
strict condition of obedience on her part to my wishes,
that is to say, cessation of all intercourse with her lover.’
When this decision had been finally adopted, another
weighty consideration occurred to Alexey
Alexandrovitch in support of it. ‘By such a course only
shall I be acting in accordance with the dictates of
religion,’ he told himself. ‘In adopting this course, I am
not casting off a guilty wife, but giving her a chance of
amendment; and, indeed, difficult as the task will be to
me, I shall devote part of my energies to her reformation
and salvation.’

.’
Though Alexey Alexandrovitch was perfectly aware
that he could not exert any moral influence over his wife,
that such an attempt at reformation could lead to nothing
but falsity; though in passing through these difficult
moments he had not once thought of seeking guidance in
religion, yet now, when his conclusion corresponded, as it
seemed to him, with the requirements of religion, this
religious sanction to his decision gave him complete
satisfaction, and to some extent restored his peace of mind.
He was pleased to think that, even in such an important
crisis in life, no one would be able to say that he had not
acted in accordance with the principles of that religion
whose banner he had always held aloft amid the general
coolness and indifference. As he pondered over subsequent
developments, Alexey Alexandrovitch did not see, indeed,
why his relations with his wife should not remain
practically the same as before. No doubt, she could never
regain his esteem, but there was not, and there could not
be, any sort of reason that his existence should be
troubled, and that he should suffer because she was a bad
and faithless wife. ‘Yes, time will pass; time, which
arranges all things, and the old relations will be
reestablished,’ Alexey Alexandrovitch told himself; ‘so far
reestablished, that is, that I shall not be sensible of a break
in the continuity of my life. She is bound to be unhappy,
but I am not to blame, and so I cannot be unhappy.’
Chapter 14
As he neared Petersburg, Alexey Alexandrovitch not
only adhered entirely to his decision, but was even
composing in his head the letter he would write to his
wife. Going into the porter’s room, Alexey
Alexandrovitch glanced at the letters and papers brought
from his office, and directed that they should be brought
to him in his study.
‘The horses can be taken out and I will see no one,’ he
said in answer to the porter, with a certain pleasure,
indicative of his agreeable frame of mind, emphasizing the
words, ‘see no one.’
In his study Alexey Alexandrovitch walked up and
down twice, and stopped at an immense writing-table, on
which six candles had already been lighted by the valet
who had preceded him. He cracked his knuckles and sat
down, sorting out his writing appurtenances. Putting his
elbows on the table, he bent his head on one side, thought
a minute, and began to write, without pausing for a
second. He wrote without using any form of address to
her, and wrote in French, making use of the plural ‘vous,’
which has not the same note of coldness as the
corresponding Russian form.
‘At our last conversation, I notified you of my intention
to communicate to you my decision in regard to the
subject of that conversation. Having carefully considered
everything, I am writing now with the object of fulfilling
that promise. My decision is as follows. Whatever your
conduct may have been, I do not consider myself justified
in breaking the ties in which we are bound by a Higher
Power. The family cannot be broken up by a whim, a
caprice, or even by the sin of one of the partners in the
marriage, and our life must go on as it has done in the
past. This is essential for me, for you, and for our son. I
am fully persuaded that you have repented and do repent
of what has called forth the present letter, and that you
will cooperate with me in eradicating the cause of our
estrangement, and forgetting the past. In the contrary
event, you can conjecture what awaits you and your son.
All this I hope to discuss more in detail in a personal
interview. As the season is drawing to a close, I would beg
you to return to Petersburg as quickly as possible, not later
than Tuesday. All necessary preparations shall be made for
your arrival here. I beg you to note that I attach particular
significance to compliance with this request.
A. Karenin
‘P.S.—I enclose the money which may be needed for
your expenses.’
He read the letter through and felt pleased with it, and
especially that he had remembered to enclose money:
there was not a harsh word, not a reproach in it, nor was
there undue indulgence. Most of all, it was a golden
bridge for return. Folding the letter and smoothing it with
a massive ivory knife, and putting it in an envelope with
the money, he rang the bell with the gratification it always
afforded him to use the well arranged appointments of his
writing-table.
‘Give this to the courier to be delivered to Anna
Arkadyevna tomorrow at the summer villa,’ he said,
getting up.
‘Certainly, your excellency; tea to be served in the
study?’
Alexey Alexandrovitch ordered tea to be brought to
the study, and playing with the massive paper-knife, he
moved to his easy chair, near which there had been placed
ready for him a lamp and the French work on Egyptian
hieroglyphics that he had begun. Over the easy chair there
hung in a gold frame an oval portrait of Anna, a fine
painting by a celebrated artist. Alexey Alexandrovitch
glanced at it. The unfathomable eyes gazed ironically and
insolently at him. Insufferably insolent and challenging was
the effect in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s eyes of the black lace
about the head, admirably touched in by the painter, the
black hair and handsome white hand with one finger
lifted, covered with rings. After looking at the portrait for
a minute, Alexey Alexandrovitch shuddered so that his lips
quivered and he uttered the sound ‘brrr,’ and turned away.
He made haste to sit down in his easy chair and opened
the book. He tried to read, but he could not revive the
very vivid interest he had felt before in Egyptian
hieroglyphics. He looked at the book and thought of
something else. He thought not of his wife, but of a
complication that had arisen in his official life, which at
the time constituted the chief interest of it. He felt that he
had penetrated more deeply than ever before into this
intricate affair, and that he had originated a leading idea—
he could say it without self-flattery—calculated to clear up
the whole business, to strengthen him in his official career,
to discomfit his enemies, and thereby to be of the greatest
benefit to the government. Directly the servant had set the
tea and left the room, Alexey Alexandrovitch got up and
went to the writing-table. Moving into the middle of the
table a portfolio of papers, with a scarcely perceptible smile
of self-satisfaction, he took a pencil from a rack and
plunged into the perusal of a complex report relating to
the present complication. The complication was of this
nature: Alexey Alexandrovitch’s characteristic quality as a
politician, that special individual qualification that every
rising functionary possesses, the qualification that with his
unflagging ambition, his reserve, his honesty, and with his
self-confidence had made his career, was his contempt for
red tape, his cutting down of correspondence, his direct
contact, wherever possible, with the living fact, and his
economy. It happened that the famous Commission of the
2nd of June had set on foot an inquiry into the irrigation
of lands in the Zaraisky province, which fell under Alexey
Alexandrovitch’s department, and was a glaring example of
fruitless expenditure and paper reforms. Alexey
Alexandrovitch was aware of the truth of this. The
irrigation of these lands in the Zaraisky province had been
initiated by the predecessor of Alexey Alexandrovitch’s
predecessor. And vast sums of money had actually been
spent and were still being spent on this business, and
utterly unproductively, and the whole business could
obviously lead to nothing whatever. Alexey
Alexandrovitch had perceived this at once on entering
office, and would have liked to lay hands on the Board of
Irrigation. But at first, when he did not yet feel secure in
his position, he knew it would affect too many interests,
and would be injudicious. Later on he had been engrossed
in other questions, and had simply forgotten the Board of
Irrigation. It went of itself, like all such boards, by the
mere force of inertia. (Many people gained their
livelihood by the Board of Irrigation, especially one highly
conscientious and musical family: all the daughters played
on stringed instruments, and Alexey Alexandrovitch knew
the family and had stood godfather to one of the elder
daughters.) The raising of this question by a hostile
department was in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s opinion a
dishonorable proceeding, seeing that in every department
there were things similar and worse, which no one
inquired into, for well-known reasons of official etiquette.
However, now that the glove had been thrown down to
him, he had boldly picked it up and demanded the
appointment of a special commission to investigate and
verify the working of the Board of Irrigation of the lands
in the Zaraisky province. But in compensation he gave no
quarter to the enemy either. He demanded the
appointment of another special commission to inquire into
the question of the Native Tribes Organization
Committee. The question of the Native Tribes had been
brought up incidentally in the Commission of the 2nd of
June, and had been pressed forward actively by Alexey
Alexandrovitch as one admitting of no delay on account of
the deplorable condition bf the native tribes. In the
commission this question had been a ground of contention
between several departments. The department hostile to
Alexey Alexandrovitch proved that the condition of the
native tribes was exceedingly flourishing, that the
proposed reconstruction might be the ruin of their
prosperity, and that if there were anything wrong, it arose
mainly from the failure on the part of Alexey
Alexandrovitch’s department to carry out the measures
prescribed by law. Now Alexey Alexandrovitch intended
to demand: First, that a new commission should be formed
which should be empowered to investigate the condition
of the native tribes on the spot; secondly, if it should
appear that the condition of the native tribes actually was
such as it appeared to be from the official documents in
the hands of the committee, that another new scientific
commission should be appointed to investigate the
deplorable condition of the native tribes from the—(1)
political, (2) administrative, (3) economic, (4)
ethnographical, (5) material, and (6) religious points of
view; thirdly, that evidence should be required from the
rival department of the measures that had been taken
during the last ten years by that department for averting
the disastrous conditions in which the native tribes were
now placed; and fourthly and finally, that that department
explain why it had, as appeared from the evidence before
the committee, from No. 17,015 and 18,038, from
December 5, 1863, and June 7, 1864, acted in direct
contravention of the intent of the law T...Act 18, and the
note to Act 36. A flash of eagerness suffused the face of
Alexey Alexandrovitch as he rapidly wrote out a synopsis
of these ideas for his own benefit. Having filled a sheet of
paper, he got up, rang, and sent a note to the chief
secretary of his department to look up certain necessary
facts for him. Getting up and walking about the room, he
glanced again at the portrait, frowned, and smiled
contemptuously. After reading a little more of the book
on Egyptian hieroglyphics, and renewing his interest in it,
Alexey Alexandrovitch went to bed at eleven o’clock, and
recollecting as he lay in bed the incident with his wife, he
saw it now in by no means such a gloomy light.
