IV

1

The Karenins, husband and wife, continued to live in the same house, and meet every day, but they were utter strangers to each other. Alexei Alexandrovich made it a rule to see his wife every day, so that a servant would have no right to make any assumptions, but he avoided dinners at home. Vronsky never appeared in Alexei Alexandrovich’s house, but Anna saw him outside the house, and her husband knew this.

The situation was agonizing for all three, and none of them would have had the strength to make it through a single day in this situation had he not anticipated that it would change and that it was merely a temporary, grievous complication that would pass. Alexei Alexandrovich was waiting for this passion to pass, as everything does, for everyone to forget about it and his name to remain unbesmirched. Anna, on whom this situation depended and for whom it was more agonizing than anyone, endured it because she not only anticipated but was firmly confident that all this would be disentangled and clarified very soon. She decidedly did not know what would disentangle the situation, but she was firmly confident that this something would now come very soon. Vronsky, who could not do other than obey her, was also anticipating something independent of himself that would oblige all the complications to be resolved.

In the middle of winter Vronsky spent a very boring week. He had been assigned to a foreign prince who was visiting Petersburg and was supposed to show him the sights of Petersburg. Vronsky himself was impressive. Besides that, he possessed the art of bearing himself in a dignified and respectful manner and had the habit of dealing with such individuals; this was why he had been assigned to the prince. He found his duty very hard, though. The prince did not want to miss anything about which he would be asked at home whether he had seen it in Russia; and he himself wished to partake of all the Russian pleasures he could. Vronsky was obliged to guide him in both. In the mornings they rode around viewing the sights, and in the evenings they took part in national pleasures. The prince enjoyed health unusual even among princes; through both gymnastics and good care of his body he had brought himself to such strength that, despite the excesses of his pleasures, he was as fresh as a big green glossy Dutch cucumber. The prince had traveled a great deal and found that one of the main advantages of the current ease of transportation consisted in the accessibility of national pleasures. He had been in Spain and there had serenaded and become intimate with a Spanish girl who played the mandolin. In Switzerland he had killed a chamois. In England he had jumped fences on horseback wearing a red hunting jacket and killed two hundred pheasants on a bet. In Turkey he had been in a harem, in India he had ridden an elephant, and now in Russia he wished to sample all the special Russian pleasures.

Vronsky, who was with him as a kind of master of ceremonies, took great pains to apportion all the Russian pleasures offered the prince by various individuals. There were trotters, bliny, bear hunts, troikas, Gypsies, and drinking bouts with Russian plate smashing.¹ The prince assimilated the Russian spirit with extraordinary ease, smashed trays of plates, sat a Gypsy woman on his knee, and seemed to ask, Isn’t there something else, or does the entire Russian spirit consist merely of this?

In essence, of all the Russian pleasures the prince liked best of all the French actresses, the ballet dancer, and the white seal Champagne. Vronsky was used to princes, but whether it was because he himself had changed of late or due to the excessive closeness with this prince, he found this week terribly hard. All this week without a break he experienced an emotion similar to the emotion of someone who has been assigned to a dangerous lunatic, who fears the lunatic and at the same time, due to his proximity, fears for his own sanity. Vronsky felt a constant necessity not for one second to ease up on his tone of strict official deference, so that he would not be insulted. The prince’s manner of address with the very same people who, to Vronsky’s surprise, were doing their utmost to afford him Russian pleasures, was contemptuous. His judgments on Russian women, whom he wished to study, made Vronsky turn red with indignation more than once. The main reason why Vronsky found the prince especially difficult was the fact that he could not help but see himself in him. And what he saw in this mirror did not flatter his self-esteem. This was a very foolish, very self-assured, very healthy, very cleanly man, and nothing more. He was a gentleman—that was true, and Vronsky could not deny it. He was even-tempered and not ingratiating with his superiors; he was free and easy in addressing his equals and was contemptuously good-natured with his inferiors. Vronsky himself was just the same and considered it a great virtue; but with respect to the prince he was an inferior, and this contemptuous good nature infuriated him.

“Dumb ox! Am I really like that?” he thought.

Be that as it may, when he said good-bye to him on the seventh day, before his departure for Moscow, and received his gratitude, he was happy to be rid of this awkward situation and distasteful mirror. He said good-bye to him at the station upon their return from a bear hunt where all night long they had witnessed a presentation of Russian mettle.

2

Returning home, Vronsky found a note from Anna in his room. She wrote, “I am ill and unhappy. I cannot go out, but I cannot go any longer without seeing you. Come this evening. At seven o’clock Alexei Alexandrovich is going to the council and will be there until ten.” After contemplating for a minute the oddness of her summoning him directly to her home, despite her husband’s demand that she not receive him, he decided he would go.

Vronsky had that winter been promoted to colonel, had moved out of the regiment, and was living alone. After eating, he immediately lay down on the sofa, and in five minutes memories of the outrageous scenes he had witnessed in the last few days became confused and mixed up with an image in his mind of Anna and the peasant beater who had played an important role in the bear hunt; and Vronsky fell asleep. He awoke in the darkness, trembling from terror, and hastily lit a candle. “What’s this? What? What terrible thing did I dream? Yes, yes. The peasant beater, I think, that short, filthy man with the rumpled beard, leaned over doing something and suddenly started speaking such strange words in French. Yes, that’s all I dreamed,” he told himself. “But why was it so awful?” Once again he vividly recalled the peasant and those incomprehensible French words this peasant had uttered, and horror ran down his spine like ice.

“What nonsense!” thought Vronsky, and he looked at his watch.

It was already half past eight. He rang for his servant, dressed in haste, and went out onto the front steps, having completely forgotten the dream and bothered only by the fact that he was late. Riding up to the Karenins’ front steps, he glanced at his watch and saw that it was ten until nine. A tall, narrow carriage harnessed with a pair of grays was standing by the entrance. He recognized Anna’s carriage. “She’s coming to see me,” thought Vronsky, “and that would have been better. I find it distasteful to enter this house. It doesn’t matter, though; I can’t hide,” he told himself, and with the manners of a man who has nothing to be ashamed of, manners he had possessed since childhood, Vronsky stepped from his sleigh and walked to the door. The door opened and the porter, carrying a lap robe on his arm, beckoned to the carriage. Vronsky, who was unaccustomed to noticing details, noticed nonetheless the now astonished expression the porter cast at him. Vronsky nearly ran into Alexei Alexandrovich in the doorway. A gas jet directly lit the bloodless, pinched face under the black hat and the white tie that gleamed from under the beaver of his coat. Karenin’s perfectly still, dull eyes focused on Vronsky’s face. Vronsky bowed, and Alexei Alexandrovich, chewing his lips, raised his hand to his hat and walked past. Vronsky saw him get into the carriage without looking back, take the lap robe and opera glass through the window, and disappear. Vronsky walked into the front hall. His brow was scowling, and his eyes glittered with an angry and proud gleam.

“There’s a situation!” he thought. “Had he struggled and tried to defend his honor, I might have acted, expressed my feelings; but this weakness, or baseness. … He is putting me in the position of the cheat, and that I have never wanted to be.”

Since the time of his explanation with Anna, in Madame Wrede’s garden, Vronsky’s thoughts had changed greatly. Unwillingly submitting to Anna’s weakness, who had surrendered to him completely and only awaited from him the decision of her fate, submitting in advance to everything, he had long since ceased to think that this liaison could end, as he had once thought. His ambitious plans once again receded into the background, and sensing that he had stepped out of the circle of activity in which everything was well defined, he surrendered entirely to his emotion, and this emotion was attaching him to her with increasing strength.

While still in the front hall he heard her retreating steps. He realized that she had been waiting for him, listening, and had now returned to the drawing room.

“No!” she cried when she saw him, and at the first sound of her voice tears came to her eyes. “No, if this is going to go on like this, then it’s going to happen much, much sooner!”

“What, my friend?”

“What? I’ve been waiting, agonizing, an hour, two. … No, I’m not going to! I cannot quarrel with you. It’s true, you couldn’t have. No, I’m not going to!”

She put both hands on his shoulders and for a long time gazed at him with a deep, ecstatic, yet searching gaze. She studied his face to make up for the time she had not seen him. As at any rendezvous, she rolled into one her imagined notion of him (incomparably better, impossible in reality) and the way he really was.

3

“Did you run into him?” she asked when they had sat down by the table under the lamp. “That’s your punishment for being late.”

“Yes, but how did it happen? Wasn’t he supposed to be in council?”

“He was and came back and went out again somewhere. But that doesn’t matter. Don’t speak of it. Where have you been? With the prince all that time?”

She knew all the details of his life. He wanted to tell her that he hadn’t slept all night and had fallen asleep, but looking at her agitated and happy face, he felt guilty. He said that he’d had to go give a report on the prince’s departure.

“But now it’s over? He’s gone?”

“Thank God, it’s over. You can’t believe how unbearable it was for me.”

“But why? After all, it’s the typical life of all you young men,” she said, furrowing her brow, and, picking up her crocheting, which lay on the table, she began freeing the hook from it, not looking at Vronsky.

“I left that life behind long ago,” he said, amazed at the change of expression in her face and trying to penetrate its meaning. “I confess,” he said, displaying his strong white teeth with his smile, “I’ve been looking in the mirror this week, looking at this life, and I found it distasteful.”

She held her crocheting in her hands but didn’t crochet, instead she looked at him with a strange, glittering, and unfriendly gaze.

“This morning Liza came by to see me. They’re still not afraid of paying me a visit, despite Countess Lydia Ivanovna,” she interjected, “and she told me about your Athenian night.² What filth!”

“I just wanted to say that—”

She interrupted him.

“Was that Thérèse there, who you used to know?”

“I wanted to say—”

“How vile you are, you men! How can you fail to conceive that a woman cannot forget that,” she said, getting angrier and angrier and in this way revealing to him the reason for her irritation. “Especially a woman who cannot know your life. What do I know? What did I know?” she said. “Just what you tell me. But how do I know you’re telling me the truth?”

“Anna! You’re insulting me. Don’t you believe me? Haven’t I told you that I have no thought I wouldn’t reveal to you?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, evidently trying to drive out her jealous thoughts. “But if you knew how hard it was for me! I believe you, I do. … So what were you saying?”

But he couldn’t remember immediately what he had been about to say. These fits of jealousy, which had been coming over her more and more often lately, horrified him, and no matter how he tried to conceal it, they made him cooler toward her, although he knew that the cause of her jealousy was her love for him. How many times had he told himself that her love was his happiness; and here she loved him as a woman can love for whom love outweighed every good in life—yet he was much farther from happiness than when he had followed her from Moscow. Then, he had counted himself unhappy, but happiness was ahead, and now he felt that the best happiness was already behind. She was not at all the way she had been when he had seen her the first time. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. She was much filled out, and her face, when she was talking about the actress, had a spiteful expression that distorted it. He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has plucked and in which he has trouble seeing the beauty that had led him to pluck and ruin it. He felt that when his love had been stronger he could have, if he had wanted to very much, torn that love out of his heart, but now, when at this moment he did not seem to feel any love for her, he knew that his tie to her could not be sundered.

“Well, well, so what did you want to tell me about the prince? I’ve driven the demon out, driven it out,” she added. Between themselves they called her jealousy the demon. “Yes, weren’t you starting to tell me about the prince? Why was it so difficult for you?”

“Oh, unbearable!” he said, trying to retrieve the thread of his lost thought. “He doesn’t gain from closer acquaintance. If I were to define him, then he’s a superbly fed animal, the kind that wins first in show, and nothing more,” he said with an annoyance that piqued her interest.

“No, but how?” she objected. “Hasn’t he seen a great deal? Isn’t he educated?”

“It’s a completely different education—their education. He evidently has been educated only in order to have the right to despise education, as they despise everything other than animal pleasures.”

“Yes, but you all love these animal pleasures,” she said, and again he noticed the dark look that avoided him.

“So how is it you’re defending him?” he said, smiling.

“I’m not defending him, I don’t care at all; but I think that if you yourself did not love these pleasures, then you could have refused. But it gives you pleasure to look at Thérèse in the costume of Eve.”

“Again, again the devil!” said Vronsky, picking up the hand she had laid on the table and kissing it.

“Yes, but I can’t help it! You don’t know how I suffered waiting for you! I don’t think I’m jealous. I’m not jealous; I believe in you when you’re here, with me; but when you’re somewhere alone leading a life I don’t understand …”

She pulled away from him, extricated, at last, the hook from her crocheting, and quickly, with the help of her index finger, began throwing one loop after another of white wool gleaming under the lamp’s light, and quickly, nervously began twisting her slender wrist in its embroidered cuff.

“Well how was it? Where did you meet Alexei Alexandrovich?” Her voice suddenly sounded unnatural.

“We ran into each other at the door.”

“And he bowed to you like this?”

She made a long face, and half-closing her eyes, quickly changed the expression of her face and folded her hands, and Vronsky suddenly saw in her handsome face the very expression with which Alexei Alexandrovich had bowed to him. He smiled, and she laughed gaily, that sweet, deep laugh that was one of her main charms.

“I decidedly do not understand him,” said Vronsky. “If after your explanation at the dacha he had broken with you, if he had challenged me to a duel … but this I don’t understand. How can he bear this situation? He’s suffering, that is obvious.”

“He?” she said with a grin. “He is perfectly content.”

“What do we all keep torturing ourselves over when everything could be so fine?”

“Only not him. Don’t I know him, this lie that runs right through him? Could I, feeling anything, live the way he lives with me? He understands nothing, feels nothing. Can a man who feels anything really live in the same house with a criminal wife? Could he really speak with her? Address her familiarly?”³

Again she could not help but mimic him. “Anna, ma chère, Anna dear!

“He’s not a man, not a human being, he’s a puppet! No one knows, but I know. Oh, if I were in his place, I would have killed her long ago, I would have torn a wife like myself to pieces, and I would not be saying, ‘Anna, ma chère, Anna, dear.’ He’s not a man, he’s a ministerial machine. He doesn’t understand that I am your wife, that he is the outsider, that he is the one who is superfluous. Let’s not, let’s not speak of him!”

“You’re unfair, very unfair, my friend,” said Vronsky, trying to calm her. “But it doesn’t matter, let’s not talk about him. Tell me, what have you been doing? What’s wrong with you? What is this illness, and what did the doctor say?”

She looked at him with derisive delight. Evidently she had found still other ridiculous and ugly aspects in her husband and was waiting for the moment to express them.

He went on.

“I’m guessing it’s not an illness but your condition. When will it be?”

The mocking light went out in her eyes, but another smile—the knowledge of something he did not know and of a quiet sorrow—replaced her former expression.

“Soon, soon. You yourself have said that our situation is agonizing, that we need to disentangle it. If only you knew how hard it was for me, what I would give to love you freely and boldly! I would not be tormented, and would not torment you with my jealousy. And this is going to happen soon, but not the way we have been thinking.”

At the thought of how it would be, she seemed so pathetic even to herself that tears sprang to her eyes, and she could not go on. She put her very white hand with its rings, which glowed under the lamp, on his sleeve.

“It’s not going to be the way we’ve been thinking. I didn’t want to tell you this, but you’ve forced me. Soon, very soon, everything will disentangle itself, and all of us, all of us will calm down and be tormented no longer.”

“I don’t understand,” he said, understanding her.

“You asked when? Soon. And I won’t survive it. Don’t interrupt!” She hastened to finish. “I know this, and I know it for certain. I’m going to die, and I’m very happy that I’m going to die and free myself and you.”

Tears streamed from her eyes; he leaned over her hand and began kissing it, trying to conceal his agitation, which, he knew, had no foundation, but he could not overcome it.

“There, that’s it, and it’s better that way,” she said, pressing his hand with a powerful movement. “This is the one thing, the one thing we have left.”

He recovered and looked up.

“What nonsense! What idiotic nonsense you’re speaking!”

“No, it’s the truth.”

“What? What’s the truth?”

“That I’m going to die. I had a dream.”

“A dream?” Vronsky repeated, and he instantly recalled the peasant in his dream.

“Yes, a dream,” she said. “It was a long time ago that I had this dream. I dreamed that I was running into my bedroom, that I needed to get something there, find out something. You know how it is in a dream,” she said, opening her eyes wide in horror. “And in the bedroom, something was standing in the corner.”

“What nonsense! How can you believe …”

But she would not let herself be cut off. What she was saying was too important to her.

“That ‘something’ turned around, and I saw it was a peasant with a rumpled beard, and he was small and frightening. I wanted to run, but he leaned over a sack and rummaged through it.”

She imitated him rummaging in the sack. Horror was on her face. And Vronsky, recalling his own dream, felt the same horror that had filled his soul.

“He was rummaging around and saying something in French, very quickly, and you know, he was using French r’s: ‘Il faut le battre le fer, le boyer, le pétrir.’⁴ And from terror I wanted to wake up, and I did, but when I woke up I was still dreaming, and I began asking myself what it meant, and Kornei told me, ‘Labor, you’re going to die in labor, labor, good mother.’ Then I woke up.”

“What nonsense, what nonsense!” said Vronsky, but he himself could feel the lack of conviction in his voice.

“But let’s not talk about it. Ring, I’ll have tea served. And stay awhile, it won’t be long now until I—”

But suddenly she stopped. The expression on her face changed instantaneously. Horror and agitation were suddenly replaced by an expression of gentle, grave, and blissful attention. He couldn’t understand the significance of this change. She had felt inside her the stirring of a new life.

4

After meeting Vronsky on his own front steps, Alexei Alexandrovich had set out, as he had intended, for the Italian opera. He had sat through two acts there and seen everyone he needed to see. When he returned home, he examined the coat stand carefully, and remarking that there was no military coat, he proceeded to his rooms, as was his custom. But contrary to custom he did not go to bed and paced back and forth, up and down his study, until three o’clock in the morning. His fury at his wife, who had not wished to observe the proprieties and comply with the sole condition he had set for her—not to receive her lover at home—would give him no rest. She had not met his demand, and he had to punish her and carry out his threat—demand a divorce and take away their son. He knew all the difficulties connected with this course of action, but he said he would do it and now he had to follow through on his threat. Countess Lydia Ivanovna had hinted to him that this was the best solution to his situation, and of late the practice of divorces had been brought to such a state of perfection that Alexei Alexandrovich could see an opportunity for overcoming the formal difficulties. Moreover, misfortune does not come alone, and the affairs of organizing the native populations and irrigating the fields of Zaraisk Province had brought down upon Alexei Alexandrovich such official troubles that of late he had been constantly in a state of extreme irritation.

He did not sleep all night, and his fury, mounting in a tremendous progression, by morning had reached extreme limits. He dressed hurriedly, and as if he were carrying a full cup of his fury and afraid of spilling it, afraid of wasting not only his fury but the energy needed for the explanation with his wife, went into her room the moment he learned that she had risen.

Anna, who had thought she knew her husband so well, was stunned by the sight of him when he entered her room. His brow was furrowed, and his eyes were staring gloomily straight ahead, avoiding her gaze; his mouth was pressed firmly and contemptuously shut. His walk, his movements, and the sound of his voice held a decisiveness and firmness that his wife had never seen in him before. He entered the room and without greeting her headed directly toward her writing table, picked up the key, and opened the drawer.

“What do you need?!” she cried.

“Your lover’s letters,” he said.

“They’re not here,” she said, closing the drawer; but by this movement he realized that he had guessed correctly, and rudely pushing her hand aside, he quickly snatched the portfolio in which he knew she kept her most essential papers. She was about to tear the portfolio away, but he pushed her back.

“Sit down! I need to speak with you,” he said, slipping the portfolio under his arm and squeezing it so tensely with his elbow that his shoulder lifted.

Surprised and intimidated, she looked at him in silence.

“I told you I would not allow you to receive your lover at home.”

“I needed to see him to—”

She stopped, not finding any excuse.

“I won’t go into the details of why a woman needs to see her lover.”

“I wanted, I only …” she said, blazing up. This rudeness of his irritated her and gave her daring. “Can’t you feel how easy it is for you to insult me?” she said.

