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Before Vronsky and Oblonsky came back the ladies
heard the facts from the butler.
Oblonsky and Vronsky had both seen the mutilated
corpse. Oblonsky was evidently upset. He frowned and
seemed ready to cry.
‘Ah, how awful! Ah, Anna, if you had seen it! Ah, how
awful!’ he said.
Vronsky did not speak; his handsome face was serious,
but perfectly composed.
‘Oh, if you had seen it, countess,’ said Stepan
Arkadyevitch. ‘And his wife was there.... It was awful to
see her!.... She flung herself on the body. They say he was
the only support of an immense family. How awful!’
‘Couldn’t one do anything for her?’ said Madame
Karenina in an agitated whisper.
Vronsky glanced at her, and immediately got out of the
carriage.
‘I’ll be back directly, maman,’ he remarked, turning
round in the doorway.
When he came back a few minutes later, Stepan
Arkadyevitch was already in conversation with the
countess about the new singer, while the countess was
impatiently looking towards the door, waiting for her son.
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‘Now let us be off,’ said Vronsky, coming in. They
went out together. Vronsky was in front with his mother.
Behind walked Madame Karenina with her brother. Just as
they were going out of the station the station-master
overtook Vronsky.
‘You gave my assistant two hundred roubles. Would
you kindly explain for whose benefit you intend them?’
‘For the widow,’ said Vronsky, shrugging his shoulders.
‘I should have thought there was no need to ask.’
‘You gave that?’ cried Oblonsky, behind, and, pressing
his sister’s hand, he added: ‘Very nice, very nice! Isn’t he a
splendid fellow? Good-bye, countess.’
And he and his sister stood still, looking for her maid.
When they went out the Vronsky’s carriage had already
driven away. People coming in were still talking of what
happened.
‘What a horrible death!’ said a gentleman, passing by.
‘They say he was cut in two pieces.’
‘On the contrary, I think it’s the easiest—
instantaneous,’ observed another.
‘How is it they don’t take proper precautions?’ said a
third.
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Madame Karenina seated herself in the carriage, and
Stepan Arkadyevitch saw with surprise that her lips were
quivering, and she was with difficulty restraining her tears.
‘What is it, Anna?’ he asked, when they had driven a
few hundred yards.
‘It’s an omen of evil,’ she said.
‘What nonsense!’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch. ‘You’ve
come, that’s the chief thing. You can’t conceive how I’m
resting my hopes on you.’
‘Have you known Vronsky long?’ she asked.
‘Yes. You know we’re hoping he will marry Kitty.’
‘Yes?’ said Anna softly. ‘Come now, let us talk of you,’
she added, tossing her head, as though she would
physically shake off something superfluous oppressing her.
‘Let us talk of your affairs. I got your letter, and here I
am.’
‘Yes, all my hopes are in you,’ said Stepan
Arkadyevitch.
‘Well, tell me all about it.’
And Stepan Arkadyevitch began to tell his story.
On reaching home Oblonsky helped his sister out,
sighed, pressed her hand, and set off to his office.
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Chapter 19
When Anna went into the room, Dolly was sitting in
the little drawing-room with a white-headed fat little boy,
already like his father, giving him a lesson in French
reading. As the boy read, he kept twisting and trying to
tear off a button that was nearly off his jacket. His mother
had several times taken his hand from it, but the fat little
hand went back to the button again. His mother pulled
the button off and put it in her pocket.
‘Keep your hands still, Grisha,’ she said, and she took
up her work, a coverlet she had long been making. She
always set to work on it at depressed moments, and now
she knitted at it nervously, twitching her fingers and
counting the stitches. Though she had sent word the day
before to her husband that it was nothing to her whether
his sister came or not, she had made everything ready for
her arrival, and was expecting her sister-in-law with
emotion.
Dolly was crushed by her sorrow, utterly swallowed up
by it. Still she did not forget that Anna, her sister-in-law,
was the wife of one of the most important personages in
Petersburg, and was a Petersburg grande dame. And,
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thanks to this circumstance, she did not carry out her
threat to her husband—that is to say, she remembered that
her sister-in-law was coming. ‘And, after all, Anna is in no
wise to blame,’ thought Dolly. ‘I know nothing of her
except the very best, and I have seen nothing but kindness
and affection from her towards myself.’ It was true that as
far as she could recall her impressions at Petersburg at the
Karenins’, she did not like their household itself; there was
something artificial in the whole framework of their family
life. ‘But why should I not receive her? If only she doesn’t
take it into her head to console me!’ thought Dolly. ‘All
consolation and counsel and Christian forgiveness, all that
I have thought over a thousand times, and it’s all no use.’
All these days Dolly had been alone with her children.
She did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that
sorrow in her heart she could not talk of outside matters.
She knew that in one way or another she would tell Anna
everything, and she was alternately glad at the thought of
speaking freely, and angry at the necessity of speaking of
her humiliation with her, his sister, and of hearing her
ready-made phrases of good advice and comfort. She had
been on the lookout for her, glancing at her watch every
minute, and, as so often happens, let slip just that minute
when her visitor arrived, so that she did not hear the bell.
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Catching a sound of skirts and light steps at the door,
she looked round, and her care-worn face unconsciously
expressed not gladness, but wonder. She got up and
embraced her sister-in-law.
‘What, here already!’ she said as she kissed her.
‘Dolly, how glad I am to see you!’
‘I am glad, too,’ said Dolly, faintly smiling, and trying
by the expression of Anna’s face to find out whether she
knew. ‘Most likely she knows,’ she thought, noticing the
sympathy in Anna’s face. ‘Well, come along, I’ll take you
to your room,’ she went on, trying to defer as long as
possible the moment of confidences.
‘Is this Grisha? Heavens, how he’s grown!’ said Anna;
and kissing him, never taking her eyes off Dolly, she stood
still and flushed a little. ‘No, please, let us stay here.’
She took off her kerchief and her hat, and catching it in
a lock of her black hair, which was a mass of curls, she
tossed her head and shook her hair down.
