Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  No, I won't… I can't quarrel with you. Of course you couldn't come. No, I won't.' She laid her two hands on his shoulders, and looked a long while at him with a profound, passionate, and at the same time searching look. She was studying his face to make up for the time she had not seen him. She was, every time she saw him, making the picture of him in her imagination (incomparably superior, impossible in reality) fit with him as he really was. III 'Y ou met him?' she asked, when they sat down at the table in the lamp-light. 'You're punished, you see, for being late.' 'Yes; but how was it? Wasn't he to be at the council?' 'He had been and come back, and was going out somewhere again. But that's no matter. Don't talk about it. Where have you been? With the prince still?' She knew every detail of his existence. He was going to say that he had been up all night and had dropped asleep, but looking at her thrilled and rapturous face, he was ashamed. And he said he had had to go to report on the prince's departure. 'But it's over now ? He is gone ?' 'Thank God it's over! You wouldn't believe how insufferable it's been for me.' 'Why so? Isn't it the life all of you, all young men, always lead?' she said, knitting her brows; and taking up the crochet-work that was lying on the table, she began drawing the hook out of it, without looking at Vronsky. 'I gave that life up long ago,' said he, wondering at the change in her face, and trying to divine its meaning. 'And I confess,' he said, with a smile, showing his thick, white teeth, 'this week I've been, as it were, looking at myself in a glass, seeing that life, and I didn't like it.' She held the work in her hands, but did not crochet, and looked at him with strange, shining, and hostile eyes. 'This morning Liza came to see me—they're not afraid to call on me, in spite of the Countess Lidia Ivanovna,' she put in—'and she told me about your Athenian evening. How loathsome!' 'I was just going to say . . . ' She interrupted him. 'It was that Thérèse you used to know?' 'I was just saying . . . ' 'How disgusting you are, you men! How is it you can't understand that a woman can never forget that,' she said, getting more and more angry, and so letting him see the cause of her irritation, 'especially a woman who cannot know your life? What do I know? What have I ever known?' she said, 'what you tell me. And how do I know whether you tell me the truth? . . . ' 'Anna, you hurt me. Don't you trust me?

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  '—instant of passion?' . . . he said, and would have gone on, but at that word, as at a pang of physical pain, her lips stiffened again, and again the muscles of her right cheek worked. 'Go away, go out of the room!' she shrieked still more shrilly, 'and don't talk to me of your passion and your loathsomeness.' She tried to go out, but tottered, and clung to the back of a chair to support herself. His face relaxed, his lips swelled, his eyes were swimming with tears. 'Dolly!' he said, sobbing now; 'for mercy's sake, think of the children; they are not to blame! I am to blame, and punish me, make me expiate my fault. Anything I can do, I am ready to do anything! I am to blame, no words can express how much I am to blame! But, Dolly, forgive me!' She sat down. He listened to her hard, heavy breathing, and he was unutterably sorry for her. She tried several times to begin to speak, but could not. He waited. 'You remember the children, Stiva, to play with them; but I remember them, and know that this means their ruin,' she said—obviously one of the phrases she had more than once repeated to herself in the course of the last three days. She had called him 'Stiva,' and he glanced at her with gratitude, and moved to take her hand, but she drew back from him with aversion. 'I think of the children, and for that reason I would do anything in the world to save them; but I don't myself know how to save them. By taking them away from their father, or by leaving them with a vicious father—yes, a vicious father. . . . Tell me, after what . . . has happened, can we live together? Is that possible? Tell me, eh, is it possible?' she repeated, raising her voice, 'after my husband, the father of my children, enters into a love-affair with his own children's governess?' 'But what could I do? what could I do?' he kept saying in a pitiful voice, not knowing what he was saying, as his head sank lower and lower. 'You are loathsome to me, repulsive!' she shrieked, getting more and more heated. 'Your tears mean nothing! You have never loved me; you have neither heart nor honourable feeling! You are hateful to me, disgusting, a stranger—yes, a complete stranger!' With pain and wrath she uttered the word so terrible to herself— stranger. He looked at her, and the fury expressed in her face alarmed and amazed him. He did not understand how his pity for her exasperated her. She saw in him sympathy for her, but not love. 'No, she hates me. She will not forgive me,' he thought. 'It is awful! awful!' he said.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'Come, now…. In the first place, the dispensary is needed. We ourselves sent for the district doctor for Agafea Mihalovna.' 'Oh, well, but I fancy her wrist will never be straight again.' 'That remains to be proved…. Next, the peasant who can read and write is as a workman of more use and value to you.' 'No; you can ask anyone you like,' Konstantin Levin answered with decision, 'the man that can read and write is much inferior as a workman. And mending the high-roads is an impossibility; and as soon as they put up bridges they're stolen.' 'Still, that's not the point,' said Sergey Ivanovitch, frowning. He disliked contradiction, and still more, arguments that were continually skipping from one thing to another, introducing new and disconnected points, so that there was no knowing to which to reply. 'Do you admit that education is a benefit for the people?' 'Yes, I admit it,' said Levin without thinking, and he was conscious immediately that he had said what he did not think. He felt that if he admitted that it would be proved that he had been talking meaningless rubbish. How it would be proved he could not tell, but he knew that this would inevitably be logically proved to him, and he awaited the proofs. The argument turned out to be far simpler than he had expected. 