“One can insult an honest man and an honest woman, but to tell a thief that he is a thief is only la constatation d’un fait.”⁵

“This is a new cruelty I never knew in you before.”

“You call it cruelty when a husband gives his wife her freedom, giving her the honorable shelter of his name on the sole condition that she observe the proprieties. That is cruelty?”

“It’s worse than cruelty. It’s baseness, if you really want to know!” Anna shouted in a burst of anger, and standing up, she tried to leave.

“No!” he cried in his shrill voice, which now rose a note even higher than usual, and grabbing her by the arm with his large fingers so powerfully that the bracelet he squeezed left red marks, he forcibly sat her down. “Baseness? If you want to use that word, then baseness is abandoning husband and son for a lover while eating your husband’s bread!”

She bowed her head. She not only did not say what she had said yesterday to her lover, that he was her husband, and her husband was superfluous; she did not even think this. She felt the full justice of his words and only said softly, “You cannot make my position out to be worse than I myself understand it to be, but what are you saying all this for?”

“What am I saying this for? What for?” he continued just as angrily. “So you know that, since you have not complied with my will concerning observing the proprieties, I am going to take measures to end this situation.”

“Soon, very soon, it will end anyway,” she said, and again tears at the thought of her imminent, now desired death sprang to her eyes.

“It will end sooner than you and your lover imagined! You need satisfaction of your animal passion—”

“Alexei Alexandrovich! I’m not saying this is not magnanimous, but it is indecent to beat someone who is already laid low.”

“Yes, all you think of is yourself, but the sufferings of the man who was your husband are of no interest for you. You don’t care that his entire life has been ruined, what he has suffel … suffel … suffeled through.”

Alexei Alexandrovich was speaking so quickly that he got muddled and simply could not pronounce that word. Eventually he pronounced it “suffeled.” She found this funny and was immediately ashamed that she could find anything funny at a moment like this. And for the first time, she felt sorry for him for an instant, put herself in his place and felt sorry for him. But what could she say or do? She dropped her head and fell silent. He, too, was silent for a brief while and began speaking again in a less shrill and cold voice, emphasizing arbitrarily chosen words of no particular importance:

“I came to tell you, …” he said.

She looked up at him. “No, I only imagined it,” she thought, recalling the expression of his face when he got muddled on the word “suffered.” “No, can a man with these dull eyes and this complacent calm feel anything?”

“I cannot change anything,” she whispered.

“I came to tell you that I am leaving for Moscow tomorrow and I will not return again to this house, and you will have news of my decision through my lawyer, to whom I will entrust the matter of a divorce. My son will move to my sister’s,” said Alexei Alexandrovich, struggling to remember what he had meant to say about his son.

“You need Seryozha just to hurt me,” she said, looking up at him sullenly. “You don’t love him. Leave me Seryozha!”

“Yes, I’ve even lost my love for my son because he is connected to my revulsion for you. But I will take him anyway. Good-bye!”

He was about to leave, but she held him back.

“Alexei Alexandrovich, leave me Seryozha,” she whispered again. “I have nothing else to say. Leave me Seryozha until I … I’m going to give birth soon, leave him to me!”

Alexei Alexandrovich flared up and tearing his hand away from her left the room without a word.

5

The waiting room of the famous Petersburg lawyer was full when Alexei Alexandrovich entered it. Three ladies—an old woman, a young woman, and a merchant’s wife—and three gentlemen—one German banker with a signet ring on his finger, another a merchant with a beard, and a third, an angry official wearing a civil uniform, with an order around his neck, had evidently been waiting a long time.⁶ Two assistants were writing at their desks, scratching with their pens. The writing implements, for which Alexei Alexandrovich was a great enthusiast, were uncommonly fine; Alexei Alexandrovich could not help but notice this. One of the assistants, without standing, scowled and addressed Alexei Alexandrovich angrily.

“What can I do for you?”

“I have a matter for the lawyer.”

“The lawyer is busy,” the assistant replied sternly, pointing with his pen to the people waiting, and he continued to write.

“Can’t he find the time?” said Alexei Alexandrovich.

“He has no free time, he is always busy. If you like, you may wait.”

“Then I must trouble you to give him my card,” said Alexei Alexandrovich with dignity, seeing the necessity of abandoning his incognito.

The assistant took his card, and obviously not approving of its content, passed through the door.

Alexei Alexandrovich sympathized with the public trial in principle, but some of the details of its application among us did not meet with his full sympathy, due to higher official attitudes known to him, and he condemned it, as much as he was capable of condemning anything that had been approved at the very highest level.⁷ His entire life had passed in administrative work, so when he did not sympathize with something, his lack of sympathy was tempered by his recognition of the inevitability of mistakes and the possibility of correction in each case. In the new judicial institutions he did not approve of the conditions in which the legal profession had been placed. Up until this time, however, he had never had any dealings with the legal profession, so he had disapproved of it only in theory; now his disapproval was intensified by the distasteful impression he had been given in the lawyer’s waiting room.

“He will be right out,” said the assistant, and indeed, two minutes later the tall figure of an elderly man of the law who had been consulting with the lawyer appeared in the doorway together with the lawyer himself.

The lawyer was a short, stocky, balding man with a dark rusty beard, long fair eyebrows, and an overhanging brow. He was as smartly turned out as a bridegroom, from his tie to his double chain and patent leather boots. His face was clever and peasantlike; his attire dandyish and in poor taste.

“Please,” said the lawyer, addressing Alexei Alexandrovich. After gloomily allowing Karenin to pass, he shut the door. “Will this do?” He pointed to a comfortable chair by a desk covered with papers and himself sat in the presiding chair, rubbing his small hands with his stubby fingers covered in white hairs, his head tilted to one side. No sooner had he settled into his pose, though, than a moth flew across his desk. With a speed one could not have expected from him, the lawyer unclasped his hands, caught the moth, and resumed his former position.

“Before beginning to speak about my case,” said Alexei Alexandrovich, watching the lawyer’s movements in astonishment, “I must note that the case about which I must speak with you is to remain a secret.”

A barely perceptible smile spread the lawyer’s rusty hanging mustache.

“I would not be a lawyer if I could not keep the secrets entrusted to me. However, if you would like confirmation …”

Alexei Alexandrovich looked at his face and saw that the clever gray eyes were laughing and already knew everything.

“Do you know my name?” continued Alexei Alexandrovich.

“I know you and your beneficial”—he caught another moth—“activities, as does every Russian,” said the lawyer, bowing.

Alexei Alexandrovich took a deep breath, summoning his courage. Once he had made up his mind, though, he continued in his shrill voice, not at all timid, without stumbling, and emphasizing the odd word.

“I have the misfortune,” began Alexei Alexandrovich, “of being a deceived husband, and I wish to legally sunder my relations with my wife, that is, divorce, however in such a manner that my son does not remain with his mother.”

The lawyer’s gray eyes tried not to laugh, but they were leaping from irrepressible glee, and Alexei Alexandrovich could see that that was not just the glee of someone obtaining a profitable order; here too were triumph and delight, a gleam similar to that sinister gleam he had seen in the eyes of his wife.

“You desire my assistance in obtaining a divorce?”

“Yes, precisely so, but I must warn you that I risk abusing your attention. I came merely to consult with you preliminarily. I do wish a divorce, but the forms under which it is possible are important for me. It may well be that these forms will not coincide with my requirements, and then I will reject a legal suit.”

“Oh, it’s always that way,” said the lawyer, “and it’s always up to you.”

The lawyer lowered his gaze to Alexei Alexandrovich’s feet, sensing that he might offend his client with the sight of his irrepressible glee. He looked at a moth flying under his nose, and his hand twitched, but he did not catch it out of respect for Alexei Alexandrovich’s situation.

“Although our statutes on this subject are known to me in their general features,” Alexei Alexandrovich continued, “I would like to know generally the forms in which this type of matter is accomplished in practice.”

“You wish me,” replied the lawyer without looking up, and not without a certain satisfaction, entering into the tone of his client’s speech, “to set forth the ways in which it is possible to fulfill your wish.”

At the confirmatory nod of Alexei Alexandrovich’s head, he continued, only rarely glancing at Alexei Alexandrovich’s face, which was blotchy red.

“Under our laws,” he said with a slight nuance of disapproval for our laws, “divorce is possible, as you know, in the following instances. Wait!” he addressed his assistant, who had poked his head in the door, but nonetheless did stand up, say a few words, and sit back down. “In the following instances: the spouses’ physical defects, then a separation of five years without any contact,” he said, bending down a stubby and very hairy finger, “then adultery (he pronounced this word with obvious satisfaction) in the following subcategories (he continued to bend down his fat fingers, although the instances and subcategories evidently could not be classified together): physical defects in the husband or wife, and then the adultery of the husband or wife.” Since all his fingers were used, he straightened them all and continued, “This is the theoretical view, but I believe you have done me the honor of turning to me in order to learn the practical application, and so, guided by precedents, I must inform you that instances of divorce all lead to the following. There are no physical defects, do I understand correctly? Nor any absence without contact?”

Alexei Alexandrovich nodded in the affirmative.

“They come down to the following: the adultery of one of the spouses and the disclosure of the illicit aspect by mutual consent and, in lieu of such consent, involuntary disclosure. I have to tell you that this last instance is rarely met with in practice,” said the lawyer, and glancing briefly at Alexei Alexandrovich he fell silent, like the purveyor of revolvers who has described the advantages of one weapon or another and is anticipating his buyer’s choice. Alexei Alexandrovich said nothing, however, and so the lawyer continued. “The most common and simple, the most reasonable, I believe, is adultery by mutual consent. I would not permit myself to express myself in this way speaking with an uncultured man,” said the lawyer, “but I believe that you will understand this.”

Alexei Alexandrovich was so distraught, however, that he did not immediately perceive the reasonableness of adultery by mutual consent and expressed this perplexity in his look; but the lawyer immediately came to his aid:

“The people cannot live together any longer—this is a fact, and if both agree in this, then the details and formalities become a matter of indifference. In addition, this is the simplest and surest means.”

Alexei Alexandrovich understood perfectly now, but he had religious requirements that prevented him from permitting this measure.

“That is out of the question in the present instance,” he said. “Here just one instance is possible: involuntary disclosure, confirmed by letters in my possession.”

At the mention of letters, the lawyer pursed his lips and produced a subtle, sympathetic, and contemptuous sound.

“Kindly observe,” he began. “Matters of this type are decided, as you know, by the religious authorities; in cases of this type the priests and archpriests are avid to go into the finest details,” he said with a smile, indicating his sympathy for the archpriests’ taste. “Letters can, without a doubt, confirm in part; however, the evidence must be obtained by direct means, that is, by eyewitnesses. Generally speaking, if you would do me the honor of conferring on me your trust and entrust me with your choice of those measures which should be employed. Whoever desires a result must also allow for the means.”

“If that is so,” began Alexei Alexandrovich, blanching, but at the same time the lawyer rose and again went to the door to talk to his assistant, who had interrupted him.

“Tell her we are not dealing in cheap goods!”⁸ he said, and he returned to Alexei Alexandrovich.

Returning to his seat, he caught another moth he had failed to notice. “My repp is going to be in a fine state by summer!” he thought, frowning.

“And so, you were so kind as to be saying …” he said.

“I shall inform you of my decision in writing,” said Alexei Alexandrovich, and he held onto the desk as he rose. After standing there for a moment in silence, he said, “From your explanation I may conclude, accordingly, that accomplishment of a divorce is possible. I would ask that you inform me as well of what your terms are.”

“Everything is possible if you allow me complete freedom of action,” said the lawyer, not answering his question. “When may I expect to receive news from you?” asked the lawyer, moving toward the door, his eyes and patent leather boots gleaming.

“In a week. And your reply as to whether you agree to plead this case and on what terms, you’ll be so kind as to inform me.”

“Very good.”

The lawyer bowed respectfully, let his client through the door, and once alone, gave in to his delight. He became so cheerful that, contrary to his own rules, he gave a discount to the haggling young lady and stopped catching moths, having decided conclusively that before next winter he must reupholster the furniture in velvet, as Sigonin had.

6

Alexei Alexandrovich won a brilliant victory at the Commission of August 17th, but the consequences of this victory undercut him. The new commission investigating all aspects of the life of native populations had been constituted and sent off to the site with an unusual speed and energy aroused by Alexei Alexandrovich. A report was presented three months later. The life of native populations had been researched in its political, administrative, economic, ethnographic, material, and religious aspects. To all these questions excellent answers were set forth, and answers that were not subject to doubt, since they were not the product of human thought, which is always subject to error, but were all the product of official activity. All the answers were the results of official data and reports from the governors and archbishops, based on reports from the district heads and rural deans, which were based, in turn, on reports from rural administrations and parish priests; and so all these answers were indubitable. All the questions about why, for instance, there were crop failures, why inhabitants clung to their beliefs, and so forth, questions which cannot be resolved without the official machinery and have not been resolved for ages, received a clear and indubitable solution. And the solution supported Alexei Alexandrovich’s opinion. Stremov, however, feeling he had been cut to the quick at the last session, upon receiving the commission’s reports, employed a tactic that caught Alexei Alexandrovich off guard. Bringing several other members along with him, Stremov suddenly went over to Alexei Alexandrovich’s side and heatedly not only defended the introduction of the measures proposed by Karenin but also proposed others more radical in the same spirit. These measures, extreme even compared with what had been Alexei Alexandrovich’s main concept, were approved, and then Stremov’s tactic was laid bare. These measures, taken to their extreme, suddenly appeared so foolish that at one and the same time men of state, and public opinion, and intellectual ladies, and the newspapers—everyone came crashing down on these measures, expressing their indignation both at the measures themselves and at their acknowledged father, Alexei Alexandrovich. Stremov stepped back, pretending that he had merely been blindly following Karenin’s plan and now himself was amazed and indignant at what had been done. This undercut Alexei Alexandrovich. Despite his declining health, however, and despite his familial woes, Alexei Alexandrovich did not yield. A schism occurred in the commission. Some members, led by Stremov, tried to justify their error by saying that they had trusted the commission of inspection directed by Alexei Alexandrovich which had presented the report, and they said that the report of this commission was rubbish and nothing more than scribbled paper. Alexei Alexandrovich and a group of men who saw the danger of this kind of revolutionary attitude toward documents continued to support the figures worked out by the commission of inspection. As a result of this, in higher spheres, and even in society, all was chaos, and even though everyone found this extremely interesting, no one could tell whether the native populations were truly living in poverty and perishing, or whether they were flourishing. Alexei Alexandrovich’s position as a result of this and, in part, the contempt that had befallen him due to his wife’s unfaithfulness, became quite shaky. In this position, Alexei Alexandrovich took an important decision. To the commission’s surprise, he announced that he would be asking permission to travel himself to the site to study the matter. Once he had obtained permission, Alexei Alexandrovich set out for the remote provinces.

Alexei Alexandrovich’s departure caused a great sensation, especially since immediately before his departure he officially returned the traveling allowance issued him for twelve horses to proceed to the appointed location.

“I find that very noble,” Betsy told Princess Myahkaya. “Why issue an allowance for post horses when everyone knows that there are railways everywhere now?”

However, Princess Myahkaya did not agree, and the opinion of Princess Tverskaya rather irritated her.

“Fine for you to say,” said she, “when you have I don’t know how many millions, but I like it very much when my husband travels to inspect in the summer. It’s good for his health and he enjoys the travel, and it has already been established for me that with this money I can keep a carriage and driver.”

En route to the remote provinces, Alexei Alexandrovich spent three days in Moscow.

The day after his arrival he called on the governor general. At the crossing near Gazetny Lane, where carriages and drivers always clustered, Alexei Alexandrovich suddenly heard his name being shouted in such a loud and cheerful voice that he could not help but look around. On the corner of the sidewalk, wearing a short stylish coat, with a short stylish hat tilted to the side, beaming with a smile of white teeth between red lips, cheerful and young, stood Stepan Arkadyevich, who had been shouting firmly and insistently demanding that he stop. He kept one hand on the window of a carriage that had stopped at the corner, out of which poked a woman’s head in a velvet hat and also two childish heads, and he smiled and beckoned to his brother-in-law. The lady smiled a good smile and also beckoned to Alexei Alexandrovich. It was Dolly and her children.

Alexei Alexandrovich had not wanted to see anyone in Moscow, least of all his wife’s brother. He tipped his hat and was about to continue on his way, but Stepan Arkadyevich ordered his driver to stop and ran toward him through the snow.

“Well, it wouldn’t have hurt to send word! Been here long? I was at Dussault’s yesterday and saw ‘Karenin’ on the board, but it didn’t occur to me that it was you!” said Stepan Arkadyevich, poking his head through the carriage window. “Otherwise I would have stopped by. How glad I am to see you!” he said, knocking one foot against the other to shake off the snow. “It wouldn’t have hurt to let us know!” he repeated.

“I had no time. I’m very busy,” replied Alexei Alexandrovich dryly.

“Let’s go over to my wife, she so wants to see you.”

Alexei Alexandrovich folded back the lap robe tucked around his shivering legs, and emerging from the carriage, made his way through the snow to see Darya Alexandrovna.

“What is this, Alexei Alexandrovich? Why are you trying so hard to avoid us?” said Dolly, smiling dolefully.

“I’ve been very busy. I’m very pleased to see you,” he said in a tone that clearly said he was grieved by this. “How is your health?”

“Well, and what of my dear Anna?”

Alexei Alexandrovich mumbled something and was about to leave. But Stepan Arkadyevich stopped him.

“Here’s what we’ll do tomorrow. Dolly, invite him to dinner! We’ll invite Koznyshev and Pestsov in order to treat him to the Moscow intelligentsia.”

“Yes, please, do come,” said Dolly. “We’ll be expecting you at five or six o’clock, if you like. Well, and what about my dear Anna? It’s been so long—”

“She is well,” Alexei Alexandrovich mumbled again, frowning. “Very pleased!” and he headed for his carriage.

“Will you come?” cried Dolly.

Alexei Alexandrovich said something Dolly could not make out in the noise of the jostling carriages.

“I shall stop by tomorrow!” Stepan Arkadyevich shouted after him.

Alexei Alexandrovich got into his carriage and sat so far inside that he could neither see nor be seen.

“A peculiar man!” Stepan Arkadyevich said to his wife, and glancing at his watch, he made a motion with his hand in front of his face that signified a caress for his wife and children, and set off jauntily down the sidewalk.

“Stiva! Stiva!” shouted Dolly, blushing.

He turned around.

“You know I need to buy coats for Grisha and Tanya. Give me some money!”

“It’s all right, just tell them I’ll pay,” and he was gone, cheerfully nodding to a passing acquaintance.

7

The next day was Sunday. Stepan Arkadyevich stopped in at the Bolshoi Theater for a ballet rehearsal and gave Masha Chibisova, the pretty little dancer who had newly come under his protection, the coral beads he had promised the night before, and backstage, in the theater’s dim daylight, he managed to kiss her pretty little face, which was beaming from the gift. Besides the gift of the coral beads, he needed to make arrangements with her for a tryst after the ballet. Explaining to her that he could not be there for the ballet’s beginning, he gave her his word that he would arrive by the final act and take her to supper. From the theater Stepan Arkadyevich drove by Hunter’s Row, himself selected the fish and asparagus for dinner, and at twelve o’clock was already at Dussault’s, where he needed to see three different people who, to his good fortune, were all staying in the same hotel: Levin, who was staying there, having recently arrived from abroad; his new superior, who had just entered into this exalted position and was inspecting Moscow; and his brother-in-law Karenin, in order to be sure to bring him for dinner.