‘You are radiant with health and happiness!’ said Dolly,
almost with envy.
‘I?.... Yes,’ said Anna. ‘Merciful heavens, Tanya!
You’re the same age as my Seryozha,’ she added,
addressing the little girl as she ran in. She took her in her
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arms and kissed her. ‘Delightful child, delightful! Show me
them all.’
She mentioned them, not only remembering the
names, but the years, months, characters, illnesses of all the
children, and Dolly could not but appreciate that.
‘Very well, we will go to them,’ she said. ‘It’s a pity
Vassya’s asleep.’
After seeing the children, They sat down, alone now,
in the drawing room, to coffee. Anna took the tray, and
then pushed it away from her.
‘Dolly,’ she said, ‘he has told me.’
Dolly looked coldly at Anna; she was waiting now for
phrases of conventional sympathy, but Anna said nothing
of the sort.
‘Dolly, dear,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to speak for him to
you, nor to try to comfort you; that’s impossible. But,
darling, I’m simply sorry, sorry from my heart for you!’
Under the thick lashes of her shining eyes tears
suddenly glittered. She moved nearer to her sister-in-law
and took her hand in her vigorous little hand. Dolly did
not shrink away, but her face did not lose its frigid
expression. She said:
‘To comfort me’s impossible. Everything’s lost after
what has happened, everything’s over!’
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And directly she had said this, her face suddenly
softened. Anna lifted the wasted, thin hand of Dolly,
kissed it and said:
‘But, Dolly, what’s to be done, what’s to be done?
How is it best to act in this awful position—that’s what
you must think of.’
‘All’s over, and there’s nothing more,’ said Dolly. ‘And
the worst of all is, you see, that I can’t cast him off: there
are the children, I am tied. And I can’t live with him! it’s a
torture to me to see him.’
‘Dolly, darling, he has spoken to me, but I want to hear
it from you: tell me about it.’
Dolly looked at her inquiringly.
Sympathy and love unfeigned were visible on Anna’s
face.
‘Very well,’ she said all at once. ‘But I will tell you it
from the beginning. You know how I was married. With
the education mamma gave us I was more than innocent, I
was stupid. I knew nothing. I know they say men tell their
wives of their former lives, but Stiva’—she corrected
herself—‘Stepan Arkadyevitch told me nothing. You’ll
hardly believe it, but till now I imagined that I was the
only woman he had known. So I lived eight years. You
must understand that I was so far from suspecting
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infidelity, I regarded it as impossible, and then— try to
imagine it—with such ideas, to find out suddenly all the
horror, all the loathsomeness.... You must try and
understand me. To be fully convinced of one’s happiness,
and all at once...’ continued Dolly, holding back her sobs,
‘to get a letter...his letter to his mistress, my governess.
No, it’s too awful!’ She hastily pulled out her handkerchief
and hid her face in it. ‘I can understand being carried away
by feeling,’ she went on after a brief silence, ‘but
deliberately, slyly deceiving me...and with whom?... To go
on being my husband together with her...it’s awful! You
can’t understand..’
‘Oh, yes, I understand! I understand! Dolly, dearest, I
do understand,’ said Anna, pressing her hand.
‘And do you imagine he realizes all the awfulness of my
position?’ Dolly resumed. ‘Not the slightest! He’s happy
and contented.’
‘Oh, no!’ Anna interposed quickly. ‘He’s to be pitied,
he’s weighed down by remorse..’
‘Is he capable of remorse?’ Dolly interrupted, gazing
intently into her sister-in-law’s face.
‘Yes. I know him. I could not look at him without
feeling sorry for him. We both know him. He’s goodhearted,
but he’s proud, and now he’s so humiliated. What
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touched me most...’ (and here Anna guessed what would
touch Dolly most) ‘he’s tortured by two things: that he’s
ashamed for the children’s sake, and that, loving you—yes,
yes, loving you beyond everything on earth,’ she hurriedly
interrupted Dolly, who would have answered— ‘he has
hurt you, pierced you to the heart. ‘No, no, she cannot
forgive me,’ he keeps saying.’
Dolly looked dreamily away beyond her sister-in-law as
she listened to her words.
‘Yes, I can see that his position is awful; it’s worse for
the guilty than the innocent,’ she said, ‘if he feels that all
the misery comes from his fault. But how am I to forgive
him, how am I to be his wife again after her? For me to
live with him now would be torture, just because I love
my past love for him..’
And sobs cut short her words. But as though of set
design, each time she was softened she began to speak
again of what exasperated her.
‘She’s young, you see, she’s pretty,’ she went on. ‘Do
you know, Anna, my youth and my beauty are gone,
taken by whom? By him and his children. I have worked
for him, and all I had has gone in his service, and now of
course any fresh, vulgar creature has more charm for him.
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No doubt they talked of me together, or, worse still, they
were silent. Do you understand?’
Again her eyes glowed with hatred.
‘And after that he will tell me.... What! can I believe
him? Never! No, everything is over, everything that once
made my comfort, the reward of my work, and my
sufferings.... Would you believe it, I was teaching Grisha
just now: once this was a joy to me, now it is a torture.
What have I to strive and toil for? Why are the children
here? What’s so awful is that all at once my heart’s turned,
and instead of love and tenderness, I have nothing but
hatred for him; yes, hatred. I could kill him.’
‘Darling Dolly, I understand, but don’t torture yourself.
You are so distressed, so overwrought, that you look at
many things mistakenly.’
Dolly grew calmer, and for two minutes both were
silent.
‘What’s to be done? Think for me, Anna, help me. I
have thought over everything, and I see nothing.’
Anna could think of nothing, but her heart responded
instantly to each word, to each change of expression of her
sister-in-law.
‘One thing I would say,’ began Anna. ‘I am his sister, I
know his character, that faculty of forgetting everything,
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everything’ (she waved her hand before her forehead),
‘that faculty for being completely carried away, but for
completely repenting too. He cannot believe it, he cannot
comprehend now how he can have acted as he did.’
‘No; he understands, he understood!’ Dolly broke in.
