by Anna Karenina (tr Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky) (Penguin Classics) (epub)
‘Well, what am I to do then? How am I to do it?’ he said to himself, trying to put into words all that he had thought and felt during that short night. All those thoughts and feelings were divided into three separate lines of argument. One was to renounce his old life, his useless knowledge, his utterly needless education. This renunciation gave him pleasure and was easy and simple for him. Other thoughts and notions concerned the life he wished to live now. The simplicity, the purity, the legitimacy of this life he felt clearly, and he was convinced that he would find in it that satisfaction, repose and dignity, the absence of which he felt so painfully. But the third line of argument turned around the question of how to make this transition from the old life to the new. And here nothing clear presented itself to him. ‘To have a wife? To have work and the necessity to work? To leave Pokrovskoe? To buy land? To join a community? To marry a peasant woman? How am I to do it?’ he asked himself again, and found no answer. ‘However, I didn’t sleep all night and can’t give myself a clear accounting,’ he told himself. ‘I’ll clear it up later. One thing is sure, that this night has decided my fate. All my former dreams about family life are nonsense, not the right thing,’ he said to himself. ‘All this is much simpler and better …
‘How beautiful!’ he thought, looking at the strange mother–of–pearl shell of white, fleecy clouds that stopped right over his head in the middle of the sky. ‘How lovely everything is on this lovely night! And when did that shell have time to form? A moment ago I looked at the sky, and there was nothing there – only two white strips. Yes, and in that same imperceptible way my views of life have also changed!’
He left the meadow and walked down the main road to the village. A slight breeze sprang up, and it turned grey, gloomy. The bleak moment came that usually precedes dawn, the full victory of light over darkness.
Hunched up with cold, Levin walked quickly, his eyes on the ground. ‘What’s that? Someone’s coming,’ he thought, hearing bells, and he raised his head. Forty paces away from him, on the grassy main road down which he was walking, a coach–and–four with leather trunks on its roof came driving towards him. The shaft–horses pressed towards the shafts, away from the ruts, but the adroit driver, sitting sideways on the box, guided the shafts along the ruts, so that the wheels ran over the smooth ground.
That was the only thing Levin noticed and, without thinking who it might be, he glanced absentmindedly into the coach.
Inside the coach an old lady dozed in the corner and a young girl, apparently just awakened, sat by the window, holding the ribbons of her white bonnet with both hands. Bright and thoughtful, all filled with a graceful and complex inner life to which Levin was a stranger, she looked through him at the glowing sunrise.
At the very instant when this vision was about to vanish, the truthful eyes looked at him. She recognized him, and astonished joy lit up her face.
He could not have been mistaken. There were no other eyes in the world like those. There was no other being in the world capable of concentrating for him all the light and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty. He realized that she was driving to Yergushovo from the railway station. And all that had troubled Levin during that sleepless night, all the decisions he had taken, all of it suddenly vanished. He recalled with disgust his dreams of marrying a peasant woman. There, in that carriage quickly moving away and bearing to the other side of the road, was the only possibility of resolving the riddle of his life that had been weighing on him so painfully of late.
She did not look out again. The noise of the springs could no longer be heard; the bells were barely audible. The barking of dogs indicated that the coach had entered the village – and around there remained the empty fields, the village ahead, and he himself, solitary and a stranger to everything, walking alone down the deserted main road.
He looked at the sky, hoping to find there the shell he had admired, which had embodied for him the whole train of thoughts and feelings of the past night. There was no longer anything resembling a shell in the sky. There, in the inaccessible heights, a mysterious change had already been accomplished. No trace of the shell was left, but spread over half the sky was a smooth carpet of ever diminishing fleecy clouds. The sky had turned blue and radiant, and with the same tenderness, yet also with the same inaccessibility, it returned his questioning look.
‘No,’ he said to himself, ‘however good that life of simplicity and labour may be, I cannot go back to it. I love her.’
XIII
No one except the people closest to Alexei Alexandrovich knew that this ostensibly most cold and reasonable man had one weakness that contradicted the general cast of his character. Alexei Alexandrovich was unable to hear and see the tears of a child or a woman with indifference. The sight of tears perplexed him and made him lose all ability to reason. His office manager and his secretary knew it and warned lady petitioners that they should not weep, if they did not want to ruin their chances. ‘He’ll get angry and won’t listen to you,’ they said. And, indeed, in such cases the inner disturbance produced in Alexei Alexandrovich by tears expressed itself in quick anger. ‘I can do nothing, nothing. Kindly get out!’ he usually shouted.
When, on the way home from the race, Anna told him about her relations with Vronsky and immediately after that covered her face with her hands and wept, Alexei Alexandrovich, despite the anger aroused in him against her, felt at the same time the surge of that inner disturbance which tears always produced in him. Aware of it and aware that an expression of his feelings at that moment would be unsuitable to the situation, he tried to suppress in himself any manifestation of life, and therefore did not move and did not look at her. From this came that strange expression of deadness on his face, which so struck Anna.
