Leo Tolstoy

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

  But the longer he listened to the King Lear fantasia, the further he felt from any possibility of forming some definite opinion for himself. The musical expression of feeling was ceaselessly beginning, as if gathering itself up, but it fell apart at once into fragments of new beginnings of musical expressions and sometimes into extremely complex sounds, connected by nothing other than the mere whim of the composer. But these fragments of musical expressions, good ones on occasion, were unpleasant because they were totally unexpected and in no way prepared for. Gaiety, sadness, despair, tenderness and triumph appeared without justification, like a madman’s feelings. And, just as with a madman, these feelings passed unexpectedly.

  All through the performance Levin felt like a deaf man watching people dance. He was in utter perplexity when the piece ended and felt great fatigue from such strained but in no way rewarded attention. Loud applause came from all sides. Everybody stood up, began walking, talking. Wishing to explain his perplexity by means of other people’s impressions, Levin began to walk about, looking for connoisseurs, and was glad to see one well–known connoisseur talking with Pestsov, whom he knew.

  ‘Amazing!’ Pestsov’s dense bass said. ‘Good afternoon, Konstantin Dmitrich. Particularly graphic and, so to speak, sculptural and rich in colour is the place where you feel Cordelia approaching, where a woman, das ewig Weibliche,[8]** enters the struggle with fate. Don’t you think?’

  ‘But what does Cordelia have to do with it?’ Levin asked timidly, forgetting completely that the fantasia portrayed King Lear on the heath.

  ‘Cordelia comes in … here!’ said Pestsov, tapping his fingers on the satiny playbill he was holding and handing it to Levin.

  Only then did Levin remember the title of the fantasia, and he hastened to read Shakespeare’s verses in Russian translation, printed on the back of the bill.

  ‘You can’t follow without it,’ said Pestsov, addressing Levin, since his interlocutor had left and there was no one else for him to talk to.

  During the entr’acte an argument arose between Levin and Pestsov

  * The eternal feminine.

  about the virtues and shortcomings of the Wagnerian trend in music.[9] Levin maintained that the mistake of Wagner and all his followers lay in their music wishing to cross over to the sphere of another art, just as poetry is mistaken when it describes facial features, something that should be done by painting, and he gave as an example of such a mistake a sculptor who decided to carve in marble the phantoms of poetic images emerging around the figure of a poet on a pedestal.[10] ‘The sculptor gave these phantoms so little of the phantasmic that they’re even holding on to the stairs,’ said Levin. He liked the phrase, but he did not remember whether he might not have used it before, and precisely with Pestsov, and having said it, he became embarrassed.

  Pestsov maintained that art is one and that it can reach its highest manifestations only by uniting all its forms.

  The second part of the concert Levin could not hear at all. Pestsov stood next to him and spent almost the whole time talking to him, denouncing the piece for its superfluous, cloying, affected simplicity and comparing it with the Pre–Raphaelites in painting. On the way out Levin met still more acquaintances, with whom he talked about politics, music and mutual acquaintances. Among others he met Count Bohl, whom he had completely forgotten to visit.

  ‘Well, you can go now,’ Natalie said to him when he told her of it. ‘Maybe they won’t receive you, and then you can come and fetch me at the meeting. I’ll still be there.’

  VI

  ‘Perhaps they’re not receiving?’ said Levin, entering the front hall of Countess Bohl’s house.

  ‘They are. Please come in,’ said the porter, resolutely helping him out of his coat.

  ‘How annoying,’ thought Levin, sighing as he removed a glove and shaped his hat. ‘Well, why am I going? And what shall I talk about with them?’

  Passing through the first drawing room, Levin met Countess Bohl in the doorway. With a preoccupied and stern face, she was ordering a servant to do something. Seeing Levin, she smiled and invited him into the next small drawing room, from which voices came. In this drawing room, in armchairs, sat the countess’s two daughters and a Moscow colonel of Levin’s acquaintance. Levin went up to them and, after the greetings, sat down by the sofa, holding his hat on his knee.

  ‘How is your wife’s health? Were you at the concert? We couldn’t go. Mama had to be at a panikhida.’[11]

  ‘Yes, I heard … Such a sudden death,’ said Levin.

  The countess came in, sat on the sofa and also asked about his wife and the concert.

  Levin answered her and repeated the remark about the suddenness of Mme Apraksin’s death.

  ‘Though she always had weak health.’

  ‘Did you go to the opera yesterday?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Lucca was very good.’[12]

  ‘Yes, very good,’ he said, and as he was totally indifferent to what they thought of him, he began to repeat what he had heard hundreds of times about the singer’s special talent. Countess Bohl pretended to listen. Then, when he had talked enough and fell silent, the colonel, silent up to then, began to speak. The colonel also talked about the opera and the lighting. Finally, having mentioned the planned folle journée*[13] at Tiurin’s, the colonel started laughing, got up noisily and left. Levin also got up, but noticed from the countess’s face that it was too early for him to leave. Another couple of minutes were called for. He sat down.

