Anna Karenina
able to help sharing with his friend the porter the family good fortune
of which he had heard during his walk in the public gardens from Lidia
Ivanovna’s niece. This piece of good news seemed to him particularly
important from its coming at the same time with the gladness of the
bandaged clerk and his own gladness at toys having come for him. It
seemed to Seryozha that this was a day on which everyone ought to be
glad and happy.
“You know papa’s received the Alexander Nevsky today?”
“To be sure I do! People have been already to congratulate him.”
“And is he glad?”
“Glad at the Tsar’s gracious favor! I should think so! It’s a proof
he’s deserved it,” said the porter severely and seriously.
Seryozha fell to dreaming, gazing up at the face of the porter, which
he had thoroughly studied in every detail, especially the chin that
hung down between the gray whiskers, never seen by anyone but Seryozha,
who saw him only from below.
“Well, and has your daughter been to see you lately?”
The porter’s daughter was a ballet dancer.
“When is she to come on week-days? They’ve their lessons to learn too.
And you’ve your lesson, sir; run along.”
On coming into the room, Seryozha, instead of sitting down to his
lessons, told his tutor of his supposition that what had been brought
him must be a machine. “What do you think?” he inquired.
But Vassily Lukitch was thinking of nothing but the necessity of
learning the grammar lesson for the teacher, who was coming at two.
“No, do just tell me, Vassily Lukitch,” he asked suddenly, when he was
seated at their work table with the book in his hands, “what is greater
than the Alexander Nevsky? You know papa’s received the Alexander
Nevsky?”
Vassily Lukitch replied that the Vladimir was greater than the
Alexander Nevsky.
“And higher still?”
“Well, highest of all is the Andrey Pervozvanny.”
“And higher than the Andrey?”
“I don’t know.”
“What, you don’t know?” and Seryozha, leaning on his elbows, sank into
deep meditation.
His meditations were of the most complex and diverse character. He
imagined his father’s having suddenly been presented with both the
Vladimir and the Andrey today, and in consequence being much better
tempered at his lesson, and dreamed how, when he was grown up, he would
himself receive all the orders, and what they might invent higher than
the Andrey. Directly any higher order were invented, he would win it.
They would make a higher one still, and he would immediately win that
too.
The time passed in such meditations, and when the teacher came, the
lesson about the adverbs of place and time and manner of action was not
ready, and the teacher was not only displeased, but hurt. This touched
Seryozha. He felt he was not to blame for not having learned the
lesson; however much he tried, he was utterly unable to do that. As
long as the teacher was explaining to him, he believed him and seemed
to comprehend, but as soon as he was left alone, he was positively
unable to recollect and to understand that the short and familiar word
“suddenly” is an adverb of manner of action. Still he was sorry that he
had disappointed the teacher.
He chose a moment when the teacher was looking in silence at the book.
“Mihail Ivanitch, when is your birthday?” he asked all, of a sudden.
“You’d much better be thinking about your work. Birthdays are of no
importance to a rational being. It’s a day like any other on which one
has to do one’s work.”
Seryozha looked intently at the teacher, at his scanty beard, at his
spectacles, which had slipped down below the ridge on his nose, and
fell into so deep a reverie that he heard nothing of what the teacher
was explaining to him. He knew that the teacher did not think what he
said; he felt it from the tone in which it was said. “But why have they
all agreed to speak just in the same manner always the dreariest and
most useless stuff? Why does he keep me off; why doesn’t he love me?”
he asked himself mournfully, and could not think of an answer.
Chapter 27
After the lesson with the grammar teacher came his father’s lesson.
While waiting for his father, Seryozha sat at the table playing with a
penknife, and fell to dreaming. Among Seryozha’s favorite occupations
was searching for his mother during his walks. He did not believe in
death generally, and in her death in particular, in spite of what Lidia
Ivanovna had told him and his father had confirmed, and it was just
because of that, and after he had been told she was dead, that he had
begun looking for her when out for a walk. Every woman of full,
graceful figure with dark hair was his mother. At the sight of such a
woman such a feeling of tenderness was stirred within him that his
breath failed him, and tears came into his eyes. And he was on the
tiptoe of expectation that she would come up to him, would lift her
veil. All her face would be visible, she would smile, she would hug
him, he would sniff her fragrance, feel the softness of her arms, and
cry with happiness, just as he had one evening lain on her lap while
she tickled him, and he laughed and bit her white, ring-covered
fingers. Later, when he accidentally learned from his old nurse that
his mother was not dead, and his father and Lidia Ivanovna had
explained to him that she was dead to him because she was wicked (which
he could not possibly believe, because he loved her), he went on
seeking her and expecting her in the same way. That day in the public
gardens there had been a lady in a lilac veil, whom he had watched with
a throbbing heart, believing it to be she as she came towards them
along the path. The lady had not come up to them, but had disappeared
somewhere. That day, more intensely than ever, Seryozha felt a rush of
love for her, and now, waiting for his father, he forgot everything,
and cut all round the edge of the table with his penknife, staring
straight before him with sparkling eyes and dreaming of her.
