by Anna Karenina (tr Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky) (Penguin Classics) (epub)
This was not a supposition. She saw it clearly in that piercing light which now revealed to her the meaning of life and of people’s relations.
‘My love grows ever more passionate and self–centred, and his keeps fading and fading, and that’s why we move apart,’ she went on thinking. ‘And there’s no help for it. For me, everything is in him alone, and I demand that he give his entire self to me more and more. While he wants more and more to get away from me. We precisely went towards each other before our liaison, and after it we irresistibly move in different directions. And it’s impossible to change that. He tells me I’m senselessly jealous, and I’ve told myself that I’m senselessly jealous, but it’s not true. I’m not jealous, I’m dissatisfied. But…’ She opened her mouth and shifted her place in the carriage from the excitement provoked by the thought that suddenly occurred to her. ‘If I could be anything else but a mistress who passionately loves only his caresses – but I cannot and do not want to be anything else. And by this desire I provoke his disgust, and he provokes my anger, and it cannot be otherwise. Don’t I know that he would not deceive me, that he doesn’t have any intentions towards Princess Sorokin, that he is not in love with Kitty, that he will not be unfaithful to me? I know all that, but it’s none the easier for me. If he is kind and gentle towards me out of duty, without loving me, and I am not to have what I want – that is a thousand times worse even than anger! It’s hell! And that is what we have. He has long ceased loving me. And where love stops, hatred begins. I don’t know these streets at all. Some sort of hills, and houses, houses … And in the houses people, people … So many, no end of them, and they all hate each other. Well, so let me think up for myself what I want in order to be happy. Well? I get the divorce, Alexei Alexandrovich gives me Seryozha, and I marry Vronsky.’ Remembering Alexei Alexandrovich, she immediately pictured him with extraordinary vividness as if he were standing before her, with his meek, lifeless, extinguished eyes, the blue veins on his white hands, his intonations, the cracking of his fingers, and, remembering the feeling there had been between them, which was also called love, she shuddered with disgust. ‘Well, I’ll get the divorce and be Vronsky’s wife. What, then? Will Kitty stop looking at me as she did today? No. And will Seryozha stop asking or thinking about my two husbands? And between me and Vronsky what new feeling will I think up? Is anything – not even happiness but just not torment – possible? No, nothing!’ she answered herself now without the least hesitation. ‘Impossible! Our lives are parting ways, and I have become his unhappiness and he mine, and it’s impossible to remake either him or me. All efforts have been made; the screw is stripped. Ah, a beggar woman with a child. She thinks she’s to be pitied. Aren’t we all thrown into the world only in order to hate each other and so to torment ourselves and others. Students going by, laughing. Seryozha?’ she remembered. ‘I also thought I loved him and used to be moved by my own tenderness. But I did live without him, exchanged him for another love, and didn’t complain of the exchange as long as I was satisfied by that love.’ And with disgust she remembered what it was that she called ‘that love’. And she was glad of the clarity with which she now saw her own and everyone else’s life. ‘So it is with me, and with Pyotr, with the driver Fyodor, and that merchant, and all the people living there on the Volga, where these announcements invite one to go, and everywhere and always,’ she thought, as she drove up to the low building of the Nizhni Novgorod station and the attendants came running to meet her.
‘A ticket to Obiralovka?’ said Pyotr.
She had completely forgotten where and why she was going, and only with great effort was able to understand the question.
‘Yes,’ she said, handing him her purse and, with her small red bag on her arm, she got out of the carriage.
Walking through the crowd into the first–class waiting room, she gradually recalled all the details of her situation and the decisions among which she had been hesitating. And first hope, then despair over old hurts again began to chafe the wounds of her tormented, terribly fluttering heart. Sitting on a star–shaped sofa and waiting for the train, looking with revulsion at the people coming in and going out (they all disgusted her), she thought of how she would arrive at the station, write a note to him, and of what she would write, then of how he was now complaining to his mother (not understanding her suffering) about his situation, and how she would come into the room and what she would say to him. Then she thought of how life could still be happy, and how tormentingly she loved and hated him, and how terribly her heart was pounding.
XXXI
The bell rang, some young men went by, ugly, insolent and hurried, and at the same time conscious of the impression they produced; Pyotr also crossed the room in his livery and gaiters, with a dull, animal face, and came up to her in order to escort her to the train. The noisy men quieted down when she passed them on the platform, and one whispered something about her to another – something nasty, to be sure. She mounted the high step and sat by herself in a compartment, on a soiled, once white, spring seat. Her bag bounced on the springs and lay still. Outside the window, Pyotr, with a foolish smile, raised his gold–braided cap in a sign of farewell; an insolent conductor slammed the door and latched it. An ugly lady with a bustle (Anna mentally undressed the woman and was horrified at her hideousness) and a little girl, laughing unnaturally, ran by under the window.
