Leo Tolstoy

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

  ‘Because Alexei – I am speaking of Alexei Alexandrovich (such a strange, terrible fate, that they’re both Alexei, isn’t it?) – Alexei wouldn’t refuse me. I would have forgotten, he would have forgiven … But why doesn’t he come? He’s kind, he himself doesn’t know how kind he is. Ah! My God, what anguish! Give me water, quickly! Ah, it will be bad for her, for my little girl! Well, all right, let her have a wet nurse! I agree, it’s even better. He’ll come, it will be painful for him to see her. Take her away.’

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

  ‘Ah, what nonsense!’ Anna went on, not seeing her husband. ‘But give her to me, give me my little girl! He hasn’t come yet. You say he won’t forgive, because you don’t know him. No one ever knew him. Only I did, and even for me it was hard. His eyes, you should know, Seryozha has the same eyes, that’s why I can’t look at them. Did Seryozha have his dinner? I know everybody will forget. He wouldn’t have forgotten. You must move Seryozha to the corner room and ask Mariette to sleep with him.’

  Suddenly she shrank, fell silent and fearfully, as if expecting to be struck, as if shielding herself, raised her hands to her face. She had seen her husband.

  ‘No, no,’ she began, ‘I’m not afraid of him, I’m afraid of death. Alexei, come here. I’m hurrying because I have no time, I haven’t long to live, I’ll be feverish soon and won’t understand anything. Now I do understand, I understand everything, I see everything.’

  Alexei Alexandrovich’s pinched faced acquired a suffering expression. He took her hand and wanted to say something, but was quite unable to speak; his lower lip trembled, but he kept struggling with his agitation and only occasionally glanced at her. And each time he glanced at her, he saw her eyes, which looked at him with such moved and rapturous tenderness as he had never seen in them before.

  ‘Wait, you don’t know … Wait, wait, all of you …’ She stopped, as if trying to collect her thoughts. ‘Yes,’ she began. ‘Yes, yes, yes. This is what I wanted to say. Don’t be surprised at me. I’m the same … But there is another woman in me, I’m afraid of her – she fell in love with that man, and I wanted to hate you and couldn’t forget the other one who was there before. The one who is not me. Now I’m real, I’m whole. I’m dying now, I know I’ll die, ask him. I feel weights now – here they are – on my hands, my feet, my fingers. My fingers are like this – enormous! But it will all end soon … There’s one thing I need: forgive me, forgive me completely! I’m terrible, but my nanny told me: that holy martyr – what was her name? – she was worse.[17] I’ll go to Rome, too, there are deserts there, and then I won’t bother anybody, I’ll take only Seryozha and my little girl … No, you can’t forgive me! I know this can’t be forgiven! No, no, go away, you’re too good!’ With one hot hand she held his hand, and with the other she pushed him away.

  Alexei Alexandrovich’s inner disturbance kept growing and now reached such a degree that he ceased to struggle with it; he suddenly felt that what he had considered an inner disturbance was, on the contrary, a blissful state of soul, which suddenly gave him a new, previously unknown happiness. He was not thinking that the Christian law which he had wanted to follow all his life prescribed that he forgive and love his enemies; but the joyful feeling of love and forgiveness of his enemies filled his soul. He knelt down and, placing his head on the crook of her arm, which burned him like fire through her jacket, sobbed like a child. She embraced his balding head, moved closer to him, and raised her eyes with defiant pride.

  ‘Here he is, I knew it! Now good–bye all, good–bye!… Again they’ve come, why don’t they go away?… And do take these fur coats off me!’

  The doctor took her arms away, carefully laid her back on the pillow and covered her shoulders. She lay back obediently and gazed straight ahead of her with radiant eyes.

  ‘Remember one thing, that all I need is forgiveness, and I want nothing more, nothing … Why doesn’t he come?’ she said, addressing Vronsky through the door. ‘Come here, come! Give him your hand.’

  Vronsky came to the side of the bed and, seeing her, again covered his face with his hands.

  ‘Uncover your face, look at him. He’s a saint,’ she said. ‘No, uncover it, uncover your face!’ she said crossly. ‘Alexei Alexandrovich, uncover his face! I want to see him.’

  Alexei Alexandrovich took Vronsky’s hands and drew them away from his face, terrible in the expression of suffering and shame that was on it.

  ‘Give him your hand. Forgive him.’

  Alexei Alexandrovich gave him his hand, not holding back the tears that poured from his eyes.

  ‘Thank God, thank God,’ she said, ‘now everything is ready. Just let me stretch my legs a little. There, that’s wonderful. How tastelessly these flowers are done, quite unlike violets,’ she said, pointing to the wallpaper. ‘My God, my God! When will it end? Give me morphine. Doctor, give me morphine! Oh, my God, my God!’

  And she began thrashing about in her bed.

  The doctor and his colleagues said it was puerperal fever, which in ninety–nine cases out of a hundred ends in death. All day there was fever, delirium and unconsciousness. By midnight the sick woman lay without feeling and almost without pulse.

