by Leo Tolstoy
It was that kind of practical love for her nephew and niece and for her sister and Lyubov Sergeyevna, and even for me, because Dmitry was fond of me, that shone in Sofya Ivanovna’s eyes and in her every word and gesture.
I would come to appreciate Sofya Ivanovna fully only much later, but even then the question occurred to me why Dmitry, who was trying to understand love in a way quite different from the way young people usually do, and who, moreover, had always had the sweet, loving Sofya Ivanovna before him, had nevertheless suddenly fallen passionately in love with the incomprehensible Lyubov Sergeyevna, while merely supposing that his aunt possessed good qualities, too. The saying would seem to be true: ‘A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country.’53 It’s one of two things: either there really is more bad than good in every person, or else people are more receptive to the bad than to the good. Dmitry hadn’t known Lyubov Sergeyevna very long, but he had experienced his aunt’s love from the day he was born.
TWENTY-FIVE
I Get Acquainted
When I returned to the veranda, they were not, as I had supposed, talking about me at all, although Varenka wasn’t reading but had put her book down to argue heatedly with Dmitry, who was pacing back and forth, adjusting his cravat with his neck and scowling. The matter at issue appeared to be Ivan Yakovlevich and superstition, but the argument was too vehement for there not to have been some tacit meaning closer to the whole family. The princess and Lyubov Sergeyevna sat in silence, listening closely to every word, clearly wanting at times to join the argument but restraining themselves, the one allowing Varenka to speak for her and the other, Dmitry. When I came in Varenka glanced at me with an expression of such indifference that it was clear that she was too fiercely involved in the argument to care whether or not I heard what she was saying. The princess, who was obviously on her side, looked at me the same way. But Dmitry started to argue even more heatedly in my presence, while Lyubov Sergeyevna seemed to be quite startled by my entrance and said, without addressing anyone in particular, ‘Old people speak the truth: si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait.’54
While that maxim didn’t stop the argument, it did make me think that Lyubov Sergeyevna and my friend’s side was the wrong one. Although I was slightly embarrassed to witness that family discord, I was still happy to see the family’s true relations reveal themselves as a result of it, and to feel that my presence hadn’t kept them from doing so.
How often it happens that for years you see a family concealed by the same unchanging false curtain of decorum, which hides the members’ true relations from you (I’ve even noticed that the more impenetrable and therefore beautiful the curtain, the coarser the true relations it conceals). But then, quite unexpectedly some question will come up within the circle of that family, sometimes a seemingly insignificant question, about silk lace or a call made with the husband’s carriage, and for no apparent reason the argument will grow more and more rancorous until it becomes too confining behind the curtain to examine the matter, and suddenly, to the horror of the arguers themselves and the astonishment of those present, all the true relations burst out, and the curtain, no longer hiding anything, flaps pointlessly between the contending parties, serving only to remind you how long you had been deceived by it. It’s often less painful to bang your head with full force against a lintel than to touch, however gingerly, a raw wound. And there is such a raw wound in almost every family. For the Nekhlyudovs, it was Dmitry’s strange love for Lyubov Sergeyevna, which aroused in his sister and mother if not envy, then offended family feeling. And that’s why the argument about Ivan Yakovlevich and superstition was so important to them all.
‘You always try to find in whatever other people laugh at and everyone scorns,’ Varenka said in her resonant voice, enunciating every syllable, ‘– you always try to find in all that something exceptionally fine.’
‘In the first place, only the silliest person could speak of scorn for someone as remarkable as Ivan Yakovlevich,’ Dmitry replied, convulsively jerking his head away from his sister. ‘And in the second, it is on the contrary you who make a point of not seeing the good that’s standing right in front of you.’
On rejoining us, Sofya Ivanovna looked several times in alarm first at her nephew, then at her niece, then at me, and then, as if she had just said something mentally to herself, heavily sighed a couple of times with her mouth open.
‘Varya, please hurry up and get on with the reading,’ she said, holding out the book to her and affectionately patting her hand. ‘I can’t wait to see if he found her again.’ (I don’t think there was anything in the novel about anyone being found.) ‘And you, Mitya, it would be better to wrap up your cheek, my friend, or else your teeth will start aching again,’ she said to her nephew, despite the resentful look he gave her, presumably because she had broken the logical thread of his argument. The reading continued.