Stepan Arkadyevich liked to dine, but even more he liked to give dinners, not too big, but refined, both for their food and drink and for the choice of guests. He liked the program for the present dinner very much: there would be fresh perch, asparagus, and, la pièce de résistance—a marvelous but simple roast of beef and the appropriate wines: that took care of the food and drink. Of the guests there would be Kitty and Levin, and so that it was not too obvious, there would also be a cousin and young Shcherbatsky and, la pièce de résistance among the guests—Sergei Koznyshev and Alexei Alexandrovich. Sergei Ivanovich was a Muscovite and philosopher, Alexei Alexandrovich a Petersburger and a practitioner; and he would also invite that famous eccentric and enthusiast Pestsov, a liberal, chatterer, musician, historian, and the sweetest of fifty-year-old youths, who would be the sauce or garnish for Koznyshev and Karenin. He would stir them up and play them off against each other.

The second installment of the forest money had been received and was not yet entirely spent, Dolly had been very sweet and good of late, and the thought of this dinner cheered Stepan Arkadyevich in all respects. He was in the most cheerful of spirits. There were two rather unpleasant circumstances, but both these circumstances drowned in the sea of good-natured cheer surging inside Stepan Arkadyevich. These two circumstances were the following: first, yesterday, when he met Alexei Alexandrovich on the street, he had noticed that he was dry and stern with him, and putting together the expression on Alexei Alexandrovich’s face and the fact that he had not come to see them or let them know he was there with the talk he had heard about Anna and Vronsky, Stepan Arkadyevich guessed that something was amiss between husband and wife.

That was one unpleasant thing. The other somewhat unpleasant thing was the fact that his new superior, like all new superiors, had a reputation as a terrifying man who rose at six in the morning, worked like a horse, and demanded the same kind of work from his subordinates. Moreover, this new superior also had a reputation as a bear in his manner and was, according to rumors, a man of the tendency completely opposite to the one to which his predecessor, and up to this point, Stepan Arkadyevich belonged. Yesterday Stepan Arkadyevich showed up for service in his uniform, and his new superior was very amiable and spoke with Oblonsky as if he were an acquaintance; therefore Stepan Arkadyevich felt it was his duty to call on him in his frock coat. The thought that his new superior might not receive him well, that was the other unpleasant circumstance. However, Stepan Arkadyevich instinctively felt that everything would shapify beautifully. “They’re all people, all human beings, sinners like us. What’s the point of being cross and quarrelsome?” he thought as he entered the hotel.

“Good day, Vasily,” he said, passing down the corridor, his hat atilt and addressing a footman he knew. “You let your whiskers grow? Levin is room seven, right? Take me there, please. Oh, and would you find out whether Count Anichkin (this was his new superior) is receiving?”

“Yes, sir,” replied Vasily, smiling. “You haven’t been to see us in a long time.”

“I was here yesterday, only from the other entry. This is seven?”

Levin was standing with a peasant from Tver in the middle of his room, measuring a fresh bearskin, when Stepan Arkadyevich walked in.

“You killed it, eh?” exclaimed Stepan Arkadyevich. “A marvelous piece! A mama bear? Hello there, Arkhip!”

He shook the peasant’s hand and sat down on a chair without removing his coat and hat.

“Oh, take it off, stay a while!” said Levin, removing Stiva’s hat.

“No, I’m in a rush, I’ve only one second,” replied Stepan Arkadyevich. He opened his coat but then did remove it and sat there a full hour talking with Levin about hunting and the subjects nearest to his heart.

“Well, then, tell me, please, what you did abroad. Where were you?” said Stepan Arkadyevich when the peasant had left.

“Oh, I was in Germany, Prussia, France, England—not in the capitals but in the manufacturing towns, and I saw a lot that was new. And I’m glad I went.”

“Yes, I know your idea about reorganizing labor.”

“Not at all. In Russia there can be no labor issue. In Russia it’s an issue of the working people’s relationship to the land; that’s true there, too, but there it’s repairing something rotten, while here—”

Stepan Arkadyevich was listening closely to Levin.

“Yes, yes!” he said. “You may very well be right,” he said. “But I’m happy you’re in hearty spirits; you’re going after bears, and working, and getting carried away. Yet Shcherbatsky told me—he saw you—that you’re in some kind of despondency, you keep talking about death.”

“Well, yes, I never stop thinking about death,” said Levin. “It’s true that it’s time to die, and that it’s all nonsense. I’ll tell you in truth: I treasure my ideas and work highly, but in essence—you must think about this: all this world of ours is but a little mold that has grown on our tiny planet. And yet we think that we might have something great—thoughts and deeds! It’s all grains of sand.”

“This is as old as the hills, brother!”

“It is, but you know, when you understand it clearly, everything somehow becomes insignificant. When you understand that any day now you’re going to die and there’ll be nothing left, then it’s all so insignificant! I consider my idea very important, but it’s turning out, even if it does get implemented, to be as insignificant as walking around this mama bear. That’s how you spend your life, distracting yourself with hunting, work—anything just so you don’t think about death.”

Stepan Arkadyevich smiled faintly and affectionately as he listened to Levin.

“Well, of course! Here you’ve come around to my position. Remember how you attacked me for seeking pleasures in life?

“Be not, oh moralist, so stern!”⁹

“No, still, what’s good in life is …” Levin became confused. “I don’t really know. All I know is we’re going to die soon.”

“Why so soon?”

“And you know, life’s charms are fewer when you’re thinking about death—but it’s more peaceful.”

“On the contrary, it’s even more cheerful at the finish. Well, it’s time I went,” said Stepan Arkadyevich, rising for the tenth time.

“Oh no, sit a while!” said Levin, holding him back. “Now when are we going to see each other? I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“A fine one I am! That’s why I came. You simply must come to my house now for dinner. Your brother will be there, and so will Karenin, my brother-in-law.”

“You mean he’s here?” said Levin, and he wanted to ask about Kitty. He’d heard that she’d been in Petersburg with her sister, the diplomat’s wife, at winter’s start, and didn’t know whether she’d returned, but he thought better of asking. “Whether she is or not, it doesn’t matter.”

“So you’ll come?”

“Naturally.”

“Then at five o’clock. Frock coat.”

Stepan Arkadyevich rose and went downstairs to see his new superior. Instinct had not misled Stepan Arkadyevich. His terrifying new superior proved to be an extremely courteous man, and Stepan Arkadyevich had lunch with him and sat so long it was after three before he got to Alexei Alexandrovich’s.

8

Alexei Alexandrovich, having returned from Mass, spent the entire morning at home. That morning he had two matters to attend to: first, to receive and send on a deputation from the native population who were now in Moscow on their way to Petersburg; second, to write the promised letter to the lawyer. Although it had been summoned at Alexei Alexandrovich’s initiative, the deputation presented many inconveniences and even perils, and Alexei Alexandrovich was very glad to have found them in Moscow. The members of this deputation had not the slightest concept of their role and obligations. They were naïvely confident that their business consisted in setting forth their needs and the actual state of affairs and asking for the government’s aid, and they decidedly did not realize that certain statements and demands of theirs supported the enemy party and so were destroying their entire cause. Alexei Alexandrovich took great pains with them, wrote them a program from which they were not supposed to deviate, and after letting them go, wrote letters to Petersburg for the deputation’s guidance. His principal helper in this matter was supposed to be Countess Lydia Ivanovna. She was a specialist in the matter of deputations, and no one could manage and give genuine guidance to deputations as she could. Having completed this, Alexei Alexandrovich wrote the letter to the lawyer. Without the slightest hesitation he gave him permission to act at his own discretion. With the letter he included three notes from Vronsky to Anna which had been found in the portfolio he had taken.

Ever since Alexei Alexandrovich had left his house with the intention of not returning to his family, and ever since he had seen the lawyer and had spoken if only to one person of his intention, and especially ever since he had translated this matter of life to a matter of paper, he had become more and more used to his intention and now saw clearly the possibility of its realization.

He was sealing the envelope to the lawyer when he heard the loud sounds of Stepan Arkadyevich’s voice. Stepan Arkadyevich was arguing with Alexei Alexandrovich’s servant and insisting that he be informed of his presence.

“It doesn’t matter,” thought Alexei Alexandrovich. “All the better: I’ll announce my position now with respect to his sister and explain why I cannot dine at his home.”

“Ask him in!” he spoke loudly as he gathered his papers and put them in their folder.

“There, you see? You’re lying. He is at home!” answered the voice of Stepan Arkadyevich to the servant who had not let him in, and removing his coat as he walked, Oblonsky entered the room. “Well, I’m very pleased I’ve caught you! I do so hope—” Stepan Arkadyevich began cheerfully.

“I cannot come,” said Alexei Alexandrovich coldly, standing and not asking his guest to sit.

Alexei Alexandrovich thought immediately to enter into the cool relations he must have with the brother of a wife against whom he had initiated divorce proceedings; but he had not counted on the sea of good nature that overflowed the shores of Stepan Arkadyevich’s soul.

Stepan Arkadyevich opened his shining, clear eyes wide.

“Why can’t you? What do you mean?” he said in French, in disbelief. “No, you’ve promised. We’re all counting on you.”

“I mean that I cannot come to your house because the familial relations that existed between us must come to an end.”

“What? What’s that? Why?” Stepan Arkadyevich said with a smile.

“Because I am initiating divorce proceedings against your sister, my wife. I should have—”

But before Alexei Alexandrovich could finish his speech, Stepan Arkadyevich acted in a way entirely different from what he had anticipated. Stepan Arkadyevich gasped and sat down in an armchair.

“No, Alexei Alexandrovich, what are you saying!” exclaimed Oblonsky, and his suffering was expressed on his face.

“It is so.”

“Forgive me, I cannot, simply cannot believe this.”

Alexei Alexandrovich sat down, sensing that his words had not had the anticipated effect and that he would have to explain himself and that, regardless of what his explanations were, his relations with his brother-in-law would remain the same.

“Yes, I have been placed in the difficult but necessary position of demanding a divorce,” he said.

“I shall say one thing, Alexei Alexandrovich. I know you for an excellent and fair man, and I know Anna—excuse me, I cannot alter my opinion of her—for a marvelous and excellent woman, and so, pardon me, I cannot believe this. There is some misunderstanding here,” he said.

“If only it were a misunderstanding.”

“Please, I understand,” Stepan Arkadyevich interrupted. “But, of course … for one, there’s no need to rush into anything. No need, no need to rush!”

“I have not rushed,” said Alexei Alexandrovich coolly. “But in such a matter one cannot consult with anyone. My mind is made up.”

“This is awful!” said Stepan Arkadyevich, sighing heavily. “I would do one thing, Alexei Alexandrovich. I beg of you, do this!” he said. “The proceedings are not yet begun, as I understand. Before you do begin, please see my wife, speak with her. She loves Anna like a sister, she loves you, and she is an amazing woman. For God’s sake, speak with her! Perform this act of friendship for me, I beg of you!”

Alexei Alexandrovich thought it over, and Stepan Arkadyevich watched him with concern without interrupting his silence.

“Will you go see her?”

“I just don’t know. This is why I haven’t been to see you. I believe our relations must change.”

“But why? I don’t see that. Allow me to think that apart from our familial relations you have, at least in part, the same amicable feelings that I have always had for you. And sincere respect,” said Stepan Arkadyevich pressing his hand. “If even your worst suppositions are correct, I cannot and never will take it upon myself to condemn one side or the other, and I see no reason why our relations have to change. But now, do this, and come see my wife.”

“Well, we look on this matter differently,” said Alexei Alexandrovich coolly. “Actually, let’s not talk about this.”

“No, why shouldn’t you come? At least to dine today? My wife is expecting you. Please, do come. And above all, talk it over with her. She is an amazing woman. For God’s sake, I’m on my knees begging you!”

“If you want me to so much, I’ll come,” said Alexei Alexandrovich, sighing.

Wishing to change the conversation, he asked about what interested them both—Stepan Arkadyevich’s new superior, a man not yet old who had suddenly received such a high appointment.

Alexei Alexandrovich had not liked Count Anichkin even before and had already differed from him in his opinions, but now he could not restrain himself from the hatred, understandable to those in service, of someone who had suffered a defeat in service for a man who has received a promotion.

“Well then, have you seen him?” said Alexei Alexandrovich with a venomous grin.

“Oh yes, he was at our office yesterday. He seems to have an excellent understanding of his work and is quite energetic.”

“Yes, but what is his energy directed toward?” said Alexei Alexandrovich. “To do what needs doing or redo what’s been done? The misfortune of our state is the paper-ridden administration of which he is a worthy representative.”

“True, I don’t know what there is to condemn in him. I don’t know his aims, but for one thing he is an excellent fellow,” replied Stepan Arkadyevich. “I was just in to see him, and it’s true, he’s an excellent fellow. We lunched, and I taught him to make that drink, you know, wine with oranges. It’s very refreshing. I’m amazed he didn’t know it. He liked it very much. No, it’s true, he’s a splendid fellow.”

Stepan Arkadyevich glanced at his watch.

“Gracious me! It’s past four and I still have to see Dolgovushin! So please, come dine with us. You can’t imagine how you would grieve me and my wife.”

Alexei Alexandrovich saw his brother-in-law out in a manner completely different from the way he had greeted him.

“I promised and I’ll come,” he replied dolefully.

“Believe me, I appreciate this, and I hope you won’t regret it,” Stepan Arkadyevich replied, smiling.

Donning his overcoat as he went, he patted the footman on the head, laughed, and went out.

“At five o’clock, and in a frock coat, please!” he shouted once again, turning back to the door.

9

It was after five and a few guests had already arrived when the host himself did. He walked in with Sergei Ivanovich Koznyshev and Pestsov, who had run into one another at the front door. These were the two principal representatives of the Moscow intelligentsia, as Oblonsky referred to them. Both were men admired for both their character and their intellect. They respected each other but in nearly everything were in utter and hopeless disagreement—not because they belonged to opposite trends but precisely because they were in the same camp (their enemies confused them), but in this camp each had his own nuance, and since there is nothing more incapable of reconciliation than differences of opinion on semiabstract ideas, not only did they never come to any agreement in their opinions, but they had long become accustomed, without becoming angry, of merely making fun of the incorrigible error of the other.

They were walking through the door, talking about the weather, when Stepan Arkadyevich caught up with them. Already seated in the drawing room were Oblonsky’s father-in-law, Prince Alexander Dmitrievich, young Shcherbatsky, Turovtsyn, Kitty, and Karenin.

Stepan Arkadyevich immediately saw that things were going poorly in the drawing room without him. Darya Alexandrovna, wearing her formal gray silk dress and evidently worried both by the children, who were to have their dinner in the nursery alone, and by the fact that her husband had not yet arrived, had not been able without him to get this whole company to mix nicely. Everyone was sitting like priest’s daughters on a visit (as the old prince put it), evidently perplexed as to why they were here, squeezing out words so as not to be silent. The good-natured Turovtsyn, evidently, felt himself out of his element, and the smile of his thick lips with which he greeted Stepan Arkadyevich said as well as words could, “Well, brother, you’ve besieged me with some smart fellows! Why don’t we go drink at Château des Fleurs—that’s more in my line.”¹⁰ The old prince was sitting in silence, glancing out of the corner of his glittering eyes at Karenin, and Stepan Arkadyevich realized the old prince had come up with some phrase to plant on this man of state whom they had invited for the sake of the guests as if he were a sturgeon. Kitty was watching the door, gathering her presence of mind in order not to blush at Konstantin Levin’s entrance. Young Shcherbatsky, who had not been introduced to Karenin, was trying to show that he wasn’t one whit intimidated by him. Karenin himself was, according to the Petersburg custom, wearing an evening coat and white tie for a dinner with ladies, and from his face Stepan Arkadyevich realized he had come merely to keep his word and by being present in this society was performing a difficult obligation. He was primarily to blame for the chill that had frozen all the guests before Stepan Arkadyevich’s arrival.

As he entered the drawing room, Stepan Arkadyevich made his apologies, explained he had been detained by the same prince who was his usual scapegoat for all his late arrivals and absences, and in a minute he had reintroduced everyone, bringing Alexei Alexandrovich and Sergei Koznyshev together, and had slipped them the topic of the Russification of Poland, which they immediately latched onto, as did Pestsov. Giving Turovtsyn a hearty slap on the shoulder, he whispered something humorous to him and sat him down with his wife and the prince. Then he told Kitty that she was very pretty today and introduced Shcherbatsky to Karenin. In one minute he had given this entire social batter such a good stir that wherever you went in the drawing room you heard animated voices. Only Konstantin Levin was absent. This was for the best, however, because upon entering the dining room Stepan Arkadyevich saw to his horror that the port and sherry had been gotten from Depré, not Levé, and after giving orders for the driver to be sent to Levé’s post haste, he headed back to the drawing room.

He was met in the dining room by Konstantin Levin.

“I’m not late?”

“Could you ever not be late!” said Stepan Arkadyevich, taking him by the arm.

“Do you have a lot of people? Who then?” asked Levin, blushing uncontrollably as he knocked the snow off his hat with his glove.

“All our own people. Kitty’s here. Let’s go, I’ll introduce you to Karenin.”

For all his liberalism, Stepan Arkadyevich knew that meeting Karenin could not help but be flattering and so treated his best friends to it. But at this moment Konstantin Levin was in no condition to experience the full satisfaction of this introduction. He had not seen Kitty since the evening he remembered so well when he had met Vronsky, if you didn’t count the glimpse he had had of her on the highway. In the depths of his soul he had known that he would see her here today. But trying to keep his thoughts free, he tried to assure himself that he did not know so. Now, when he heard that she was here, he suddenly felt such joy and at the same time such terror that he was left gasping for breath, and he could not get out what he wanted to say.

“What is she like? The same as before, or the way she was in the carriage? What if Darya Alexandrovna was speaking the truth? Why shouldn’t it be the truth?” he thought.

“Ah yes, please, introduce me to Karenin,” he said with difficulty and with a desperately decisive step entered the drawing room and saw her.

She was neither the same as before nor the same as she had been in the carriage; she was completely different.

She was frightened, timid, flustered, and so even more magnificent. She saw him the very moment he entered the room. She had been waiting for him. She rejoiced and was so embarrassed by her joy that there was a moment, the very moment he walked over to the hostess and again glanced at her, when it seemed to her, and him, and Dolly, who had seen all, that she would not be able to stand it and would burst into tears. She turned red, then white, then red again, and then froze, her lips trembling slightly, waiting for him. He walked up to her, bowed, and silently extended his hand. Had it not been for the light tremor of her lips and the moisture in her eyes that gave them a gleam, her smile would have been almost tranquil when she said, “How long it’s been since we’ve seen each other!” and she squeezed his hand with her cold one with desperate resolution.

“You haven’t seen me, but I’ve seen you,” said Levin, beaming with a smile of happiness. “I saw you when you were traveling from the railway to Ergushovo.”

“When?” she asked in surprise.

“You were on your way to Ergushovo,” said Levin, feeling himself choking from the happiness that was flooding his soul. “How dare I tie the thought of anything not innocent with this touching creature! Yes, apparently, it’s true what Darya Alexandrovna said,” he thought.

Stepan Arkadyevich took him by the arm and led him toward Karenin.

“Allow me to introduce you.” He mentioned their names.

“It’s my pleasure to meet again,” said Alexei Alexandrovich coolly as he shook Levin’s hand.

“You know each other?” asked Stepan Arkadyevich in surprise.

“We spent three hours together on the train,” said Levin, smiling, “but we emerged as if from a masked ball, intrigued, or at least I did.”

“Imagine that! Please join us,” said Stepan Arkadyevich, pointing in the direction of the dining room.

The men went into the dining room and walked up to the table of appetizers on which had been set six sorts of vodka and as many sorts of cheeses with and without little silver spades, caviars, herrings, preserves of various sorts, and plates with slices of French bread.

The men stood around the fragrant vodkas and appetizers, and the discussion among Sergei Ivanovich Koznyshev, Karenin, and Pestsov of the Russification of Poland died down in anticipation of dinner.

Sergei Ivanovich, who knew better than anyone how, in order to close the most abstract and serious debate, to sprinkle Attic salt unexpectedly and in this way change his opponents’ mood, did so now.¹¹

Alexei Alexandrovich had been trying to prove that the Russification of Poland could be brought about only as a consequence of higher principles, which would have to be introduced by the Russian administration.