Chapter 15
Though Anna had obstinately and with exasperation
contradicted Vronsky when he told her their position was
impossible, at the bottom of her heart she regarded her
own position as false and dishonorable, and she longed
with her whole soul to change it. On the way home from
the races she had told her husband the truth in a moment
of excitement, and in spite of the agony she had suffered
in doing so, she was glad of it. After her husband had left
her, she told herself that she was glad, that now everything
was made clear, and at least there would be no more lying
and deception. It seemed to her beyond doubt that her
position was now made clear forever. It might be bad, this
new position, but it would be clear; there would be no
indefiniteness or falsehood about it. The pain she had
caused herself and her husband in uttering those words
would be rewarded now by everything being made clear,
she thought. That evening she saw Vronsky, but she did
not tell him of what had passed between her and her
husband, though, to make the position definite, it was
necessary to tell him.
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When she woke up next morning the first thing that
rose to her mind was what she had said to her husband,
and those words seemed to her so awful that she could not
conceive now how she could have brought herself to utter
those strange, coarse words, and could not imagine what
would come of it. But the words were spoken, and Alexey
Alexandrovitch had gone away without saying anything. ‘I
saw Vronsky and did not tell him. At the very instant he
was going away I would have turned him back and told
him, but I changed my mind, because it was strange that I
had not told him the first minute. Why was it I wanted to
tell him and did not tell him?’ And in answer to this
question a burning blush of shame spread over her face.
She knew what had kept her from it, she knew that she
had been ashamed. Her position, which had seemed to her
simplified the night before, suddenly struck her now as not
only not simple, but as absolutely hopeless. She felt
terrified at the disgrace, of which she had not ever thought
before. Directly she thought of what her husband would
do, the most terrible ideas came to her mind. She had a
vision of being turned out of the house, of her shame
being proclaimed to all the world. She asked herself where
she should go when she was turned out of the house, and
she could not find an answer.
When she thought of Vronsky, it seemed to her that he
did not love her, that he was already beginning to be tired
of her, that she could not offer herself to him, and she felt
bitter against him for it. It seemed to her that the words
that she had spoken to her husband, and had continually
repeated in her imagination, she had said to everyone, and
everyone had heard them. She could not bring herself to
look those of her own household in the face. She could
not bring herself to call her maid, and still less go
downstairs and see her son and his governess.
The maid, who had been listening at her door for a
long while, came into her room of her own accord. Anna
glanced inquiringly into her face, and blushed with a
scared look. The maid begged her pardon for coming in,
saying that she had fancied the bell rang. She brought her
clothes and a note. The note was from Betsy. Betsy
reminded her that Liza Merkalova and Baroness Shtoltz
were coming to play croquet with her that morning with
their adorers, Kaluzhsky and old Stremov. ‘Come, if only
as a study in morals. I shall expect you,’ she finished.
Anna read the note and heaved a deep sigh.
‘Nothing, I need nothing,’ she said to Annushka, who
was rearranging the bottles and brushes on the dressing
table. ‘You can go. I’ll dress at once and come down. I
need nothing.’
Annushka went out, but Anna did not begin dressing,
and sat in the same position, her head and hands hanging
listlessly, and every now and then she shivered all over,
seemed as though she would make some gesture, utter
some word, and sank back into lifelessness again. She
repeated continually, ‘My God! my God!’ But neither
‘God’ nor ‘my’ had any meaning to her. The idea of
seeking help in her difficulty in religion was as remote
from her as seeking help from Alexey Alexandrovitch
himself, although she had never had doubts of the faith in
which she had been brought up. She knew that the
support of religion was possible only upon condition of
renouncing what made up for her the whole meaning of
life. She was not simply miserable, she began to feel alarm
at the new spiritual condition, never experienced before,
in which she found herself. She felt as though everything
were beginning to be double in her soul, just as objects
sometimes appear double to over-tired eyes. She hardly
knew at times what it was she feared, and what she hoped
for. Whether she feared or desired what had happened, or
what was going to happen, and exactly what she longed
for, she could not have said.
‘Ah, what am I doing!’ she said to herself, feeling a
sudden thrill of pain in both sides of her head. When she
came to herself, she saw that she was holding her hair in
both hands, each side of her temples, and pulling it. She
jumped up, and began walking about.
‘The coffee is ready, and mademoiselle and Seryozha
are waiting,’ said Annushka, coming back again and
finding Anna in the same position.
‘Seryozha? What about Seryozha?’ Anna asked, with
sudden eagerness, recollecting her son’s existence for the
first time that morning.
‘He’s been naughty, I think,’ answered Annushka with
a smile.
‘In what way?’
‘Some peaches were lying on the table in the corner
room. I think he slipped in and ate one of them on the
sly.’

.’
The recollection of her son suddenly roused Anna from
the helpless condition in which she found herself. She
recalled the partly sincere, though greatly exaggerated, role
of the mother living for her child, which she had taken up
of late years, and she felt with joy that in the plight in
which she found herself she had a support, quite apart
from her relation to her husband or to Vronsky. This
support was her son. In whatever position she might be
placed, she could not lose her son. Her husband might put
her to shame and turn her out, Vronsky might grow cold
to her and go on living his own life apart (she thought of
him again with bitterness and reproach); she could not
leave her son. She had an aim in life. And she must act; act
to secure this relation to her son, so that he might not be
taken from her. Quickly indeed, as quickly as possible, she
must take action before he was taken from her. She must
take her son and go away. Here was the one thing she had
to do now. She needed consolation. She must be calm,
and get out of this insufferable position. The thought of
immediate action binding her to her son, of going away
somewhere with him, gave her this consolation.
She dressed quickly, went downstairs, and with resolute
steps walked into the drawing room, where she found, as
usual, waiting for her, the coffee, Seryozha, and his
governess. Seryozha, all in white, with his back and head
bent, was standing at a table under a looking-glass, and
with an expression of intense concentration which she
knew well, and in which he resembled his father, he was
doing something to the flowers he carried.
The governess had a particularly severe expression.
Seryozha screamed shrilly, as he often did, ‘Ah, mamma!’
and stopped, hesitating whether to go to greet his mother
and put down the flowers, or to finish making the wreath
and go with the flowers.
The governess, after saying good-morning, began a
long and detailed account of Seryozha’s naughtiness, but
Anna did not hear her; she was considering whether she
would take her with her or not. ‘No, I won’t take her,’
she decided. ‘I’ll go alone with my child.’
‘Yes, it’s very wrong,’ said Anna, and taking her son by
the shoulder she looked at him, not severely, but with a
timid glance that bewildered and delighted the boy, and
she kissed him. ‘Leave him to me,’ she said to the
astonished governess, and not letting go of her son, she sat
down at the table, where coffee was set ready for her.
‘Mamma! I...I...didn’t...’ he said, trying to make out
from her expression what was in store for him in regard to
the peaches.
‘Seryozha,’ she said, as soon as the governess had left
the room, ‘that was wrong, but you’ll never do it again,
will you?... You love me?’
She felt that the tears were coming into her eyes. ‘Can
I help loving him?’ she said to herself, looking deeply into
his scared and at the same time delighted eyes. ‘And can
he ever join his father in punishing me? Is it possible he
will not feel for me?’ Tears were already flowing down
her face, and to hide them she got up abruptly and almost
ran out on to the terrace.
After the thunder showers of the last few days, cold,
bright weather had set in. The air was cold in the bright
sun that filtered through the freshly washed leaves.
She shivered, both from the cold and from the inward
horror which had clutched her with fresh force in the
open air.