‘But I...you are forgetting me...does it make it easier for
me?’
‘Wait a minute. When he told me, I will own I did not
realize all the awfulness of your position. I saw nothing
but him, and that the family was broken up. I felt sorry for
him, but after talking to you, I see it, as a woman, quite
differently. I see your agony, and I can’t tell you how
sorry I am for you! But, Dolly, darling, I fully realize your
sufferings, only there is one thing I don’t know; I don’t
know...I don’t know how much love there is still in your
heart for him. That you know—whether there is enough
for you to be able to forgive him. If there is, forgive him!’
‘No,’ Dolly was beginning, but Anna cut her short,
kissing her hand once more.
‘I know more of the world than you do,’ she said. ‘I
know how met like Stiva look at it. You speak of his
talking of you with her. That never happened. Such men
are unfaithful, but their home and wife are sacred to them.
Somehow or other these women are still looked on with
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contempt by them, and do not touch on their feeling for
their family. They draw a sort of line that can’t be crossed
between them and their families. I don’t understand it, but
it is so.’
‘Yes, but he has kissed her..’
‘Dolly, hush, darling. I saw Stiva when he was in love
with you. I remember the time when he came to me and
cried, talking of you, and all the poetry and loftiness of his
feeling for you, and I know that the longer he has lived
with you the loftier you have been in his eyes. You know
we have sometimes laughed at him for putting in at every
word: ‘Dolly’s a marvelous woman.’ You have always
been a divinity for him, and you are that still, and this has
not been an infidelity of the heart..’
‘But if it is repeated?’
‘It cannot be, as I understand it..’
‘Yes, but could you forgive it?’
‘I don’t know, I can’t judge.... Yes, I can,’ said Anna,
thinking a moment; and grasping the position in her
thought and weighing it in her inner balance, she added:
‘Yes, I can, I can, I can. Yes, I could forgive it. I could not
be the same, no; but I could forgive it, and forgive it as
though it had never been, never been at all..’
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‘Oh, of course,’ Dolly interposed quickly, as though
saying what she had more than once thought, ‘else it
would not be forgiveness. If one forgives, it must be
completely, completely. Come, let us go; I’ll take you to
your room,’ she said, getting up, and on the way she
embraced Anna. ‘My dear, how glad I am you came. It
has made things better, ever so much better.’
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Chapter 20
The whole of that day Anna spent at home, that’s to
say at the Oblonskys’, and received no one, though some
of her acquaintances had already heard of her arrival, and
came to call; the same day. Anna spent the whole morning
with Dolly and the children. She merely sent a brief note
to her brother to tell him that he must not fail to dine at
home. ‘Come, God is merciful,’ she wrote.
Oblonsky did dine at home: the conversation was
general, and his wife, speaking to him, addressed him as
‘Stiva,’ as she had not done before. In the relations of the
husband and wife the same estrangement still remained,
but there was no talk now of separation, and Stepan
Arkadyevitch saw the possibility of explanation and
reconciliation.
Immediately after dinner Kitty came in. She knew
Anna Arkadyevna, but only very slightly, and she came
now to her sister’s with some trepidation, at the prospect
of meeting this fashionable Petersburg lady, whom
everyone spoke so highly of. But she made a favorable
impression on Anna Arkadyevna—she saw that at once.
Anna was unmistakably admiring her loveliness and her
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youth: before Kitty knew where she was she found herself
not merely under Anna’s sway, but in love with her, as
young girls do fall in love with older and married women.
Anna was not like a fashionable lady, nor the mother of a
boy of eight years old. In the elasticity of her movements,
the freshness and the unflagging eagerness which persisted
in her face, and broke out in her smile and her glance, she
would rather have passed for a girl of twenty, had it not
been for a serious and at times mournful look in her eyes,
which struck and attracted Kitty. Kitty felt that Anna was
perfectly simple and was concealing nothing, but that she
had another higher world of interests inaccessible to her,
complex and poetic.
After dinner, when Dolly went away to her own room,
Anna rose quickly and went up to her brother, who was
just lighting a cigar.
‘Stiva,’ she said to him, winking gaily, crossing him and
glancing towards the door, ‘go, and God help you.’
He threw down the cigar, understanding her, and
departed through the doorway.
When Stepan Arkadyevitch had disappeared, she went
back to the sofa where she had been sitting, surrounded by
the children. Either because the children saw that their
mother was fond of this aunt, or that they felt a special
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charm in her themselves, the two elder ones, and the
younger following their lead, as children so often do, had
clung about their new aunt since before dinner, and
would not leave her side. And it had become a sort of
game among them to sit a close as possible to their aunt, to
touch her, hold her little hand, kiss it, play with her ring,
or even touch the flounce of her skirt.
‘Come, come, as we were sitting before,’ said Anna
Arkadyevna, sitting down in her place.
And again Grisha poked his little face under her arm,
and nestled with his head on her gown, beaming with
pride and happiness.
‘And when is your next ball?’ she asked Kitty.
‘Next week, and a splendid ball. One of those balls
where one always enjoys oneself.’
‘Why, are there balls where one always enjoys oneself?’
Anna said, with tender irony.
‘It’s strange, but there are. At the Bobrishtchevs’ one
always enjoys oneself, and at the Nikitins’ too, while at the
Mezhkovs’ it’s always dull. Haven’t you noticed it?’
‘No, my dear, for me there are no balls now where one
enjoys oneself,’ said Anna, and Kitty detected in her eyes
that mysterious world which was not open to her. ‘For me
there are some less dull and tiresome.’
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‘How can YOU be dull at a ball?’
‘Why should not I be dull at a ball?’ inquired Anna.
Kitty perceived that Anna knew what answer would
follow.
‘Because you always look nicer than anyone.’
Anna had the faculty of blushing. She blushed a little,
and said:
‘In the first place it’s never so; and secondly, if it were,
what difference would it make to me?’
‘Are you coming to this ball?’ asked Kitty.
