by Anna Karenina (tr Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky) (Penguin Classics) (epub)
Countess Lydia.
This letter achieved the secret goal that Countess Lydia Ivanovna had concealed from herself. It offended Anna to the depths of her soul.
Alexei Alexandrovich, for his part, on returning home from Lydia Ivanovna’s, was unable for the rest of the day to give himself to his usual occupations and find that peace of mind of a saved and believing man which he had felt before.
The memory of the wife who was so guilty before him and before whom he was so saintly, as Countess Lydia Ivanovna had rightly told him, should not have upset him; yet he was not at peace: he could not understand the book he was reading, could not drive away the painful memories of his relations with her, of those mistakes that he, as it now seemed to him, had made regarding her. The memory of how he had received her confession of unfaithfulness on the way back from the races (and in particular that he had demanded only external propriety from her and had made no challenge to a duel), tormented him like remorse. The memory of the letter he had written her also tormented him, and in particular his forgiveness, needed by no one, and his taking care of another man’s child, burned his heart with shame and remorse.
And he now experienced exactly the same sense of shame and remorse, going over all his past with her and remembering the awkward words with which, after long hesitation, he had proposed to her.
‘But in what am I to blame?’ he said to himself. And this question always called up another question in him – whether they feel differently, love differently, marry differently, these other people, these Vronskys and Oblonskys . .. these gentlemen of the bed–chamber with their fat calves. And he pictured a whole line of these juicy, strong, undoubting people, who, against his will, had always and everywhere attracted his curious attention. He drove these thoughts away; he tried to convince himself that he lived not for this temporary life here and now but for eternal life, and that there was peace and love in his soul. Yet the fact that in this temporary, negligible life he had made, as it seemed to him, some negligible mistakes tormented him as though that eternal salvation in which he believed did not exist. But this temptation did not last long, and soon the tranquillity and loftiness were restored in Alexei Alexandrovich’s soul thanks to which he was able to forget what he did not want to remember.
XXVI
‘Well, Kapitonych?’ said Seryozha, red–cheeked and merry, coming back from a walk on the eve of his birthday and giving his pleated jacket to the tall old hall porter, who smiled down at the little fellow from his great height. ‘Did the bandaged official come today? Did papa receive him?’
‘He did. As soon as the manager came out, I announced him,’ the porter said with a merry wink. ‘I’ll take it off, if you please.’
‘Seryozha!’ said the Slav tutor,[39] pausing in the inside doorway. ‘Take it off yourself.’
But Seryozha, though he heard the tutor’s weak voice, paid no attention. He stood holding on to the porter’s sash and looking into his face.
‘And did papa do what he wanted him to?’
The porter nodded affirmatively.
The bandaged official, who had already come seven times to petition Alexei Alexandrovich for something, interested both Seryozha and the hall porter. Seryozha had come upon him once in the front hall and had heard him pitifully asking the porter to announce him, saying that he and his children were sure to die.
Since then Seryozha had taken an interest in the official, having met him in the front hall another time.
‘And was he very glad?’ he asked.
‘How could he not be! He was all but skipping when he left.’
‘And has anything come?’ asked Seryozha, after a pause.
‘Well, sir,’ the porter said in a whisper, shaking his head, ‘there’s something from the countess.’
Seryozha understood at once that the porter was talking about a present for his birthday from Countess Lydia Ivanovna.
‘Is there really? Where?’
‘Kornei took it to your papa’s. Must be something nice!’
‘How big is it? Like this?’
‘A bit smaller, but it’s nice.’
‘A book?’
‘No, a thing. Go, go, Vassily Lukich is calling,’ the porter said, hearing the steps of the approaching tutor and, carefully unclasping the little hand in the half–removed glove that was holding on to his sash, he winked and nodded towards Vunich.
‘Coming, Vassily Lukich!’ Seryozha answered with that merry and loving smile that always won over the dutiful Vassily Lukich.
Seryozha was too merry, everything was too happy, for him not to tell his friend the porter about another family joy, which he had learned of during his walk in the Summer Garden from Countess Lydia Ivanovna’s niece. This joy seemed especially important to him, as it fell in with the joy of the official and his own joy about the toys that had come. It seemed to Seryozha that this was a day when everybody must be glad and merry.
‘You know papa got the Alexander Nevsky?’
‘How could I not know? People have already come to congratulate him.’
‘And is he glad?’
‘How could he not be glad of the tsar’s favour! He must have deserved it,’ the porter said sternly and seriously.
Seryozha reflected, peering into the porter’s face, which he had studied in the smallest detail, particularly his chin, hanging between grey side–whiskers, which no one saw except Seryozha, because he always looked at it from below.
‘Well, and has your daughter been to see you lately?’