‘Katerina Andreevna has it, she has everything, ma tante' cried the girl.
‘The little girl – even she is ugly and affected,’ Anna thought. So as not to see anyone, she quickly got up and sat at the opposite window in the empty carriage. A dirty, ugly muzhik in a peaked cap, his matted hair sticking out from under it, passed by the window, bending down to the wheels of the carriage. ‘There’s something familiar about that hideous muzhik,’ thought Anna. And recalling her dream, she stepped away to the opposite door, trembling with fear. The conductor was opening the door, letting in a husband and wife.
‘Would you like to get out?’
Anna did not reply. Neither the conductor nor the people who entered noticed the expression of terror on her face under the veil. She went back to her corner and sat down. The couple sat on the opposite side, studying her dress attentively but surreptitiously. Anna found both husband and wife repulsive. The husband asked whether she would allow him to smoke, obviously not in order to smoke, but in order to strike up a conversation with her. Having received her consent, he began talking with his wife in French about things he needed to talk about still less than he needed to smoke. They said foolish things in an affected way only so that she would overhear them. Anna saw clearly how sick they were of each other and how they hated each other. And it was impossible not to hate such pathetically ugly people.
The second bell rang and was followed by the moving of luggage, noise, shouting, laughter. It was so clear to Anna that no one had anything to be glad about, that this laughter irritated her painfully, and she would have liked to stop her ears so as not to hear it. Finally the third bell rang, the whistle sounded, the engine screeched, the chain jerked and the man crossed himself. ‘It would be interesting to ask him what he means by that,’ thought Anna, looking at him spitefully. She was gazing out of the window past the lady at the people who, as if rolling backwards, were standing on the platform seeing the train off. Rhythmically jolting over the joints of the tracks, the carriage in which Anna sat rolled past the platform, the brick wall, the signal disc, other carriages; the well–oiled, smooth–rolling wheels rang slightly over the rails, the window lit up with bright evening sunlight, and the breeze played with the curtain. Anna forgot her companions in the carriage and, to the slight rocking of the train, breathing in the fresh air, again began to think.
‘Yes, where did I leave off ? At the fact that I’m unable to think up a situation in which life would not be suffering, that we’re all created in order to suffer, and that we all know it and keep thinking up ways of deceiving ourselves. But if you see the truth, what can you d
o?’
‘Man has been given reason in order to rid himself of that which troubles him,’ the lady said in French, obviously pleased with her phrase and grimacing with her tongue between her teeth.
The words were like a response to Anna’s thought.
‘To rid himself of that which troubles,’ Anna repeated. And, glancing at the red–cheeked husband and the thin wife, she realized that the sickly wife considered herself a misunderstood woman and that her husband deceived her and supported her in this opinion of herself. It was as if Anna could see their story and all the hidden corners of their souls, turning her light on them. But there was nothing interesting there, and she went on with her thinking.
‘Yes, troubles me very much, and reason was given us in order to rid ourselves of it. So I must rid myself of it. Why not put out the candle, if there’s nothing more to look at, if it’s vile to look at it all? But how? Why was that conductor running along the footboard? Why are those young men in the other carriage shouting? Why do they talk? Why do they laugh? It’s all untrue, all a lie, all deceit, all evil! …’
When the train arrived at the station, Anna got off in a crowd of other passengers and, shunning them like lepers, stopped on the platform, trying to remember why she had come there and what she had intended to do. Everything that had seemed possible to her earlier was now very hard for her to grasp, especially in the noisy crowd of all these hideous people who would not leave her alone. Attendants came running up to her offering their services; young men, stomping their heels on the boards of the platform and talking loudly, looked her over; the people she met stepped aside the wrong way. Remembering that she wanted to go further if there was no answer, she stopped an attendant and asked whether there was a coachman there with a note for Count Vronsky.
‘Count Vronsky? There was someone here from him just now. Meeting Princess Sorokin and her daughter. What is the coachman like?’
As she was speaking with the attendant, the coachman Mikhaila, red–cheeked, cheerful, in smart blue jacket with a watch chain, obviously proud of having fulfilled his errand so well, came up to her and handed her a note. She opened it, and her heart sank even before she read it.