‘I imagine it won’t be possible to avoid going. Here,
take it,’ she said to Tanya, who was bulling the looselyfitting
ring off her white, slender-tipped finger.
‘I shall be so glad if you go. I should so like to see you
at a ball.’
‘Anyway, if I do go, I shall comfort myself with the
thought that it’s a pleasure to you...Grisha, don’t pull my
hair. It’s untidy enough without that,’ she said, putting up
a straying lock, which Grisha had been playing with.
‘I imagine you at the ball in lilac.’
‘And why in lilac precisely?’ asked Anna, smiling.
‘Now, children, run along, run along. Do you hear? Miss
Hoole is calling you to tea,’ she said, tearing the children
form her, and sending them off to the dining room.
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‘I know why you press me to come to the ball. You
expect a great deal of this ball, and you want everyone to
be there to take part in it.’
‘How do you know? Yes.’
‘Oh! what a happy time you are at,’ pursued Anna. ‘I
remember, and I know that blue haze like the mist on the
mountains in Switzerland. That mist which covers
everything in that blissful time when childhood is just
ending, and out of that vast circle, happy and gay, there is
a path growing narrower and narrower, and it is delightful
and alarming to enter the ballroom, bright and splendid as
it is.... Who has not been through it?’
Kitty smiled without speaking. ‘But how did she go
through it? How I should like to know all her love story!’
thought Kitty, recalling the unromantic appearance of
Alexey Alexandrovitch, her husband.
‘I know something. Stiva told me, and I congratulate
you. I liked him so much,’ Anna continued. ‘I met
Vronsky at the railway station.’
‘Oh, was he there?’ asked Kitty, blushing. ‘What was it
Stiva told you?’
‘Stiva gossiped about it all. And I should be so glad...I
traveled yesterday with Vronsky’s mother,’ she went on;
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‘and his mother talked without a pause of him, he’s her
favorite. I know mothers are partial, but..’
‘What did his mother tell you?’
‘Oh, a great deal! And I know that he’s her favorite;
still one can see how chivalrous he is.... Well, for instance,
she told me that he had wanted to give up all his property
to his brother, that he had done something extraordinary
when he was quite a child, saved a woman out of the
water. He’s a hero, in fact,’ said Anna, smiling and
recollecting the two hundred roubles he had given at the
station.
But she did not tell Kitty about the two hundred
roubles. For some reason it was disagreeable to her to
think of it. She felt that there was something that had to
do with her in it, and something that ought not to have
been.
‘She pressed me very much to go and see her,’ Anna
went on; ‘and I shall be glad to go to see her tomorrow.
Stiva is staying a long while in Dolly’s room, thank God,’
Anna added, changing the subject, and getting up, Kitty
fancied, displeased with something.
‘No, I’m first! No, I!’ screamed the children, who had
finished tea, running up to their Aunt Anna.
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‘All together,’ said Anna, and she ran laughing to meet
them, and embraced and swung round all the throng of
swarming children, shrieking with delight.
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Chapter 21
Dolly came out of her room to the tea of the grown-up
people. Stepan Arkadyevitch did not come out. He must
have left his wife’s room by the other door.
‘I am afraid you’ll be cold upstairs,’ observed Dolly,
addressing Anna; ‘I want to move you downstairs, and we
shall be nearer.’
‘Oh, please, don’t trouble about me,’ answered Anna,
looking intently into Dolly’s face, trying to make out
whether there had been a reconciliation or not.
‘It will be lighter for you here,’ answered her sister-inlaw.
‘I assure you that I sleep everywhere, and always like a
marmot.’
‘What’s the question?’ inquired Stepan Arkadyevitch,
coming out of his room and addressing his wife.
From his tone both Kitty and Anna knew that a
reconciliation had taken place.
‘I want to move Anna downstairs, but we must hang
up blinds. No one knows how to do it; I must see to it
myself,’ answered Dolly addressing him.
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‘God knows whether they are fully reconciled,’
thought Anna, hearing her tone, cold and composed.
‘Oh, nonsense, Dolly, always making difficulties,’
answered her husband. ‘Come, I’ll do it all, if you like..’
‘Yes, They must be reconciled,’ thought Anna.
‘I know how you do everything,’ answered Dolly.
‘You tell Matvey to do what can’t be done, and go away
yourself, leaving him to make a muddle of everything,’
and her habitual, mocking smile curved the corners of
Dolly’s lips as she spoke.
‘Full, full reconciliation, full,’ thought Anna; ‘thank
God!’ and rejoicing that she was the cause of it, she went
up to Dolly and kissed her.
‘Not at all. Why do you always look down on me and
Matvey?’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling hardly
perceptibly, and addressing his wife.
The whole evening Dolly was, as always, a little
mocking in her tone to her husband, while Stepan
Arkadyevitch was happy and cheerful, but not so as to
seem as though, having been forgiven, he had forgotten
his offense.
At half-past nine o’clock a particularly joyful and
pleasant family conversation over the tea-table at the
Oblonskys’ was broken up by an apparently simple
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incident. But this simple incident for some reason struck
everyone as strange. Talking about common acquaintances
in Petersburg, Anna got up quickly.
‘She is in my album,’ she said; ‘and, by the way, I’ll
show you by Seryozha,’ she added, with a mother’s smile
of pride.
Towards ten o’clock, when she usually said good-night
to her son, and often before going to a ball put him to bed
herself, she felt depressed at being so far from him; and
whatever she was talking about, she kept coming back in
thought to her curly-headed Seryozha. She longed to look
at his photograph and talk of him. Seizing the first pretext,
she got up, and with her light, resolute step went for her
album. The stairs up to her room came out on the landing
of the great warm main staircase.
Just as she was leaving the drawing room, a ring was
heard in the hall.
‘Who can that be?’ said Dolly
‘It’s early for me to be fetched, and for anyone else it’s
late,’ observed Kitty.
‘Sure to be someone with papers for me,’ put in Stepan
Arkadyevitch. When Anna was passing the top of the
staircase, a servant was running up to announce the visitor,
while the visitor himself was standing under a lamp. Anna
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Before Vronsky and Oblonsky came back the ladies
heard the facts from the butler.
