ANNA KARENINA
by Leo Tolstoy
Translated by Constance Garnett
Contents
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
PART FIVE
PART SIX
PART SEVEN
PART EIGHT
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its
own way.
Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had
discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French
girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced
to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with
him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only
the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family
and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the
house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that
the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in
common with one another than they, the members of the family and
household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the
husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all
over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper,
and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for
her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time;
the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.
Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch
Oblonsky—Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable world—woke up at
his usual hour, that is, at eight o’clock in the morning, not in his
wife’s bedroom, but on the leather-covered sofa in his study. He turned
over his stout, well-cared-for person on the springy sofa, as though he
would sink into a long sleep again; he vigorously embraced the pillow
on the other side and buried his face in it; but all at once he jumped
up, sat up on the sofa, and opened his eyes.
“Yes, yes, how was it now?” he thought, going over his dream. “Now, how
was it? To be sure! Alabin was giving a dinner at Darmstadt; no, not
Darmstadt, but something American. Yes, but then, Darmstadt was in
America. Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, and the
tables sang, _Il mio tesoro_—not _Il mio tesoro_ though, but something
better, and there were some sort of little decanters on the table, and
they were women, too,” he remembered.
Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a
smile. “Yes, it was nice, very nice. There was a great deal more that
was delightful, only there’s no putting it into words, or even
expressing it in one’s thoughts awake.” And noticing a gleam of light
peeping in beside one of the serge curtains, he cheerfully dropped his
feet over the edge of the sofa, and felt about with them for his
slippers, a present on his last birthday, worked for him by his wife on
gold-colored morocco. And, as he had done every day for the last nine
years, he stretched out his hand, without getting up, towards the place
where his dressing-gown always hung in his bedroom. And thereupon he
suddenly remembered that he was not sleeping in his wife’s room, but in
his study, and why: the smile vanished from his face, he knitted his
brows.
“Ah, ah, ah! Oo!...” he muttered, recalling everything that had
happened. And again every detail of his quarrel with his wife was
present to his imagination, all the hopelessness of his position, and
worst of all, his own fault.
“Yes, she won’t forgive me, and she can’t forgive me. And the most
awful thing about it is that it’s all my fault—all my fault, though I’m
not to blame. That’s the point of the whole situation,” he reflected.
“Oh, oh, oh!” he kept repeating in despair, as he remembered the
acutely painful sensations caused him by this quarrel.
Most unpleasant of all was the first minute when, on coming, happy and
good-humored, from the theater, with a huge pear in his hand for his
wife, he had not found his wife in the drawing-room, to his surprise
had not found her in the study either, and saw her at last in her
bedroom with the unlucky letter that revealed everything in her hand.
She, his Dolly, forever fussing and worrying over household details,
and limited in her ideas, as he considered, was sitting perfectly still
with the letter in her hand, looking at him with an expression of
horror, despair, and indignation.
“What’s this? this?” she asked, pointing to the letter.
And at this recollection, Stepan Arkadyevitch, as is so often the case,
was not so much annoyed at the fact itself as at the way in which he
had met his wife’s words.
There happened to him at that instant what does happen to people when
they are unexpectedly caught in something very disgraceful. He did not
succeed in adapting his face to the position in which he was placed
towards his wife by the discovery of his fault. Instead of being hurt,
denying, defending himself, begging forgiveness, instead of remaining
indifferent even—anything would have been better than what he did
do—his face utterly involuntarily (reflex spinal action, reflected
Stepan Arkadyevitch, who was fond of physiology)—utterly involuntarily
assumed its habitual, good-humored, and therefore idiotic smile.
This idiotic smile he could not forgive himself. Catching sight of that
smile, Dolly shuddered as though at physical pain, broke out with her
characteristic heat into a flood of cruel words, and rushed out of the
room. Since then she had refused to see her husband.
“It’s that idiotic smile that’s to blame for it all,” thought Stepan
Arkadyevitch.
“But what’s to be done? What’s to be done?” he said to himself in
despair, and found no answer.
Chapter 2
Stepan Arkadyevitch was a truthful man in his relations with himself.
He was incapable of deceiving himself and persuading himself that he
repented of his conduct. He could not at this date repent of the fact
that he, a handsome, susceptible man of thirty-four, was not in love
with his wife, the mother of five living and two dead children, and
only a year younger than himself. All he repented of was that he had
not succeeded better in hiding it from his wife. But he felt all the
difficulty of his position and was sorry for his wife, his children,
and himself. Possibly he might have managed to conceal his sins better
from his wife if he had anticipated that the knowledge of them would
have had such an effect on her. He had never clearly thought out the
subject, but he had vaguely conceived that his wife must long ago have
suspected him of being unfaithful to her, and shut her eyes to the
fact. He had even supposed that she, a worn-out woman no longer young
or good-looking, and in no way remarkable or interesting, merely a good
mother, ought from a sense of fairness to take an indulgent view. It
had turned out quite the other way.