  But as he kept thinking how stupid it was, he could find nothing to talk about and remained silent.

  ‘You’re not going to the public meeting? They say it’s very interesting,’ the countess began.

  ‘No, I promised my belle–soeur I’d come and fetch her,’ said Levin.

  Silence ensued. Mother and daughter exchanged glances once more.

  ‘Well, I suppose now is the time,’ thought Levin, and he got up. The ladies shook hands with him and asked him to convey mille choses* to his wife.

  As he held his coat for him, the porter asked:

  ‘Where are you staying, if you please?’ and wrote it down at once in a big, well–bound book.

  ‘Of course, it makes no difference to me, but still it’s embarrassing

  * Crazy day.

  * All their best.

  and terribly stupid,’ Levin reflected, comforting himself with the thought that everyone did it; and he drove to the public meeting of the Committee, where he was to find his sister–in–law and take her home with him.

  There were many people, including almost the whole of society, at the public meeting of the Committee. Levin managed to catch the summary, which, as everyone said, was very interesting. When the reading of the summary was over, society got together, and Levin met Sviyazhsky, who insisted on inviting him that evening to the Agricultural Society, where a celebrated lecture would be read, and Stepan Arkadyich, who was just back from the races, and many other acquaintances, and Levin talked more and listened to various opinions about the meeting, about the new music, and about a certain trial. But, probably owing to the flagging attention he was beginning to experience, when he talked about the trial he made a blunder, and later he recalled that blunder several times with vexation. Speaking of the impending sentencing of a foreigner who was on trial in Russia, and about how wrong it would be to sentence him to exile abroad,[14] Levin repeated what he had heard the day before from an acquaintance.

  ‘I think that exiling him abroad is the same as punishing a pike by throwing it into the water,’ Levin said. Only later did he remember that this thought, which he seemed to pass off as his own and had really heard from an acquaintance, came from one of Krylov’s fables,[15] and his acquaintance had repeated it from a newspaper feuilleton.

  After taking his sister–in–law home with him, and finding Kitty happy and well, Levin went to the club.

  VII

  Levin arrived at the club just in time. Guests and members wer
e driving up as he arrived. Levin had not been to the club in a very long while, not since he had lived in Moscow and gone out in society after leaving the university. Though he remembered the club, the external details of its arrangement, he had completely forgotten the impression it used to make on him. But as soon as he drove into the wide, semi–circular courtyard and stepped out of the cab on to the porch, where a porter in a sash soundlessly opened the door for him and bowed; as soon as he saw in the porter’s lodge the galoshes and coats of the members who understood that it was less trouble to take off their galoshes downstairs than to go up in them; as soon as he heard the mysterious bell ringing to announce him, saw the statue on the landing as he went up the low carpeted steps of the stairway, and saw in the doorway above a third familiar though aged porter in club livery, promptly but unhurriedly opening the door while looking the visitor over, he was enveloped by the long–past impression of the club – an impression of restfulness, contentment and propriety.

  ‘Your hat, please,’ the porter said to Levin, who had forgotten the club rule about leaving hats in the porter’s lodge. ‘It’s a long time since you were here. The prince signed you in yesterday. Prince Stepan Arkadyich has not arrived yet.’

  The porter knew not only Levin but all his connections and family and at once mentioned people close to him.

  Going through the first big room with screens and another to the right where there was a fruit buffet, overtaking a slow–walking old man, Levin entered a dining room full of noisy people.

  He walked among almost completely occupied tables, looking the guests over. Here and there he saw the most diverse people, old and young, familiar or barely known to him. There was not a single angry or worried face. It seemed they had all left their anxieties and cares in the porter’s lodge together with their hats and were now about to enjoy the material blessings of life at their leisure. Sviyazhsky, and Shcherbatsky, and Nevedovsky, and the old prince, and Vronsky and Sergei Ivanovich were all there.

  ‘Ah! Why so late?’ said the prince, smiling and giving him his hand over his shoulder. ‘How’s Kitty?’ he added, straightening the napkin that he had tucked behind a waistcoat button.

  ‘Quite well, thanks. The three of them are dining at home.’

  ‘Ah, Alines and Nadines. Well, we have no room here. Go to that table and quickly take a seat,’ said the prince and, turning away, he carefully accepted a plate of burbot soup.

  ‘Levin, over here!’ a good–natured voice called from a bit further off. It was Turovtsyn. He was sitting with a young military man, and next to them two chairs were tipped forward. Levin gladly joined them. He had always liked the good–natured carouser Turovtsyn – his proposal to Kitty was connected with him – but now, after so many strained intellectual conversations, he found Turovtsyn’s good–natured air especially agreeable.