Pestsov had insisted that one nation assimilates another only when it is more densely populated.

Koznyshev recognized both arguments, but with qualifications. When they emerged from the drawing room, in order to wind up the discussion, Koznyshev said, smiling:

“So, for the Russification of native populations there is a single means—raise as many children as possible. Here my brother and I are behaving worse than everyone. Whereas you married gentlemen, especially you, Stepan Arkadyevich, are acting quite patriotically. How many do you have?” he turned, smiling kindly at his host, and handed him a tiny glass.

Everyone laughed, and Stepan Arkadyevich with especial cheer.

“Yes, that is the very best means!” he said, chewing on cheese and pouring some special type of vodka into the proffered glass. The discussion did indeed end on a jest.

“This cheese isn’t bad. May I give you some?” said the host. “Don’t tell me you’ve been at gymnastics again?” he turned to Levin and with his left hand felt his muscle. Levin smiled, flexed his arm, and under Stepan Arkadyevich’s fingers rose a steel-hard lump, like a round cheese, under the fine fabric of his coat.

“There’s a bicep! Samson!”

“I think you must need great strength to hunt bear,” said Alexei Alexandrovich, who had the vaguest of notions of hunting, as he spread cheese and tore through the soft bread, which was fine as a spider’s web.

Levin smiled.

“None whatsoever. On the contrary, a child could kill a bear,” he said, bowing slightly and stepping aside for the ladies, who with their hostess were approaching the appetizer table.

“And you killed a bear, they were telling me?” said Kitty, vainly trying to catch a recalcitrant, slippery mushroom with her fork and shaking her lace, through which her arm showed white. “Do you really have bears?” she added, half-turning her lovely head toward him and smiling.

There was nothing unusual, it seemed, in what she had said, but with these words there was some unexpressed significance for him in every sound, every movement of her lips, eyes, and hand when she said this! In it was her plea for forgiveness, and her trust in him, and a fondness, a tender, timid fondness, and a promise, and a hope, and a love for him in which he could not help but believe and which was suffocating him with happiness.

“No, we were traveling to Tver Province. On our return, in the train car, I met your beau-frère or your brother-in-law’s beau-frère,” he said with a smile.¹² “It was an entertaining encounter.”

And gaily and humorously he recounted that, not having slept all night, he had burst into Alexei Alexandrovich’s compartment wearing his sheepskin jacket.

“The conductor, contrary to the proverb, wanted to throw me out because of my clothes, but then I started expressing myself in high style, and … you too,” he said, forgetting Karenin’s name as he turned to him, “first you wanted to drive me out because of my coat, but then you stood up for me, for which I am very grateful.”¹³

“Generally speaking, passengers’ rights as to the selection of a seat are quite vague,” said Alexei Alexandrovich, wiping the tips of his fingers with his handkerchief.

“I could see you were undecided concerning me,” said Levin, smiling good-naturedly, “but I hastened to begin an intelligent conversation, in order to smooth over my sheepskin.”

Continuing his conversation with his hostess and listening to his brother with one ear, Sergei Ivanovich shot a glance at him. “What is it about him now? Quite the conqueror,” he thought. He didn’t know that Levin felt as if he had grown wings. Levin knew she was listening to what he was saying and that she liked to listen to him, and this was the only thing that concerned him. Not in this room alone but in the whole world there existed for him only he, who had acquired tremendous significance and importance for himself, and she. He felt himself at such a height it made his head spin, and there, below, far away, were all these good, glorious Karenins and Oblonskys and the whole world.

Quite inconspicuously, without looking at them, and acting as if there were nowhere else to put them, Stepan Arkadyevich seated Levin and Kitty side by side.

“Why don’t you sit here,” he said to Levin.

The dinner was just as fine as the plate, of which Stepan Arkadyevich was an enthusiast. The potage Marie-Louise had come out wonderfully; the tiny pirozhki, which melted in the mouth, were irreproachable. Two footmen and Matvei, wearing white ties, went about their duties with the food and wine unobtrusively, quietly, and swiftly. The dinner was a success from the material aspect; it was no less of a success from the nonmaterial. The conversation, some of it general, some of it private, never let up, and by the end of the dinner had so livened up that the men rose from the table still talking, and even Alexei Alexandrovich had livened up.

10

Pestsov loved to argue a subject out to its conclusion and was not satisfied with what Sergei Ivanovich had said, especially since he felt his own opinion to be wrong.

“I never had in mind,” he said over the soup, addressing Alexei Alexandrovich, “simply density of population, but in combination with fundamentals, not principles.”

“It seems to me,” Alexei Alexandrovich replied unhurriedly, languidly, “that this is the same thing. In my opinion, the only nation that can act upon another nation is one which has a higher development, which—”

“But that’s just the issue,” Pestsov, who was always in a hurry to speak and who always seemed to put his whole heart into what he was saying, interrupted in his bass voice. “Just what is this higher development supposed to be? The English, the French, the Germans—which stands at the highest degree of development? Which is going to nationalize the other? We see that the Rhine has become French, but the Germans do not stand below them!” he shouted. “Here there is another law!”

“It seems to me that influence is always on the side of true culture,” said Alexei Alexandrovich, raising his eyebrows slightly.

“But what exactly are the signs of true culture?” said Pestsov.

“I think these signs are well known,” said Alexei Alexandrovich.

“Are they known in their entirety?” Sergei Ivanovich interjected with a thin smile. “It is now recognized that a genuine education can be only a purely classical one; however, we are seeing bitter disputes on both sides, and it cannot be denied that the opposing camp does have strong arguments in their favor.”

“You are a classicist, Sergei Ivanovich. Would you care for some red?” said Stepan Arkadyevich.

“I am not expressing my own opinion about any particular culture,” said Sergei Ivanovich with a smile of condescension, as if for a child, as he offered his glass. “I am merely saying that both sides have powerful arguments,” he continued, addressing Alexei Alexandrovich. “I am a classicist by education, but in this argument I personally cannot find a place for myself. I see no clear arguments as to why classical learning is given preference over the real sciences.”

“The natural sciences have just as much pedagogical and educational influence,” chimed in Pestsov. “Just take astronomy, take botany, or zoology, with its system of universal laws!”

“I cannot agree with this entirely,” replied Alexei Alexandrovich. “It seems to me that one cannot help but admit that the very process of studying the forms of languages has a particularly beneficial influence on one’s spiritual development. Moreover, one cannot deny either that the influence of classical writers is to the highest degree moral, whereas, unfortunately, linked to the teaching of the natural sciences are those dangerous and false teachings which constitute the plague of our era.”

Sergei Ivanovich was about to say something, but Pestsov interrupted him in his thick bass voice. He hotly began trying to prove the injustice of this opinion. Sergei Ivanovich calmly awaited his turn, obviously with a vanquishing objection at the ready.

“Nevertheless,” said Sergei Ivanovich, smiling thinly and addressing Karenin, “one must agree that weighing fully all the advantages and disadvantages of the various sciences is difficult and that the question of which to prefer would not be so quickly and conclusively decided if on the side of classical education there were not that advantage which you have just expressed: the moral—disons le mot—antinihilist influence.”¹⁴

“Without a doubt.”

“Were it not for this advantage of the antinihilist influence on the side of classical learning, we would think over and weigh the arguments of both sides better,” said Sergei Ivanovich with a thin smile, “and we would give space to both tendencies. Now, however, we know that in these little pills of classical education lies the healing power of antinihilism, and we boldly offer them to our patients. But what if there is no healing power?” he concluded, sprinkling the Attic salt.

At Sergei Ivanovich’s “little pills,” everyone burst into laughter, and Turovtsyn especially loudly and merrily, having finally reached the funny part, which is all he’d been waiting for, as he listened to the conversation.

Stepan Arkadyevich had not been mistaken in inviting Pestsov. With Pestsov an intelligent conversation could not flag for a moment. No sooner had Sergei Ivanovich concluded the discussion with his jest than Pestsov immediately raised a new one.

“One cannot even agree,” he said, “with the government having this goal. The government, obviously, is guided by general considerations and remains indifferent to the influences the measures it takes might have. For example, the question of women’s education ought to be considered pernicious, but the government is opening women’s courses and universities.”

The conversation immediately jumped to the new topic of women’s education.

Alexei Alexandrovich expressed the thought that the education of women was usually confused with the issue of women’s freedom and for this reason alone could be considered harmful.

“I, on the contrary, think that these two issues are indissolubly linked,” said Pestsov, “it’s a vicious circle. A woman is deprived of her rights because of insufficient education, and her insufficient education stems from the absence of rights. One must not forget that the enslavement of women is so great and old that we often do not want to understand the gulf that separates them from us,” he said.

“You said ‘rights,’” said Sergei Ivanovich, waiting for Pestsov’s silence, “‘rights’ to occupy positions as jurors, councilors, chairmen, the rights of a civil servant, a member of parliament—”

“Without a doubt.”

“But even if women, as a rare exception, could occupy these places, then it seems to me that you have incorrectly used the term ‘rights.’ It would be more accurate to say: ‘obligations.’ Anyone would agree that in performing the function of juror, councilor, or telegraph clerk, we feel we are fulfilling an obligation. And so it is more accurate to express oneself by saying that women are seeking obligations, and perfectly legitimately. One can only sympathize with this desire to assist in the general labor of the man.”

“Perfectly fair,” confirmed Alexei Alexandrovich. “The question, I think, consists merely in whether they are fit for these obligations.”

“They probably will be quite capable,” interposed Stepan Arkadyevich, “when education is widespread among them. We can see this—”

“And the old saying?” said the prince, who had long been listening in on the discussion and whose small, bemused eyes were gleaming. “In front of my daughters I can say, Long of hair, short …”¹⁵

“That’s precisely what they thought of the Negroes before their emancipation!” said Pestsov angrily.

“I find it strange only that women are looking for new obligations,” said Sergei Ivanovich, “while we, unfortunately, see that men ordinarily avoid them.”

“Obligations are harnessed to rights: power, money, and honor. These are what women are seeking,” said Pestsov.

“It is as if I were seeking the right to be a wet nurse and took offense that they were paying women and didn’t want me,” said the old prince.

Turovtsyn burst into loud laughter, and Sergei Ivanovich regretted that he had not said this. Even Alexei Alexandrovich smiled.

“Yes, but a man can’t nurse,” said Pestsov, “whereas a woman—”

“No, an Englishman nursed his own child on a ship,” said the old prince, permitting himself this liberty of conversation in front of his own daughters.

“The same number of women as there are such Englishmen will be officials,” said Sergei Ivanovich now.

“Yes, but what’s a young woman to do who doesn’t have a family?” Stepan Arkadyevich interjected, recalling Miss Chibisova, whom he had in mind the whole time he was sympathizing with and supporting Pestsov.

“If you sort out the story of that young woman properly, you’ll find that this young woman abandoned a family, either her own, or her sister’s, where she would have had a woman’s work,” Darya Alexandrovna said with irritability, unexpectedly entering into the discussion and probably guessing what sort of young woman Stepan Arkadyevich had in mind.

“But we stand for a principle, an ideal!” Pestsov objected in his booming bass voice. “A woman has the right to be independent and educated. She is constrained, repressed, by the awareness of the impossibility of being so.”

“And I am constrained and repressed by the fact that they won’t take me for a wet nurse at the foundling hospital,” said the old prince again, to the great delight of Turovtsyn, who was laughing so hard he dropped the fat end of his asparagus in the sauce.

11

Everyone took part in the general conversation except Kitty and Levin. At first, when they were talking about one nation’s influence on another, Levin involuntarily thought about what he had to say on this subject, but these thoughts, previously very important for him, flickered in his mind as if in a dream and held for him now not the slightest interest. It even seemed strange to him why they were trying to speak of something of no use to anyone. In precisely the same way, Kitty thought that what they were saying about the rights and education of women ought to be interesting. How many times had she thought about this, recalling her friend Varenka abroad and her difficult state of dependence if she didn’t marry, how many times had she thought about herself and what would become of her if she did not marry, and how many times she had argued about this with her sister! But now this did not interest her in the slightest. She and Levin were having their own conversation, not even a conversation but a kind of mysterious communication which tied them closer and closer together by the minute and produced in both a sense of joyous terror before the unknown into which they were entering.

At first Levin, to Kitty’s question as to how he could have seen her last year in her carriage, told her how he had been walking back from the mowing down the highway and encountered her.

“It was very early in the morning. You had probably only just awakened. Your maman was sleeping in her corner. It was a marvelous morning. I was walking along and wondering who that was in the carriage with the team of four. A glorious team of four with bells, and for an instant you flashed by, and I saw through the window—you were sitting like this and holding the ties of your bonnet with both hands and thinking terribly hard about something,” he said, smiling. “How I would have liked to know what you were thinking about then. Something important?”

“Wasn’t I very untidy?” she thought; but when she saw the ecstatic smile these details evoked in his recollection, she sensed that, on the contrary, the impression she had produced was very good. She blushed and laughed delightedly.

“Truly, I don’t recall.”

“How well Turovtsyn laughs!” said Levin, admiring his moist eyes and shaking body.

“Have you known him long?” asked Kitty.

“Who doesn’t know him!”

“And I see you think he’s a bad man?”

“Not bad, inconsequential.”

“That’s not true! You must quickly stop thinking that way anymore!” said Kitty. “I also used to have a poor opinion of him, but he is, he is—a terribly dear and amazingly good person. He has a heart of gold.”

“How is it you could find out about his heart?”

“He and I are great friends. I know him very well. Last winter, soon after … you came to see us,” she said with a guilty and at the same time trusting smile, “Dolly’s children all had scarlet fever, and somehow he stopped by to see her. And just imagine,” she whispered, “he felt so sorry for her that he stayed and began helping her look after the children. Yes, he spent three weeks with them in the house and looked after the children like a nurse.

“I’m telling Konstantin Dmitrievich about Turovtsyn and the scarlet fever,” she said, leaning toward her sister.

“Yes, it was amazing, splendid!” said Dolly, glancing at Turovtsyn, who sensed they were talking about him, and smiling briefly at him. Levin once again glanced at Turovtsyn and was amazed how he had not realized before just how splendid this man was.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I shall never think badly of people again!” he said cheerfully, sincerely expressing what he now felt.

12

The conversation begun in the ladies’ presence about women’s rights turned to ticklish questions about the inequality of rights in marriage. During dinner Pestsov several times touched upon these questions, but Sergei Ivanovich and Stepan Arkadyevich cautiously deflected him.

When they rose from the table and the ladies went out, Pestsov, not following them, turned to Alexei Alexandrovich and set about expressing the main reason for the inequality. The inequality of spouses, in his opinion, consisted in the fact that the infidelity of a wife and the infidelity of a husband were punished unequally both by law and by public opinion.

Stepan Arkadyevich hurriedly walked over to Alexei Alexandrovich, offering him a cigar.

“No, I don’t smoke,” replied Alexei Alexandrovich calmly, and as if intentionally wishing to show that he was not afraid of this conversation, he turned toward Pestsov with a cold smile.

“I think that the bases for this view lie in the very essence of things,” he said, and he was about to proceed to the drawing room, but at this Turovtsyn suddenly spoke up, addressing Alexei Alexandrovich.

“And have you by chance heard about Pryachnikov?” said Turovtsyn, enlivened by the Champagne he had drunk and long awaiting an occasion to break his burdensome silence. “Vasya Pryachnikov,” he said with a kindhearted smile of his moist and rosy lips, addressing primarily the main guest, Alexei Alexandrovich, “I just heard that he fought a duel in Tver with Kvytsky and killed him.”

Just as one always seems to be bruising oneself, as if on purpose, on the very spot that’s already sore, so too Stepan Arkadyevich felt that by ill luck the conversation kept landing, time and again, on Alexei Alexandrovich’s sore spot. Again he tried to lead his brother-in-law away, but Alexei Alexandrovich himself asked with curiosity:

“What was Pryachnikov fighting over?”

“His wife. Acted like a man! Challenged him and killed him!”

“Ah!” said Alexei Alexandrovich noncommittally and, lifting his eyebrows, proceeded to the drawing room.

“I’m so glad you’ve come,” Dolly said to him with a frightened smile when she encountered him in the outer drawing room. “I need to speak with you. Let’s sit down here.”

With the same expression of indifference that his raised eyebrows had lent him, Alexei Alexandrovich sat down alongside Darya Alexandrovna and smiled affectedly.

“Especially,” he said, “since I wanted to beg your forgiveness and say my good-bye immediately. I must leave tomorrow.”

Darya Alexandrovna was firmly convinced of Anna’s innocence and felt that she was turning white and her lips were trembling from fury at this cold, unfeeling man who was so calmly intent on ruining her innocent friend.

“Alexei Alexandrovich,” she said, looking straight at him with desperate decisiveness. “I’ve asked you about Anna and you have not replied. How is she?”

“She is fine, apparently, Darya Alexandrovna,” replied Alexei Alexandrovich without looking at her.

“Alexei Alexandrovich, forgive me, I have no right … but I love and respect Anna like a sister. I’m begging, imploring you to tell me what has happened between you. Of what are you accusing her?”

Alexei Alexandrovich frowned and, nearly shutting his eyes, dropped his head.

“I presume your husband conveyed to you the reasons why I feel it necessary to alter my former relations with Anna Arkadyevna,” he said, not looking her in the eye but surveying with displeasure Shcherbatsky, who was passing through the drawing room.

“I don’t believe it. I don’t. I can’t believe it!” said Dolly, kneading her bony hands in front of her in an energetic gesture. She rose quickly and put her hand on Alexei Alexandrovich’s sleeve. “We shall be disturbed here. Let us go in here, please.”

Darya Alexandrovna’s agitation had its effect on Alexei Alexandrovich. He rose and meekly followed her into the classroom. They sat at a table covered in oilcloth scarred by penknives.

“I don’t believe it, I don’t!” Dolly continued, trying to catch his averted gaze.

“One cannot fail to believe facts, Darya Alexandrovna,” he said, emphasizing the word “facts.”

“But what did she do? What? What?” said Darya Alexandrovna. “What exactly did she do?”

“She despised her obligations and deceived her husband. That is what she did,” he said.

“No, no, it can’t be! No, for the love of God, you’re mistaken!” said Dolly, touching her temples and shutting her eyes.

Alexei Alexandrovich smiled coldly with just his lips, wishing to show her and himself the firmness of his conviction; but this heated defense, although it did not sway him, did rub salt in his wound. He began speaking with greater animation.

“It is extremely difficult to be mistaken when one’s wife herself declares this to her husband. And declares that eight years of life and a son—that all this is a mistake and that she wants to start her life all over again,” he said angrily, snorting.

“Anna and sin—I can’t connect them, I can’t believe it.”

“Darya Alexandrovna!” he said, now looking directly into Dolly’s good and agitated face and feeling his tongue loosening in spite of himself. “I would pay dearly for doubt to still be possible. When I doubted, it was hard for me, but easier than it is now. When I doubted, there was hope; but now there is no hope, and nonetheless I doubt everything. I so doubt everything that I hate my son and sometimes believe he is not my son. I am very unhappy.”

He did not have to say that. Darya Alexandrovna realized this as soon as he looked into her face; and she began to feel sorry for him, and her faith in her friend’s innocence wavered.

“Oh no! This is horrible, horrible! But is it really true that you’ve decided on divorce?”

“I’ve decided on the final measure. I have no other choice.”

“No other choice, no other choice,” she said with tears in her eyes. “No, not no other choice!” she said.

“What is so horrible in this kind of grief is that one cannot do what one can in any other—in loss, in death—bear your cross, while here one must act,” he said, as if guessing her thought. “One must extricate oneself from the humiliating position in which one has been put. One cannot live à trois.”¹⁶

“I understand, I understand very well,” said Dolly, and she lowered her head. She was silent for a while, thinking about herself and about her own familial grief, and suddenly with an energetic gesture she raised her head and in an imploring gesture folded her hands. “But wait! You’re a Christian. Think of her! What will happen to her if you abandon her?”