‘Run along, run along to Mariette,’ she said to
Seryozha, who had followed her out, and she began
walking up and down on the straw matting of the terrace.
‘Can it be that they won’t forgive me, won’t understand
how it all couldn’t be helped?’ she said to herself.
Standing still, and looking at the tops of the aspen trees
waving in the wind, with their freshly washed, brightly
shining leaves in the cold sunshine, she knew that they
would not forgive her, that everyone and everything
would be merciless to her now as was that sky, that green.
And again she felt that everything was split in two in her
soul. ‘I mustn’t, mustn’t think,’ she said to herself. ‘I must
get ready. To go where? When? Whom to take with me?
Yes, to Moscow by the evening train. Annushka and
Seryozha, and only the most necessary things. But first I
must write to them both.’ She went quickly indoors into
her boudoir, sat down at the table, and wrote to her
husband:—‘After what has happened, I cannot remain any
longer in your house. I am going away, and taking my son
with me. I don’t know the law, and so I don’t know with
which of the parents the son should remain; but I take him
with me because I cannot live without him. Be generous,
leave him to me.’
Up to this point she wrote rapidly and naturally, but
the appeal to his generosity, a quality she did not
recognize in him, and the necessity of winding up the
letter with something touching, pulled her up. ‘Of my
fault and my remorse I cannot speak, because..’
She stopped again, finding no connection in her
ideas.’No,’ she said to herself, ‘there’s no need of
anything,’ and tearing up the letter, she wrote it again,
leaving out the allusion to generosity, and sealed it up.
Another letter had to be written to Vronsky. ‘I have
told my husband,’ she wrote, and she sat a long while
unable to write more. It was so coarse, so unfeminine.
‘And what more am I to write him?’ she said to herself.
Again a flush of shame spread over her face; she recalled
his composure, and a feeling of anger against him impelled
her to tear the sheet with the phrase she had written into
tiny bits. ‘No need of anything,’ she said to herself, and
closing her blotting-case she went upstairs, told the
governess and the servants that she was going that day to
Moscow, and at once set to work to pack up her things.
Chapter 16
All the rooms of the summer villa were full of porters,
gardeners, and footmen going to and fro carrying out
things. Cupboards and chests were open; twice they had
sent to the shop for cord; pieces of newspaper were tossing
about on the floor. Two trunks, some bags and strappedup
rugs, had been carried down into the hall. The carriage
and two hired cabs were waiting at the steps. Anna,
forgetting her inward agitation in the work of packing,
was standing at a table in her boudoir, packing her
traveling bag, when Annushka called her attention to the
rattle of some carriage driving up. Anna looked out of the
window and saw Alexey Alexandrovitch’s courier on the
steps, ringing at the front door bell.
‘Run and find out what it is,’ she said, and with a calm
sense of being prepared for anything, she sat down in a
low chair, folding her hands on her knees. A footman
brought in a thick packet directed in Alexey
Alexandrovitch’s hand.
‘The courier had orders to wait for an answer,’ he said.
‘Very well,’ she said, and as soon as he had left the
room she tore open the letter with trembling fingers. A
roll of unfolded notes done up in a wrapper fell out of it.
She disengaged the letter and began reading it at the end.
‘Preparations shall be made for your arrival here...I attach
particular significance to compliance...’ she read. She ran
on, then back, read it all through, and once more read the
letter all through again from the beginning. When she had
finished, she felt that she was cold all over, and that a
fearful calamity, such as she had not expected, had burst
upon her.
In the morning she had regretted that she had spoken
to her husband, and wished for nothing so much as that
those words could be unspoken. And here this letter
regarded them as unspoken, and gave her what she had
wanted. But now this letter seemed to her more awful
than anything she had been able to conceive.
‘He’s right!’ she said; ‘of course, he’s always right; he’s a
Christian, he’s generous! Yes, vile, base creature! And no
one understands it except me, and no one ever will; and I
can’t explain it. They say he’s so religious, so highprincipled,
so upright, so clever; but they don’t see what
I’ve seen. They don’t know how he has crushed my life
for eight years, crushed everything that was living in me—
he has not once even thought that I’m a live woman who
must have love. They don’t know how at every step he’s
humiliated me, and been just as pleased with himself.
Haven’t I striven, striven with all my strength, to find
something to give meaning to my life? Haven’t I struggled
to love him, to love my son when I could not love my
husband? But the time came when I knew that I couldn’t
cheat myself any longer, that I was alive, that I was not to
blame, that God has made me so that I must love and live.
And now what does he do? If he’d killed me, if he’d killed
him, I could have borne anything, I could have forgiven
anything; but, no, he.... How was it I didn’t guess what he
would do? He’s doing just what’s characteristic of his
mean character. He’ll keep himself in the right, while me,
in my ruin, he’ll drive still lower to worse ruin yet..’
She recalled the words from the letter. ‘You can
conjecture what awaits you and your son....’ ‘That’s a
threat to take away my child, and most likely by their
stupid law he can. But I know very well why he says it.
He doesn’t believe even in my love for my child, or he
despises it (just as he always used to ridicule it). He
despises that feeling in me, but he knows that I won’t
abandon my child, that I can’t abandon my child, that
there could be no life for me without my child, even with
him whom I love; but that if I abandoned my child and
ran away from him, I should be acting like the most
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infamous, basest of women. He knows that, and knows
that I am incapable of doing that.’
She recalled another sentence in the letter. ‘Our life
must go on as it has done in the past....’ ‘That life was
miserable enough in the old days; it has been awful of late.
What will it be now? And he knows all that; he knows
that I can’t repent that I breathe, that I love; he knows
that it can lead to nothing but lying and deceit; but he
wants to go on torturing me. I know him; I know that
he’s at home and is happy in deceit, like a fish swimming
in the water. No, I won’t give him that happiness. I’ll
break through the spiderweb of lies in which he wants to
catch me, come what may. Anything’s better than lying
and deceit.
‘But how? My God! my God! Was ever a woman so
miserable as I am?..’
‘No; I will break through it, I will break through it!’
she cried, jumping up and keeping back her tears. And she
went to the writing table to write him another letter. But
at the bottom of her heart she felt that she was not strong
enough to break through anything, that she was not strong
enough to get out of her old position, however false and
dishonorable it might be.
She sat down at the writing table, but instead of writing
she clasped her hands on the table, and, laying her head on
them, burst into tears, with sobs and heaving breast like a
child crying. She was weeping that her dream of her
position being made clear and definite had been
annihilated forever. She knew beforehand that everything
would go on in the old way, and far worse, indeed, than
in the old way. She felt that the position in the world that
she enjoyed, and that had seemed to her of so little
consequence in the morning, that this position was
precious to her, that she would not have the strength to
exchange it for the shameful position of a woman who has
abandoned husband and child to join her lover; that
however much she might struggle, she could not be
stronger than herself. She would never know freedom in
love, but would remain forever a guilty wife, with the
menace of detection hanging over her at every instant;
deceiving her husband for the sake of a shameful
connection with a man living apart and away from her,
whose life she could never share. She knew that this was
how it would be, and at the same time it was so awful that
she could not even conceive what it would end in. And
she cried without restraint, as children cry when they are
punished.
The sound of the footman’s steps forced her to rouse
herself, and hiding her face from him, she pretended to be
writing.
‘The courier asks if there’s an answer,’ the footman
announced.
‘An answer? Yes,’ said Anna. ‘Let him wait. I’ll ring.’
‘What can I write?’ she thought. ‘What can I decide
upon alone? What do I know? What do I want? What is
there I care for?’ Again she felt that her soul was beginning
to be split in two. She was terrified again at this feeling,
and clutched at the first pretext for doing something
which might divert her thoughts from herself. ‘I ought to
see Alexey’ (so she called Vronsky in her thoughts); ‘no
one but he can tell me what I ought to do. I’ll go to
Betsy’s, perhaps I shall see him there,’ she said to herself,
completely forgetting that when she had told him the day
before that she was not going to Princess Tverskaya’s, he
had said that in that case he should not go either. She
went up to the table, wrote to her husband, ‘I have
received your letter. —A.’; and, ringing the bell, gave it to
the footman.
‘We are not going,’ she said to Annushka, as she came
in.
‘Not going at all?’
‘No; don’t unpack till tomorrow, and let the carriage
wait. I’m going to the princess’s.’
‘Which dress am I to get ready?’
Chapter 17
The croquet party to which the Princess Tverskaya had
invited Anna was to consist of two ladies and their adorers.
These two ladies were the chief representatives of a select
new Petersburg circle, nicknamed, in imitation of some
imitation, les sept merveilles du monde. These ladies
belonged to a circle which, though of the highest society,
was utterly hostile to that in which Anna moved.