‘I’m very sorry the note did not find me. I’ll be back at ten,’ Vronsky wrote in a careless hand.
‘So! I expected that!’ she said to herself with a spiteful smile.
‘Very well, you may go home,’ she said softly, addressing Mikhaila. She spoke softly because the quick beating of her heart interfered with her breathing. ‘No, I won’t let you torment me,’ she thought, addressing her threat not to him, not to herself, but to the one who made her suffer, and she walked along the platform past the station–house.
Two maids who were pacing the platform bent their heads back, looking at her and voicing their thoughts about her clothes. ‘The real thing,’ they said of the lace she was wearing. The young men would not leave her alone. They passed by again, peering into her face, laughing and shouting something in unnatural voices. The stationmaster, as he passed by, asked whether she would be getting on the train. A boy selling kvass could not take his eyes off her. ‘My God, where to go?’ she thought, walking further and further down the platform. At the end of it she stopped. Some ladies and children, who were laughing and talking loudly as they met a gentleman in spectacles, fell silent and looked her over as she went past them. She quickened her pace and walked away from them to the edge of the platform. A goods train was coming. The platform shook, and it seemed to her that she was on the train again.
And suddenly, remembering the man who was run over the day she first met Vronsky, she realized what she must do. With a quick, light step she went down the stairs that led from the water pump to the rails and stopped close to the passing train. She looked at the bottoms of the carriages, at the bolts and chains and big cast–iron wheels of the first carriage slowly rolling by, and tried to estimate by eye the midpoint between the front and back wheels and the moment when the middle would be in front of her.
‘There!’ she said to herself, staring into the shadow of the carriage at the sand mixed with coal poured between the sleepers, ‘there, right in the middle, and I’ll punish him and be rid of everybody and of myself.’
She wanted to fall under the first carriage, the midpoint of which had drawn even with her. But the red bag, which she started taking off her arm, delayed her, and it was too late: the midpoint went by. She had to wait for the next carriage. A feeling seized her, similar to what she experienced when preparing to go into the water for a swim, and she crossed herself. The habitual gesture of making the sign of the cross called up in her soul a whole series of memories from childhood and girlhood, and suddenly the darkness that covered everything for her broke and life rose up before her momentarily with all its bright past joys. Yet she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the approaching second carriage. And just at the moment when the midpoint between the two wheels came even with her, she threw the red bag aside and, drawing her head down between her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage, and with a light movement, as if preparing to get up again at once, sank to her knees. And in that same instant she was horrified at what she was doing. ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Why?’ She wanted to rise, to throw herself back, but something huge and implacable pushed at her head and dragged over her. ‘Lord, forgive me for everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of any struggle. A little muzhik, muttering to himself, was working over some iron. And the candle by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been in darkness, sputtered, grew dim, and went out for ever.
Part Eight
* * *
I
Nearly two months had gone by. It was already the middle of the hot summer, and Sergei Ivanovich was only now preparing to leave Moscow.
During that time, Sergei Ivanovich had his own events going on in his life. His book, the fruit of six years of toil, entitled An Essay in Survey of the Principles and Forms of Statehood in Europe and Russia, had been finished a year ago. Some sections of the book and the introduction had been printed in periodical publications and other parts had been read by Sergei Ivanovich to people of his circle, so that the ideas of the work could no longer be quite new to the public; but all the same Sergei Ivanovich expected the appearance of the book to make a serious impression in society and cause, if not a revolution in scholarship, at least a great stir in the scholarly world.
This book, after careful polishing, had been published last year and sent out to the booksellers.
Asking no one about it, responding with reluctance and feigned indifference to his friends’ questions about how the book was doing, not even asking the booksellers how the sales were, Sergei Ivanovich watched keenly and with strained attention for the first impression his book would make in society and in literature.
But a week went by, a second, a third, and there was no noticeable impression in society. His friends, the specialists and scholars, sometimes mentioned it, evidently out of politeness. But his other acquaintances, not interested in a book of learned content, did not speak to him about it at all. And in society, which especially now was busy with other things, there was complete indifference. In literature, too, for a whole month there was not a word about the book.
Sergei Ivanovich calculated in detail the time needed to write a review, but a month went by, then another, and there was the same silence.
Only in the Northern Beetle,[1] in a humorous feuilleton about the singer Drabanti, who had lost his voice, were a few scornful words said in passing about Koznyshev’s book, indicating that it had long since been condemned by all and handed over to general derision.