“I have thought, Darya Alexandrovna. I’ve thought a great deal,” said Alexei Alexandrovich. His face broke out in red blotches, and his cloudy eyes looked straight at her. Darya Alexandrovna now pitied him with all her soul. “That is exactly what I did after she herself announced to me my disgrace; I left everything as it had been. I gave her an opportunity to amend, I tried to save her. And what happened? She did not fulfill my easiest demand—to observe the proprieties,” he said, growing heated. “A person can be saved who does not want to perish; but if her entire nature is so corrupt, so depraved, that perishing itself seems to her salvation, what is to be done?”

“Anything, only not divorce!” answered Darya Alexandrovna.

“But what is anything?”

“No, this is horrible. She will be no one’s wife, she will perish!”

“What can I do?” said Alexei Alexandrovich, raising his shoulders and eyebrows. The memory of his wife’s latest transgression so vexed him that he again turned cold, as he had been at the beginning of the conversation. “I am very grateful to you for your concern, but it’s time I went,” he said, standing.

“No, wait! You must not ruin her. Wait, I’ll tell you about myself. I married. My husband deceived me; in anger and jealousy, I wanted to abandon everything, I myself wanted … but I came to my senses; and who was it? Anna saved me. And so I live. My children are growing up, my husband has returned to his family and senses his error, things are getting cleaner, better, and I live. I forgave, and you should forgive!”

Alexei Alexandrovich listened to her, but her words had no further effect on him. The full anger of the day he decided on divorce rose up inside him again. He gave himself a shake and began speaking in a loud, penetrating voice, “I cannot forgive, and I do not want to, and I consider it unjust. I have done everything for this woman, and she has trampled it all in the mud characteristic of her. I am not a spiteful man, I have never hated anyone, but I hate her with every fiber of my being, and I cannot even forgive her because I hate her too much for all the evil she has done me!” he said with tears of anger in his voice.

“Love those who hate you,” whispered Darya Alexandrovna bashfully.¹⁷

Alexei Alexandrovich smiled contemptuously. He had long known this, but it could not be applied to his case.

“Love those who hate you, but to love those you hate is impossible. Forgive me for troubling you. Each of us has grief enough of his own!” And regaining his self-control, Alexei Alexandrovich calmly said good-bye and left.

13

When they rose from the table, Levin wanted to follow Kitty into the drawing room, but he was afraid she might find this unpleasant because he was so obviously courting her. He remained among the men, taking part in the general conversation, and without looking at Kitty felt her movements, her gazes, and the spot where she was in the drawing room.

Now, at once, without the slightest effort he was keeping the promise he had given her—always to think well of all people and always to love everyone. The conversation turned to the commune, in which Pestsov saw such a special principle, which he called the choral principle.¹⁸ Levin did not agree with Pestsov or with his brother, who somehow in his own way managed both to admit and not to admit the significance of the Russian commune. But he spoke with them, trying only to reconcile them and soften their objections. He had not the slightest interest in what he himself was saying, and even less in what they were saying, and wanted only one thing—for them and everyone to have a good and pleasant time. He knew now that just one thing was important. And this one thing was first there, in the drawing room, and then began moving and stopped at the door. Without turning around, he could feel her gaze and smile aimed at himself, and he could not help but turn around. She was standing in the doorway with Shcherbatsky, looking at him.

“I thought you were on your way to the piano,” he said, walking over to her. “That is what I miss in the country: music.”

“No, we only came to get you, and thank you for coming,” she said, rewarding him with a smile like a gift. “What is this urge to argue? After all, no one ever convinces anyone else.”

“Yes, it’s true,” said Levin, “most of the time you argue heatedly only because you just can’t understand what exactly your opponent is trying to prove.”

Levin had often noticed in debates among the most intelligent of men that after tremendous efforts and a tremendous number of logical subtleties and words, the debaters arrived ultimately at the awareness that what they had long been fighting to prove to one another had been known to them all for a very long time, since the beginning of the debate, but they liked different things and so did not want to name what they did like, in order not to be disputed. He frequently experienced during a debate that sometimes you understand what your opponent likes and suddenly you yourself come to like the very same thing and immediately you agree and then all arguments fall away as unnecessary. But sometimes you experience the opposite: you finally state what you yourself like and what you have been coming up with arguments for, and if you happen to express this well and sincerely then suddenly your opponent agrees and stops arguing. This is the very thing he wanted to say.

She frowned, trying to understand. But as soon as he began explaining, she understood.

“I understand. You have to know what he’s arguing for and what he loves, and then you can …”

She had fully intuited and expressed his badly expressed thought. Levin smiled delightedly. So astonishing to him was this transition from the confused, verbose debate with Pestsov and his brother to this laconic and clear report, without words almost, of the most complicated thoughts.

Shcherbatsky walked away from them, and Kitty, walking over to the card table that had been set up, sat down, and picking up the chalk, began drawing spirals with it on the new green cloth.

They revived the conversation they’d been having at dinner about the freedom and occupations of women. Levin agreed with Darya Alexandrovna’s opinion that a young woman who did not marry would find her womanly duties in the family. He confirmed this by the fact that no family could get along without a helper, that every family rich and poor had and should have nurses, whether hired or relations.

“No!” said Kitty, blushing, but looking at him all the more boldly with her truthful eyes, “a young woman may be so disposed that she cannot enter a family without humiliation, while she herself—”

He understood immediately.

“Oh yes!” he said. “Yes, yes, yes, you’re right, you’re right!”

And he understood everything Pestsov had been arguing at dinner about women’s freedom merely by the fact that he saw in Kitty’s heart the terror of being an old maid and suffering humiliation; and loving her, he felt this terror and humiliation and immediately rejected his own arguments.

There was a silence. She was still drawing with chalk on the table. Her eyes were shining quietly. Falling in with her mood, he felt throughout his being the constantly mounting tension of happiness.

“Oh no! I’ve written all over the table!” she said, and putting down the chalk, she made a movement as if to rise.

“How can I be left alone without her?” he thought with horror and he picked up the chalk.

“Wait,” he said, sitting down at the table. “I’ve long wanted to ask you something.”

And he looked straight into her kind, albeit frightened eyes.

“Please, ask.”

“Look,” he said, and he wrote the initial letters: w, y, a, i, c, b, d, t, m, n, o, t? These letters meant: “When you answered, It cannot be, did that mean never, or then?” There was no likelihood she could understand this complicated sentence; but he gave her a look that said his life depended on whether she would understand these words.

She looked at him gravely, then leaned her furrowed brow on her hand and began to read. She glanced up at him from time to time, asking him with her gaze, “Is it what I think it is?”

“I understand,” she said, blushing.

“What word is this?” he said, pointing to the “n,” which signified “never.”

“That means ‘never,’” she said, “but it’s not true!”

He quickly wiped away what he had written, gave her the chalk, and stood. She wrote: t, i, c, n, h, a, o.

Dolly was completely consoled from the grief inflicted upon her by the conversation with Alexei Alexandrovich when she caught sight of these two figures: Kitty with the chalk in her hands and looking up at Levin with a shy and happy smile, and his handsome figure bent over the table, his ardent eyes aimed first at the table, then at her. He suddenly beamed: he had understood. It meant, “Then I could not have answered otherwise.”

He looked at her questioningly, timidly.

“Only then?”

“Yes,” her smile answered.

“And n … and now?” he asked.

“Well, read this then. I’ll tell you what I would wish. With all my heart!” She wrote the initial letters: f, y, t, f, a, f, w, h. This meant, “For you to forget and forgive what happened.”

He grabbed the chalk with tense, trembling fingers, and breaking it, wrote the initial letters of the following, “I have nothing to forget or forgive, I never stopped loving you.”

She looked at him with an unswerving smile.

“I understand,” she whispered.

He sat down and wrote a long sentence. She understood everything, and without asking him, Is this so? took the chalk and immediately replied.

For a long time he couldn’t understand what she had written and he kept looking into her eyes. He was stupefied by happiness. He simply could not supply the words she had meant; but in her splendid eyes radiant with happiness he understood everything he needed to know. He wrote three letters. But before he could finish writing she had already read over his arm and herself finished it and wrote her answer: Yes.

“Are you playing secrétaire?” said the old prince, approaching. “Well, we should be going, though, if you want to be on time to the theater.”

Levin stood and saw Kitty to the door.

In their conversation, all had been said; it had been said that she loved him and would tell her father and mother, and that he would come tomorrow morning.

14

When Kitty had gone and Levin was left alone, he felt such disquiet without her and such an impatient desire to live as quickly, as quickly as possible, through to the coming morning, when he would see her again and be united with her forever, that he feared like death these fourteen hours that he faced spending without her. He had to be with and talk with someone in order not to be left alone, in order to cheat time. Stepan Arkadyevich would have been the most pleasant of companions, but he had said he was going to an evening party, though in reality to the ballet. Levin only managed to tell him that he was happy and that he loved him and would never, never forget what he had done for him. Stepan Arkadyevich’s look and smile showed Levin that he had properly understood this emotion.

“So it’s not time to die after all?” said Stepan Arkadyevich, shaking Levin’s hand with emotion.

“Nnnno!” said Levin.

Darya Alexandrovna, in saying good-bye to him, also seemed to be congratulating him when she said, “I’m so pleased you saw Kitty again. We must treasure old friendships.”

But Levin found these words of Darya Alexandrovna unpleasant. She could not understand how lofty and inaccessible to her all this was, and she should not make bold to mention this.

Levin said good-bye to them, but in order not to be left alone, he latched on to his brother.

“Where are you going?”

“To a meeting.”

“Well, I’m going with you. May I?”

“Why not? Let’s go,” said Sergei Ivanovich, smiling. “What’s just happened to you?”

“To me? Happiness has happened to me!” said Levin, lowering the window of the carriage in which they were riding. “You don’t mind? Otherwise it’s stuffy. Happiness happened! Why haven’t you ever married?”

Sergei Ivanovich smiled.

“I’ve very glad, she seems a splendid young—” Sergei Ivanovich was about to begin.

“Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it!” cried Levin, grabbing him by the coat collar with both hands and muffling him up. “She’s a splendid young woman” were such simple, common words, so inappropriate to his emotion.

Sergei Ivanovich gave a merry laugh, something which happened rarely with him.

“Well, at least I can say I’m very glad of it.”

“You can say that tomorrow, tomorrow, and nothing more! Nothing, nothing, silence!”¹⁹ said Levin, and muffling him up once more with his coat, he added, “I love you very much! So, may I attend your meeting?”

“Of course you may.”

“What are you discussing these days?” asked Levin, who couldn’t stop smiling.

They arrived at the meeting. Levin listened to the secretary, stammering, read the minutes, which he himself obviously did not understand; but Levin saw from the face of this secretary what a dear, good, and splendid man he was. That was evident from the way he got confused and embarrassed reading the minutes. Then the speeches began. They argued about the allocation of certain sums and about laying certain pipelines, and Sergei Ivanovich wounded two members and spoke for a long time triumphantly; and another member, having written something on a piece of paper, first was shy, but then responded to him quite venomously and sweetly. And then Sviyazhsky (he was there as well) also said something very handsomely and nobly. Levin listened to them and clearly saw that neither these allocated sums or pipelines nor any of this was anything at all, and they were not in the least angry, but were all such good, splendid people, and everything was going so well, so sweetly among them. They weren’t bothering anyone, and everyone was having a pleasant time. It was remarkable for Levin that he could see right through all of them now, and from small, nearly imperceptible signs he could recognize the soul of each and clearly see that they were all good. In particular, they all now had an extraordinary love for him, Levin. This was evident from how they spoke with him and how kindly and lovingly even everyone he didn’t know looked at him.

“Well, are you satisfied?” Sergei Ivanovich asked him.

“Quite. I never thought this would be so interesting! Splendid, wonderful!”

Sviyazhsky came up to Levin and invited him for tea. Levin simply could not understand or recall why he had been dissatisfied with Sviyazhsky, what he had been looking for in him. He was an intelligent and amazingly good man.

“Oh, my pleasure,” he said, and he inquired about his wife and sister-in-law. By a strange association of thoughts, since in his imagination the thought of Sviyazhsky’s sister-in-law was connected with marriage, he imagined that there could be no one better to tell about his happiness than Sviyazhsky’s wife and sister-in-law, and he was very happy to go see them.

Sviyazhsky questioned him all about his affairs in the country, as he always did, not presuming any possibility of discovering something that had not been discovered in Europe, and now this was not the least bit unpleasant for Levin. On the contrary, he felt that Sviyazhsky was right, that this whole business was inconsequential, and he saw the astonishing gentleness and kindness with which Sviyazhsky avoided proclaiming his own correctness. Sviyazhsky’s ladies were especially sweet. It seemed to Levin that they all knew already and sympathized with him but were not speaking merely out of delicacy. He sat with them for one hour, two, three, talking about various subjects, but he implied only what was filling his soul and did not notice that he had bored them dreadfully and that it was long past their bedtime.

Sviyazhsky saw him to the front door, yawning and wondering at the strange state his friend was in. It was after one. Levin returned to his hotel and took fright at the thought of spending the remaining ten hours alone with his impatience. The night servant, who was not asleep, lit the candles for him and was about to leave, but Levin stopped him. This servant, Egor, whom Levin had not noticed previously, proved a quite intelligent and fine, and most important, good man.

“Say, Egor, is it hard not to sleep?”

“What can I do? That’s our duty. It’s more restful in a gentleman’s house, but the pay here is more.”

It turned out that Egor had a family, three boys and a seamstress daughter whom he wanted to marry off to a sales clerk in a harness shop.

Levin took this occasion to inform Egor of his thought about how in marriage the main thing was love and that with love you would always be happy because happiness can only be in you yourself.

Egor listened to all he had to say and evidently fully understood Levin’s thought, but in confirmation of it he made a comment that surprised Levin, that when he had lived with fine gentlemen he had always been content with his employer, and now he was perfectly content with his master, even though he was a Frenchman.

“What an amazingly good man,” thought Levin.

“Well, and what about you, Egor, when you married, did you love your wife?”

“How could I not?” replied Egor.

Levin saw that Egor, too, was in an enthusiastic state and intended to express all his own most heartfelt emotions.

“My life is amazing, too. Ever since I was a small boy—” he began, his eyes glittering, evidently having caught Levin’s enthusiasm, the way people catch yawning.

But at that moment the bell rang; Egor went and Levin was left alone. He had eaten practically nothing at dinner and had refused tea and supper at the Sviyazhskys’, but he couldn’t think about supper. He hadn’t slept the previous night, but he couldn’t think about sleep, either. The air was fresh in the room, but the heat was suffocating him. He opened two small panes in the window and sat at the table in front of them. Beyond the snow-covered roofs he could see the patterned cross with chains and, above that, the rising triangle of the constellation Charioteer with its bright yellow Capella. He looked first at the cross and then at the star, inhaled the fresh frosty air flowing evenly into the room, and as in a dream followed the images and memories that arose in his imagination. Between three and four he heard steps in the corridor and looked out the door. This was a gambler he knew, Myaskin, returning from the club. He was walking gloomily, frowning and clearing his throat. “Poor, unfortunate man!” thought Levin, and tears came to his eyes out of love and pity for this man. He was about to speak with him and console him; but recalling he was wearing only his nightshirt, he thought better of it and again sat down by the open pane in order to bathe in the cold air and look at this cross of marvelous shape, silent but for him full of meaning, and at the bright yellow star rising. Between six and seven the floor polishers began making noise, people started ringing for service, and Levin felt himself getting chilled. He shut the pane, washed, dressed, and went outside.

15

The streets were still deserted. Levin set out for the Shcherbatsky house. The front doors were locked and everyone was asleep. He started back, went to his room again, and asked for coffee. The day servant, no longer Egor, brought it to him. Levin wanted to start a conversation, but someone rang for the servant and he left. Levin tried to sip his coffee and put a bun in his mouth, but his mouth definitely did not know what to do with the bun. Levin spat out the bun, put on his coat, and went out for a walk again. It was past nine when he arrived for the second time on the Shcherbatskys’ front steps. In the house they had just gotten up, and the cook was on his way to get provisions. He would have to live through at least two more hours.

All this night and morning Levin had been living perfectly unconsciously and had felt totally removed from the conditions of material life. He had not eaten for an entire day, had not slept for two nights, had spent several hours without a coat in the frost and felt not only fresher and haler than ever but perfectly independent of his body. He moved without any effort of his muscles and felt he could do anything. He was certain he could fly or move the corner of a building if need be. He spent the remaining time walking through the streets, constantly looking at his watch and looking from side to side.

What he saw then he never saw again. In particular the children on their way to school, the doves flying down from the rooftops to the sidewalk, and the flour-dusted batch bread, set out by an invisible hand, touched him. The bread, the doves, and the two boys were unearthly creatures. All this happened simultaneously: a boy ran up to a dove and, smiling, glanced at Levin; the dove fluttered its wings and darted off, gleaming in the sun between flakes of snow trembling in the air; and from a window he could smell freshly baked bread and the buns were set out. All this taken together was so unusually fine that Levin laughed and cried from joy. Having made a large circle along Gazetny Lane and Kislovka, he returned again to the hotel, and placing his watch before him, sat down, waiting for twelve o’clock. In the next room they were saying something about machines and trickery and coughing a morning cough. They didn’t realize the hand was approaching twelve. The hand reached it. Levin came out on the front steps. The drivers obviously knew everything. They surrounded Levin with happy faces, arguing among themselves and offering their services. Trying not to offend the other drivers and promising to ride with them as well, Levin took one and ordered him to drive to the Shcherbatskys’. The driver was splendid in his white shirt collar, which poked out from under his coat and fit snugly around his strong, red, muscled neck. This driver’s sleigh was high and comfortable such as Levin never rode in again, and the horse was fine and tried to gallop but seemed not to budge. The driver knew the Shcherbatsky house and, with especial deference to his fare, pulled up to the entrance with a sweep of the arm and a “Whoa!” The Shcherbatskys’ doorman obviously knew all. This was evident from the smile in his eyes and from the way he said, “Well, you haven’t been to see us for quite a while, Konstantin Dmitrievich!”

Not only did he know everything, but he was obviously delighted and making an effort to conceal his delight. Looking at his kindly old eyes, Levin even realized something else new in his happiness.

“Have they gotten up?”

“Please, come in! And leave that here,” he said smiling, when Levin wanted to go back for his hat. That meant something.

“To whom shall I announce your arrival?” asked a footman.

Although the footman was young and one of the new footmen, and a dandy, he was a very good and fine man and also understood everything.

“The princess … The prince … The young princess …” said Levin.

The first face he saw was Mademoiselle Linon. She was passing through the hall, and her ringlets and face were shining. No sooner had he begun talking with her than suddenly behind the door he heard the rustle of a dress, and Mademoiselle Linon vanished from Levin’s sight, and the joyous horror of the proximity of his happiness was conveyed to him. Mademoiselle Linon hurried, and leaving him, went toward another door. As soon as she went out, quick, quick, light steps were heard across the parquet, and his happiness, his life, he himself—the best of himself, that which he had been searching for and longing for so long—quickly, quickly drew near. She was not walking but borne toward him by some invisible power.

He saw only her clear, truthful eyes, frightened by the same joy of love that filled his heart as well. These eyes shone closer and closer, blinding him with their light of love. She stopped right alongside him, touching him. Her hands rose up and rested on his shoulders.

She had done everything she could. She had run up to him and given herself to him wholeheartedly, shy and joyous. He embraced her and pressed his lips to her mouth, which sought his kiss.

She too had not slept all night and had been waiting for him all morning. Her mother and father were unreservedly agreed and happy with her happiness. She had been waiting for him. She wanted to be the first to announce to him her own and his happiness. She had been preparing to greet him alone and rejoiced at this thought, and she was both shy and embarrassed and did not know herself what she would do. She had heard his steps and voice and waited behind the door for Mademoiselle Linon to leave. Mademoiselle Linon had left. Without thinking, without asking herself how or what, she went up to him and did what she had done.