  The end was expected at any moment.

  Vronsky went home, but came in the morning to inquire, and Alexei Alexandrovich, meeting him in the front hall, said:

  ‘Stay, she may ask for you,’ and himself led him to his wife’s boudoir.

  Towards morning the excitement, liveliness, quickness of thought and speech began again, and again ended in unconsciousness. On the third day it was the same, and the doctors said there was hope. That day Alexei Alexandrovich came to the boudoir where Vronsky was sitting and, closing the door, sat down facing him.

  ‘Alexei Alexandrovich,’ said Vronsky, feeling that a talk was imminent, ‘I am unable to speak, unable to understand. Spare me! However painful it is for you, believe me, it is still more terrible for me.’

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

  ‘I beg you to hear me out, it’s necessary. I must explain my feelings to you, those that have guided me and those that will guide me, so that you will not be mistaken regarding me. You know that I had decided on a divorce and had even started proceedings. I won’t conceal from you that, when I started proceedings, I was undecided, I suffered; I confess that I was driven by a desire for revenge on you and on her. When I received her telegram, I came here with the same feelings – I will say more: I wished for her death. But…’ he paused, pondering whether to reveal his feelings to him or not. ‘But I saw her and I forgave. And the happiness of forgiveness revealed my duty to me. I forgave her completely. I want to turn the other cheek, I want to give my shirt when my caftan is taken, and I only pray to God that He not take from me the happiness of forgiveness!’ Tears welled up in his eyes, and their luminous, serene look struck Vronsky. ‘That is my position. You may trample me in the mud, make me the laughing–stock of society, I will not abandon her, I will never say a word of reproach to you,’ he went on. ‘My duty is clearly ordained for me: I must be with her and I will be. If she wishes to see you, I will let you know, but now I suppose it will be better if you leave.’

  He stood up, and sobs broke off his speech. Vronsky also got up and in a stooping, unstraightened posture looked at him from under his brows. He did not understand Alexei Alexandrovich’s feelings. But he felt that this was something lofty and even inaccessible to him in his world–view.

  XVIII

  After his conversation with Alexei Alexandrovich, Vronsky went out to the porch of the Karenins’ house and stopped, hardly remembering where he was and where he had to go or drive. He felt himself shamed, humiliated, guilty and deprived of any possibility of washing away his humiliation. He felt himself thrown out of the rut he had been following so proudly and easily till then. All the habits and rules of his life,
which had seemed so firm, suddenly turned out to be false and inapplicable. The deceived husband, who till then had seemed a pathetic being, an accidental and somewhat comic hindrance to his happiness, had suddenly been summoned by her and raised to an awesome height, and on that height the husband appeared not wicked, not false, not ludicrous, but kind, simple and majestic. Vronsky could not but feel it. The roles had been suddenly changed. Vronsky felt Karenin’s loftiness and his own abasement, Karenin’s Tightness and his own wrongness. He felt that the husband had been magnanimous even in his grief, while he had been mean and petty in his deceit. But this realization of his meanness before the man he had unjustly despised made up only a small part of his grief. He felt himself inexpressibly unhappy now, because his passion for Anna, which had been cooling, as it had seemed to him, in recent days, now, when he knew he had lost her forever, had become stronger than it had ever been. He had seen the whole of her during her illness, had come to know her soul, and it seemed to him that he had never loved her before then. And now, when he had come to know her, to love her as he ought to have loved her, he had been humiliated before her and had lost her forever, leaving her with nothing but a disgraceful memory of himself. Most terrible of all had been his ridiculous, shameful position when Alexei Alexandrovich tore his hands from his ashamed face. He stood on the porch of the Karenins’ house like a lost man and did not know what to do.

  ‘Shall I call a cab?’ asked the porter.

  ‘A cab, yes.’ Returning home after three sleepless nights, Vronsky lay face down on the sofa without undressing, his arms folded and his head resting on them. His head was heavy. Images, memories and the strangest thoughts followed one another with extreme rapidity and clarity: now it was the medicine he had poured for the sick woman, overfilling the spoon, now the midwife’s white arms, now Alexei Alexandrovich’s strange position on the floor beside the bed.

  ‘Sleep! Forget!’ he said to himself with the calm certainty of a healthy man that, if he was tired and wanted to sleep, he would fall asleep at once. And indeed at that moment there was confusion in his head, and he began to fall into the abyss of oblivion. The waves of the sea of unconsciousness were already beginning to close over his head when suddenly – as if a strong electric shock was discharged in him – he gave such a start that his whole body jumped on the springs of the sofa and, propping himself with his arms, he got to his knees. His eyes were wide open, as if he had never slept. The heaviness of head and sluggishness of limb that he had experienced a moment before suddenly vanished.

  ‘You may trample me in the mud.’ He heard Alexei Alexandrovich’s words and saw him before his eyes, and he saw Anna’s face with its feverish flush and shining eyes, looking tenderly and lovingly not at him but at Alexei Alexandrovich; he saw his own stupid and ridiculous figure, as it seemed to him, when Alexei Alexandrovich drew his hands away from his face. He stretched his legs out again, threw himself on the sofa in the same position, and closed his eyes.