Moreover, Stremov, one of the most influential people in
Petersburg, and the elderly admirer of Liza Merkalova, was
Alexey Alexandrovitch’s enemy in the political world.
From all these considerations Anna had not meant to go,
and the hints in Princess Tverskaya’s note referred to her
refusal. But now Anna was eager to go, in the hope of
seeing Vronsky.
Anna arrived at Princess Tverskaya’s earlier than the
other guests.
At the same moment as she entered, Vronsky’s
footman, with side- whiskers combed out like a
Kammerjunker, went in too. He stopped at the door, and,
taking off his cap, let her pass. Anna recognized him, and
only then recalled that Vronsky had told her the day
before that he would not come. Most likely he was
sending a note to say so.
As she took off her outer garment in the hall, she heard
the footman, pronouncing his ‘r’s’ even like a
Kammerjunker, say, ‘From the count for the princess,’ and
hand the note.
She longed to question him as to where his master was.
She longed to turn back and send him a letter to come and
see her, or to go herself to see him. But neither the first
nor the second nor the third course was possible. Already
she heard bells ringing to announce her arrival ahead of
her, and Princess Tverskaya’s footman was standing at the
open door waiting for her to go forward into the inner
rooms.
‘The princess is in the garden; they will inform her
immediately. Would you be pleased to walk into the
garden?’ announced another footman in another room.
The position of uncertainty, of indecision, was still the
same as at home—worse, in fact, since it was impossible to
take any step, impossible to see Vronsky, and she had to
remain here among outsiders, in company so uncongenial
to her present mood. But she was wearing a dress that she
knew suited her. She was not alone; all around was that
luxurious setting of idleness that she was used to, and she
felt less wretched than at home. She was not forced to
think what she was to do. Everything would be done of
itself. On meeting Betsy coming towards her in a white
gown that struck her by its elegance, Anna smiled at her
just as she always did. Princess Tverskaya was walking
with Tushkevitch and a young lady, a relation, who, to
the great joy of her parents in the provinces, was spending
the summer with the fashionable princess.
There was probably something unusual about Anna, for
Betsy noticed it at once.
‘I slept badly,’ answered Anna, looking intently at the
footman who came to meet them, and, as she supposed,
brought Vronsky’s note.
‘How glad I am you’ve come!’ said Betsy. ‘I’m tired,
and was just longing to have some tea before they come.
You might go’— she turned to Tushkevitch—‘with
Masha, and try the croquet ground over there where
they’ve been cutting it. We shall have time to talk a little
over tea; we’ll have a cozy chat, eh?’ she said in English to
Anna, with a smile, pressing the hand with which she held
a parasol.
‘Yes, especially as I can’t stay very long with you. I’m
forced to go on to old Madame Vrede. I’ve been
promising to go for a century,’ said Anna, to whom lying,
alien as it was to her nature, had become not merely
simple and natural in society, but a positive source of
satisfaction. Why she said this, which she had not thought
of a second before, she could not have explained. She had
said it simply from the reflection that as Vronsky would
not be here, she had better secure her own freedom, and
try to see him somehow. But why she had spoken of old
Madame Vrede, whom she had to go and see, as she had
to see many other people, she could not have explained;
and yet, as it afterwards turned out, had she contrived the
most cunning devices to meet Vronsky, she could have
thought of nothing better.
‘No. I’m not going to let you go for anything,’
answered Betsy, looking intently into Anna’s face. ‘Really,
if I were not fond of you, I should feel offended. One
would think you were afraid my society would
compromise you. Tea in the little dining room, please,’
she said, half closing her eyes, as she always did when
addressing the footman.
Taking the note from him, she read it.
‘Alexey’s playing us false,’ she said in French; ‘he writes
that he can’t come,’ she added in a tone as simple and
natural as though it could never enter her head that
Vronsky could mean anything more to Anna than a game
of croquet. Anna knew that Betsy knew everything, but,
hearing how she spoke of Vronsky before her, she almost
felt persuaded for a minute that she knew nothing.
‘Ah!’ said Anna indifferently, as though not greatly
interested in the matter, and she went on smiling: ‘How
can you or your friends compromise anyone?’
This playing with words, this hiding of a secret, had a
great fascination for Anna, as, indeed, it has for all women.
And it was not the necessity of concealment, not the aim
with which the concealment was contrived, but the
process of concealment itself which attracted her.
‘I can’t be more Catholic than the Pope,’ she said.
‘Stremov and Liza Merkalova, why, they’re the cream of
the cream of society. Besides, they’re received
everywhere, and I’—she laid special stress on the I—‘have
never been strict and intolerant. It’s simply that I haven’t
the time.’

.’
‘No; you don’t care, perhaps, to meet Stremov? Let
him and Alexey Alexandrovitch tilt at each other in the
committee— that’s no affair of ours. But in the world, he’s
the most amiable man I know, and a devoted croquet
player. You shall see. And, in spite of his absurd position
as Liza’s lovesick swain at his age, you ought to see how
he carries off the absurd position. He’s very nice. Sappho
Shtoltz you don’t know? Oh, that’s a new type, quite
new.’
Betsy said all this, and, at the same time, from her
good-humored, shrewd glance, Anna felt that she partly
guessed her plight, and was hatching something for her
benefit. They were in the little boudoir.
‘I must write to Alexey though,’ and Betsy sat down to
the table, scribbled a few lines, and put the note in an
envelope.
‘I’m telling him to come to dinner. I’ve one lady extra
to dinner with me, and no man to take her in. Look what
I’ve said, will that persuade him? Excuse me, I must leave
you for a minute. Would you seal it up, please, and send it
off?’ she said from the door; ‘I have to give some
directions.’
Without a moment’s thought, Anna sat down to the
table with Betsy’s letter, and, without reading it, wrote
below: ‘It’s essential for me to see you. Come to the
Vrede garden. I shall be there at six o’clock.’ She sealed it
up, and, Betsy coming back, in her presence handed the
note to be taken.
At tea, which was brought them on a little tea-table in
the cool little drawing room, the cozy chat promised by
Princess Tverskaya before the arrival of her visitors really
did come off between the two women. They criticized
the people they were expecting, and the conversation fell
upon Liza Merkalova.
‘She’s very sweet, and I always liked her,’ said Anna.
‘You ought to like her. She raves about you. Yesterday
she came up to me after the races and was in despair at not
finding you. She says you’re a real heroine of romance,
and that if she were a man she would do all sorts of mad
things for your sake. Stremov says she does that as it is.’
‘But do tell me, please, I never could make it out,’ said
Anna, after being silent for some time, speaking in a tone
that showed she was not asking an idle question, but that
what she was asking was of more importance to her than it
should have been; ‘do tell me, please, what are her
relations with Prince Kaluzhsky, Mishka, as he’s called?
I’ve met them so little. What does it mean?’
Betsy smiled with her eyes, and looked intently at
Anna.
‘It’s a new manner,’ she said. ‘They’ve all adopted that
manner. They’ve flung their caps over the windmills. But
there are ways and ways of flinging them.’
‘Yes, but what are her relations precisely with
Kaluzhsky?’
Betsy broke into unexpectedly mirthful and
irrepressible laughter, a thing which rarely happened with
her.
‘You’re encroaching on Princess Myakaya’s special
domain now. That’s the question of an enfant terrible,’
and Betsy obviously tried to restrain herself, but could not,
and went off into peals of that infectious laughter that
people laugh who do not laugh often. ‘You’d better ask
them,’ she brought out, between tears of laughter.
‘No; you laugh,’ said Anna, laughing too in spite of
herself, ‘but I never could understand it. I can’t understand
the husband’s role in it.’
‘The husband? Liza Merkalova’s husband carries her
shawl, and is always ready to be of use. But anything more
than that in reality, no one cares to inquire. You know in
decent society one doesn’t talk or think even of certain
details of the toilet. That’s how it is with this.’
‘Will you be at Madame Rolandak’s fete?’ asked Anna,
to change the conversation.
‘I don’t think so,’ answered Betsy, and, without
looking at her friend, she began filling the little transparent
cups with fragrant tea. Putting a cup before Anna, she
took out a cigarette, and, fitting it into a silver holder, she
lighted it.
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‘It’s like this, you see: I’m in a fortunate position,’ she
began, quite serious now, as she took up her cup. ‘I
understand you, and I understand Liza. Liza now is one of
those naive natures that, like children, don’t know what’s
good and what’s bad. Anyway, she didn’t comprehend it
when she was very young. And now she’s aware that the
lack of comprehension suits her. Now, perhaps, she
doesn’t know on purpose,’ said Betsy, with a subtle smile.
‘But, anyway, it suits her. The very same thing, don’t you
see, may be looked at tragically, and turned into a misery,
or it may be looked at simply and even humorously.