“Let us go see mama!” she said, taking him by the hand. For a long time he couldn’t say anything, not so much because he was afraid of spoiling the exaltation of his emotion as because each time he tried to say something, instead of words, he felt he would burst out in tears of happiness. He took her hand and kissed it.

“Can it really be true?” he said, at last, in a husky voice. “I can’t believe you love me!”

She smiled at his familiar address and at the shyness with which he looked at her.

“Yes!” she said significantly, slowly. “I’m so happy!”

Without letting go of his hand, she went into the drawing room. The princess, seeing them, took quick breaths and immediately began to cry and then to laugh and with an energetic step Levin had not expected, ran up to him, and putting her hands around Levin’s head, kissed him and wet his cheeks with her tears.

“So it’s all over! I’m glad. Love her. I’m glad … Kitty!”

“You got that settled quickly!” said the old prince, trying to be casual; but Levin noticed that his eyes were moist when he turned toward him. “For so long, I’ve always wished for this!” he said, taking Levin’s hand and drawing him toward himself. “Even then, when this empty little head got the idea—”

“Papa!” Kitty exclaimed, and she covered his mouth with her hands.

“No, I won’t!” he said. “I’m very very … plea … Ah! I’m so stupid.”

He embraced Kitty, kissed her face, her hand, her face again, and made the sign of the cross over her.

Levin was overcome by a new feeling of love for this man, the old prince, who had before been a stranger to him, when he saw how long and tenderly Kitty kissed his fleshy hand.

16

The princess was sitting in an armchair, not talking, smiling; the prince was sitting next to her. Kitty was standing by her father’s chair, still not letting go of his hand. Everyone was silent.

The princess was the first to put everything in words and translated all their thoughts and emotions into practical questions, and this seemed identically strange and painful to everyone in that first minute.

“When? There needs to be a blessing and an announcement. But when is the wedding? What do you think, Alexander?”

“Here he is,” said the old prince, pointing to Levin. “He’s the principal person here.”

“When?” said Levin, turning red. “Tomorrow. If you’re asking me, then, in my opinion, the blessing today and the wedding tomorrow.”

“Come, mon cher, stop it. That’s silly!”

“Well then, in a week.”

“He truly is mad.”

“No, but why?”

“Have some pity!” said the mother, smiling radiantly at his impatience. “What about the trousseau?”

“Is there really going to be a trousseau and all that?” thought Levin with horror. “But actually, can a trousseau, and a blessing, and all that—can that really spoil my happiness? Nothing can!” He looked at Kitty and noticed that she was not offended in the least by the thought of a trousseau. “It must be needed, then,” he thought.

“I know nothing, really, I only said what I wished,” he said, apologizing.

“Then let’s talk it over. We can have the blessing and announcement now. That’s fine.”

The princess walked up to her husband, kissed him, and was about to go, but he held her back, embraced her, and tenderly, like a young lover, several times, smiling, kissed her. The old people evidently had become confused for a moment and didn’t know very well whether it was they who were in love again or only their daughter. After the prince and princess left, Levin went over to his betrothed and took her hand. He had mastered himself and could speak, and he had a lot he needed to tell her. But he said something completely different from what he should have.

“How I knew it would be like this! I never stopped hoping; but in my heart I was always sure,” he said. “I believe it was ordained.”

“And I?” she said. “Even then …” She stopped and then resumed, looking at him squarely with her truthful eyes, “even then, when I pushed away my happiness. I always loved you alone, but I was distracted. I have to say it. … Can you forget that?”

“Perhaps it’s for the best. You have much to forgive me for. I have to tell you …”

This was one of the things he had resolved to tell her. He had decided from the very first days to tell her two things—that he was not as pure as she, and also that he was not a believer. This was agonizing, but he felt he had to say both things.

“No, not now, afterward!” he said.

“Fine, afterward, but you must be sure to tell me. I’m not afraid of anything. I need to know everything. Now it’s done.”

To which he added, “It’s done and you will take me, no matter what I was, you won’t reject me? Yes?”

“Yes, yes.”

Their conversation was interrupted by Mademoiselle Linon, who, with an affected but tender smile, came to congratulate her favorite pupil. Before she left, the servants came in with their congratulations. Then relatives came, and then began that blissful chaos from which Levin did not emerge until the day after his wedding. Levin’s awkwardness and tedium were constant, but the intensity of his happiness kept increasing. He constantly felt that a great deal he didn’t know was required of him, and he did all he was told, and all this afforded him happiness. He thought that his engagement would have nothing resembling others’ and that the usual conditions of an engagement would spoil his special happiness; but it ended in his doing as others do, and his happiness only increased from this and became more and more special, since he had never known anything like it.

“Now we shall eat candy,” Mademoiselle Linon would say, and Levin would go out to purchase candy.

“Well, I’m very glad,” said Sviyazhsky. “I advise you to get your bouquets from Fomin.”

“Must I?” And he went to Fomin’s.

His brother told him he must borrow some money because there would be many expenses and gifts.

“Must there be gifts?” And he galloped off to Fulde’s.²⁰

And at the confectioner’s, and at Fomin’s, and at Fulde’s, he saw he was expected, that they were happy to see him and exulted in his happiness, as did everyone he had dealings with during those days. What was extraordinary was that everyone not only loved him but that everyone who had in the past been unsympathetic, cold, and indifferent now admired him and yielded to him in everything. They treated his emotion gently and delicately and shared his conviction that he was the happiest man in the world because his betrothed was beyond perfection. Kitty was experiencing the same thing. When Countess Nordston allowed herself to hint that she had wished for something better, Kitty became so furious and proved so convincingly that there could be nothing in the world better than Levin, Countess Nordston had to admit this and in Kitty’s presence no longer failed to greet Levin without a smile of admiration.

The explanation he had promised was the one difficult event of this period. He consulted with the old prince, and having received his permission, gave Kitty his diary, in which was written what had been tormenting him. He had in fact written this diary with a view toward his future bride. Two things tormented him: his lack of innocence and his lack of faith. His confession of his lack of faith passed unremarked. She was religious and never doubted the truths of religion, but his outward lack of faith did not affect her in the slightest. She knew his entire soul with her love, and in his soul she saw what she wanted, and the fact that this state of the soul was called being a nonbeliever did not matter to her. The other confession cost her bitter tears.

Not without an inner struggle had Levin handed over his diary to her. He knew that between him and her there could and should be no secrets, and so he had decided this was how it must be. But he had not realized what effect this might have, he had not put himself in her place. Only when that evening he came to see them before the theater, entered her room, and saw her tear-stained, pitiful, and dear face, so unhappy for the irretrievable grief he had caused, did he realize the abyss that separated his shameful past from her profound purity, and he was horrified at what he had done.

“Take them, take these horrid books!” she said, pushing away the notebooks that lay in front of her on the table. “Why did you give them to me? No, still, it’s better,” she added, taking pity on his despairing face. “But this is horrid, horrid!”

He dropped his head and said nothing. There was nothing he could say.

“You can’t forgive me,” he whispered.

“No, I’ve forgiven you, but this is horrid!”

His happiness was so great, though, that this confession did not destroy it but merely lent it a new nuance. She had forgiven him, but since then he had considered himself even more unworthy of her and bowed even lower morally before her and valued even more highly his own undeserved happiness.

17

Unable to keep himself from sorting through in his memory his impression of the conversations he had had during and after dinner, Alexei Alexandrovich returned to his lonely room. Darya Alexandrovna’s words about forgiveness had produced nothing but irritation in him. The applicability or nonapplicability of the Christian precept to his case was too difficult a matter about which one could not speak lightly, and this matter had long since been decided by Alexei Alexandrovich in the negative. From all that had been said, what stayed most in his imagination were the words of the foolish, good-natured Turovtsyn: Acted like a man! Challenged him and killed him! Everyone, evidently, shared this feeling, although out of courtesy had not said so.

“Actually, the matter is settled, and there is nothing more to think about it,” Alexei Alexandrovich told himself. And thinking only about his impending departure and the matter of the inspection, he walked into his room and asked the doorman escorting him where his valet was; the porter said that the valet had just gone out. Alexei Alexandrovich ordered tea served, sat down at the table, and picking up Froom, began deciding the route of his journey.²¹

“Two telegrams,” said the returned valet as he entered the room. “Forgive me, Your Excellency, I had just gone out.”

Alexei Alexandrovich took the telegrams and unsealed them. The first telegram was news of Stremov’s appointment to the very position that Karenin had wanted. Alexei Alexandrovich threw down the dispatch and, red in the face, rose and began pacing around the room. “Quos vult perdere dementat,” he said, by quos, naturally, implying those individuals who had promoted this appointment.²² He was not annoyed that he had not been given the job, that he had obviously been passed over; but he could not understand, he was amazed, that they hadn’t seen that the loudmouth phrasemonger Stremov was the last man fit for it. How had they failed to see that they were ruining themselves and their prestige with this appointment!

“Something else in the same vein,” he told himself biliously, opening the second dispatch. The telegram was from his wife. Her signature in blue pencil, “Anna,” was the first thing to catch his eye. “I am dying, I am begging, pleading for you to come. With your forgiveness I will die more peacefully,” he read. He smiled contemptuously and threw down the telegram. That this was a deceit and a trick, at the first moment he felt that there could be no doubt of this.

“There is no deceit at which she would not stop. She is supposed to give birth. Perhaps it is an illness of childbirth. But what is their purpose? To legitimize the child, compromise me, and prevent the divorce,” he thought. “But something was said there: I am dying.” He reread the telegram and suddenly the plain meaning of what was said struck him. “And what if it’s true?” he told himself. “If it’s true that in her moment of suffering and the imminence of death she sincerely repents and I, having taken it for deceit, refuse to come? That would not only be cruel, not only would everyone condemn me, but it would be foolish on my part.”

“Peter, cancel the carriage. I’m going to Petersburg,” he told his valet.

Alexei Alexandrovich decided he would go to Petersburg and see his wife. If her illness was a trick, he would say nothing and leave. If she was in fact ill, near death, and wished to see him before her death, then he would forgive her, if he reached her still alive, and would do his final duty if he came too late.

All the way he thought no more of what he should do.

Feeling weary and dirty, as a result of a night spent in the train car, in the early fog of Petersburg, Alexei Alexandrovich rode down a deserted Nevsky Avenue and looked straight ahead, not thinking about what awaited him. He could not think about this because in trying to imagine what would happen, he could not drive away the supposition that her death would resolve at once all the difficulty of his position. The bakeries, the locked shops, the night cabbies, the porters sweeping the sidewalks flashed before his eyes, and he watched it all, trying to drown out the thought of what awaited him and what he dared not wish for yet did wish for. He rode up to the front steps. A sleigh and a carriage with a sleeping driver were waiting by the entrance. As he walked into the entry, Alexei Alexandrovich seemed to draw his resolution from the deepest corner of his brain and got a grip on it. It meant, “If it’s a trick, then calm disdain, and leave. If it’s the truth, then observe the proprieties.”

The porter opened the door even before Alexei Alexandrovich rang. The doorman, Petrov, otherwise known as Kapitonych, looked odd in his old coat, without a tie, in his slippers.

“How is the mistress?”

“A successful delivery yesterday.”

Alexei Alexandrovich stopped and turned pale. Now he clearly understood how powerfully he had wished her death.

“And her health?”

Kornei, wearing his morning apron, ran down the stairs.

“Very bad,” he replied. “Yesterday there was a doctor’s consultation, and the doctor is here now.”

“Take my things,” said Alexei Alexandrovich, and feeling some relief at the news that there was still a hope of death, he walked into the front hall. Hanging there was a military coat. Alexei Alexandrovich noted this and asked:

“Who is here?”

“The doctor, the midwife, and Count Vronsky.”

Alexei Alexandrovich proceeded into the inner rooms.

There was no one in the drawing room; from her sitting room, at the sound of his steps, the midwife emerged in a cap with purple ribbons.

She went up to Alexei Alexandrovich and with the familiarity brought by the imminence of death, took him by the arm and led him into the bedroom.

“Thank God you’ve arrived! She talks of you and only of you,” she said.

“Get me ice, fast!” said the doctor’s imperious voice from the bedroom.

Alexei Alexandrovich went into her sitting room. Near her table, sitting sideways on a low chair, sat Vronsky, crying, his hands covering his face. He jumped up at the doctor’s voice, took his hands from his face, and saw Alexei Alexandrovich. Upon seeing the husband, he became so confused that he sat back down, pulling his head into his shoulders as if wishing to disappear. Nonetheless, he made an effort over himself, rose, and said, “She is dying. The doctors said there is no hope. I am entirely in your power, but allow me to be here. … It’s as you will, I …”

Alexei Alexandrovich, seeing Vronsky’s tears, felt a rush of that emotional distress which the sight of other people’s sufferings produced in him, and averting his face, without listening to the rest of his words, he hurried toward the door. From the bedroom he could hear Anna’s voice saying something. Her voice was cheerful, animated, with extraordinarily precise intonations. Alexei Alexandrovich walked into the bedroom and up to the bed. She lay with her head turned toward him. Her cheeks glowed with color, her eyes glittered, her small white hands, poking out from the cuffs of her dressing gown, were playing with, twisting the corner of the blanket. She seemed not only healthy and fresh but in the best of spirits. She was speaking quickly, sonorously, and with unusually correct and heartfelt intonations.

“Because Alexei, I’m speaking of Alexei Alexandrovich (what a strange, terrible fate, that they’re both Alexei, isn’t it?), Alexei would not refuse me. I would forget and he would forgive. … But why doesn’t he come? He is good, he himself does not know how good he is. Oh, my God, what agony! Quick, give me some water! Oh, it would harm her, my little girl! Well, fine, then give her to the nurse. Yes, I agree, that’s even better. He will come, it will hurt him to see her. Take her away.”

“Anna Arkadyevna, he’s come. Here he is!” said the midwife, trying to draw her attention to Alexei Alexandrovich.

“Oh, what nonsense!” Anna continued, not seeing her husband. “Come, give her to me, my little girl, give her! He hasn’t arrived yet. You’re just saying he won’t forgive me because you don’t know him. No one knew him. Only I do, and it was hard even for me. His eyes, you’ve got to know, Seryozha has the very same eyes, and I see them and I can’t go on because of it. Did Seryozha have his dinner? You see I know, everyone will forget. He wouldn’t forget. You must move Seryozha into the corner room and ask Mariette to sleep with him.”

Suddenly she shrank, stopped talking, and in fright, as if anticipating a blow, as if protecting herself, she raised her hands to her face. She had seen her husband.

“No, no,” she began, “I am not afraid of him. I am afraid of death. Alexei, come here. I am in a hurry because I have no time, I have only a little longer to live, now the fever will begin and I won’t understand anything anymore. Now I understand, I understand everything, I see everything.”

Alexei Alexandrovich’s wrinkled face took on an expression full of suffering. He took her hand and wanted to say something but simply could not get the words out; his lower lip quivered, but he was still battling his agitation and now and then glanced at her. Each time he glanced, he saw her eyes, which were watching him with a touching and ecstatic tenderness as he had never seen in them.

“Wait, you don’t know. Wait, wait …” She stopped, as if gathering her thoughts. “Yes,” she began. “Yes, yes, yes. Here is what I wanted to say. Don’t be surprised at me. I’m still the same. … But there is another woman inside me, and I’m afraid of her—she loved the other man, and I wanted to hate you and couldn’t forget the woman who had been before. I’m not her. Now I’m the real one, I’m whole. I’m dying now, I know I’ll die, ask him. Even now I feel, here they are, the weights on my arms, my legs, my fingers. Look at my fingers—they’re huge! But this will all end soon. … I just need one thing: forgive me. Forgive me completely! I’ve been horrible, but my nurse used to say: the holy martyr—what was her name?—she was worse.²³ I’ll go to Rome, there’s a hermitage there, and then I won’t bother anyone, only I’ll take Seryozha and my little girl. No, you cannot forgive me! I know it can’t be forgiven! No, no, go away, you’re too good!” She held his hand in one of her hot hands and pushed him away with the other.

Alexei Alexandrovich’s emotional derangement had kept increasing and had now reached the point where he stopped fighting it. He suddenly felt that what he had considered emotional derangement was, on the contrary, a blessed state of the soul, which had suddenly given him a new happiness he had never before experienced. He did not think that the Christian law he had tried to follow all his life prescribed that he forgive and love his enemies, but a joyous feeling of love and forgiveness for his enemies filled his soul. He knelt, and laying his head on the curve of her arm, which burned him like fire through her dressing gown, sobbed like a child. She embraced his balding head, shifted toward him, and with defiant pride looked upward.

“That’s him, I knew it! Now forgive everything, forgive! … They’ve come again, why don’t they go away? … Oh, take these furs off me!”

The doctor took away her hands, cautiously lowered her to the pillow, and covered her to her shoulders. She lay back meekly and looked straight ahead with a shining gaze.

“Remember one thing, that I needed only forgiveness, and I want nothing more. … Why doesn’t he come?” she said, turning toward Vronsky at the door. “Come closer, come closer! Give him your hand.”

Vronsky walked up to the edge of the bed, and when he saw her, he again covered his face with his hands.

“Uncover your face, look at him. He’s a saint,” she said. “Yes, uncover it, uncover your face!” she said angrily. “Alexei Alexandrovich, uncover his face! I want to see it.”

Alexei Alexandrovich took Vronsky’s hands and moved them away from his face, which was horrible for the suffering and shame on it.

“Give him your hand. Forgive him.”

Alexei Alexandrovich gave him his hand and could not hold back the tears that were streaming from his eyes.

“Thank God, thank God,” she began. “Now everything is settled. Only stretch my legs out a little. There, that’s it, that’s wonderful. How tastelessly these flowers were done, nothing at all like a violet,” she said, pointing to the wallpaper. “My God, my God! When will it end? Give me morphine. Doctor! Give me morphine. My God, my God!”

And she thrashed about in the bed.

The doctors said it was a case of puerperal fever, of which ninety-nine cases out of a hundred ended in death. All day she suffered fever, delirium, and unconsciousness. By midnight the patient was lying senseless and nearly without a pulse.

They expected the end at any moment.

Vronsky went home, but in the morning he came to inquire, and Alexei Alexandrovich, meeting him in the entry, said, “Stay, she may ask for you,” and he himself led him into his wife’s sitting room.

At dawn the agitation, vivacity, and quickness of thought and speech began all over again, and ended again in unconsciousness. On the third day it was the same, and the doctors said that there was hope. That day Alexei Alexandrovich went out into the sitting room, where Vronsky sat, and locking the door, sat down across from him.

“Alexei Alexandrovich,” said Vronsky, sensing that an explanation was coming. “I can’t talk, I can’t understand. Have mercy on me! However hard it is for you, believe me, it is even more awful for me.”

He was about to rise. But Alexei Alexandrovich took his hand and said:

“I beg you to hear me out, it’s necessary. I must explain to you my feelings, those that have guided me and will guide me, so that you are not misled about me. You know that I decided on divorce and even began proceedings. I won’t hide from you the fact that, in initiating the proceedings, I was reluctant and I agonized. I confess to you that a desire to take revenge on you and on her pursued me. When I got the telegram I came here with the same feelings. I’ll say even more: I wished for her death. But …” He fell silent and pondered whether to reveal or not to reveal to him his feeling. “But I saw her and forgave. And the happiness of forgiveness revealed my duty to me. I have forgiven completely. I want to turn the other cheek, I would give my coat if my cloak be taken, and I pray to God for only one thing, that He not take away from me the happiness of forgiveness!” There were tears in his eyes, and their bright, tranquil gaze struck Vronsky. “Here is my position. You can trample me in the mud, you can make me the laughingstock of the world, but I won’t abandon her and will never utter a word of reproach to you,” he continued. “My duty is clearly marked out for me: I must be with her and I will. If she wishes to see you, I’ll let you know, but for now, I think, it’s better if you stay away.”