The porter’s daughter was a ballet dancer.
‘When could she come on weekdays? They’ve also got to study. And you, too, sir. Off you go!’
When he came to his room, instead of sitting down to his lessons, Seryozha told his tutor his guess that what had been brought must be an engine. ‘What do you think?’ he asked.
But Vassily Lukich thought only that the grammar lesson had to be learned for the teacher, who was to come at two o’clock.
‘No, but just tell me, Vassily Lukich,’ he asked suddenly, already sitting at his desk and holding the book in his hands, ‘what’s bigger than the Alexander Nevsky? You know papa got the Alexander Nevsky?’
Vassily Lukich replied that the Vladimir was bigger than the Alexander Nevsky.
‘And higher?’
‘The highest of all is Andrew the First–called.’[40]
‘And higher than Andrew?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What, even you don’t know?’ And Seryozha, leaning on his elbow, sank into reflection.
His reflections were most complex and varied. He imagined how his father would suddenly get both the Vladimir and the Andrew, and how as a result of that he would be much kinder today at the lesson, and how he himself, when he grew up, would get all the decorations, and the one they would invent that was higher than the Andrew. No sooner would they invent it than he would deserve it. They would invent a still higher one, and he would also deserve it at once.
The time passed in such reflections, and when the teacher came, the lesson about the adverbial modifiers of time, place and manner was not prepared, and the teacher was not only displeased but also saddened. The teacher’s sadness touched Seryozha. He did not feel himself to blame for not having learned the lesson; but try as he might, he was quite unable to do it: while the teacher was explaining it to him, he believed and seemed to understand, but once he was on his own, he was simply unable to remember and understand that such a short and clear word as ‘thus’ was an adverbial modifier of manner. But all the same he was sorry that he had made his teacher sad and wanted to comfort him.
He chose a moment when the teacher was silently looking in the book.
‘Mikhail Ivanych, when is your name–day?’ he asked suddenly.
‘You’d better think about your work. Name–days mean nothing to intelligent beings. Just like any other day when we have to work.’
Seryozha looked attentively at the teacher, his sparse lit
tle beard, his spectacles which had slipped down below the red mark on his nose, and lapsed into thought so that he heard nothing of what his teacher explained to him. He realized that his teacher was not thinking about what he said, he felt it by the tone in which it was spoken. ‘But why have they all decided to say it in the same way, everything that’s most boring and unnecessary? Why does he push me away from him? Why doesn’t he love me?’ he asked himself with sorrow, and could think of no answer.
XXVII
After the teacher there was a lesson with his father. Waiting for his father, Seryozha sat at the desk playing with his penknife and began to think. Among his favourite occupations was looking for his mother during his walk. He did not believe in death generally and especially not in her death, though Lydia Ivanovna had told him and his father had confirmed it, and therefore, even after he was told that she was dead, he looked for her during his walks. Any full–bodied, graceful woman with dark hair was his mother. At the sight of such a woman, a feeling of tenderness welled up in his soul, so strong that he choked and tears came to his eyes. And he expected her to come up to him at any moment and lift her veil. Her whole face would be visible, she would smile, embrace him, he would smell her smell, feel the tenderness of her hand, and weep happily, as he had one evening when he lay at her feet and she tickled him, and he laughed and bit her white hand with its rings. Later, when he learned by chance from the nanny that his mother was not dead, and his father and Lydia Ivanovna explained to him that she was dead for him, because she was not good (which he simply could not believe, because he loved her), he kept looking and waiting for her in the same way. Today in the Summer Garden there was a lady in a purple veil whom he watched with a sinking heart, expecting it to be her as she approached them on the path. This lady did not reach them but disappeared somewhere. Today Seryozha felt stronger surges of love for her than ever, and now, forgetting himself, while waiting for his father, he cut up the whole edge of the desk with his knife, staring straight ahead with shining eyes and thinking of her.
‘Papa is coming!’ Vassily Lukich distracted him.
Seryozha jumped up, approached his father and, after kissing his hand, looked at him attentively, searching for signs of joy at getting the Alexander Nevsky.
‘Did you have a nice walk?’ Alexei Alexandrovich said, sitting down in his armchair, moving the book of the Old Testament to him and opening it. Though Alexei Alexandrovich had told Seryozha many times that every Christian must have a firm knowledge of sacred history, he often consulted the Old Testament himself, and Seryozha noticed it.
‘Yes, it was great fun, papa,’ said Seryozha, sitting sideways on the chair and rocking it, which was forbidden. ‘I saw Nadenka’ (Nadenka was Lydia Ivanovna’s niece, whom she was bringing up). ‘She told me you’ve been given a new star. Are you glad, papa?’