Possibly you are inclined to look at things too tragically.’
‘How I should like to know other people just as I
know myself!’ said Anna, seriously and dreamily. ‘Am I
worse than other people, or better? I think I’m worse.’
‘Enfant terrible, enfant terrible!’ repeated Betsy. ‘But
here they are.’
Chapter 18
They heard the sound of steps and a man’s voice, then
a woman’s voice and laughter, and immediately thereafter
there walked in the expected guests: Sappho Shtoltz, and a
young man beaming with excess of health, the so-called
Vaska. It was evident that ample supplies of beefsteak,
truffles, and Burgundy never failed to reach him at the
fitting hour. Vaska bowed to the two ladies, and glanced at
them, but only for one second. He walked after Sappho
into the drawing-room, and followed her about as though
he were chained to her, keeping his sparkling eyes fixed
on her as though he wanted to eat her. Sappho Shtoltz was
a blonde beauty with black eyes. She walked with smart
little steps in high-heeled shoes, and shook hands with the
ladies vigorously like a man.
Anna had never met this new star of fashion, and was
struck by her beauty, the exaggerated extreme to which
her dress was carried, and the boldness of her manners. On
her head there was such a superstructure of soft, golden
hair—her own and false mixed—that her head was equal
in size to the elegantly rounded bust, of which so much
was exposed in front. The impulsive abruptness of her
movements was such that at every step the lines of her
knees and the upper part of her legs were distinctly
marked under her dress, and the question involuntarily
rose to the mind where in the undulating, piled-up
mountain of material at the back the real body of the
woman, so small and slender, so naked in front, and so
hidden behind and below, really came to an end.
Betsy made haste to introduce her to Anna.
‘Only fancy, we all but ran over two soldiers,’ she
began telling them at once, using her eyes, smiling and
twitching away her tail, which she flung back at one
stroke all on one side. ‘I drove here with Vaska.... Ah, to
be sure, you don’t know each other.’ And mentioning his
surname she introduced the young man, and reddening a
little, broke into a ringing laugh at her mistake—that is at
her having called him Vaska to a stranger. Vaska bowed
once more to Anna, but he said nothing to her. He
addressed Sappho: ‘You’ve lost your bet. We got here
first. Pay up,’ said he, smiling.
Sappho laughed still more festively.
‘Not just now,’ said she.
‘Oh, all right, I’ll have it later.’
‘Very well, very well. Oh, yes.’ She turned suddenly to
Princess Betsy: ‘I am a nice person...I positively forgot it...
I’ve brought you a visitor. And here he comes.’ The
unexpected young visitor, whom Sappho had invited, and
whom she had forgotten, was, however, a personage of
such consequence that, in spite of his youth, both the
ladies rose on his entrance.
He was a new admirer of Sappho’s. He now dogged
her footsteps, like Vaska.
Soon after Prince Kaluzhsky arrived, and Liza
Merkalova with Stremov. Liza Merkalova was a thin
brunette, with an Oriental, languid type of face, and—as
everyone used to say—exquisite enigmatic eyes. The tone
of her dark dress (Anna immediately observed and
appreciated the fact) was in perfect harmony with her style
of beauty. Liza was as soft and enervated as Sappho was
smart and abrupt.
But to Anna’s taste Liza was far more attractive. Betsy
had said to Anna that she had adopted the pose of an
innocent child, but when Anna saw her, she felt that this
was not the truth. She really was both innocent and
corrupt, but a sweet and passive woman. It is true that her
tone was the same as Sappho’s; that like Sappho, she had
two men, one young and one old, tacked onto her, and
devouring her with their eyes. But there was something in
her higher than what surrounded her. There was in her
the glow of the real diamond among glass imitations. This
glow shone out in her exquisite, truly enigmatic eyes. The
weary, and at the same time passionate, glance of those
eyes, encircled by dark rings, impressed one by its perfect
sincerity. Everyone looking into those eyes fancied he
knew her wholly, and knowing her, could not but love
her. At the sight of Anna, her whole face lighted up at
once with a smile of delight.
‘Ah, how glad I am to see you!’ she said, going up to
her. ‘Yesterday at the races all I wanted was to get to you,
but you’d gone away. I did so want to see you, yesterday
especially.
Wasn’t it awful?’ she said, looking at Anna with eyes
that seemed to lay bare all her soul.
‘Yes; I had no idea it would be so thrilling,’ said Anna,
blushing.
The company got up at this moment to go into the
garden.
‘I’m not going,’ said Liza, smiling and settling herself
close to Anna. ‘You won’t go either, will you? Who
wants to play croquet?’
‘Oh, I like it,’ said Anna.
‘There, how do you manage never to be bored by
things? It’s delightful to look at you. You’re alive, but I’m
bored.’
‘How can you be bored? Why, you live in the liveliest
set in Petersburg,’ said Anna.
‘Possibly the people who are not of our set are even
more bored; but we—I certainly—are not happy, but
awfully, awfully bored.’
Sappho smoking a cigarette went off into the garden
with the two young men. Betsy and Stremov remained at
the tea-table.
‘What, bored!’ said Betsy. ‘Sappho says they did enjoy
themselves tremendously at your house last night.’
‘Ah, how dreary it all was!’ said Liza Merkalova. ‘We
all drove back to my place after the races. And always the
same people, always the same. Always the same thing. We
lounged about on sofas all the evening. What is there to
enjoy in that? No; do tell me how you manage never to
be bored?’ she said, addressing Anna again. ‘One has but
to look at you and one sees, here’s a woman who may be
happy or unhappy, but isn’t bored. Tell me how you do
it?’
‘I do nothing,’ answered Anna, blushing at these
searching questions.
‘That’s the best way,’ Stremov put it. Stremov was a
man of fifty, partly gray, but still vigorous-looking, very
ugly, but with a characteristic and intelligent face. Liza
Merkalova was his wife’s niece, and he spent all his leisure
hours with her. On meeting Anna Karenina, as he was
Alexey Alexandrovitch’s enemy in the government, he
tried, like a shrewd man and a man of the world, to be
particularly cordial with her, the wife of his enemy.
‘‘Nothing,’’ he put in with a subtle smile, ‘that’s the
very best way. I told you long ago,’ he said, turning to
Liza Merkalova, ‘that if you don’t want to be bored, you
mustn’t think you’re going to be bored. It’s just as you
mustn’t be afraid of not being able to fall asleep, if you’re
afraid of sleeplessness. That’s just what Anna Arkadyevna
has just said.’
‘I should be very glad if I had said it, for it’s not only
clever but true,’ said Anna, smiling.
‘No, do tell me why it is one can’t go to sleep, and one
can’t help being bored?’
‘To sleep well one ought to work, and to enjoy oneself
one ought to work too.’
‘What am I to work for when my work is no use to
anybody? And I can’t and won’t knowingly make a
pretense about it.’
‘You’re incorrigible,’ said Stremov, not looking at her,
and he spoke again to Anna. As he rarely met Anna, he
could say nothing but commonplaces to her, but he said
those commonplaces as to when she was returning to
Petersburg, and how fond Countess Lidia Ivanovna was of
her, with an expression which suggested that he longed
with his whole soul to please her and show his regard for
her and even more than that.
Tushkevitch came in, announcing that the party were
awaiting the other players to begin croquet.
‘No, don’t go away, please don’t,’ pleaded Liza
Merkalova, hearing that Anna was going. Stremov joined
in her entreaties.
‘It’s too violent a transition,’ he said, ‘to go from such
company to old Madame Vrede. And besides, you will
only give her a chance for talking scandal, while here you
arouse none but such different feelings of the highest and
most opposite kind,’ he said to her.
Anna pondered for an instant in uncertainty. This
shrewd man’s flattering words, the naive, childlike
affection shown her by Liza Merkalova, and all the social
atmosphere she was used to,— it was all so easy, and what
was in store for her was so difficult, that she was for a
minute in uncertainty whether to remain, whether to put
off a little longer the painful moment of explanation. But
remembering what was in store for her alone at home, if
she did not come to some decision, remembering that
gesture—terrible even in memory—when she had
clutched her hair in both hands—she said good-bye and
went away.
Chapter 19
In spite of Vronsky’s apparently frivolous life in society,
he was a man who hated irregularity. In early youth in the
Corps of Pages, he had experienced the humiliation of a
refusal, when he had tried, being in difficulties, to borrow
money, and since then he had never once put himself in
the same position again.
In order to keep his affairs in some sort of order, he
used about five times a year (more or less frequently,
according to circumstances) to shut himself up alone and
put all his affairs into definite shape. This he used to call
his day of reckoning or faire la lessive.