When they drove up to their house, he helped her out of the carriage and, making an inner effort, took leave of her with his usual courtesy, uttering words that did not oblige him to anything; he said that he would tell her his decision tomorrow.
His wife’s words, confirming his worst doubts, produced a cruel pain in Alexei Alexandrovich’s heart. This pain was further intensified by a strange feeling of physical pity for her, produced in him by her tears. But, left alone in the carriage, Alexei Alexandrovich, to his own surprise and joy, felt complete deliverance both from this pity and from the doubt and suffering of jealousy that had lately tormented him.
He felt like a man who has had a long–aching tooth pulled out. After the terrible pain and the sensation of something huge, bigger than his head, being drawn from his jaw, the patient, still not believing his good fortune, suddenly feels that what had poisoned his life and absorbed all his attention for so long exists no more, and that he can again live, think and be interested in something other than his tooth. This was the feeling Alexei Alexandrovich experienced. The pain had been strange and terrible, but now it was gone; he felt that he could again live and think about something other than his wife.
‘No honour, no heart, no religion – a depraved woman! I always knew it, and always saw it, though I tried to deceive myself out of pity for her,’ he said to himself. And indeed it seemed to him that he had always seen it; he recalled details of their past life which before had not seemed to him to be anything bad – now these details showed clearly that she had always been depraved. ‘I made a mistake in binding my life to hers, but there is nothing bad in this mistake, and therefore I cannot be unhappy. I am not the guilty one,’ he said to himself, ‘she is. But I have nothing to do with her. For me she doesn’t exist…’
All that was going to befall her and their son, towards whom his feeling had changed just as it had towards her, ceased to concern him. The only thing that concerned him now was the question of how to shake off in the best, most decent, most convenient for him, and therefore most just way, the mud she had spattered on him in her fall, and to continue on his path of active, honest and useful life.
‘I cannot be unhappy because a despicable woman has committed a crime; I must only find th
e best way out of the painful situation she has put me in. And I will find it,’ he said to himself, frowning more and more. ‘I am not the first, nor am I the last.’ And, to say nothing of historical examples, beginning with Menelaus, refreshed in everyone’s memory by La Belle Helene,[12] a whole series of cases of contemporary unfaithfulness of wives to husbands in high society emerged in Alexei Alexandrovich’s imagination. ‘Daryalov, Poltavsky, Prince Karibanov, Count Paskudin, Dram . .. Yes, Dram, too … such an honest, efficient man … Semyonov, Chagin, Sigonin,’ recalled Alexei Alexandrovich. ‘Granted, some unreasonable ridicule falls on these people, but I never saw anything but misfortune in it, and I always sympathized with them,’ he said to himself, though it was not true; he had never sympathized with misfortunes of that sort, but had valued himself the higher, the more frequent were the examples of women being unfaithful to their husbands. ‘It is a misfortune that may befall anybody. And this misfortune has befallen me. The only thing is how best to endure this situation.’ And he began going through the details of the modes of action chosen by others who had found themselves in the same position.
‘Daryalov fought a duel…’
In his youth Karenin’s thoughts had been especially drawn to duelling, precisely because he was physically a timid man and knew it very well. Alexei Alexandrovich could not think without horror of a pistol pointed at him, and had never in his life used any weapon. In his youth this horror had made him think often about duelling and measure himself against a situation in which he would have to put his life in danger. Having achieved success and a firm position in life, he had long forgotten this feeling; yet the habit of the feeling claimed its own, and the fear of cowardliness proved so strong in him even now that Alexei Alexandrovich pondered and mentally fondled the question of a duel for a long time from all sides, though he knew beforehand that he would not fight under any circumstances.
‘No doubt our society is still so savage (a far cry from England) that a great many’ – and among the many were those whose opinion Alexei Alexandrovich especially valued – ‘would look favourably upon a duel. But what result would be achieved? Suppose I challenge him,’ Alexei Alexandrovich went on to himself and, vividly imagining the night he would spend after the challenge and the pistol pointed at him, he shuddered and realized that he would never do it. ‘Suppose I challenge him to a duel. Suppose they teach me how,’ he went on thinking. ‘They place me, I pull the trigger,’ he said to himself, shutting his eyes, ‘and it turns out that I’ve killed him.’ Alexei Alexandrovich shook his head to drive these foolish thoughts away. ‘What is the sense of killing a man in order to define one’s attitude towards a criminal wife and a son? I’ll have to decide what I am to do with her just the same. But what is still more likely and what would undoubtedly happen, is that I would be killed or wounded. I, the innocent one, the victim, would be killed or wounded. Still more senseless. But not only that: a challenge to a duel would be a dishonest act on my part. Do I not know beforehand that my friends would never allow me to go as far as a duel, would not allow the life of a statesman, needed by Russia, to be put in danger? What would it mean? It would mean that I, knowing beforehand that the thing would never go as far as danger, merely wanted to give myself a certain false glitter by this challenge. It is dishonest, it is false, it is deceiving others and myself. A duel is unthinkable, and no one expects it of me. My goal consists in safeguarding my reputation, which I need for the unimpeded continuation of my activity.’ His official activity, of great importance in his eyes even before, now presented itself as especially important.