Oblonsky and Vronsky had both seen the mutilated
corpse. Oblonsky was evidently upset. He frowned and
seemed ready to cry.
‘Ah, how awful! Ah, Anna, if you had seen it! Ah, how
awful!’ he said.
Vronsky did not speak; his handsome face was serious,
but perfectly composed.
‘Oh, if you had seen it, countess,’ said Stepan
Arkadyevitch. ‘And his wife was there.... It was awful to
see her!.... She flung herself on the body. They say he was
the only support of an immense family. How awful!’
‘Couldn’t one do anything for her?’ said Madame
Karenina in an agitated whisper.
Vronsky glanced at her, and immediately got out of the
carriage.
‘I’ll be back directly, maman,’ he remarked, turning
round in the doorway.
When he came back a few minutes later, Stepan
Arkadyevitch was already in conversation with the
countess about the new singer, while the countess was
impatiently looking towards the door, waiting for her son.
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‘Now let us be off,’ said Vronsky, coming in. They
went out together. Vronsky was in front with his mother.
Behind walked Madame Karenina with her brother. Just as
they were going out of the station the station-master
overtook Vronsky.
‘You gave my assistant two hundred roubles. Would
you kindly explain for whose benefit you intend them?’
‘For the widow,’ said Vronsky, shrugging his shoulders.
‘I should have thought there was no need to ask.’
‘You gave that?’ cried Oblonsky, behind, and, pressing
his sister’s hand, he added: ‘Very nice, very nice! Isn’t he a
splendid fellow? Good-bye, countess.’
And he and his sister stood still, looking for her maid.
When they went out the Vronsky’s carriage had already
driven away. People coming in were still talking of what
happened.
‘What a horrible death!’ said a gentleman, passing by.
‘They say he was cut in two pieces.’
‘On the contrary, I think it’s the easiest—
instantaneous,’ observed another.
‘How is it they don’t take proper precautions?’ said a
third.
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Madame Karenina seated herself in the carriage, and
Stepan Arkadyevitch saw with surprise that her lips were
quivering, and she was with difficulty restraining her tears.
‘What is it, Anna?’ he asked, when they had driven a
few hundred yards.
‘It’s an omen of evil,’ she said.
‘What nonsense!’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch. ‘You’ve
come, that’s the chief thing. You can’t conceive how I’m
resting my hopes on you.’
‘Have you known Vronsky long?’ she asked.
‘Yes. You know we’re hoping he will marry Kitty.’
‘Yes?’ said Anna softly. ‘Come now, let us talk of you,’
she added, tossing her head, as though she would
physically shake off something superfluous oppressing her.
‘Let us talk of your affairs. I got your letter, and here I
am.’
‘Yes, all my hopes are in you,’ said Stepan
Arkadyevitch.
‘Well, tell me all about it.’
And Stepan Arkadyevitch began to tell his story.
On reaching home Oblonsky helped his sister out,
sighed, pressed her hand, and set off to his office.
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Chapter 19
When Anna went into the room, Dolly was sitting in
the little drawing-room with a white-headed fat little boy,
already like his father, giving him a lesson in French
reading. As the boy read, he kept twisting and trying to
tear off a button that was nearly off his jacket. His mother
had several times taken his hand from it, but the fat little
hand went back to the button again. His mother pulled
the button off and put it in her pocket.
‘Keep your hands still, Grisha,’ she said, and she took
up her work, a coverlet she had long been making. She
always set to work on it at depressed moments, and now
she knitted at it nervously, twitching her fingers and
counting the stitches. Though she had sent word the day
before to her husband that it was nothing to her whether
his sister came or not, she had made everything ready for
her arrival, and was expecting her sister-in-law with
emotion.
Dolly was crushed by her sorrow, utterly swallowed up
by it. Still she did not forget that Anna, her sister-in-law,
was the wife of one of the most important personages in
Petersburg, and was a Petersburg grande dame. And,
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thanks to this circumstance, she did not carry out her
threat to her husband—that is to say, she remembered that
her sister-in-law was coming. ‘And, after all, Anna is in no
wise to blame,’ thought Dolly. ‘I know nothing of her
except the very best, and I have seen nothing but kindness
and affection from her towards myself.’ It was true that as
far as she could recall her impressions at Petersburg at the
Karenins’, she did not like their household itself; there was
something artificial in the whole framework of their family
life. ‘But why should I not receive her? If only she doesn’t
take it into her head to console me!’ thought Dolly. ‘All
consolation and counsel and Christian forgiveness, all that
I have thought over a thousand times, and it’s all no use.’
All these days Dolly had been alone with her children.
She did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that
sorrow in her heart she could not talk of outside matters.
She knew that in one way or another she would tell Anna
everything, and she was alternately glad at the thought of
speaking freely, and angry at the necessity of speaking of
her humiliation with her, his sister, and of hearing her
ready-made phrases of good advice and comfort. She had
been on the lookout for her, glancing at her watch every
minute, and, as so often happens, let slip just that minute
when her visitor arrived, so that she did not hear the bell.
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Catching a sound of skirts and light steps at the door,
she looked round, and her care-worn face unconsciously
expressed not gladness, but wonder. She got up and
embraced her sister-in-law.
‘What, here already!’ she said as she kissed her.
‘Dolly, how glad I am to see you!’
‘I am glad, too,’ said Dolly, faintly smiling, and trying
by the expression of Anna’s face to find out whether she
knew. ‘Most likely she knows,’ she thought, noticing the
sympathy in Anna’s face. ‘Well, come along, I’ll take you
to your room,’ she went on, trying to defer as long as
possible the moment of confidences.
‘Is this Grisha? Heavens, how he’s grown!’ said Anna;
and kissing him, never taking her eyes off Dolly, she stood
still and flushed a little. ‘No, please, let us stay here.’
She took off her kerchief and her hat, and catching it in
a lock of her black hair, which was a mass of curls, she
tossed her head and shook her hair down.