  ‘Sleep! Sleep!’ he repeated to himself. But with his eyes closed he saw still more clearly the face of Anna as it had been on that evening, so memorable for him, before the race.

  ‘It is not and will not be, and she wishes to wipe it from her memory. And I cannot live without it. How, how can we be reconciled?’ he said aloud, and began unconsciously to repeat these words. The repetition of the words held back the emergence of new images and memories which he felt thronging in his head. But not for long. Again, one after another, the best moments presented themselves with extreme rapidity, and together with them the recent humiliation. ‘Take your hands away,’ Anna’s voice says. He takes his hands away and senses the ashamed and stupid look on his face.

  He went on lying there, trying to fall asleep, though he felt that there was not the slightest hope, and he went on repeating in a whisper the accidental words of some thought, wishing to hold back the emergence of new images. He listened – and heard, repeated in a strange, mad whisper, the words: ‘Unable to value, unable to enjoy; unable to value, unable to enjoy.’

  ‘What is this? Or am I losing my mind?’ he said to himself. ‘Maybe so. Why else do people lose their minds, why else do they shoot themselves?’ he answered himself and, opening his eyes, was surprised to see an embroidered pillow by his head, made 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 to think of something extraneous was painful. ‘No, I must sleep!’ He moved the pillow and pressed his head to it, but he had to make an effort to keep his eyes closed. He sat up abruptly. ‘That is finished for me,’ he said to himself. ‘I must think what to do. What’s left?’ His thought quickly ran through his life apart from his love for Anna.

  ‘Ambition? Serpukhovskoy? Society? Court?’ He could not fix on any of them. That had all had meaning once, but now nothing remained of it. He got up from the sofa, took off his frock coat, loosened his belt and, baring his shaggy chest in order to breathe more freely, paced up and down the room. ‘This is how people lose their minds,’ he repeated, ‘and shoot themselves … so as not to be ashamed,’ he added slowly.

  He went to the door and closed it. Then with a fixed gaze and tightly clenched teeth he went to the table, took his revolver, examined it, turned it to a loaded chamber, and lapsed into thought. For a couple of minutes, his head bowed in an expression of mental effort, he stood motionless with the revolver in his hands and considered. ‘Of course,’ he said to himself, as if a logical, continuous and clear train of thought had brought him to an unquestionable conclusion. In fact, this ‘of course’ that he found so convincing was only the consequence of a repetition of exactly the same round of memories and notions that he had already gone through a dozen times within the hour. It was the same memory of happiness lost forever, the same notion of the meaninglessness of everything he saw ahead of him in life, the same consciousness of his humiliation. The sequence of these notions and feelings was also the same.

  ‘Of course,’ he repeated, when his thought started for the third time on the same enchanted round of memories and thoughts, and, putting the revolver to the left side of his chest and forcefully jerking his whole hand as if clenching it into a fist, he pulled the trigger. He did not hear the sound of the shot, but a strong blow to his chest knocked him off his feet. He tried to catch hold of the edge of the table, dropped the revolver, staggered and sat down on the floor, looking around himself in surprise. He did not recognize his room as he looked from below at the curved legs of the table, the wastepaper basket and the tiger–skin rug. The quick, creaking steps of his servant, walking through the drawing room, brought him to his senses. He made a mental effort and understood that he was on the floor, and, seeing blood on the tiger–skin and on his hand, understood that he had tried to shoot himself.

  ‘Stupid! I missed,’ he said, groping for the revolver with his hand. The revolver was close by him, but he groped for it further away. Continuing to search, he reached out on the other side and, unable to keep his balance, fell over, bleeding profusely.

  The elegant servant with side–whiskers, who had complained to his acquaintances more than once about the weakness of his nerves, was so frightened when he saw his master lying on the floor that he left him bleeding profusely while he ran for help. An hour later, Varya, his brother’s wife, came and with the help of three doctors, whom she had summoned from all sides and who arrived at the same time, lay the wounded man in bed and stayed there to look after him.

  XIX

  The mistake Alexei Alexandrovich had made, while preparing to see his wife, in not taking into account the eventuality that her repentance would be sincere and he would forgive her, and then she would not die – this mistake presented itself to him in all its force two months after his return from Moscow. But the mistake came not only from his not having taken this eventuality into account, but also from the fact that, prior to the day when he saw his dying wife, he had not known his own heart. At his wife’s bedside he had given himself fo
r the first time in his life to that feeling of tender compassion which other people’s suffering evoked in him, and which he had previously been ashamed of as a bad weakness. Pity for her, and repentance at having wished for her death, and above all the very joy of forgiveness, made it so that he suddenly felt not only relief from his suffering but also an inner peace that he had never experienced before. He suddenly felt that the very thing that had once been the source of his suffering had become the source of his spiritual joy, that what had seemed insoluble when he condemned, reproached and hated, became simple and clear when he forgave and loved.