Having considered and rejected a duel, Alexei Alexandrovich turned to divorce – another way out chosen by some of the husbands he remembered. Going through all the cases of divorce he could remember (there were a great many in the highest society, which he knew so well), he did not find a single one in which the purpose of the divorce was the same as the one he had in mind. In all these cases the husband had yielded up or sold the unfaithful wife, and the very side which, being guilty, had no right to remarry, had entered into fictional, quasi–legitimate relations with a new consort. And in his own case Alexei Alexandrovich saw that to obtain a legal divorce – that is, one in which the guilty wife would simply be rejected – was impossible. He saw that the complex conditions of life in which he found himself did not allow for the possibility of the coarse proofs the law demanded to establish the wife’s criminality; he saw that there was a certain refinement of that life which also did not allow for the use of such proofs, if there were any, that the use of these proofs would harm him more than it would her in the eyes of society.
An attempt at divorce could only lead to a scandalous court trial, which would be a godsend for his enemies, for the slandering and humiliation of his high position in society. Nor could the chief goal – to define the situation with the least disturbance – be achieved through divorce. Besides that, divorce, or even an attempt at divorce, implied that the wife had broken relations with her husband and joined with her lover. And in Alexei Alexandrovich’s soul, despite what now seemed to him an utter, contemptuous indifference to his wife, there remained one feeling with regard to her – an unwillingness that she be united with Vronsky unhindered, that her crime be profitable for her. This one thought so vexed him that, merely imagining it, he groaned with inner pain, got up, changed his position in the carriage and, frowning, spent a long time after that wrapping his chilled and bony legs in a fluffy rug.
‘Apart from formal divorce, it would also be possible to do what Karibanov, Paskudin, and the good Dram did – that is, to separate from my wife,’ he went on thinking once he had calmed down. But that measure presented the same inconvenience of disgrace as did divorce, and above all, just like formal divorce, it would throw his wife into Vronsky’s arms. ‘No, this is impossible, impossible!’ he spoke aloud, beginning to fuss with his rug again. ‘I cannot be unhappy, but neither should she and he be happy.’
The feeling of jealousy that had tormented him while he did not know, had gone away the moment his tooth was painfully pulled out by his wife’s words. But that feeling had been replaced by another: the wish not only that she not triumph, but that she be paid back for her crime. He did not acknowledge this feeling, but in the depths of his soul he wished her to suffer for disturbing his peace and honour. And again going over the conditions of a duel, a divorce, a separation and again rejecting them, Alexei Alexandrovich became convinced that there was only one solution: to keep her with him, concealing what had happened from society, and taking all possible measures to stop their affair and above all – something he did not admit to himself – to punish her. ‘I must announce my decision, that, having thought over the painful situation in which she has put the family, any other solution would be worse for both sides than the external status quo, which I agree to observe, but on the strict condition that she carry out my will, that is, cease all relations with her lover.’ In confirmation of this decision, once it was finally taken, another important consideration occurred to Alexei Alexandrovich. ‘Only with such a decision am I also acting in conformity with religion,’ he said to himself, ‘only with this decision am I not rejecting a criminal wife, but giving her an opportunity to reform and even – hard though it may be for me – devoting part of my strength to reforming and saving her.’ Though Alexei Alexandrovich knew that he could not have any moral influence on his wife, that nothing would come of this attempt at reformation except lies; though, while living through these difficult moments, he never once thought of seeking guidance from religion – now that his decision coincided, as it seemed to him, with the requirements of religion, this religious sanction of his decision gave him full satisfaction and a measure of peace. It gladdened him to think that, even in so important a matter of life as this, no one would be able to say that he had not acted in accordance with the rules of that religion whose banner he had always held high, amidst the general coolness and indifference. In thinking over the further details, Alexei Al
exandrovich did not see why his relations with his wife might not even remain almost the same as before. Doubtless he would never be able to give her back his respect; but there were not and could not be any reasons for him to upset his life and to suffer as a result of her being a bad and unfaithful wife. ‘Yes, time will pass, all–amending time, and the former relations will be restored,’ Alexei Alexandrovich said to himself, ‘that is, restored far enough so that I will not feel as if the whole course of my life has been upset. She should be unhappy, but I am not guilty and therefore cannot be unhappy.’
XIV
Approaching Petersburg, Alexei Alexandrovich was not only fully set on this decision, but had also composed in his head the letter he would write to his wife. Going into the hall porter’s lodge, he glanced at the letters and papers sent from the ministry and ordered them to be brought to him in the study.
‘Unharness and admit no one,’ he said to the porter’s question, emphasizing the words ‘admit no one’ with a certain pleasure, which in him was a sign of good spirits.