‘You are radiant with health and happiness!’ said Dolly,
almost with envy.
‘I?.... Yes,’ said Anna. ‘Merciful heavens, Tanya!
You’re the same age as my Seryozha,’ she added,
addressing the little girl as she ran in. She took her in her
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arms and kissed her. ‘Delightful child, delightful! Show me
them all.’
She mentioned them, not only remembering the
names, but the years, months, characters, illnesses of all the
children, and Dolly could not but appreciate that.
‘Very well, we will go to them,’ she said. ‘It’s a pity
Vassya’s asleep.’
After seeing the children, They sat down, alone now,
in the drawing room, to coffee. Anna took the tray, and
then pushed it away from her.
‘Dolly,’ she said, ‘he has told me.’
Dolly looked coldly at Anna; she was waiting now for
phrases of conventional sympathy, but Anna said nothing
of the sort.
‘Dolly, dear,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to speak for him to
you, nor to try to comfort you; that’s impossible. But,
darling, I’m simply sorry, sorry from my heart for you!’
Under the thick lashes of her shining eyes tears
suddenly glittered. She moved nearer to her sister-in-law
and took her hand in her vigorous little hand. Dolly did
not shrink away, but her face did not lose its frigid
expression. She said:
‘To comfort me’s impossible. Everything’s lost after
what has happened, everything’s over!’
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And directly she had said this, her face suddenly
softened. Anna lifted the wasted, thin hand of Dolly,
kissed it and said:
‘But, Dolly, what’s to be done, what’s to be done?
How is it best to act in this awful position—that’s what
you must think of.’
‘All’s over, and there’s nothing more,’ said Dolly. ‘And
the worst of all is, you see, that I can’t cast him off: there
are the children, I am tied. And I can’t live with him! it’s a
torture to me to see him.’
‘Dolly, darling, he has spoken to me, but I want to hear
it from you: tell me about it.’
Dolly looked at her inquiringly.
Sympathy and love unfeigned were visible on Anna’s
face.
‘Very well,’ she said all at once. ‘But I will tell you it
from the beginning. You know how I was married. With
the education mamma gave us I was more than innocent, I
was stupid. I knew nothing. I know they say men tell their
wives of their former lives, but Stiva’—she corrected
herself—‘Stepan Arkadyevitch told me nothing. You’ll
hardly believe it, but till now I imagined that I was the
only woman he had known. So I lived eight years. You
must understand that I was so far from suspecting
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infidelity, I regarded it as impossible, and then— try to
imagine it—with such ideas, to find out suddenly all the
horror, all the loathsomeness.... You must try and
understand me. To be fully convinced of one’s happiness,
and all at once...’ continued Dolly, holding back her sobs,
‘to get a letter...his letter to his mistress, my governess.
No, it’s too awful!’ She hastily pulled out her handkerchief
and hid her face in it. ‘I can understand being carried away
by feeling,’ she went on after a brief silence, ‘but
deliberately, slyly deceiving me...and with whom?... To go
on being my husband together with her...it’s awful! You
can’t understand..’
‘Oh, yes, I understand! I understand! Dolly, dearest, I
do understand,’ said Anna, pressing her hand.
‘And do you imagine he realizes all the awfulness of my
position?’ Dolly resumed. ‘Not the slightest! He’s happy
and contented.’
‘Oh, no!’ Anna interposed quickly. ‘He’s to be pitied,
he’s weighed down by remorse..’
‘Is he capable of remorse?’ Dolly interrupted, gazing
intently into her sister-in-law’s face.
‘Yes. I know him. I could not look at him without
feeling sorry for him. We both know him. He’s goodhearted,
but he’s proud, and now he’s so humiliated. What
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touched me most...’ (and here Anna guessed what would
touch Dolly most) ‘he’s tortured by two things: that he’s
ashamed for the children’s sake, and that, loving you—yes,
yes, loving you beyond everything on earth,’ she hurriedly
interrupted Dolly, who would have answered— ‘he has
hurt you, pierced you to the heart. ‘No, no, she cannot
forgive me,’ he keeps saying.’
Dolly looked dreamily away beyond her sister-in-law as
she listened to her words.
‘Yes, I can see that his position is awful; it’s worse for
the guilty than the innocent,’ she said, ‘if he feels that all
the misery comes from his fault. But how am I to forgive
him, how am I to be his wife again after her? For me to
live with him now would be torture, just because I love
my past love for him..’
And sobs cut short her words. But as though of set
design, each time she was softened she began to speak
again of what exasperated her.
‘She’s young, you see, she’s pretty,’ she went on. ‘Do
you know, Anna, my youth and my beauty are gone,
taken by whom? By him and his children. I have worked
for him, and all I had has gone in his service, and now of
course any fresh, vulgar creature has more charm for him.
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No doubt they talked of me together, or, worse still, they
were silent. Do you understand?’
Again her eyes glowed with hatred.
‘And after that he will tell me.... What! can I believe
him? Never! No, everything is over, everything that once
made my comfort, the reward of my work, and my
sufferings.... Would you believe it, I was teaching Grisha
just now: once this was a joy to me, now it is a torture.
What have I to strive and toil for? Why are the children
here? What’s so awful is that all at once my heart’s turned,
and instead of love and tenderness, I have nothing but
hatred for him; yes, hatred. I could kill him.’
‘Darling Dolly, I understand, but don’t torture yourself.
You are so distressed, so overwrought, that you look at
many things mistakenly.’
Dolly grew calmer, and for two minutes both were
silent.
‘What’s to be done? Think for me, Anna, help me. I
have thought over everything, and I see nothing.’
Anna could think of nothing, but her heart responded
instantly to each word, to each change of expression of her
sister-in-law.
‘One thing I would say,’ began Anna. ‘I am his sister, I
know his character, that faculty of forgetting everything,
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everything’ (she waved her hand before her forehead),
‘that faculty for being completely carried away, but for
completely repenting too. He cannot believe it, he cannot
comprehend now how he can have acted as he did.’
‘No; he understands, he understood!’ Dolly broke in.