He rose, and sobs cut short his speech. Vronsky rose as well and while still stooped over, before he had straightened up, looked up at him. He did not understand Alexei Alexandrovich’s emotion. But he felt that this was something loftier and even inaccessible to him with his outlook on the world.

18

After his conversation with Alexei Alexandrovich, Vronsky walked out onto the front steps of the Karenins’ home and stopped, having a hard time remembering where he was and where he should go. He felt contrite, humiliated, guilty, and robbed of any opportunity to wipe away his humiliation. He felt he had been knocked off the track he had been following so proudly and easily until now. Everything that had seemed so solid, the habits and rules of his life, had suddenly proved false and inapplicable. The husband, the deceived husband, who had before seemed a pitiful creature, an irrelevant and somewhat comic obstacle to his happiness, had suddenly been summoned by Anna herself and elevated to an awe-inspiring height, and this husband had shown himself at this height not malicious, not affected, and not ridiculous, but good, simple, and magnificent. Vronsky could not help but feel this. Their roles had suddenly reversed. Vronsky felt the other man’s height and his own humiliation, the other man’s right and his own wrong. He felt that the husband had been magnanimous even in his grief, whereas he had been base and petty in his deception. But this awareness of his own baseness before the man whom he had unjustly despised was only a small part of his grief. He felt inexpressibly unhappy now because his passion for Anna, who of late seemed to be cooling toward him, now that he knew he had lost her forever had become stronger than it had ever been. He saw the whole of her during her illness, he glimpsed her soul, and it seemed to him he had never loved her until now. And now that he had come to know her and come to love her as he should, he had been humiliated before her and lost her forever, having left her with a single shameful memory of himself. Most horrible of all was his ridiculous and shameful position when Alexei Alexandrovich pulled his hands away from his ashamed face. He was standing on the front steps of the Karenins’ house like a lost soul not knowing what to do.

“Shall I summon a sleigh?” asked the doorman.

“Yes, a sleigh.”

Returning home after three sleepless nights, Vronsky lay prone on the sofa without undressing, crossing his arms and resting his head on them. His head was heavy. The strangest pictures, memories, and thoughts kept coming, one after the other, with incredible speed and clarity: the medicine he had poured the patient, letting the spoon overflow; the midwife’s white hands; Alexei Alexandrovich’s strange position on the floor by her bed.

“To sleep! And forget!” he told himself, with the serene confidence of a healthy man that if he is tired and sleepy he will fall asleep right away. Indeed, in that instant his mind grew hazy and he began to plunge into the abyss of forgetfulness. The waves of the sea of unconscious life were already starting to gather over his head when suddenly—it was exactly as if a powerful jolt of electricity had passed through him—he shuddered so that his entire body lurched on the springs of the sofa, and leaning on his hands, in fright he jumped to his knees. His eyes were wide open, as if he had never been asleep. The weight of his head and the sluggishness of his limbs that he had experienced for a minute suddenly vanished.

“You can trample me in the dirt”—he heard Alexei Alexandrovich speaking and saw him before him, and saw Anna’s face with the feverish flush and glittering eyes looking with tenderness and love not at him but at Alexei Alexandrovich; he saw his own foolish and ridiculous, or so it seemed to him, figure when Alexei Alexandrovich pulled his hands away from his face. He stretched his legs out again and flung himself on the sofa in his former pose and closed his eyes.

“Sleep! Sleep!” he repeated to himself. But with closed eyes he saw even more clearly Anna’s face as it was on that memorable evening before the races.

“That is gone and will never be, and she wants to wipe that from her memory. But I cannot live without it. How are we to reconcile? How are we to reconcile?” he said out loud and unconsciously began repeating these words. This repetition of words kept back the emergence of the new images and memories he felt teeming in his head. But the repetition of words did not restrain his imagination for long. Again, one after another, he pictured with extraordinary rapidity the best minutes and along with them his recent humiliation. “Take away his hands,” says Anna’s voice. He takes away his hands and senses the ashamed and foolish expression on his face.

He lay there, trying to fall asleep, though he felt there was not the slightest hope of it, and kept repeating in a whisper random words from some thought, hoping in this way to keep new images from appearing. He listened closely—and heard words repeated in a bizarre, insane whisper, “Unable to value it, unable to make the most of it; unable to value it, unable to make the most of it.”

“What is this? Or am I going mad?” he told himself. “Perhaps. Why do people go mad? Why do they shoot themselves?” he answered himself and opening his eyes, was surprised to see near his head the pillow embroidered by Varya, his brother’s wife. He touched the pillow’s tassel and tried to recall Varya and when he had seen her last. But it was agony to think of anything unrelated. “No, I must sleep!” He moved the pillow closer and pressed his head to it, but he had to make an effort to keep his eyes closed. He jumped up and sat down. “It’s over for me,” he told himself. “I must figure out what to do. What is left?” His thoughts quickly ran over his life apart from his love for Anna.

“Ambition? Serpukhovskoi? Society? The court?” He couldn’t decide on anything. All this had had meaning, but now none of it existed anymore. He rose from the sofa, removed his coat, loosened his belt, and baring his hairy chest in order to breathe more freely, walked around the room. “This is how people go mad,” he repeated, “and shoot themselves … to escape the shame,” he added slowly.

He walked to the door and closed it. Then, with a fixed gaze and clenched teeth, he walked over to the table, picked up his revolver, examined it, spun it to a loaded chamber, and became lost in thought. For a couple of minutes, his head lowered with an expression of intense mental effort, he stood perfectly still holding the revolver and thought. “Of course,” he told himself, as if a logical, extended, and clear progression of thought had led him to an unquestionable conclusion. In reality, this “of course” that seemed convincing to him was only the result of the repetition of exactly the same circle of memories and pictures through which he had passed tens of times in that hour. The same memories of happiness, forever lost, the same picture of the meaninglessness of everything he had to look forward to in life, the same awareness of his own humiliation. And the sequence of pictures and emotions was also the same.

“Of course,” he repeated when for the third time his thoughts headed back through the same vicious circle of memories and thoughts, and pressing the revolver to the left side of his chest and giving it a good jerk with his whole hand, as if suddenly squeezing it in his fist, he pulled the trigger. He didn’t hear the shot, but the powerful blow to his chest knocked him off his feet. He tried to clutch at the edge of the table, dropped the revolver, staggered, and sat down on the ground, looking around in amazement. He did not recognize his room, looking from below at the table’s curved legs, at the waste paper basket and the tiger skin. The fast, creaking steps of his valet walking through the drawing room brought him around. He made an effort to think and realized he was on the floor, and seeing the blood on the tiger skin and on his own hand he realized he had shot himself.

“How stupid! I missed,” he said, groping for the revolver. The revolver was next to him—he was looking farther away. Still searching, he reached in the other direction and too weak to maintain his balance, fell, bleeding profusely.

The elegant valet with whiskers who had complained many times to his acquaintances about the weakness of his nerves took such fright when he saw his master lying on the floor that he left him there to bleed to death and ran for help. An hour later Varya, his brother’s wife, arrived, and with the help of three doctors who had come, for whom she had sent everywhere and who all arrived at the same time, laid the wounded man on the bed and stayed there to nurse him.

19

The mistake Alexei Alexandrovich had made that, in preparing for his meeting with his wife, he had not considered the chance that her repentance would be sincere and he would forgive her but she wouldn’t die—this mistake presented itself to him in full force two months after his return from Moscow. But the mistake he had made had come about not only because he had overlooked this possibility but also because until that day of meeting with his dying wife he had not known his own heart. At his ill wife’s bedside, for the first time in his life, he surrendered to the warm compassion which other people’s suffering evoked in him and which had previously embarrassed him as a harmful weakness; and his pity for her, and remorse for having wished her death, and, most of all, the very joy of forgiveness made him feel not only relief from his sufferings but also a spiritual peace he had never before experienced. He suddenly felt that the very thing that had been the source of his sufferings had become the source of his spiritual joy; that what had seemed insoluble when he had condemned, reproached, and hated became simple and clear when he forgave and loved.

He forgave his wife and pitied her for her sufferings and repentance. He forgave Vronsky and pitied him, especially after the rumors reached him of his desperate act. He pitied even his son more than before and reproached himself now for taking too little interest in him. But for the newborn baby girl he experienced a special feeling, not only of pity but of tenderness. At first from a feeling of compassion alone he took an interest in the rather weak newborn girl who was not his daughter and who had been abandoned during her mother’s illness and who surely would have died had he not taken an interest in her—and himself did not notice how he had come to love her. Several times a day he went to the nursery and sat there for long stretches of time so that the wet nurse and nurse, who at first were shy in front of him, became accustomed to him. Sometimes he would spend half an hour silently watching the sleeping, saffron-and-red, downy and wrinkled little face of the child and observing the movements of her frowning brow and her plump little hands and her curled fingers, which wiped her little eyes and the bridge of her nose with the back of her hand. In those moments in particular Alexei Alexandrovich felt perfectly at peace and in harmony with himself and did not see in his position anything unusual, anything that needed changing.

The more time passed, however, the more clearly he saw that no matter how natural this situation was for him now, he would not be allowed to remain in it. He sensed that apart from the benevolent spiritual force guiding his soul there was another, brutal force, just as or even more powerful, that was guiding his life, and this force would not allow him the humble peace he desired. He sensed everyone looking at him with questioning amazement; they did not understand him and were waiting for something from him. In particular, he sensed the instability and unnaturalness of his relations with his wife.

When the softening produced in her by the imminence of death had passed, Alexei Alexandrovich noticed that Anna was afraid of him, oppressed by him, and could not look him in the eye. It was as if she wanted to tell him something but couldn’t bring herself to do so and also as if she had a presentiment that their relations could not continue, that she was expecting something from him.

Late in February it happened that Anna’s newborn daughter, also named Anna, fell ill. Alexei Alexandrovich was in the nursery that morning and after ordering that the doctor be sent for, he left for the ministry. After three o’clock, finished with his affairs, he returned home. Walking into the entry he caught sight of a handsome footman in braided livery and a bearskin cape holding a white cloak made of American wolf.

“Who is here?” asked Alexei Alexandrovich.

“Princess Elizaveta Fyodorovna Tverskaya,” replied the footman with a smile, or so it seemed to Alexei Alexandrovich.

Throughout this difficult time Alexei Alexandrovich had noticed that his society acquaintances, especially the women, had taken a particular interest in him and his wife. He had noticed in all their acquaintances a barely concealed delight in something, the same delight he had seen in the eyes of the lawyer and now saw in the eyes of the footman. Everyone seemed to be in rapture, as if they were marrying someone off. When he was greeted, he was asked with scarcely concealed delight about her health.

The presence of Princess Tverskaya—both because of the memories connected with her and because he did not like her in general—was distasteful to Alexei Alexandrovich, and he went straight to the nursery. In the first nursery, Seryozha, lying with his chest on the table and his feet on the chair, was drawing something and chattering away. The English governess, who had replaced the French one during Anna’s illness and was sitting alongside the boy tatting her picot, hastily rose, sat back down, and tugged at Seryozha.²⁴

Alexei Alexandrovich stroked his son’s hair, answered the governess’s question about his wife’s health, and asked what the doctor had said about the baby.²⁵

“The doctor said there was no danger and prescribed baths, sir.”

“But she is still suffering,” said Alexei Alexandrovich, listening to the child’s screaming in the next room.

“I think the wet nurse isn’t working out, sir,” said the Englishwoman decisively.

“What makes you think so?” he asked, stopping.

“That’s how it was with Countess Pohl, sir. They were treating the child, but it turned out the child was simply hungry: the wet nurse had no milk, sir.”

Alexei Alexandrovich pondered that, and after standing there for several seconds went through the other door. The little girl lay there, her tiny head flung back, arching her back in the wet nurse’s arms, and would not take the plump breast being offered her or be quiet, despite the double shushing of the wet nurse and the nurse bending over her.

“Still no better?” said Alexei Alexandrovich.

“Very restless,” the nurse whispered in reply.

“Miss Edward says that perhaps the wet nurse has no milk,” he said.

“I think so, too, Alexei Alexandrovich.”

“Then why don’t you say something?”

“Who could I say it to? Anna Arkadyevna is still unwell,” said the nurse, displeased.

The nurse was an old family servant, and in these plain words of hers Alexei Alexandrovich saw a hint at his position.

The baby was screaming louder and louder, tossing about and wheezing. With a gesture of despair, the nurse walked up to her, took her from the wet nurse’s arms, and began rocking her as she walked.

“You must ask the doctor to examine the wet nurse,” said Alexei Alexandrovich.

The robust-looking, well-dressed wet nurse, frightened that they would turn her away, mumbled something to herself, and covering up her large breast, smiled contemptuously at the doubts about her milk supply. In this smile Alexei Alexandrovich also found scorn for his own position.

“Unlucky child!” said the nurse, shushing the child and continuing to walk her up and down.

Alexei Alexandrovich sat down on a chair and with a suffering, mournful face watched the nurse pacing back and forth.

When the baby, quieted at last, was lowered into her deep crib and the nurse had straightened the pillow and walked away, Alexei Alexandrovich stood up, and trying hard to walk on tiptoe, approached the child. For a minute he was silent and watched the baby with the same mournful face; but suddenly, a smile, moving his hair and the skin on his forehead, a smile broke out on his face, and he walked out of the room just as quietly.

In the dining room he rang and ordered the servant who came in to send again for the doctor. He was annoyed at his wife for not concerning herself with this charming child and in this irritated mood did not want to go to her, nor did he feel like seeing Princess Betsy; but his wife might wonder why he did not stop in to see her as usual and so he made an effort to master himself and went to the bedroom. As he walked over the soft carpet toward the doorway, he could not help but overhear a conversation which he did not want to hear.

“If he weren’t going away, I would have understood your refusal and his as well. But your husband has to be above that,” said Betsy.

“It’s not for my husband that I don’t want it but for myself. Don’t say that!” Anna’s agitated voice replied.

“Yes, but you can’t help wishing to say good-bye to the man who shot himself over you.”

“That’s exactly why I don’t want to.”

With a frightened and guilty expression, Alexei Alexandrovich came to a halt and was about to go back unobserved. But reflecting that this would be unworthy of him, he turned back, coughed, and walked toward the bedroom. The voices fell silent and he entered.

Anna, wearing a gray robe, her black hair cut short but growing out like a thick brush on her round head, was sitting on the settee. As always at the sight of her husband, the animation of her face suddenly vanished. She dropped her head and looked over nervously at Betsy. Betsy, dressed in the very latest fashion, wearing a hat that swooped somewhere above her head, like the shade over a lamp, and a dove-gray dress with dramatic diagonal stripes going one way on the bodice and the other on the skirt, was sitting next to Anna, holding her tall, flat torso erect, and bowing her head, she greeted Alexei Alexandrovich with an amused smile.

“Ah!” she said, as if surprised. “I’m very happy that you’re home. You never show yourself anywhere, and I haven’t seen you during Anna’s illness. I’ve heard everything—your concern. Yes, you are an amazing husband!” she said with a significant and kindly look, as if conferring upon him a decoration for magnanimity for his conduct toward his wife.

Alexei Alexandrovich bowed coldly, and kissing his wife’s hand, inquired about her health.

“Better, I think,” she said, avoiding his gaze.

“But you seem to have a feverish color to your face,” he said, stressing the word “feverish.”

“We’ve been talking too much,” said Betsy. “I feel that it’s egoism on my part, so I’m leaving.”

She stood up, but Anna, blushing all of a sudden, quickly grabbed her arm.

“No, stay a little longer, please. I need to tell you … no, you,” she turned to Alexei Alexandrovich, and a flush covered her neck and brow. “I can’t and don’t want to keep anything hidden from you,” she said.

Alexei Alexandrovich cracked his knuckles and dropped his head.

“Betsy has said that Count Vronsky wishes to come by and say good-bye before his departure for Tashkent.” She was not looking at her husband and evidently was in haste to say everything, no matter how hard it was for her. “I said I could not receive him.”

“You said, my friend, that it would depend on Alexei Alexandrovich,” Betsy corrected her.

“But no, I can’t receive him, it will not do any—” She stopped suddenly and glanced inquiringly at her husband (he was not looking at her). “In short, I do not want …”

Alexei Alexandrovich moved forward and tried to take her hand.

Her first reaction was to jerk her hand away from the damp hand with its large raised veins, which was seeking hers; but making a visible effort, she pressed his hand.

“I’m very grateful for your confidence, but …” he said, feeling with embarrassment and irritation that what he might decide easily and clearly by himself he could not discuss in the presence of Princess Tverskaya, who seemed to him the personification of that brutal force that must guide his life in the eyes of society and that prevented him from surrendering to his feeling of love and forgiveness. He stopped, looking at Princess Tverskaya.

“Good-bye, then, my darling,” said Betsy, standing. She kissed Anna and went out. Alexei Alexandrovich escorted her.

“Alexei Alexandrovich! I know you for a genuinely magnanimous man,” said Betsy, who had halted in the small drawing room and was pressing his hand yet again with special fervor. “I am an outsider, but I love her and respect you and so I am allowing myself this advice. Receive him. Alexei is honor personified, and he is leaving for Tashkent.”

“I thank you, Princess, for your concern and advice. But the matter of whether my wife may or may not receive someone is for her to decide.”

He said this, lifting his eyebrows with dignity out of habit and then thought that regardless of what he said, there could be no dignity in his position, and he saw this in the suppressed, malicious, and mocking smile with which Betsy looked at him after this phrase.

20

Alexei Alexandrovich bowed to Betsy in the drawing room and went to see his wife. She was lying down, but when she heard his steps she hurriedly sat up in her former position and looked at him apprehensively. He saw that she had been crying.

“I am most grateful for your confidence in me,” he meekly repeated in Russian the sentence he had spoken in French when Betsy was there and sat down beside her. When he spoke Russian he used the familiar “you,” which never failed to irritate Anna. “And I am most grateful for your decision. I, too, think that since he is going there is no need for Count Vronsky to come here. Actually—”

“Yes, I already said that, so why repeat it?” Anna interrupted him with an irritation she made no haste to restrain. “No need,” she thought, “for a man to come to say good-bye to the woman he loves, for whom he wished to perish and ruin himself, and who cannot live without him. No need whatsoever!” She pursed her lips and lowered her glittering eyes to his venous hands, which he was slowly rubbing together. “Let’s never speak of this,” she added, more calmly.

“I left it to you to decide this matter, and I am very pleased to see—” Alexei Alexandrovich was about to go on.

“That my desire coincides with yours,” she quickly finished his sentence, irritated by the fact that he spoke so slowly, when she knew in advance all that he would say.

“Yes,” he confirmed, “and Princess Tverskaya was entirely out of line interfering in these most difficult family matters. In particular, she—”

“I don’t believe anything people say about her,” said Anna quickly. “I know that her love for me is sincere.”

Alexei Alexandrovich sighed and fell silent. She was toying anxiously with the tassels of her robe, glancing at him with the same agonizing sense of physical revulsion for him for which she had reproached herself but could not overcome. She now desired but one thing—to be rid of his hateful presence.

“I have just sent for the doctor,” said Alexei Alexandrovich.

“I’m well. Why do I need a doctor?”

“No, the little one is crying, and they’re saying the wet nurse hasn’t enough milk.”

“Why didn’t you allow me to nurse her when I begged you? Anyway”—Alexei Alexandrovich realized what “anyway” signified—“she is a baby, and they shall be the death of her.” She rang and instructed them to bring the baby in. “I begged to nurse her, they wouldn’t let me, and now they’re reproaching me.”

“I am not reproaching—”

“Yes you are! My God! Why didn’t I die!” And she burst into sobs. “Forgive me, I’m irritable, I’m being unfair,” she said, regaining control. “But go. …”

“No, it cannot go on like this,” Alexei Alexandrovich told himself decisively as he left his wife’s room.