That little quarrel didn’t upset the family’s tranquillity at all, nor the rational accord with which that feminine circle was imbued.
The circle, which clearly took its outlook and character from Princess Marya Ivanovna, had an attractive and for me completely new quality of a certain logicality, combined with simplicity and elegance. That quality was expressed for me in the beauty, purity and solidity of their things (the hand bell, the bookbinding, the chairs, the table), in the princess’s erect, corseted posture, in her frankly displayed locks of grey hair, in her way of referring to me as ‘Nicolas’ and ‘he’ at our first meeting, in their pastimes of reading and sewing, and in the exceptional whiteness of their ladies’ hands. (Their hands all had the family feature of a straight line delineating the bright pink flesh on the outside of the palm from the exceptional whiteness of the top of the hand.) But above all, that quality was expressed in the excellent Russian and French of all three, and in their way of clearly articulating every syllable and completing every word and sentence with pedantic exactitude. All that, but especially the fact that in their company I was addressed simply and seriously as a grown-up, and told their opinions while they listened to mine, was so new to me that despite my shiny buttons and blue cuffs, I was constantly afraid someone might suddenly say to me, ‘Do you really think it’s possible to have a serious conversation with you? Get back to your studies!’ It all meant, in any case, that I didn’t feel the least shy in their presence. I got up and moved around as I liked and boldly talked to everyone, except Varenka, with whom, for some reason, it still seemed improper or forbidden to be the first to speak.
As she read and I listened to her pleasant, resonant voice and looked first at her and then at the sandy path of the flower garden on which round, darkening spots of rain were forming, and then at the lindens on whose leaves occasional drops were continuing to fall with a smack from the pale, blue-edged cloud above us, and then again at her, and then at the last crimson beams of the setting sun shining on a dense stand of old birches wet from the rain, and then again at her, I thought that she was by no means as bad-looking as I had first thought.
‘Too bad I’m already in love,’ I thought, ‘and that Varenka isn’t Sonyechka, for what a good thing it would be to become a member of this family: I would suddenly have a mother, an aunt and a wife.’ As I thought that, I stared at Varenka while she read and imagined that I was magnetizing her and that she would have to look back at me. She raised her head from the book, looked at me, and on meeting my gaze looked away.
‘It’s still raining, apparently,’ she said.
And I suddenly had a strange feeling: it seemed to me that everything that was happening then was a repetition of something that had happened before; that then, too, there had been a shower and the sun had been setting behind the birches and I had been looking at her, and she had been reading, and I had magnetized her, and she had glanced back, and it even seemed that I remembered yet another time before that.
‘Can she really be she?’ I thought. ‘Is it really beginning?’ But I
quickly decided that she wasn’t she, and that it wasn’t beginning. ‘First of all, she isn’t good-looking,’ I thought, ‘but just a young lady, and I’ve made her acquaintance in the most ordinary way, while that one will be extraordinary, and I’ll meet her in some extraordinary place, and then, too, I only like this family so much because I still haven’t seen anything yet,’ I reasoned, ‘whereas there will probably always be such families and I’ll meet a great many more of them in my life.’
TWENTY-SIX
I Show Off My Best Side
The reading ended for tea, and the ladies began a conversation between themselves about people and circumstances unfamiliar to me, merely to give me a sense, I thought, of the difference between themselves and me in age and position in society, their affectionate reception notwithstanding. But in the general conversation that I was able to join, I tried to make up for my earlier reticence by putting my uncommon intelligence and originality on display, something I felt my uniform especially obliged me to do. When the conversation turned to dachas, I suddenly declared that Prince Ivan Ivanych owned such an extraordinary one near Moscow that people came all the way from London and Paris to see it, that it had wrought-iron fencing that cost 380,000 roubles, and that Prince Ivan Ivanych was a very close relation of mine and that I had dined with him that afternoon and that he had asked me to be sure to come for the whole summer, but I had refused, since I knew the house very well, having been there several times, and that all those fences and bridges were of no interest to me, since I couldn’t stand luxury, especially in the country: I liked the country to be completely like the country … After delivering myself of that terribly complicated lie, I grew embarrassed and blushed, so that they certainly all realized that I had been lying. Varenka, who was passing me a cup of tea at the time, and Sofya Ivanovna, who was looking at me as I spoke, both turned away and started to talk about something else with an expression on their faces that I’ve often noticed in kind people when a very young person has obviously started to tell barefaced lies, and that means, ‘Of course, we know he’s lying, poor fellow, but whatever for?’