On waking up the day after the races, Vronsky put on a
white linen coat, and without shaving or taking his bath,
he distributed about the table moneys, bills, and letters,
and set to work. Petritsky, who knew he was ill-tempered
on such occasions, on waking up and seeing his comrade
at the writing-table, quietly dressed and went out without
getting in his way.
Every man who knows to the minutest details all the
complexity of the conditions surrounding him, cannot
help imagining that the complexity of these conditions,
and the difficulty of making them clear, is something
exceptional and personal, peculiar to himself, and never
supposes that others are surrounded by just as complicated
an array of personal affairs as he is. So indeed it seemed to
Vronsky. And not with out inward pride, and not without
reason, he thought that any other man would long ago
have been in difficulties, would have been forced to some
dishonorable course, if he had found himself in such a
difficult position. But Vronsky felt that now especially it
was essential for him to clear up and define his position if
he were to avoid getting into difficulties.
What Vronsky attacked first as being the easiest was his
pecuniary position. Writing out on note paper in his
minute hand all that he owed, he added up the amount
and found that his debts amounted to seventeen thousand
and some odd hundreds, which he left out for the sake of
clearness. Reckoning up his money and his bank book, he
found that he had left one thousand eight hundred
roubles, and nothing coming in before the New Year.
Reckoning over again his list of debts, Vronsky copied it,
dividing it into three classes. In the first class he put the
debts which he would have to pay at once, or for which
he must in any case have the money ready so that on
demand for payment there could not be a moment’s delay
in paying. Such debts amounted to about four thousand:
one thousand five hundred for a horse, and two thousand
five hundred as surety for a young comrade, Venovsky,
who had lost that sum to a cardsharper in Vronsky’s
presence. Vronsky had wanted to pay the money at the
time (he had that amount then), but Venovsky and
Yashvin had insisted that they would pay and not
Vronsky, who had not played. That was so far well, but
Vronsky knew that in this dirty business, though his only
share in it was undertaking by word of mouth to be surety
for Venovsky, it was absolutely necessary for him to have
the two thousand five hundred roubles so as to be able to
fling it at the swindler, and have no more words with him.
And so for this first and most important division he must
have four thousand roubles. The second class—eight
thousand roubles—consisted of less important debts. These
were principally accounts owing in connection with his
race horses, to the purveyor of oats and hay, the English
saddler, and so on. He would have to pay some two
thousand roubles on these debts too, in order to be quite
free from anxiety. The last class of debts—to shops, to
hotels, to his tailor—were such as need not be considered.
So that he needed at least six thousand roubles for current
expenses, and he only had one thousand eight hundred.
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For a man with one hundred thousand roubles of revenue,
which was what everyone fixed as Vronsky’s income, such
debts, one would suppose, could hardly be embarrassing;
but the fact was that he was far from having one hundred
thousand. His father’s immense property, which alone
yielded a yearly income of two hundred thousand, was left
undivided between the brothers. At the time when the
elder brother, with a mass of debts, married Princess Varya
Tchirkova, the daughter of a Decembrist without any
fortune whatever, Alexey had given up to his elder
brother almost the whole income from his father’s estate,
reserving for himself only twenty-five thousand a year
from it. Alexey had said at the time to his brother that that
sum would be sufficient for him until he married, which
he probably never would do. And his brother, who was in
command of one of the most expensive regiments, and
was only just married, could not decline the gift. His
mother, who had her own separate property, had allowed
Alexey every year twenty thousand in addition to the
twenty-five thousand he had reserved, and Alexey had
spent it all. Of late his mother, incensed with him on
account of his love affair and his leaving Moscow, had
given up sending him the money. And in consequence of
this, Vronsky, who had been in the habit of living on the
scale of forty-five thousand a year, having only received
twenty thousand that year, found himself now in
difficulties. To get out of these difficulties, he could not
apply to his mother for money. Her last letter, which he
had received the day before, had particularly exasperated
him by the hints in it that she was quite ready to help him
to succeed in the world and in the army, but not to lead a
life which was a scandal to all good society. His mother’s
attempt to buy him stung him to the quick and made him
feel colder than ever to her. But he could not draw back
from the generous word when it was once uttered, even
though he felt now, vaguely foreseeing certain
eventualities in his intrigue with Madame Karenina, that
this generous word had been spoken thoughtlessly, and
that even though he were not married he might need all
the hundred thousand of income. But it was impossible to
draw back. He had only to recall his brother’s wife, to
remember how that sweet, delightful Varya sought, at
every convenient opportunity, to remind him that she
remembered his generosity and appreciated it, to grasp the
impossibility of taking back his gift. It was as impossible as
beating a woman, stealing, or lying. One thing only could
and ought to be done, and Vronsky determined upon it
without an instant’s hesitation: to borrow money from a
money-lender, ten thousand roubles, a proceeding which
presented no difficulty, to cut down his expenses
generally, and to sell his race horses. Resolving on this, he
promptly wrote a note to Rolandak, who had more than
once sent to him with offers to buy horses from him.
Then he sent for the Englishman and the money-lender,
and divided what money he had according to the accounts
he intended to pay. Having finished this business, he
wrote a cold and cutting answer to his mother. Then he
took out of his notebook three notes of Anna’s, read them
again, burned them, and remembering their conversation
on the previous day, he sank into meditation.

.
Chapter 20
Vronsky’s life was particularly happy in that he had a
code of principles, which defined with unfailing certitude
what he ought and what he ought not to do. This code of
principles covered only a very small circle of
contingencies, but then the principles were never
doubtful, and Vronsky, as he never went outside that
circle, had never had a moment’s hesitation about doing
what he ought to do. These principles laid down as
invariable rules: that one must pay a cardsharper, but need
not pay a tailor; that one must never tell a lie to a man,
but one may to a woman; that one must never cheat
anyone, but one may a husband; that one must never
pardon an insult, but one may give one and so on. These
principles were possibly not reasonable and not good, but
they were of unfailing certainty, and so long as he adhered
to them, Vronsky felt that his heart was at peace and he
could hold his head up. Only quite lately in regard to his
relations with Anna, Vronsky had begun to feel that his
code of principles did not fully cover all possible
contingencies, and to foresee in the future difficulties and
perplexities for which he could find no guiding clue.
His present relation to Anna and to her husband was to
his mind clear and simple. It was clearly and precisely
defined in the code of principles by which he was guided.
she was an honorable woman who had bestowed her
love upon him, and he loved her, and therefore she was in
his eyes a woman who had a right to the same, or even
more, respect than a lawful wife. He would have had his
hand chopped off before he would have allowed himself
by a word, by a hint, to humiliate her, or even to fall short
of the fullest respect a woman could look for.
His attitude to society, too, was clear. Everyone might
know, might suspect it, but no one might dare to speak of
it. If any did so, he was ready to force all who might speak
to be silent and to respect the nonexistent honor of the
woman he loved.
His attitude to the husband was the clearest of all. From
the moment that Anna loved Vronsky, he had regarded his
own right over her as the one thing unassailable. Her
husband was simply a superfluous and tiresome person. No
doubt he was in a pitiable position, but how could that be
helped? The one thing the husband had a right to was to
demand satisfaction with a weapon in his hand, and
Vronsky was prepared for this at any minute.
But of late new inner relations had arisen between him
and her, which frightened Vronsky by their indefiniteness.
Only the day before she had told him that she was with
child. And he felt that this fact and what she expected of
him called for something not fully defined in that code of
principles by which he had hitherto steered his course in
life. And he had been indeed caught unawares, and at the
first moment when she spoke to him of her position, his
heart had prompted him to beg her to leave her husband.
He had said that, but now thinking things over he saw
clearly that it would be better to manage to avoid that; and
at the same time, as he told himself so, he was afraid
whether it was not wrong.
‘If I told her to leave her husband, that must mean
uniting her life with mine; am I prepared for that? How
can I take her away now, when I have no money?
Supposing I could arrange.... But how can I take her away
while I’m in the service? If I say that I ought to be
prepared to do it, that is, I ought to have the money and
to retire from the army.’
And he grew thoughtful. The question whether to
retire from the service or not brought him to the other
and perhaps the chief though hidden interest of his life, of
which none knew but he.
Ambition was the old dream of his youth and
childhood, a dream which he did not confess even to
himself, though it was so strong that now this passion was
even doing battle with his love. His first steps in the world
and in the service had been successful, but two years
before he had made a great mistake. Anxious to show his
independence and to advance, he had refused a post that
had been offered him, hoping that this refusal would
heighten his value; but it turned out that he had been too
bold, and he was passed over. And having, whether he
liked or not, taken up for himself the position of an
independent man, he carried it off with great tact and
good sense, behaving as though he bore no grudge against
anyone, did not regard himself as injured in any way, and
cared for nothing but to be left alone since he was
enjoying himself. In reality he had ceased to enjoy himself
as long ago as the year before, when he went away to
Moscow. He felt that this independent attitude of a man
who might have done anything, but cared to do nothing
was already beginning to pall, that many people were
beginning to fancy that he was not really capable of
anything but being a straightforward, good-natured fellow.