‘But I...you are forgetting me...does it make it easier for
me?’
‘Wait a minute. When he told me, I will own I did not
realize all the awfulness of your position. I saw nothing
but him, and that the family was broken up. I felt sorry for
him, but after talking to you, I see it, as a woman, quite
differently. I see your agony, and I can’t tell you how
sorry I am for you! But, Dolly, darling, I fully realize your
sufferings, only there is one thing I don’t know; I don’t
know...I don’t know how much love there is still in your
heart for him. That you know—whether there is enough
for you to be able to forgive him. If there is, forgive him!’
‘No,’ Dolly was beginning, but Anna cut her short,
kissing her hand once more.
‘I know more of the world than you do,’ she said. ‘I
know how met like Stiva look at it. You speak of his
talking of you with her. That never happened. Such men
are unfaithful, but their home and wife are sacred to them.
Somehow or other these women are still looked on with
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contempt by them, and do not touch on their feeling for
their family. They draw a sort of line that can’t be crossed
between them and their families. I don’t understand it, but
it is so.’
‘Yes, but he has kissed her..’
‘Dolly, hush, darling. I saw Stiva when he was in love
with you. I remember the time when he came to me and
cried, talking of you, and all the poetry and loftiness of his
feeling for you, and I know that the longer he has lived
with you the loftier you have been in his eyes. You know
we have sometimes laughed at him for putting in at every
word: ‘Dolly’s a marvelous woman.’ You have always
been a divinity for him, and you are that still, and this has
not been an infidelity of the heart..’
‘But if it is repeated?’
‘It cannot be, as I understand it..’
‘Yes, but could you forgive it?’
‘I don’t know, I can’t judge.... Yes, I can,’ said Anna,
thinking a moment; and grasping the position in her
thought and weighing it in her inner balance, she added:
‘Yes, I can, I can, I can. Yes, I could forgive it. I could not
be the same, no; but I could forgive it, and forgive it as
though it had never been, never been at all..’
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‘Oh, of course,’ Dolly interposed quickly, as though
saying what she had more than once thought, ‘else it
would not be forgiveness. If one forgives, it must be
completely, completely. Come, let us go; I’ll take you to
your room,’ she said, getting up, and on the way she
embraced Anna. ‘My dear, how glad I am you came. It
has made things better, ever so much better.’
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Chapter 20
The whole of that day Anna spent at home, that’s to
say at the Oblonskys’, and received no one, though some
of her acquaintances had already heard of her arrival, and
came to call; the same day. Anna spent the whole morning
with Dolly and the children. She merely sent a brief note
to her brother to tell him that he must not fail to dine at
home. ‘Come, God is merciful,’ she wrote.
Oblonsky did dine at home: the conversation was
general, and his wife, speaking to him, addressed him as
‘Stiva,’ as she had not done before. In the relations of the
husband and wife the same estrangement still remained,
but there was no talk now of separation, and Stepan
Arkadyevitch saw the possibility of explanation and
reconciliation.
Immediately after dinner Kitty came in. She knew
Anna Arkadyevna, but only very slightly, and she came
now to her sister’s with some trepidation, at the prospect
of meeting this fashionable Petersburg lady, whom
everyone spoke so highly of. But she made a favorable
impression on Anna Arkadyevna—she saw that at once.
Anna was unmistakably admiring her loveliness and her
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youth: before Kitty knew where she was she found herself
not merely under Anna’s sway, but in love with her, as
young girls do fall in love with older and married women.
Anna was not like a fashionable lady, nor the mother of a
boy of eight years old. In the elasticity of her movements,
the freshness and the unflagging eagerness which persisted
in her face, and broke out in her smile and her glance, she
would rather have passed for a girl of twenty, had it not
been for a serious and at times mournful look in her eyes,
which struck and attracted Kitty. Kitty felt that Anna was
perfectly simple and was concealing nothing, but that she
had another higher world of interests inaccessible to her,
complex and poetic.
After dinner, when Dolly went away to her own room,
Anna rose quickly and went up to her brother, who was
just lighting a cigar.
‘Stiva,’ she said to him, winking gaily, crossing him and
glancing towards the door, ‘go, and God help you.’
He threw down the cigar, understanding her, and
departed through the doorway.
When Stepan Arkadyevitch had disappeared, she went
back to the sofa where she had been sitting, surrounded by
the children. Either because the children saw that their
mother was fond of this aunt, or that they felt a special
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charm in her themselves, the two elder ones, and the
younger following their lead, as children so often do, had
clung about their new aunt since before dinner, and
would not leave her side. And it had become a sort of
game among them to sit a close as possible to their aunt, to
touch her, hold her little hand, kiss it, play with her ring,
or even touch the flounce of her skirt.
‘Come, come, as we were sitting before,’ said Anna
Arkadyevna, sitting down in her place.
And again Grisha poked his little face under her arm,
and nestled with his head on her gown, beaming with
pride and happiness.
‘And when is your next ball?’ she asked Kitty.
‘Next week, and a splendid ball. One of those balls
where one always enjoys oneself.’
‘Why, are there balls where one always enjoys oneself?’
Anna said, with tender irony.
‘It’s strange, but there are. At the Bobrishtchevs’ one
always enjoys oneself, and at the Nikitins’ too, while at the
Mezhkovs’ it’s always dull. Haven’t you noticed it?’
‘No, my dear, for me there are no balls now where one
enjoys oneself,’ said Anna, and Kitty detected in her eyes
that mysterious world which was not open to her. ‘For me
there are some less dull and tiresome.’
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‘How can YOU be dull at a ball?’
‘Why should not I be dull at a ball?’ inquired Anna.
Kitty perceived that Anna knew what answer would
follow.
‘Because you always look nicer than anyone.’
Anna had the faculty of blushing. She blushed a little,
and said:
‘In the first place it’s never so; and secondly, if it were,
what difference would it make to me?’
‘Are you coming to this ball?’ asked Kitty.