The reason I said that Prince Ivan Ivanych had a dacha was because I couldn’t find a better pretext for telling them about being related to him and dining that afternoon at his home, but why I added that the fencing cost 380,000, or that I had often visited him, when I hadn’t done so even once, nor could have, since he lived only in Moscow and Naples, as the Nekhlyudovs well knew – why I said all that I have absolutely no idea. Neither in childhood nor in boyhood nor later at a more mature age have I observed the vice of lying in myself – on the contrary, I’ve been rather too truthful and frank – but in that early period of youth I was often visited, for no apparent reason, by a strange desire to lie in the most desperate way. I say ‘desperate’ because I lied about things in which it was very easy to catch me out. I think the main reason for that strange proclivity was a boastful desire to show myself to be quite different than I was, combined with a hope, unrealizable in life, that the lies wouldn’t be discovered.
Since the shower was over and the early evening weather was calm and clear, the princess suggested going for a walk after tea to the lower orchard to admire her favourite place. Following my rule of always being original, and believing that very clever people like the princess and myself should rise above banal courtesy, I replied that I couldn’t stand walks without any purpose, and that if I did like to walk, then it was completely alone. It didn’t occur to me at all that that was merely rude. At the time I thought that just as nothing is more deplorable than hackneyed compliments, so nothing is nicer and more original than a certain impolite candour. But, pleased as I was with my reply, I went for a walk with the whole company anyway.
The princess’s favourite place was on a small bridge over a narrow little swamp at the very bottom of the orchard in its densest part. The view was very limited but appealing and graceful. We’re so used to mixing up art and nature that natural phenomena that we’ve never encountered in a painting will very often seem unnatural to us, as if nature were unnatural, and, conversely, phenomena that have been depicted too frequently in painting will seem trite to us, while views met with in reality that are too imbued with a single idea or feeling will seem precious. The view from the princess’s favourite place was the last kind. It consisted of a small pond with weeds around its edge, a steep slope directly behind it overgrown with immense old trees and shrubs and their varied and often mingled foliage, and, jutting out over the pond at the bottom of the slope, an old birch that held on to the pond’s moist bank with part of its thick roots, while resting its crown against a tall, slender aspen and dangling its leafy branches out over the pond’s smooth surface, which reflected them and the rest of the surrounding foliage.
‘How lovely!’ the princess said with a nod, speaking to no one in particular.
‘Yes, it’s marvellous, only I think it looks terribly like a stage set,’ I said, wishing to show that I had my own opinion about everything.
The princess continued to admire the view as if she hadn’t heard my remark, and then, addressing her sister and Lyubov Sergeyevna, she pointed out a detail that she was especially fond of: a crooked hanging bough and its reflection. Sofya Ivanovna said that it was all beautiful, and that her sister spent hours there at a time, but it was clear she was only saying that to make the princess happy. I’ve noticed that people endowed with a capacity for practical love are rarely receptive to the beauties of nature. Lyubov Sergeyevna was delighted, too, and asked in passing, ‘What’s holding that birch up? Will it remain that way long?’ and kept looking at her Suzette, who wagged her fluffy tail and ran on her crooked little legs back and forth across the bridge with such a busy expression that it was as if it were the first time in her life she had been let out of her room. Dmitry began a very logical discussion with his mother about how no view can be beautiful in which the horizon is limited. Varenka said nothing. When I glanced over at her, she was leaning against the bridge’s railing and looking straight ahead with her profile towards me. Something had evidently impressed and even moved her, for she seemed to have fallen into a reverie with no awareness either of herself or that she was being observed. There was such rapt attention and calm, clear thought in her large eyes, and such naturalness and, despite her shortness, such majesty in her bearing that I was again struck as if by a memory of her, and once again I asked myself, ‘Is it beginning?’ And once again I replied to myself that I was already in love with Sonyechka, and that Varenka was only a young lady and my friend’s sister. But I liked her at that moment and, as a result, felt a vague wish to do or say some mean little thing to her.