“Oh, it’s awful! oh dear, oh dear! awful!” Stepan Arkadyevitch kept
repeating to himself, and he could think of nothing to be done. “And
how well things were going up till now! how well we got on! She was
contented and happy in her children; I never interfered with her in
anything; I let her manage the children and the house just as she
liked. It’s true it’s bad _her_ having been a governess in our house.
That’s bad! There’s something common, vulgar, in flirting with one’s
governess. But what a governess!” (He vividly recalled the roguish
black eyes of Mlle. Roland and her smile.) “But after all, while she
was in the house, I kept myself in hand. And the worst of it all is
that she’s already ... it seems as if ill-luck would have it so! Oh,
oh! But what, what is to be done?”
There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to
all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one
must live in the needs of the day—that is, forget oneself. To forget
himself in sleep was impossible now, at least till nighttime; he could
not go back now to the music sung by the decanter-women; so he must
forget himself in the dream of daily life.
“Then we shall see,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said to himself, and getting
up he put on a gray dressing-gown lined with blue silk, tied the
tassels in a knot, and, drawing a deep breath of air into his broad,
bare chest, he walked to the window with his usual confident step,
turning out his feet that carried his full frame so easily. He pulled
up the blind and rang the bell loudly. It was at once answered by the
appearance of an old friend, his valet, Matvey, carrying his clothes,
his boots, and a telegram. Matvey was followed by the barber with all
the necessaries for shaving.
“Are there any papers from the office?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch,
taking the telegram and seating himself at the looking-glass.
“On the table,” replied Matvey, glancing with inquiring sympathy at his
master; and, after a short pause, he added with a sly smile, “They’ve
sent from the carriage-jobbers.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch made no reply, he merely glanced at Matvey in the
looking-glass. In the glance, in which their eyes met in the
looking-glass, it was clear that they understood one another. Stepan
Arkadyevitch’s eyes asked: “Why do you tell me that? don’t you know?”
Matvey put his hands in his jacket pockets, thrust out one leg, and
gazed silently, good-humoredly, with a faint smile, at his master.
“I told them to come on Sunday, and till then not to trouble you or
themselves for nothing,” he said. He had obviously prepared the
sentence beforehand.
Stepan Arkadyevitch saw Matvey wanted to make a joke and attract
attention to himself. Tearing open the telegram, he read it through,
guessing at the words, misspelt as they always are in telegrams, and
his face brightened.
“Matvey, my sister Anna Arkadyevna will be here tomorrow,” he said,
checking for a minute the sleek, plump hand of the barber, cutting a
pink path through his long, curly whiskers.
“Thank God!” said Matvey, showing by this response that he, like his
master, realized the significance of this arrival—that is, that Anna
Arkadyevna, the sister he was so fond of, might bring about a
reconciliation between husband and wife.
“Alone, or with her husband?” inquired Matvey.
Stepan Arkadyevitch could not answer, as the barber was at work on his
upper lip, and he raised one finger. Matvey nodded at the
looking-glass.
“Alone. Is the room to be got ready upstairs?”
“Inform Darya Alexandrovna: where she orders.”
“Darya Alexandrovna?” Matvey repeated, as though in doubt.
“Yes, inform her. Here, take the telegram; give it to her, and then do
what she tells you.”
“You want to try it on,” Matvey understood, but he only said, “Yes,
sir.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch was already washed and combed and ready to be
dressed, when Matvey, stepping deliberately in his creaky boots, came
back into the room with the telegram in his hand. The barber had gone.
“Darya Alexandrovna told me to inform you that she is going away. Let
him do—that is you—as he likes,” he said, laughing only with his eyes,
and putting his hands in his pockets, he watched his master with his
head on one side. Stepan Arkadyevitch was silent a minute. Then a
good-humored and rather pitiful smile showed itself on his handsome
face.
“Eh, Matvey?” he said, shaking his head.
“It’s all right, sir; she will come round,” said Matvey.
“Come round?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you think so? Who’s there?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch, hearing the
rustle of a woman’s dress at the door.
“It’s I,” said a firm, pleasant, woman’s voice, and the stern,
pockmarked face of Matrona Philimonovna, the nurse, was thrust in at
the doorway.
“Well, what is it, Matrona?” queried Stepan Arkadyevitch, going up to
her at the door.
Although Stepan Arkadyevitch was completely in the wrong as regards his