“Here is your papa!” said Vassily Lukitch, rousing him.
Seryozha jumped up and went up to his father, and kissing his hand,
looked at him intently, trying to discover signs of his joy at
receiving the Alexander Nevsky.
“Did you have a nice walk?” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, sitting down in
his easy chair, pulling the volume of the Old Testament to him and
opening it. Although Alexey Alexandrovitch had more than once told
Seryozha that every Christian ought to know Scripture history
thoroughly, he often referred to the Bible himself during the lesson,
and Seryozha observed this.
“Yes, it was very nice indeed, papa,” said Seryozha, sitting sideways
on his chair and rocking it, which was forbidden. “I saw Nadinka”
(Nadinka was a niece of Lidia Ivanovna’s who was being brought up in
her house). “She told me you’d been given a new star. Are you glad,
papa?”
“First of all, don’t rock your chair, please,” said Alexey
Alexandrovitch. “And secondly, it’s not the reward that’s precious, but
the work itself. And I could have wished you understood that. If you
now are going to work, to study in order to win a reward, then the work
will seem hard to you; but when you work” (Alexey Alexandrovitch, as he
spoke, thought of how he had been sustained by a sense of duty through
the wearisome labor of the morning, consisting of signing one hundred
and eighty papers), “loving your work, you will find your reward in
it.”
Seryozha’s eyes, that had been shining with gaiety and tenderness, grew
dull and dropped before his father’s gaze. This was the same
long-familiar tone his father always took with him, and Seryozha had
learned by now to fall in with it. His father always talked to him—so
Seryozha felt—as though he were addressing some boy of his own
imagination, one of those boys that exist in books, utterly unlike
himself. And Seryozha always tried with his father to act being the
story-book boy.
“You understand that, I hope?” said his father.
“Yes, papa,” answered Seryozha, acting the part of the imaginary boy.
The lesson consisted of learning by heart several verses out of the
Gospel and the repetition of the beginning of the Old Testament. The
verses from the Gospel Seryozha knew fairly well, but at the moment
when he was saying them he became so absorbed in watching the sharply
protruding, bony knobbiness of his father’s forehead, that he lost the
thread, and he transposed the end of one verse and the beginning of
another. So it was evident to Alexey Alexandrovitch that he did not
understand what he was saying, and that irritated him.
He frowned, and began explaining what Seryozha had heard many times
before and never could remember, because he understood it too well,
just as that “suddenly” is an adverb of manner of action. Seryozha
looked with scared eyes at his father, and could think of nothing but
whether his father would make him repeat what he had said, as he
sometimes did. And this thought so alarmed Seryozha that he now
understood nothing. But his father did not make him repeat it, and
passed on to the lesson out of the Old Testament. Seryozha recounted
the events themselves well enough, but when he had to answer questions
as to what certain events prefigured, he knew nothing, though he had
already been punished over this lesson. The passage at which he was
utterly unable to say anything, and began fidgeting and cutting the
table and swinging his chair, was where he had to repeat the patriarchs
before the Flood. He did not know one of them, except Enoch, who had
been taken up alive to heaven. Last time he had remembered their names,
but now he had forgotten them utterly, chiefly because Enoch was the
personage he liked best in the whole of the Old Testament, and Enoch’s
translation to heaven was connected in his mind with a whole long train
of thought, in which he became absorbed now while he gazed with
fascinated eyes at his father’s watch-chain and a half-unbuttoned
button on his waistcoat.
In death, of which they talked to him so often, Seryozha disbelieved
entirely. He did not believe that those he loved could die, above all
that he himself would die. That was to him something utterly
inconceivable and impossible. But he had been told that all men die; he
had asked people, indeed, whom he trusted, and they too, had confirmed
it; his old nurse, too, said the same, though reluctantly. But Enoch
had not died, and so it followed that everyone did not die. “And why
cannot anyone else so serve God and be taken alive to heaven?” thought
Seryozha. Bad people, that is those Seryozha did not like, they might
die, but the good might all be like Enoch.
“Well, what are the names of the patriarchs?”
“Enoch, Enos—”
“But you have said that already. This is bad, Seryozha, very bad. If
you don’t try to learn what is more necessary than anything for a
Christian,” said his father, getting up, “whatever can interest you? I
am displeased with you, and Piotr Ignatitch” (this was the most
important of his teachers) “is displeased with you.... I shall have to
punish you.”
His father and his teacher were both displeased with Seryozha, and he
certainly did learn his lessons very badly. But still it could not be
said he was a stupid boy. On the contrary, he was far cleverer than the
boys his teacher held up as examples to Seryozha. In his father’s
opinion, he did not want to learn what he was taught. In reality he
could not learn that. He could not, because the claims of his own soul
were more binding on him than those claims his father and his teacher
made upon him. Those claims were in opposition, and he was in direct
conflict with his education. He was nine years old; he was a child; but
he knew his own soul, it was precious to him, he guarded it as the
eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love he let no one into