  ‘These are for you and Oblonsky. He’ll be here any minute.’

  The very straight–backed military man with merry, always laughing eyes was the Petersburger Gagin. Turovtsyn introduced them.

  ‘Oblonsky’s eternally late.’

  ‘Ah, here he is.’

  ‘Have you just arrived?’ said Oblonsky, quickly coming up to them. ‘Greetings! Had vodka? Well, come on!’

  Levin got up and went with him to the big table set with all kinds of vodka and a great variety of hors d’oeuvres. It seemed that out of two dozen kinds he might have chosen one to his taste, but Stepan Arkadyich ordered something special and a liveried servant who was standing there immediately brought what he had ordered. They drank a glass each and went back to the table.

  Right then, still over the fish soup, Gagin was served champagne and had four glasses poured. Levin did not refuse the wine he was offered and ordered another bottle. He was hungry, and ate and drank with great pleasure, and with still greater pleasure took part in the gay and simple conversation of his companions. Gagin, lowering his voice, told a new Petersburg joke which, though indecent and stupid, was so funny that Levin burst out laughing loudly enough to make his neighbours turn to look at him.

  ‘It’s the same kind as "That I simply cannot bear!" Do you know that one?’ asked Stepan Arkadyich. ‘Ah, it’s lovely! Bring us another bottle,’ he said to the waiter and began telling the joke.

  ‘Compliments of Pyotr Ilyich Vinovsky,’ interrupted Stepan Arkadyich’s old footman, bringing over two thin glasses of still–bubbling champagne and addressing Stepan Arkadyich and Levin. Stepan Arkadyich took a glass and, exchanging glances with a balding, red–haired man with a moustache at the other end of the table, nodded to him and smiled.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Levin.

  ‘You met him once at my house, remember? A nice fellow.’

  Levin did as Stepan Arkadyich had done and took his glass. Stepan Arkadyich’s joke was also very amusing. Levin told a joke of his own, which was enjoyed too. Then the conversation turned to horses, to the day’s races and how dashingly Vronsky’s Satiny had won the first prize. Levin did not notice how the dinner went by.

  ‘Ah, here they are!’ Stepan Arkadyich said when dinner was already over, turning across the back of his chair and holding out his hand to Vronsky, who was coming towards them with a tall colonel of the guards. Vronsky’s face also shone with the general merry good humour of the club. He merrily leaned on Stepan Arkadyich’s shoulder, whispering something to him, and with the same merry smile gave his hand to Levin.

  ‘Very glad to see you,’ he said. ‘I looked for you back at the elections, but was told you had already left.’

  ‘Yes, I left that same day. We’ve just been talking about your horse. Congratulations,’ said Levin. ‘That’s very fast riding.’

  ‘I believe you also keep horses.’

  ‘No, my father did. But I remember and know about them.’

  ‘Where did you dine?’ asked Stepan Arkadyich.

  ‘We’re at the second table, behind the columns.’

  ‘He’s been congratulated,’ said the tall colonel. ‘His second imperial prize – if only I had such luck at cards as he has with horses! … Well, no use wasting precious time. I’m off to the inferno,’ said the colonel, and he walked away from the table.

  ‘That’s Yashvin,’ Vronsky answered Turovtsyn and sat down in a place that had been vacated next to them. After drinking the glass he was offered, he ordered a bottle. Levin, influenced either by the impression of the club or by the wine he had drunk, got into a conversation with Vronsky about the best breeds of cattle and was very glad to feel no hostility towards the man. He even told him, among other things, that his wife had mentioned meeting him at Princess Marya Borisovna’s.

  ‘Ah, Princess Marya Borisovna, she’s lovely!’ said Stepan Arkadyich, and he told a joke about Marya Borisovna that made everybody laugh. Vronsky, in particular, burst into such good–natured laughter that Levin felt completely reconciled with him.

  ‘So, all done?’ said Stepan Arkadyich, getting up and smiling. ‘Let’s go!’

  VIII

  Leaving the table, feeling his arms swinging with a special Tightness and ease as he went, Levin walked with Gagin through the high–ceilinged rooms towards the billiard room. Going through the main hall, he ran into his father–in–law.

  ‘Well, so? How do you like our temple of idleness?’ the prince said, taking him under the arm. ‘Come, let’s take a stroll.’

  ‘I also wanted to have a look round. It’s interesting.’

  ‘Yes, for you it’s interesting. But my interest is different from yours. You look at these little old men,’ he said, indicating a club member with a bent back and a hanging lower lip who walked towards and then past them, barely moving his feet in their soft boots, ‘and you think they were born such sloshers.’