‘You know what, Dmitry?’ I said to my friend, after moving closer to Varenka so she could hear. ‘I find that even if there weren’t any mosquitoes, there would still be nothing good about this place, but right now,’ I added, while slapping myself on the forehead and actually crushing a mosquito, ‘it’s really pretty awful.’
‘Apparently, you don’t care for nature?’ Varenka said, without turning her head.
‘I find it to be an idle, pointless activity,’ I replied, quite pleased that I had indeed managed to say some unpleasant little thing and moreover an original one. Slightly raising her eyebrows for an instant in regret, Varenka continued to look straight ahead just as calmly as before.
I was starting to feel vexed with her, but all the same the faded grey paint of the railing against which she was leaning, the reflection in the dark pond of the jutting birch’s overhanging bough and the way the reflection seemed to want to merge with the branches suspended above it, the swampy smell, the sensation on my forehead of the crushed mosquito, and her rapt gaze and majestic pose – all that would afterwards turn up quite often and unexpectedly in my imagination.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Dmitry
When we came back from our walk, Varenka didn’t want to sing as she usually did in the evening, and I was so arroga
nt as to consider myself the reason, imagining that it was because of what I had said to her on the bridge. The Nekhlyudovs usually went off to their rooms early without having supper, but since Dmitry’s teeth had started to ache, just as Sofya Ivanovna had predicted, that evening we went up to his room even earlier than usual. Supposing I had done everything that my buttons and blue collar required of me, and that everyone liked me very much, I was in a very pleasant, contented mood. Dmitry, however, was taciturn and morose because of the argument and his toothache. He sat down at his desk, got out his copybooks – his diary and the journal in which it was his habit every evening to record his past and future activities – and wrote in them quite a long time, while continually wincing and touching his cheek.
‘Oh, leave me alone!’ he shouted at the chambermaid whom Sofya Ivanovna had sent to ask how his teeth were and if he needed to have a poultice made. After saying that a bed would be made up for me directly and that he would be right back, he went to see Lyubov Sergeyevna.
‘What a pity Varenka isn’t pretty and isn’t, in fact, Sonyechka,’ I mused after I was left alone in the room. ‘How fine it would be after graduating from the university to come to them and offer her my hand. I would say to her, “Princess, I’m no longer young, I cannot love passionately, but I’ll always love you like a dear sister.” “I already respect you,” I would say to her mother, “and you, Sofya Ivanovna, believe that I hold you in very, very high esteem. So tell me simply and directly, Varenka, will you be my wife?” “Yes.” And she’ll give me her hand, and I’ll squeeze it and say, “My love is not in words but in deeds.” But what if Dmitry,’ it occurred to me, ‘should suddenly fall in love with Lyubochka, since she’s already in love with him, and he should want to marry her? Then one or the other of us would be unable to do so.55 And that would be excellent. Here’s what I would do then. I would notice it at once, say nothing, and then go to Dmitry and tell him, “It’s in vain, my friend, that we’ve hidden it from each other: you know that my love for your sister will end only with my life, but I am aware of everything. You’ve taken my finest hope from me and made me unhappy, but do you know how Nikolay Irtenyev repays a lifetime of unhappiness? Take my sister,” and I would give him Lyubochka’s hand. He would say, “No, that cannot be!” and I would reply, “Prince Nekhlyudov! It is in vain that you wish to be more magnanimous than Nikolay Irtenyev. No one in the world is more magnanimous than he!” And I would bow and withdraw. Dmitry and Lyubochka would run after me in tears and beg me to accept their sacrifice. And I could consent to it and be very, very happy, if only I were in love with Varenka …’ Those daydreams were so pleasant that I very much wanted to share them with my friend, but despite our vow of mutual candour, I for some reason sensed there was no physical possibility of my doing so.