‘I imagine it won’t be possible to avoid going. Here,
take it,’ she said to Tanya, who was bulling the looselyfitting
ring off her white, slender-tipped finger.
‘I shall be so glad if you go. I should so like to see you
at a ball.’
‘Anyway, if I do go, I shall comfort myself with the
thought that it’s a pleasure to you...Grisha, don’t pull my
hair. It’s untidy enough without that,’ she said, putting up
a straying lock, which Grisha had been playing with.
‘I imagine you at the ball in lilac.’
‘And why in lilac precisely?’ asked Anna, smiling.
‘Now, children, run along, run along. Do you hear? Miss
Hoole is calling you to tea,’ she said, tearing the children
form her, and sending them off to the dining room.
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‘I know why you press me to come to the ball. You
expect a great deal of this ball, and you want everyone to
be there to take part in it.’
‘How do you know? Yes.’
‘Oh! what a happy time you are at,’ pursued Anna. ‘I
remember, and I know that blue haze like the mist on the
mountains in Switzerland. That mist which covers
everything in that blissful time when childhood is just
ending, and out of that vast circle, happy and gay, there is
a path growing narrower and narrower, and it is delightful
and alarming to enter the ballroom, bright and splendid as
it is.... Who has not been through it?’
Kitty smiled without speaking. ‘But how did she go
through it? How I should like to know all her love story!’
thought Kitty, recalling the unromantic appearance of
Alexey Alexandrovitch, her husband.
‘I know something. Stiva told me, and I congratulate
you. I liked him so much,’ Anna continued. ‘I met
Vronsky at the railway station.’
‘Oh, was he there?’ asked Kitty, blushing. ‘What was it
Stiva told you?’
‘Stiva gossiped about it all. And I should be so glad...I
traveled yesterday with Vronsky’s mother,’ she went on;
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‘and his mother talked without a pause of him, he’s her
favorite. I know mothers are partial, but..’
‘What did his mother tell you?’
‘Oh, a great deal! And I know that he’s her favorite;
still one can see how chivalrous he is.... Well, for instance,
she told me that he had wanted to give up all his property
to his brother, that he had done something extraordinary
when he was quite a child, saved a woman out of the
water. He’s a hero, in fact,’ said Anna, smiling and
recollecting the two hundred roubles he had given at the
station.
But she did not tell Kitty about the two hundred
roubles. For some reason it was disagreeable to her to
think of it. She felt that there was something that had to
do with her in it, and something that ought not to have
been.
‘She pressed me very much to go and see her,’ Anna
went on; ‘and I shall be glad to go to see her tomorrow.
Stiva is staying a long while in Dolly’s room, thank God,’
Anna added, changing the subject, and getting up, Kitty
fancied, displeased with something.
‘No, I’m first! No, I!’ screamed the children, who had
finished tea, running up to their Aunt Anna.
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‘All together,’ said Anna, and she ran laughing to meet
them, and embraced and swung round all the throng of
swarming children, shrieking with delight.
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Chapter 21
Dolly came out of her room to the tea of the grown-up
people. Stepan Arkadyevitch did not come out. He must
have left his wife’s room by the other door.
‘I am afraid you’ll be cold upstairs,’ observed Dolly,
addressing Anna; ‘I want to move you downstairs, and we
shall be nearer.’
‘Oh, please, don’t trouble about me,’ answered Anna,
looking intently into Dolly’s face, trying to make out
whether there had been a reconciliation or not.
‘It will be lighter for you here,’ answered her sister-inlaw.
‘I assure you that I sleep everywhere, and always like a
marmot.’
‘What’s the question?’ inquired Stepan Arkadyevitch,
coming out of his room and addressing his wife.
From his tone both Kitty and Anna knew that a
reconciliation had taken place.
‘I want to move Anna downstairs, but we must hang
up blinds. No one knows how to do it; I must see to it
myself,’ answered Dolly addressing him.
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‘God knows whether they are fully reconciled,’
thought Anna, hearing her tone, cold and composed.
‘Oh, nonsense, Dolly, always making difficulties,’
answered her husband. ‘Come, I’ll do it all, if you like..’
‘Yes, They must be reconciled,’ thought Anna.
‘I know how you do everything,’ answered Dolly.
‘You tell Matvey to do what can’t be done, and go away
yourself, leaving him to make a muddle of everything,’
and her habitual, mocking smile curved the corners of
Dolly’s lips as she spoke.
‘Full, full reconciliation, full,’ thought Anna; ‘thank
God!’ and rejoicing that she was the cause of it, she went
up to Dolly and kissed her.
‘Not at all. Why do you always look down on me and
Matvey?’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling hardly
perceptibly, and addressing his wife.
The whole evening Dolly was, as always, a little
mocking in her tone to her husband, while Stepan
Arkadyevitch was happy and cheerful, but not so as to
seem as though, having been forgiven, he had forgotten
his offense.
At half-past nine o’clock a particularly joyful and
pleasant family conversation over the tea-table at the
Oblonskys’ was broken up by an apparently simple
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incident. But this simple incident for some reason struck
everyone as strange. Talking about common acquaintances
in Petersburg, Anna got up quickly.
‘She is in my album,’ she said; ‘and, by the way, I’ll
show you by Seryozha,’ she added, with a mother’s smile
of pride.
Towards ten o’clock, when she usually said good-night
to her son, and often before going to a ball put him to bed
herself, she felt depressed at being so far from him; and
whatever she was talking about, she kept coming back in
thought to her curly-headed Seryozha. She longed to look
at his photograph and talk of him. Seizing the first pretext,
she got up, and with her light, resolute step went for her
album. The stairs up to her room came out on the landing
of the great warm main staircase.
Just as she was leaving the drawing room, a ring was
heard in the hall.
‘Who can that be?’ said Dolly
‘It’s early for me to be fetched, and for anyone else it’s
late,’ observed Kitty.
‘Sure to be someone with papers for me,’ put in Stepan
Arkadyevitch. When Anna was passing the top of the
staircase, a servant was running up to announce the visitor,
while the visitor himself was standing under a lamp. Anna
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