‘First of all, don’t rock, please,’ said Alexei Alexandrovich. ‘And second, what is precious is not the reward but the work. And I wish you to understand that. If you work and study in order to get a reward, the work will seem hard to you; but when you work,’ Alexei Alexandrovich said, recalling how he had sustained himself by a sense of duty that morning in the dull work of signing a hundred and eighteen papers, ‘if you love the work, you will find your reward in that.’ Seryozha’s eyes, shining with tenderness and gaiety, went dull and lowered under his father’s gaze. This was the same long–familiar tone in which his father always addressed him and which he had learned to fall in with. His father always talked to him – so he felt – as if he were addressing some imaginary boy, one of those that exist in books, but quite unlike him. And he always tried, when with his father, to pretend he was that book boy.
‘You understand that, I hope?’ said his father.
‘Yes, papa,’ Seryozha replied, pretending to be the imaginary boy.
The lesson consisted in learning several verses from the Gospel by heart and going over the beginning of the Old Testament. Seryozha knew the Gospel verses quite well, but as he was reciting them, he got so lost in contemplating the bone of his father’s forehead, which curved sharply at the temple, that he got confused by a repetition of the same word and moved the ending of one verse to the beginning of another. It was obvious to Alexei Alexandrovich that he did not understand what he was saying, and that annoyed him.
He frowned and began to explain what Seryozha had already heard many times and could never remember, because he understood it all too clearly – the same sort of thing as ‘thus’ being an adverbial modifier of manner. Seryozha looked at his father with frightened eyes and thought of one thing only: whether or not his father would make him repeat what he said, as sometimes happened. And this thought frightened him so much that he no longer understood anything. But his father did not make him repeat it and went on to the lesson from the Old Testament. Seryozha recounted the events themselves quite well, but when he had to answer questions about what some of the events foreshadowed, he knew nothing, though he had already been punished for this lesson. The place where he could no longer say anything and mumbled, and cut the table, and rocked on the chair, was the one where he had to speak of the antediluvian patriarchs. He knew none of them except Enoch, who had been taken alive to heaven.[41] He had remembered the names before, but now he had quite forgotten them, especially because Enoch was his favourite person in all the Old Testament, and Enoch’s having been taken alive to heaven was connected in his mind with a whole long train of thought to which he now gave himself, staring with fixed eyes at his father’s watch chain and a waistcoat button half–way through the buttonhole.
In death, which he had been told about so often, Seryozha totally refused to believe. He did not believe that the people he loved could die, and especially that he himself would die. For him that was perfectly impossible and incomprehensible. Yet he had been told that everyone would die; he had even asked people he trusted and they had confirmed it; his nanny had also confirmed it, though reluctantly. But Enoch had not died, which meant that not everyone died. ‘And why can’t everyone be deserving in the same way before God and get taken alive to heaven?’ thought Seryozha. The bad ones – that is, those whom Seryozha did not like – they could die, but the good ones should all be like Enoch.
‘Well, so who are the patriarchs?’
‘Enoch, Enos.’
‘You’ve already said that. Bad, Seryozha, very bad. If you don’t try to learn what’s most necessary for a Christian,’ his father said, getting up, ‘what else can interest you? I’m displeased with you, and Pyotr Ignatyich’ (the chief pedagogue) ‘is displeased with you … I will have to punish you.’
The father and the pedagogue were both displeased with Seryozha, and indeed he studied very badly. But it was quite impossible to say that he was an incapable boy. On the contrary, he was much more capable than the boys whom the pedagogue held up as examples to Seryozha. As his father saw it, he did not want to learn what he was taught. But in fact, he could not learn it. He could not, because there were demands in his soul that were more exacting for him than those imposed by his father and the pedagogue. These demands were conflicting, and he fought openly with his educators.
He was nine years old, he was a child; but he knew his own soul, it was dear to him, he protected it as the eyelid protects the eye, and did not let anyone into his soul without the key of love. His educators complained that he did not want to learn, yet his soul was overflowing with a thirst for knowledge. And he learned from Kapitonych, from his nurse, from Nadenka, from Vassily Lukich, but not from his teachers. The water that his father and the teacher had expected to turn their mill–wheels had long since seeped away and was working elsewhere.
His father punished Seryozha by not letting him visit Nadenka, Lydia Ivanovna’s niece; but this punishment turned out to be lucky for Seryozha. Vassily Lukich was in good spirits and showed him how to make windmills. They spent the whole evening working and dreaming of how to make a windmill so that you could turn round with it: hold on to the wing
s, or be tied to them, and turn. Seryozha did not think of his mother all evening, but when he went to bed, he suddenly remembered her and prayed in his own words that, for his birthday tomorrow, his mother would stop hiding and come to him.