His connection with Madame Karenina, by creating so
much sensation and attracting general attention, had given
him a fresh distinction which soothed his gnawing worm
of ambition for a while, but a week before that worm had
been roused up again with fresh force. The friend of his
childhood, a man of the same set, of the same coterie, his
comrade in the Corps of Pages, Serpuhovskoy, who had
left school with him and had been his rival in class, in
gymnastics, in their scrapes and their dreams of glory, had
come back a few days before from Central Asia, where he
had gained two steps up in rank, and an order rarely
bestowed upon generals so young.
As soon as he arrived in Petersburg, people began to
talk about him as a newly risen star of the first magnitude.
A schoolfellow of Vronsky’s and of the same age, he was a
general and was expecting a command, which might have
influence on the course of political events; while Vronsky,
independent and brilliant and beloved by a charming
woman though he was, was simply a cavalry captain who
was readily allowed to be as independent as ever he liked.
‘Of course I don’t envy Serpuhovskoy and never could
envy him; but his advancement shows me that one has
only to watch one’s opportunity, and the career of a man
like me may be very rapidly made. Three years ago he was
in just the same position as I am. If I retire, I burn my
ships. If I remain in the army, I lose nothing. She said
herself she did not wish to change her position. And with
her love I cannot feel envious of Serpuhovskoy.’ And
slowly twirling his mustaches, he got up from the table
and walked about the room. His eyes shone particularly
brightly, and he felt in that confident, calm, and happy
frame of mind which always came after he had thoroughly
faced his position. Everything was straight and clear, just as
after former days of reckoning. He shaved, took a cold
bath, dressed and went out.
Chapter 21
‘We’ve come to fetch you. Your lessive lasted a good
time today,’ said Petritsky. ‘Well, is it over?’
‘It is over,’ answered Vronsky, smiling with his eyes
only, and twirling the tips of his mustaches as
circumspectly as though after the perfect order into which
his affairs had been brought any over-bold or rapid
movement might disturb it.
‘You’re always just as if you’d come out of a bath after
it,’ said Petritsky. ‘I’ve come from Gritsky’s’ (that was
what they called the colonel); ‘they’re expecting you.’
Vronsky, without answering, looked at his comrade,
thinking of something else.
‘Yes; is that music at his place?’ he said, listening to the
familiar sounds of polkas and waltzes floating across to
him. ‘What’s the fete?’
‘Serpuhovskoy’s come.’
‘Aha!’ said Vronsky, ‘why, I didn’t know.’
The smile in his eyes gleamed more brightly than ever.
Having once made up his mind that he was happy in
his love, that he sacrificed his ambition to it—having
anyway taken up this position, Vronsky was incapable of
feeling either envious of Serpuhovskoy or hurt with him
for not coming first to him when he came to the
regiment. Serpuhovskoy was a good friend, and he was
delighted he had come.
‘Ah, I’m very glad!’
The colonel, Demin, had taken a large country house.
The whole party were in the wide lower balcony. In the
courtyard the first objects that met Vronsky’s eyes were a
band of singers in white linen coats, standing near a barrel
of vodka, and the robust, good-humored figure of the
colonel surrounded by officers. He had gone out as far as
the first step of the balcony and was loudly shouting across
the band that played Offenbach’s quadrille, waving his
arms and giving some orders to a few soldiers standing on
one side. A group of soldiers, a quartermaster, and several
subalterns came up to the balcony with Vronsky. The
colonel returned to the table, went out again onto the
steps with a tumbler in his hand, and proposed the toast,
‘To the health of our former comrade, the gallant general,
Prince Serpuhovskoy. Hurrah!’
The colonel was followed by Serpuhovskoy, who came
out onto the steps smiling, with a glass in his hand.
‘You always get younger, Bondarenko,’ he said to the
rosy-checked, smart-looking quartermaster standing just
before him, still youngish looking though doing his
second term of service.
It was three years since Vronsky had seen
Serpuhovskoy. He looked more robust, had let his
whiskers grow, but was still the same graceful creature,
whose face and figure were even more striking from their
softness and nobility than their beauty. The only change
Vronsky detected in him was that subdued, continual
radiance of beaming content which settles on the faces of
men who are successful and are sure of the recognition of
their success by everyone. Vronsky knew that radiant air,
and immediately observed it in Serpuhovskoy.
As Serpuhovskoy came down the steps he saw
Vronsky. A smile of pleasure lighted up his face. He tossed
his head upwards and waved the glass in his hand, greeting
Vronsky, and showing him by the gesture that he could
not come to him before the quartermaster, who stood
craning forward his lips ready to be kissed.
‘Here he is!’ shouted the colonel. ‘Yashvin told me you
were in one of your gloomy tempers.’
Serpuhovskoy kissed the moist, fresh lips of the gallantlooking
quartermaster, and wiping his mouth with his
handkerchief, went up to Vronsky.
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‘How glad I am!’ he said, squeezing his hand and
drawing him on one side.
‘You look after him,’ the colonel shouted to Yashvin,
pointing to Vronsky; and he went down below to the
soldiers.
‘Why weren’t you at the races yesterday? I expected to
see you there,’ said Vronsky, scrutinizing Serpuhovskoy.
‘I did go, but late. I beg your pardon,’ he added, and he
turned to the adjutant: ‘Please have this divided from me,
each man as much as it runs to.’ And he hurriedly took
notes for three hundred roubles from his pocketbook,
blushing a little.
‘Vronsky! Have anything to eat or drink?’ asked
Yashvin. ‘Hi, something for the count to eat! Ah, here it
is: have a glass!’
The fete at the colonel’s lasted a long while. There was
a great deal of drinking. They tossed Serpuhovskoy in the
air and caught him again several times. Then they did the
same to the colonel. Then, to the accompaniment of the
band, the colonel himself danced with Petritsky. Then the
colonel, who began to show signs of feebleness, sat down
on a bench in the courtyard and began demonstrating to
Yashvin the superiority of Russia over Poland, especially
in cavalry attack, and there was a lull in the revelry for a
moment. Serpuhovskoy went into the house to the
bathroom to wash his hands and found Vronsky there;
Vronsky was drenching his head with water. He had taken
off his coat and put his sunburnt, hairy neck under the tap,
and was rubbing it and his head with his hands. When he
had finished, Vronsky sat down by Serpuhovskoy. They
both sat down in the bathroom on a lounge, and a
conversation began which was very interesting to both of
them.
‘I’ve always been hearing about you through my wife,’
said Serpuhovskoy. ‘I’m glad you’ve been seeing her
pretty often.’
‘She’s friendly with Varya, and they’re the only women
in Petersburg I care about seeing,’ answered Vronsky,
smiling. He smiled because he foresaw the topic the
conversation would turn on, and he was glad of it.
‘The only ones?’ Serpuhovskoy queried, smiling.
‘Yes; and I heard news of you, but not only through
your wife,’ said Vronsky, checking his hint by a stern
expression of face. ‘I was greatly delighted to hear of your
success, but not a bit surprised. I expected even more.’
Serpuhovskoy smiled. Such an opinion of him was
obviously agreeable to him, and he did not think it
necessary to conceal it.
‘Well, I on the contrary expected less—I’ll own
frankly. But I’m glad, very glad. I’m ambitious; that’s my
weakness, and I confess to it.’
‘Perhaps you wouldn’t confess to it if you hadn’t been
successful,’ said Vronsky.
‘I don’t suppose so,’ said Serpuhovskoy, smiling again.
‘I won’t say life wouldn’t be worth living without it, but it
would be dull. Of course I may be mistaken, but I fancy I
have a certain capacity for the line I’ve chosen, and that
power of any sort in my hands, if it is to be, will be better
than in the hands of a good many people I know,’ said
Serpuhovskoy, with beaming consciousness of success;
‘and so the nearer I get to it, the better pleased I am.’
‘Perhaps that is true for you, but not for everyone. I
used to think so too, but here I live and think life worth
living not only for that.’
‘There it’s out! here it comes!’ said Serpuhovskoy,
laughing. ‘Ever since I heard about you, about your
refusal, I began.... Of course, I approved of what you did.
But there are ways of doing everything. And I think your
action was good in itself, but you didn’t do it quite in the
way you ought to have done.’
‘What’s done can’t be undone, and you know I never
go back on what I’ve done. And besides, I’m very well
off.’
‘Very well off—for the time. But you’re not satisfied
with that. I wouldn’t say this to your brother. He’s a nice
child, like our host here. There he goes!’ he added,
listening to the roar of ‘hurrah!’—‘and he’s happy, but that
does not satisfy you.’
