Leo Tolstoy

by Anna Karenina (tr Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky) (Penguin Classics) (epub)

  The most difficult thing in that situation was that he simply could not connect and reconcile his past with what there was now. It was not the past when he had lived happily with his wife that puzzled him. He had already suffered through the transition from that past to the knowledge of his wife’s unfaithfulness; that state had been painful but comprehensible to him. If his wife, declaring her unfaithfulness, had then left him, he would have been grieved, unhappy, but he would not have been in this hopeless, incomprehensible situation which he now felt himself to be in. He simply could not reconcile his recent forgiveness, his tenderness, his love for his sick wife and another man’s child, with what there was now – that is, when he, as if in reward for it all, found himself alone, disgraced, derided, needed by none and despised by all.

  For the first two days after his wife’s departure, Alexei Alexandrovich received petitioners, his office manager, went to the committee, and came out to eat in the dining room as usual. Without realizing why he Was doing it, he strained all his inner forces during those two days merely to look calm and even indifferent. In response to questions about what to do with Anna Arkadyevna’s rooms and belongings, he made great efforts to give himself the look of a man for whom what had happened had not been unforeseen and had nothing extraordinary about it, and he achieved his goal: no one could notice any signs of despair in him. But on the third day after her departure, when Kornei handed him a bill from a fashion shop that Anna had forgotten to pay, and reported that the shop assistant was there himself, Alexei Alexandrovich ordered the assistant to be shown in.

  ‘Excuse me, your excellency, for venturing to trouble you. But if you would prefer to have us deal with her excellency, be so kind as to inform us of her address.’

  Alexei Alexandrovich fell to pondering, as it seemed to the shop assistant, and suddenly turned and sat down at his desk. His head lowered on to his hands, he sat for a long time in that position, made several attempts to start talking and stopped.

  Understanding his master’s feelings, Kornei asked the assistant to come some other time. Left alone again, Alexei Alexandrovich realized that he was no longer able to maintain the role of firmness and calmness. He cancelled the waiting carriage, ordered that no one be received, and did not appear for dinner.

  He felt that he could not maintain himself against the general pressure of contempt and callousness that he saw clearly in the face of this assistant, and of Kornei, and of everyone without exception that he had met in those two days. He felt that he could not divert people’s hatred from himself, because the reason for that hatred was not that he was bad (then he could have tried to be better), but that he was shamefully and repulsively unhappy. For that, for the very fact that his heart was wounded, they would be merciless towards him; people would destroy him, as dogs kill a wounded dog howling with pain. He knew that the only salvation from people was to conceal his wounds from them, and for two days he had tried unconsciously to do that, but now he felt that he was no longer able to keep up this unequal struggle.

  His despair was increased by the awareness that he was utterly alone with his grief. Not only did he not have a single person in Petersburg to whom he could tell all that he felt, who would pity him not as a high official, not as a member of society, but simply as a suffering person, but he had no such person anywhere.

  Alexei Alexandrovich had grown up an orphan. They were two brothers. They did not remember their father; their mother had died when Alexei Alexandrovich was ten. The fortune was small. Their uncle Karenin, an important official and once a favourite of the late emperor, had brought them up.

  Having finished his school and university studies with medals, Alexei Alexandrovich, with his uncle’s help, had set out at once upon a prominent career in the service, and since then had devoted himself exclusively to his service ambitions. Neither at school, nor at the university, nor afterwards in the service had Alexei Alexandrovich struck up any friendly relations. His brother had been the person closest to his heart, but he had served in the ministry of foreign affairs and had always lived abroad, where he died shortly after Alexei Alexandrovich’s marriage.

  During his governorship, Anna’s aunt, a rich provincial lady, had brought the already not–so–young man but young governor together with her niece and put him in such a position that he had either to declare himself or to leave town. Alexei Alexandrovich had hesitated for a long time. There were then as many reasons for this step as against it, and there was no decisive reason that could make him abandon his rule: when in doubt, don’t.[30] But Anna’s aunt insinuated through an acquaintance that he had already compromised the girl and that he was honour–bound to propose. He proposed and gave his fiancée and wife all the feeling he was capable of.

  The attachment he experienced for Anna excluded from his soul the last need for heartfelt relations with people. And now, among all his acquaintances, there was no one who was close to him. There were many of what are known as connections, but there were no friendly relations. Alexei Alexandrovich had many people whom he could invite for dinner, ask to participate in an affair that interested him or to solicit for some petitioner, and with whom he could candidly discuss the actions of other people and the higher government; but his relations with these people were confined to one sphere, firmly defined by custom and habit, from which it was impossible to depart. There was one university comrade with whom he had become close afterwards and with whom he could have talked about a personal grief, but he was a school superintendent in a remote district. Of people living in Petersburg, the closest and most likely were his office manager and his doctor.

  Mikhail Vassilyevich Slyudin, the office manager, was a simple, intelligent, good and moral man, and Alexei Alexandrovich sensed that he was personally well disposed towards him; but their five years of work together had placed between them a barrier to heartfelt talks.