Never before had the impossibility of his position in society’s eyes and his wife’s hatred for him—and in general the might of that brutal, mysterious force which, contrary to his own spiritual mood, guided his life and demanded the fulfillment of its will and the alteration of his relations toward his wife—presented themselves to him as obviously as they did today. He saw clearly that all society and his wife were demanding something of him, but what precisely, he could not understand. He felt the anger that had risen in his soul over this, shattering his tranquility and the full merit of his deed. He believed that for Anna it would be better to break off relations with Vronsky, but if they all found that this was impossible, he was prepared even to allow these relations once again, just so they did not bring shame on the children, take them away from him, and change his position. As bad as this was, it was still better than a break, which would put her in a hopeless, shameful position, while he himself would be deprived of all he loved. But he felt powerless; he knew in advance that everyone was against him and would not allow him to do what now seemed to him so natural and good but would force him to do what was bad but to them seemed proper.

21

Before Betsy could leave the drawing room, Stepan Arkadyevich, who had only just arrived from Eliseyev’s, where fresh oysters had come in, greeted her in the doorway.²⁶

“Ah, Princess! What a pleasant meeting!” he began. “I’ve been to see you.”

“A moment’s meeting because I am going,” said Betsy, smiling and donning a glove.

“Wait to put on the glove, Princess, and let me kiss your hand. There is nothing I am so grateful for as the return of old-fashioned ways like the kissing of hands.” He kissed Betsy’s hand. “When shall we see each other?”

“You don’t deserve it,” replied Betsy, smiling.

“No, I deserve it very much because I have become the most serious of men. I have been arranging not only my own but other people’s family matters as well,” he said with a significant expression on his face.

“Oh, I’m so pleased!” replied Betsy, immediately realizing that he was speaking about Anna. And returning to the room, they stood in a corner. “He will be the death of her,” said Betsy in a significant whisper. “This is impossible, impossible.”

“I am so glad you think so,” said Stepan Arkadyevich, shaking his head with a grave look of agonized compassion on his face. “That’s what I’ve come to Petersburg for.”

“The whole town is talking about it,” she said. “It is an impossible situation. She is simply pining away. He doesn’t understand that she is one of those women who cannot trifle with their emotions. One or the other: either take her away, take vigorous action; or else give her a divorce. But this is suffocating her.”

“Yes, yes. Precisely,” said Oblonsky, sighing. “That is why I’ve come. Well, not only for that. … I’ve been made a chamberlain, and, well, I had to express my gratitude. But the main thing is I need to settle this.”

“Well, may God help you!” said Betsy.

After he had seen Princess Betsy to the entry and had kissed her wrist once again above her glove, right where the pulse beats, and having made up some other risqué nonsense so that she no longer knew whether she should be angry or laugh, Stepan Arkadyevich went to see his sister. He found her in tears.

Although he had only just been bubbling over with good cheer, Stepan Arkadyevich shifted instantly and naturally to the sympathetic, poetically moved tone that suited her mood. He asked her about her health and how she had spent the morning.

“Very, very badly. The afternoon and the morning both, and all the days past and to come,” she said.

“It seems to me you’re succumbing to gloom. You must give yourself a good shake and look life straight in the eye. I know it’s hard, but …”

“I’ve heard that women love men even for their vices,” Anna began all of a sudden, “but I despise him for his virtues. I cannot go on living with him. You must understand, the sight of him affects me physically, it enrages me. I cannot, simply cannot go on living with him. What am I to do? I was unhappy and thought one could not be any unhappier, but the horrible state I’m experiencing now I could never have imagined. Would you believe it, knowing he is a good, a superb man, that I am not worth his fingernail, I still hate him. I hate him for his magnanimity. There is nothing left for me except—”

She was about to say “death,” but Stepan Arkadyevich would not let her finish.

“You’re sick and irritable,” he said. “Believe me, you are exaggerating terribly. There is nothing so awful in this.”

And Stepan Arkadyevich smiled. No one in Stepan Arkadyevich’s place, having to deal with such despair, would have allowed himself to smile (a smile would have seemed rude), but his smile held so much goodness and almost feminine tenderness that his smile did not offend but rather soothed and consoled. His quiet, calming speeches and smiles had a soothing, calming effect, like almond oil. And Anna quickly felt this.

“No, Stiva,” she said. “I’m lost. Lost! Worse than lost. I’m not yet lost, I can’t say it’s all over, on the contrary, I feel it isn’t all over. I’m like a taut string that is bound to break. But it’s not over yet … and it will end terribly.”

“It’s all right, you can loosen the string little by little. There is no situation without a solution.”

“I’ve thought and thought. The only—”

Again he realized from her terrified glance that this only solution, in her opinion, was death, and he did not let her finish.

“Not at all,” he said. “Allow me. You can’t see your situation as I can. Let me state my opinion frankly.” Again he cautiously smiled his almond smile. “I’ll start from the beginning. You married a man twenty years your senior. You married him either without love or not knowing what love is. That was a mistake, let’s say.”

“A terrible mistake!” said Anna.

“I repeat, though: it’s an accomplished fact. Then you had, shall we say, the misfortune to love someone not your husband. That’s a misfortune, but it is also an accomplished fact. And your husband admitted and forgave this.” He paused after each sentence, expecting her objection, but she said nothing in response. “That is how it is. Now the question is whether you can go on living with your husband. Do you wish to? Does he wish to?”

“I know nothing. Nothing.”

“But you yourself said you couldn’t stand him.”

“No I didn’t. I deny it. I know nothing and understand nothing.”

“Yes, but allow—”

“You can’t understand. I feel as if I’m flying head over heels into an abyss, but I mustn’t save myself. And I can’t.”

“That’s all right, we’ll spread something out to catch you. I understand you, I understand that you can’t take it on yourself to express your wishes and feelings.”

“I wish for nothing, nothing … only for all this to be over.”

“But he sees it and knows it. Do you think he is any less weighed down by this than you? You’re in agony, he’s in agony, and what can come of this? While divorce unties all knots.” And so Stepan Arkadyevich expressed, not without effort, his main thought and looked at her significantly.

She said nothing in reply and shook her shorn head. But from the expression of her face, which suddenly beamed with its former beauty, he saw that she did not wish this only because it seemed to her an impossible happiness.

“I’m so terribly sorry for you! How happy I would be if I could settle this!” said Stepan Arkadyevich, smiling more boldly now. “Don’t say anything! Don’t! God grant I’m able to say what I feel. I’m going to see him.”

Anna looked at him with pensive, glittering eyes and said not a word.

22

Stepan Arkadyevich, with the same rather solemn face with which he took his chairman’s chair in his office, entered Alexei Alexandrovich’s study. Alexei Alexandrovich, hands clasped behind his back, was pacing around the room and thinking about exactly what Stepan Arkadyevich had spoken of with his wife.

“I’m not disturbing you?” said Stepan Arkadyevich, suddenly experiencing at the sight of his brother-in-law a sense of embarrassment unusual in him. To hide his embarrassment he took out a cigarette case with a new opening mechanism that he had just purchased, and after sniffing the leather, took out a cigarette.

“No. Can I do anything for you?” replied Alexei Alexandrovich reluctantly.

“Yes, I would like … I need to … Yes, we need to talk,” said Stepan Arkadyevich, surprised to feel an unaccustomed shyness.

This feeling was so surprising and strange that Stepan Arkadyevich could not believe it was the voice of conscience telling him that what he was about to do was wrong. Stepan Arkadyevich made a concerted effort and fought off the shyness that had descended upon him.

“I hope that you believe in my love for my sister and my sincere attachment and respect for you,” he said, blushing.

Alexei Alexandrovich halted and made no reply, but his face struck Stepan Arkadyevich with its expression of humble sacrifice.

“I intended, I wanted to speak about my sister and about your mutual situation,” said Stepan Arkadyevich, still struggling with this unaccustomed shyness.

Alexei Alexandrovich smiled dolefully, looked at his brother-in-law, and without answering, walked over to his desk, took from it the letter he had started, and handed it to his brother-in-law.

“I have been thinking of the same thing incessantly. Here is what I started to write, thinking that I would say it better in writing and that my presence irritates her,” he said, handing him the letter.

Stepan Arkadyevich took the letter, looked with perplexed surprise at the dull eyes fixed on him, and began to read.

“‘I can see that my presence weighs on you. Difficult though it was for me to convince myself of this, I can see that it is so and cannot be otherwise. I do not blame you, and God is my witness, when I saw you during your illness, I resolved with all my heart to forget everything that had been between us and begin a new life. I do not repent and never shall repent of what I have done; but I have wished one thing, your good, the good of your soul, and now I can see that I did not achieve this. Tell me yourself what would give you genuine happiness and peace for your soul. I surrender wholly to your will and your sense of fairness.’”

Stepan Arkadyevich handed the letter back and with the same perplexity continued to look at his brother-in-law, not knowing what to say. This silence was so awkward for them both that Stepan Arkadyevich’s lips began to twitch, while he said nothing, not taking his eyes off Karenin’s face.

“That is what I wanted to tell her,” said Alexei Alexandrovich, turning away.

“Yes, yes,” said Stepan Arkadyevich, unable to respond because tears were coming to his throat. “Yes, yes. I understand you,” he finally was able to say.

“I wish I knew what she wanted,” said Alexei Alexandrovich.

“I’m afraid she herself does not appreciate her own situation. She is no judge,” said Stepan Arkadyevich, recovering. “She is crushed, yes, crushed by your magnanimity. If she reads this letter she will be unable to say anything. She will merely hang her head lower.”

“Yes, but what can I do in that case? How can I explain? How can I learn her wishes?”

“If you allow me to tell you my opinion, then I think that it is up to you to point directly to those measures you deem necessary to put an end to this situation.”

“Which means you deem it necessary to end it?” Alexei Alexandrovich interrupted him. “But how?” he added, making an unaccustomed gesture across his eyes. “I see no possible solution.”

“There is a solution to every situation,” said Stepan Arkadyevich standing and becoming animated. “There was a time when you wanted to break off … If you are now convinced that you cannot accomplish your mutual happiness …”

“Happiness can be understood variously. Let us say, though, that I agree to everything, I want nothing. What is the solution to our situation?”

“If you want to know my opinion,” said Stepan Arkadyevich with the same mollifying, almond-gentle smile with which he had spoken with Anna. His good smile was so convincing that despite himself, Alexei Alexandrovich, feeling his own weakness and surrendering to it, was prepared to believe what Stepan Arkadyevich was going to say. “She would never say this. But only one thing is possible, only one thing can she desire,” continued Stepan Arkadyevich, “and that is a cessation of your relations and all the memories connected with them. In my opinion, in your position, it is essential to clarify your new relationship. And this relationship can be established only by freedom for both sides.”

“Divorce,” Alexei Alexandrovich interrupted with distaste.

“Yes, I think divorce. Yes, divorce,” repeated Stepan Arkadyevich, turning red. “That is in all respects the most sensible solution for spouses who find themselves in a relationship such as yours. What is to be done if the spouses have found that life for them is impossible together? That can always occur.” Alexei Alexandrovich sighed heavily and shut his eyes. “Here there is but one consideration: whether one of the spouses wishes to enter into another marriage. If not, then this is very simple,” said Stepan Arkadyevich, freeing himself increasingly from his embarrassment.²⁷

Frowning in distress, Alexei Alexandrovich said something to himself and made no answer. Everything that had seemed so very simple for Stepan Arkadyevich, Alexei Alexandrovich had thought over thousands and thousands of times, and it all seemed to him far from simple; it seemed utterly impossible. Divorce, the details of which he already knew, now seemed to him impossible because the sense of his own dignity and his respect for religion would not permit him to plead guilty to a fictitious charge of adultery and even less to allow his wife, whom he had forgiven and loved, to be declared guilty and disgraced. Divorce also appeared impossible for other, even more important reasons.

What would happen to their son in the event of a divorce? He could not be left with his mother. His divorced mother would have her own illegitimate family in which a stepson’s position and upbringing would, in all likelihood, be bad. Keep him with himself? He knew that this would amount to vengeance on his part, and he did not want that. Apart from this, divorce seemed even more impossible for Alexei Alexandrovich because, by agreeing to a divorce, he would be ruining Anna. Imprinted in his soul was what Darya Alexandrovna had said in Moscow, that in deciding on a divorce he was thinking about himself, and not thinking about how he was ruining her irrevocably. Connecting her word to his forgiveness, to his attachment to the children, he now understood this in his own way. Agreeing to a divorce, giving her her freedom, would mean in his understanding taking away from himself his last attachment to the life of the children he loved, and from her, her last support on the path of good, and relegating her to ruin. If she were a divorced wife, he knew that she would be united with Vronsky, and this union would be illegitimate and illicit, because according to the meaning of church law, a wife cannot marry as long as her husband is alive. “She will be united with him, and in a year or two he will abandon her, or she will enter into a new liaison,” thought Alexei Alexandrovich. “And by agreeing to an illegitimate divorce, I would be to blame for her ruin.” He had thought all this over hundreds of times and was convinced that the matter of divorce was not only far from simple, despite what his brother-in-law had said, but absolutely impossible. He did not believe one word of Stepan Arkadyevich, to whose every word he had thousands of refutations, but he did listen to him, feeling that his words were expressing that powerful and brutal force which was guiding his life and to which he would have to submit.

“The question is merely how, on what terms, you would agree to give her a divorce. She wants nothing and would not dare ask you. She leaves everything to your generosity.”

“My God! My God! What for?” thought Alexei Alexandrovich, recalling the details of a divorce in which the husband accepts the blame and with the same gesture with which Vronsky had hidden himself, hid his face with his hands from shame.

“You’re upset, I can understand that. But if you think it over—”

“But whosoever shall smite thee on one cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any man take thy coat away, let him have thy cloak also,” thought Alexei Alexandrovich.

“Yes, yes!” he exclaimed in a shrill voice, “I will take the disgrace upon myself and even give up my son, but … but wouldn’t it be better to leave it be? But do what you like.”

Turning away from his brother-in-law, so that he could not see him, he sat in the chair by the window. It was a bitter and shameful thing for him; but along with this grief and shame he was experiencing joy and tenderness at the loftiness of his own humility.

Stepan Arkadyevich was touched. He waited before speaking.

“Alexei, believe me, she does appreciate your generosity,” he said, “but evidently this was God’s will,” he added, and as soon as he had said this he felt it was foolish, and he had difficulty restraining a smile at his own foolishness.

Alexei Alexandrovich was about to say something in reply, but tears prevented him.

“This is a fatal misfortune, and this must be admitted to be. I admit this misfortune as an accomplished fact and am trying to help both her and you,” said Stepan Arkadyevich.

When Stepan Arkadyevich left his brother-in-law’s room, he was touched, but this did not prevent him from being satisfied at having successfully concluded this business, since he was confident that Alexei Alexandrovich would not renounce his words. To this satisfaction was added another; when this matter was accomplished he would ask his wife and close friends this question, “What is the difference between myself and the sovereign? When the sovereign breaks a tie, no one is the better for it, whereas when I break a tie, we have a winner. Or, what is the similarity between myself and the sovereign? When … Actually, I’ll think of something better,” he told himself with a smile.

23

Vronsky’s wound was dangerous, although it had missed his heart, and for a few days he lingered between life and death. When for the first time he was in a condition to speak, only Varya, his brother’s wife, was in his room.

“Varya!” he said, looking at her sternly. “I shot myself by accident. Please, never speak of this and explain it this way to everyone. Otherwise it is too stupid!”

Without responding to his words, Varya leaned over him and with a radiant smile looked into his face. His eyes were bright but not feverish, though their expression was stern.

“Well, thank God!” she said. “You don’t hurt?”

“A little here.” He pointed to his chest.

“Here, let me change your bandage.”

Silently, clenching his broad jaw, he watched her change his bandage. When she was finished, he said, “I’m not delirious, please, make sure there are no discussions of me having shot myself on purpose.”

“No one is saying anything. I only hope you won’t be shooting yourself by accident anymore,” she said with an inquiring smile.

“Probably not, but it would be better if …”

He smiled darkly.

Despite these words and smile, which had given Varya such a fright, when the inflammation had passed and he began to recuperate he felt utterly free of a certain portion of his grief. By this act he had somehow wiped away the shame and humiliation he had been feeling. He could now think calmly about Alexei Alexandrovich. He admitted to all his generosity and no longer felt humiliated. Moreover, he fell back into his old rut. He saw the possibility of looking men in the eye without shame and could live, guided by his habits. The one thing he could not tear from his heart, although he struggled with this feeling constantly, was the regret, which drove him to despair, that he had lost her forever. The fact that now, having redeemed his guilt before her husband, he must give her up and never stand anymore between her husband and her in her atonement, had been firmly decided in his heart; but he could not tear from his heart his regret over the loss of her love, could not wipe out from his memory those moments of happiness he had known with her, which he had valued so little at the time, and which pursued him now with all their charm.

Serpukhovskoi came up with an appointment to Tashkent for him, and Vronsky, without the slightest hesitation, accepted the offer. But the closer the time of departure came, the harder the sacrifice he was making to what he considered proper.

His wound had healed, and he was getting ready to leave, making preparations for his departure for Tashkent.

“See her once and then bury myself and die,” he thought, and making his farewell visits, he expressed this thought to Betsy. It was with this embassy that Betsy had gone to see Anna and brought him a negative reply.

“All the better,” thought Vronsky upon receiving this news. “It was a weakness that would have destroyed my last strength.”

The next morning Betsy herself came to see him and announced that she had received through Oblonsky positive news, that Alexei Alexandrovich was giving her a divorce and so he could see her.

Without even bothering to see Betsy out, forgetting all his resolutions, without asking when he could see her or where her husband was, Vronsky set off immediately for the Karenins’. He ran up the staircase, seeing nothing and no one, and with a quick step, barely keeping himself from running, went into her room. And without thinking or noticing whether anyone was in the room or not, he embraced her and began covering her face, arms, and neck with kisses.

Anna had been preparing for this meeting and thinking what she would tell him, but she did not manage to tell him any of this: his passion overwhelmed her. She wanted to calm him and calm herself, but it was too late. His emotion communicated itself to her. Her lips trembled so that for a long time she could not speak.

“Yes, you have possessed me, and I am yours,” she uttered at last, pressing his hand to her breast.

“So it had to be!” he said. “As long as we live, this must be. I know it now.”

“That’s true,” she said, turning whiter and whiter, putting her arms around his head. “Still, there is something terrible in this after all that has been.”

“It will all pass, it will all pass, and we will be so happy! Our love, if it could be stronger, is stronger because there is something terrible in it,” he said, raising his head and smiling to reveal his strong teeth.

She could not help but respond with a smile—not to his words but to his infatuated eyes. She took his hand and stroked her cold cheeks and shorn locks with it.

“I wouldn’t have recognized you with this short hair. You’re prettier than ever. A little boy. But how pale you are!”

“Yes, I’m very weak,” she said, smiling. Again her lips began to tremble.

“We will go to Italy and you will get better,” he said.

“Can that really be possible? Can you and I be like husband and wife, just ourselves, a family of you and me?” she said, gazing closely into his eyes.

“I’m only amazed that it could ever have been otherwise.”

“Stiva says he has agreed to everything, but I cannot accept his generosity,” she said, gazing pensively past Vronsky’s face. “I don’t want a divorce. I don’t care now. Only I don’t know what he will decide about Seryozha.”

He simply could not understand how at this moment of meeting she could think of and remember her son and the divorce. Wasn’t it all the same?

“Don’t speak of it. Don’t think,” he said, turning her hand over in his and trying to draw her attention; but she still would not look at him.

“Oh, why didn’t I die? It would have been better!” she said, and without a sound, tears trickled down both her cheeks; but she tried to smile, so as not to grieve him.

By Vronsky’s old lights, to turn down the flattering and dangerous assignment to Tashkent would have been disgraceful and impossible. Now, though, without a moment’s thought, he turned it down and, when he noticed the disapproval of his action among those on high, immediately resigned.

A month later, Alexei Alexandrovich was left alone with his son in his apartments and Anna and Vronsky had gone abroad not only without having obtained a divorce but having resolutely refused one.