‘I didn’t say it did satisfy me.’
‘Yes, but that’s not the only thing. Such men as you are
wanted.’
‘By whom?’
‘By whom? By society, by Russia. Russia needs men;
she needs a party, or else everything goes and will go to
the dogs.’
‘How do you mean? Bertenev’s party against the
Russian communists?’
‘No,’ said Serpuhovskoy, frowning with vexation at
being suspected of such an absurdity. ‘Tout ca est une
blague. That’s always been and always will be. There are
no communists. But intriguing people have to invent a
noxious, dangerous party. It’s an old trick. No, what’s
wanted is a powerful party of independent men like you
and me.’
Anna Karenina
680 of 1759
‘But why so?’ Vronsky mentioned a few men who
were in power. ‘Why aren’t they independent men?’
‘Simply because they have not, or have not had from
birth, an independent fortune; they’ve not had a name,
they’ve not been close to the sun and center as we have.
They can be bought either by money or by favor. And
they have to find a support for themselves in inventing a
policy. And they bring forward some notion, some policy
that they don’t believe in, that does harm; and the whole
policy is really only a means to a government house and so
much income. Cela n’est pas plus fin que ca, when you
get a peep at their cards. I may be inferior to them,
stupider perhaps, though I don’t see why I should be
inferior to them. But you and I have one important
advantage over them for certain, in being more difficult to
buy. And such men are more needed than ever.’
Vronsky listened attentively, but he was not so much
interested by the meaning of the words as by the attitude
of Serpuhovskoy who was already contemplating a
struggle with the existing powers, and already had his likes
and dislikes in that higher world, while his own interest in
the governing world did not go beyond the interests of his
regiment. Vronsky felt, too, how powerful Serpuhovskoy
might become through his unmistakable faculty for
thinking things out and for taking things in, through his
intelligence and gift of words, so rarely met with in the
world in which he moved. And, ashamed as he was of the
feeling, he felt envious.
‘Still I haven’t the one thing of most importance for
that,’ he answered; ‘I haven’t the desire for power. I had it
once, but it’s gone.’
‘Excuse me, that’s not true,’ said Serpuhovskoy,
smiling.
‘Yes, it is true, it is true...now!’ Vronsky added, to be
truthful.
‘Yes, it’s true now, that’s another thing; but that NOW
won’t last forever.’
‘Perhaps,’ answered Vronsky.
‘You say PERHAPS,’ Serpuhovskoy went on, as
though guessing his thoughts, ‘but I say FOR CERTAIN.
And that’s what I wanted to see you for. Your action was
just what it should have been. I see that, but you ought
not to keep it up. I only ask you to give me carte blanche.
I’m not going to offer you my protection...though,
indeed, why shouldn’t I protect you?— you’ve protected
me often enough! I should hope our friendship rises above
all that sort of thing. Yes,’ he said, smiling to him as
tenderly as a woman, ‘give me carte blanche, retire from
the regiment, and I’ll draw you upwards imperceptibly.’
‘But you must understand that I want nothing,’ said
Vronsky, ‘except that all should be as it is.’
Serpuhovskoy got up and stood facing him.
‘You say that all should be as it is. I understand what
that means. But listen: we’re the same age, you’ve known
a greater number of women perhaps than I have.’
Serpohovskoy’s smile and gestures told Vronsky that he
mustn’t be afraid, that he would be tender and careful in
touching the sore place. ‘But I’m married, and believe me,
in getting to know thoroughly one’s wife, if one loves her,
as someone has said, one gets to know all women better
than if one knew thousands of them.’
‘We’re coming directly!’ Vronsky shouted to an officer,
who looked into the room and called them to the colonel.
Vronsky was longing now to hear to the end and know
what Serpuhovskey would say to him.
‘And here’s my opinion for you. Women are the chief
stumbling block in a man’s career. It’s hard to love a
woman and do anything. There’s only one way of having
love conveniently without its being a hindrance—that’s
marriage. How, how am I to tell you what I mean?’ said
Serpuhovskoy, who liked similes. ‘Wait a minute, wait a
minute! Yes, just as you can only carry a fardeau and do
something with your hands, when the fardeau is tied on
your back, and that’s marriage. And that’s what I felt when
I was married. My hands were suddenly set free. But to
drag that fardeau about with you without marriage, your
hands will always be so full that you can do nothing. Look
at Mazankov, at Krupov. They’ve ruined their careers for
the sake of women.’
‘What women!’ said Vronsky, recalling the
Frenchwoman and the actress with whom the two men he
had mentioned were connected.
‘The firmer the woman’s footing in society, the worse
it is. That’s much the same as—not merely carrying the
fardeau in your arms—but tearing it away from someone
else.’
‘You have never loved,’ Vronsky said softly, looking
straight before him and thinking of Anna.
‘Perhaps. But you remember what I’ve said to you.
And another thing, women are all more materialistic than
men. We make something immense out of love, but they
are always terre-a-terre.’
‘Directly, directly!’ he cried to a footman who came in.
But the footman had not come to call them again, as he
supposed. The footman brought Vronsky a note.
‘A man brought it from Princess Tverskaya.’
Vronsky opened the letter, and flushed crimson.
‘My head’s begun to ache; I’m going home,’ he said to
Serpuhovskoy.
‘Oh, good-bye then. You give me carte blanche!’
‘We’ll talk about it later on; I’ll look you up in
Petersburg.’
Chapter 22
It was six o’clock already, and so, in order to be there
quickly, and at the same time not to drive with his own
horses, known to everyone, Vronsky got into Yashvin’s
hired fly, and told the driver to drive as quickly as possible.
It was a roomy, old-fashioned fly, with seats for four. He
sat in one corner, stretched his legs out on the front seat,
and sank into meditation.
A vague sense of the order into which his affairs had
been brought, a vague recollection of the friendliness and
flattery of Serpuhovskoy, who had considered him a man
that was needed, and most of all, the anticipation of the
interview before him—all blended into a general, joyous
sense of life. This feeling was so strong that he could not
help smiling. He dropped his legs, crossed one leg over the
other knee, and taking it in his hand, felt the springy
muscle of the calf, where it had been grazed the day
before by his fall, and leaning back he drew several deep
breaths.
‘I’m happy, very happy!’ he said to himself. He had
often before had this sense of physical joy in his own
body, but he had never felt so fond of himself, of his own
body, as at that moment. He enjoyed the slight ache in his
strong leg, he enjoyed the muscular sensation of
movement in his chest as he breathed. The bright, cold
August day, which had made Anna feel so hopeless,
seemed to him keenly stimulating, and refreshed his face
and neck that still tingled from the cold water. The scent
of brilliantine on his whiskers struck him as particularly
pleasant in the fresh air. Everything he saw from the
carriage window, everything in that cold pure air, in the
pale light of the sunset, was as fresh, and ---, and strong as
he was himself: the roofs of the houses shining in the rays
of the setting sun, the sharp outlines of fences and angles
of buildings, the figures of passers-by, the carriages that
met him now and then, the motionless green of the trees
and grass, the fields with evenly drawn furrows of
potatoes, and the slanting shadows that fell from the
houses, and trees, and bushes, and even from the rows of
potatoes—everything was bright like a pretty landscape
just finished and freshly varnished.
‘Get on, get on!’ he said to the driver, putting his head
out of the window, and pulling a three-rouble note out of
his pocket he handed it to the man as he looked round.
The driver’s hand fumbled with something at the lamp,
the whip cracked, and the carriage rolled rapidly along the
smooth highroad.
‘I want nothing, nothing but this happiness,’ he
thought, staring at the bone button of the bell in the space
between the windows, and picturing to himself Anna just
as he had seen her last time. ‘And as I go on, I love her
more and more. Here’s the garden of the Vrede Villa.
Whereabouts will she be? Where? How? Why did she fix
on this place to meet me, and why does she write in
Betsy’s letter?’ he thought, wondering now for the first
time at it. But there was now no time for wonder. He
called to the driver to stop before reaching the avenue,
and opening the door, jumped out of the carriage as it was
moving, and went into the avenue that led up to the
house. There was no one in the avenue; but looking
round to the right he caught sight of her. Her face was
hidden by a veil, but he drank in with glad eyes the special
movement in walking, peculiar to her alone, the slope of
the shoulders, and the setting of the head, and at once a
sort of electric shock ran all over him. With fresh force, he
felt conscious of himself from the springy motions of his
legs to the movements of his lungs as he breathed, and
something set his lips twitching.
Joining him, she pressed his hand tightly.
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‘You’re not angry that I sent for you? I absolutely had
to see you,’ she said; and the serious and set line of her
lips, which he saw under the veil, transformed his mood at
once.