  Alexei Alexandrovich, having finished signing papers, sat silently for a long time, glancing at Mikhail Vassilyevich, and tried several times to start talking, but could not. He had already prepared the phrase: ‘You have heard of my grief?’ But he ended by saying, as usual: ‘So you will prepare this for me’ – and dismissed him.

  The other man was the doctor, who was also well disposed towards him; but they had long ago come to a tacit agreement that they were both buried in work and always in a hurry.

  Of his female friends, and of the foremost of them, Countess Lydia Ivanovna, Alexei Alexandrovich did not think. All women, simply as women, were frightening and repulsive to him.

  XXII

  Alexei Alexandrovich had forgotten Countess Lydia Ivanovna, but she had not forgotten him. At this most difficult moment of lonely despair, she came to see him and walked into his study unannounced. She found him in the same position in which he had been sitting, resting his head on both hands.

  ‘J’ai forcé la consigne,’* she said, coming in with rapid steps and breathing heavily from agitation and quick movement. ‘I’ve heard everything! Alexei Alexandrovich! My friend!’ she went on, firmly pressing his hand with both hands and looking into his eyes with her beautiful, pensive eyes.

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

  ‘If you please, Countess. I am not receiving because I am ill,’ he said, and his lips trembled.

  ‘My friend!’ repeated Countess Lydia Ivanovna, not taking her eyes off him, and suddenly the inner tips of her eyebrows rose, forming a triangle on her forehead; her unattractive yellow face became still more unattractive; but Alexei Alexandrovich could feel that she pitied him and was ready to weep. He was deeply moved: he seized her plump hand and began to kiss it.

  * I have forced my way in.

  ‘My friend!’ she said in a voice faltering with agitation. ‘You mustn’t give way to grief. Your grief is great, but you must find comfort.’

  ‘I’m broken, I’m destroyed, I’m no longer a human being!’ Alexei Alexandrovich said, letting go of her hand, but
continuing to look into her tear–filled eyes. ‘My position is the more terrible in that I can find no foothold in myself or anywhere.’

  ‘You will find a foothold. Seek it not in me, though I beg you to believe in my friendship,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Our foothold is love, the love that He left us. His burden is light,’[31] she said with that rapturous look that Alexei Alexandrovich knew so well. ‘He will support you and help you.’

  Though there was in these words that tenderness before her own lofty feelings, and that new, rapturous, mystical mood which had recently spread in Petersburg,[32] and which Alexei Alexandrovich had considered superfluous, he now found it pleasant to hear.

  ‘I’m weak. I’m annihilated. I foresaw nothing and now I understand nothing.’

  ‘My friend,’ Lydia Ivanovna repeated.

  ‘It’s not the loss of what isn’t there now, it’s not that,’ Alexei Alexandrovich went on. ‘I don’t regret it. But I can’t help feeling ashamed before people for the position I find myself in. It’s wrong, but I can’t help it, I can’t help it.’

  ‘It was not you who accomplished that lofty act of forgiveness, which I admire along with everyone, but He, dwelling in your heart,’ Countess Lydia Ivanovna said, raising her eyes rapturously, ‘and therefore you cannot be ashamed of your action.’

  Alexei Alexandrovich frowned and, bending his hands, began cracking his fingers.

  ‘One must know all the details,’ he said in a high voice. ‘There are limits to a man’s strength, Countess, and I’ve found the limits of mine. I had to spend the whole day today making arrangements, arrangements about the house, resulting’ (he emphasized the word ‘resulting’) ‘from my new solitary situation. The servants, the governess, the accounts … These petty flames have burned me up, I couldn’t endure it. Over dinner … yesterday I almost left the dinner table. I couldn’t stand the way my son looked at me. He didn’t ask me what it all meant, but he wanted to ask, and I couldn’t endure that look. He was afraid to look at me, but that’s not all…’

  Alexei Alexandrovich wanted to mention the bill that had been brought to him, but his voice trembled and he stopped. He could not recall that bill, on blue paper, for a hat and ribbons, without pitying himself.

  ‘I understand, my friend,’ said Countess Lydia Ivanovna. ‘I understand everything. Help and comfort you will not find in me, but all the same I’ve come only so as to help you if I can. If I could take from you these petty, humiliating cares … I understand that you need a woman’s word, a woman’s order. Will you entrust me with it?’

  Alexei Alexandrovich pressed her hand silently and gratefully.

  ‘We’ll look after Seryozha together. I’m not strong in practical matters. But I’ll take it up, I’ll be your housekeeper. Don’t thank me. It is not I who am doing it.. .’

  ‘I cannot help thanking you.’

  ‘But, my friend, don’t give in to that feeling you spoke of – of being ashamed of what is the true loftiness of a Christian: "He that humbleth himself shall be exalted".[33] And you cannot thank me. You must thank Him and ask Him for help. In Him alone shall we find peace, comfort, salvation and love,’ she said and, raising her eyes to heaven, began to pray, as Alexei Alexandrovich understood from her silence.

  Alexei Alexandrovich listened to her now, and these expressions that had once seemed not exactly unpleasant but unnecessary, now seemed natural and comforting. He had not liked the new rapturous spirit. He was a believer who was interested in religion mostly in a political sense, and the new teaching that allowed itself some new interpretations was disagreeable to him on principle, precisely because it opened the door to debate and analysis. His former attitude to this new teaching had been cold and even inimical, and he had never argued with Countess Lydia Ivanovna, who was enthusiastic about it, but had carefully passed over her challenges in silence. But now for the first time he listened to her words with pleasure and did not inwardly object to them.

  ‘I’m very, very grateful to you, both for your deeds and for your words,’ he said, when she had finished praying.

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

  ‘Now I shall get down to work,’ she said with a smile, after a pause, wiping the remaining tears from her face. ‘I am going to Seryozha. I shall turn to you only in extreme cases.’ And she got up and went out.

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

  Countess Lydia Ivanovna kept her promise. She indeed took upon herself all the cares of managing and running Alexei Alexandrovich’s house. But she was not exaggerating when she said that she was not strong in practical matters. All her orders had to be changed, they were unfeasible as they were, and the one who changed them was Kornei, Alexei Alexandrovich’s valet, who, unnoticed by anyone, began to run the entire Karenin household and, while dressing his master, calmly and carefully reported to him what was needed. But all the same Lydia Ivanovna’s help was in the highest degree effective: she gave Alexei Alexandrovich moral support in the awareness of her love and respect for him, and especially, as she found it comforting to think, in that she had almost converted him to Christianity – that is, turned him from an indifferent and lazy believer into an ardent and firm adherent of that new explanation of Christian doctrine that had lately spread in Petersburg. Alexei Alexandrovich easily became convinced of it. Like Lydia Ivanovna and other people who shared their views, he was totally lacking in depth of imagination, in that inner capacity owing to which the notions evoked by the imagination become so real that they demand to be brought into correspondence with other notions and with reality. He did not see anything impossible or incongruous in the notion that death, which existed for unbelievers, did not exist for him, and that since he possessed the fullest faith, of the measure of which he himself was the judge, there was no sin in his soul and he already experienced full salvation here on earth.

  It is true that Alexei Alexandrovich vaguely sensed the levity and erroneousness of this notion of his faith, and he knew that when, without any thought that his forgiveness was the effect of a higher power, he had given himself to his spontaneous feeling, he had experienced greater happiness than when he thought every moment, as he did now, that Christ lived in his soul and that by signing papers he was fulfilling His will; but it was necessary for him to think that way, it was so necessary for him in his humiliation to possess at least an invented loftiness from which he, despised by everyone, could despise others, that he clung to his imaginary salvation as if it were salvation indeed.

  XXIII

  Countess Lydia Ivanovna had been given in marriage as a young, rapturous girl to a rich, noble, very good–natured and very dissolute bon vivant. In the second month her husband abandoned her and responded to her rapturous assurances of tenderness only with mockery and even animosity, which people who knew the count’s kind heart and saw no defects in the rapturous Lydia were quite unable to explain. Since then, though not divorced, they had lived apart, and whenever the husband met his wife, he treated her with an invariable venomous mockery, the reason for which was impossible to understand.

  Countess Lydia Ivanovna had long ceased to be in love with her husband, but she never ceased being in love with someone. She was in love with several people at the same time, both men and women; she was in love with almost everyone who was particularly distinguished in some way. She was in love with all the new princesses and princes who had come into the tsar’s family. She was in love with one metropolitan, one bishop and one priest. She was in love with one journalist, with three Slavs, with Komisarov,[34] with one minister, one doctor, one English missionary, and with Karenin. All these loves, now waning, now waxing, filled her heart, gave her something to do, but did not keep her from conducting very extensive and complex relations at court and in society. But once she took Karenin under her special patronage after the misfortune that befell
him, once she began toiling in his house, looking after his well–being, she felt that all the other loves were not real, and that she was now truly in love with Karenin alone. The feeling she now experienced for him seemed stronger to her than all her former feelings. Analysing it and comparing it with the former ones, she saw clearly that she would not have been in love with Komisarov if he had not saved the emperor’s life, would not have been in love with Ristich–Kudzhitsky if there had been no Slavic question,[35] but that she loved Karenin for himself, for his lofty, misunderstood soul, the high sound of his voice, so dear to her, with its drawn–out intonations, his weary gaze, his character, and his soft, white hands with their swollen veins. She was not only glad when they met, but sought signs in his face of the impression she made on him. She wanted him to like her not only for what she said, but for her whole person. For his sake she now took greater care with her toilette than ever. She caught herself dreaming of what might have happened if she were not married and he were free. She blushed with excitement when he came into the room; she could not suppress a smile of rapture when he said something pleasant to her.