'If you admit that it is a benefit,' said Sergey Ivanovitch, 'then, as an honest man, you cannot help caring about it and sympathising with the movement, and so wishing to work for it.' 'But I still do not admit this movement to be just,' said Konstantin Levin, reddening a little. 'What! But you said just now…' 'That's to say, I don't admit it's being either good or possible.' 'That you can't tell without making the trial.' 'Well, supposing that's so,' said Levin, though he did not suppose so at all, 'supposing that is so, still I don't see, all the same, what I'm to worry myself about it for.' 'How so?' 'No; since we are talking, explain it to me from the philosophical point of view,' said Levin. 'I can't see where philosophy comes in,' said Sergey Ivanovitch, in a tone, Levin fancied, as though he did not admit his brother's right to talk about philosophy. And that irritated Levin. 'I'll tell you, then,' he said with heat, 'I imagine the mainspring of all our actions is, after all, self-interest. Now in the local institutions I, as a nobleman, see nothing that could conduce to my prosperity, and the roads are not better and could not be better; my horses carry me well enough over bad ones. Doctors and dispensaries are no use to me.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Before he had driven many paces away, the dark clouds that had been threatening rain all day broke, and there was a heavy downpour of rain. 'What a pity!' thought Vronsky, putting up the roof of the carriage. 'It was muddy before, now it will be a perfect swamp.' As he sat in solitude in the closed carriage, he took out his mother's letter and his brother's note, and read them through. Yes, it was the same thing over and over again. Everyone, his mother, his brother, everyone thought fit to interfere in the affairs of his heart. This interference aroused in him a feeling of angry hatred— a feeling he had rarely known before. 'What business is it of theirs? Why does everybody feel called upon to concern himself about me? And why do they worry me so? Just because they see that this is something they can't understand. If it were a common, vulgar, worldly intrigue, they would have left me alone. They feel that this is something different, that this is not a mere pastime, that this woman is dearer to me than life. And this is incomprehensible, and that's why it annoys them. Whatever our destiny is or may be, we have made it ourselves, and we do not complain of it,' he said, in the word we linking himself with Anna. 'No, they must needs teach us how to live. They haven't an idea of what happiness is; they don't know that without our love, for us there is neither happiness nor unhappiness—no life at all,' he thought. He was angry with all of them for their interference just because he felt in his soul that they, all these people, were right. He felt that the love that bound him to Anna was not a momentary impulse, which would pass, as worldly intrigues do pass, leaving no other traces in the life of either but pleasant or unpleasant memories. He felt all the torture of his own and her position, all the difficulty there was for them, conspicuous as they were in the eye of all the world, in concealing their love, in lying and deceiving; and in lying, deceiving, feigning, and continually thinking of others, when the passion that united them was so intense that they were both oblivious of everything else but their love. He vividly recalled all the constantly recurring instances of inevitable necessity for lying and deceit, which were so against his natural bent. He recalled particularly vividly the shame he had more than once detected in her at this necessity for lying and deceit. And he experienced the strange feeling that had sometimes come upon him since his secret love for Anna. This was a feeling of loathing for something—whether for Alexey Alexandrovitch, or for himself, or for the whole world, he could not have said.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'There was absolutely nothing in it. That's just what I say, it was awfully stupid. Well, then, when do you think of going?' Anna shook her head as though trying to drive away some unpleasant idea. 'When? Why, the sooner the better! By tomorrow we shan't be ready. The day after tomorrow.' 'Yes . . . oh no, wait a minute! The day after tomorrow's Sunday, I have to be at maman's,' said Vronsky, embarrassed, because as soon as he uttered his mother's name he was aware of her intent, suspicious eyes. His embarrassment confirmed her suspicion. She flushed hotly and drew away from him. It was now not the Queen of Sweden's swimming-mistress who filled Anna's imagination, but the young Princess Sorokin. She was staying in a village near Moscow with Countess Vronsky. 'Can't you go tomorrow?' she said. 'Well, no! The deeds and the money for the business I'm going there for I can't get by tomorrow,' he answered. 'If so, we won't go at all.' 'But why so?' 'I shall not go later. Monday or never!' 'What for?' said Vronsky, as though in amazement. 'Why there's no meaning in it!' 'There's no meaning in it to you, because you care nothing for me. You don't care to understand my life. The one thing that I cared for here was Hannah. You say it's affectation. Why, you said yesterday that I don't love my daughter, that I love this English girl, that it's unnatural. I should like to know what life there is for me that could be natural!' For an instant she had a clear vision of what she was doing, and was horrified at how she had fallen away from her resolution. But even though she knew it was her own ruin, she could not restrain herself, could not keep herself from proving to him that he was wrong, could not give way to him. 'I never said that; I said I did not sympathise with this sudden passion.' 'How is it, though you boast of your straightforwardness, you don't tell the truth?' 'I never boast, and I never tell lies,' he said slowly, restraining his rising anger. 'It's a great pity if you can't respect…' 'Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be. And if you don't love me any more, it would be better and more honest to say so. 'No, this is becoming unbearable!' cried Vronsky, getting up from his chair; and stopping short, facing her, he said, speaking deliberately: 'What do you try my patience for?' looking as though he might have said much more, but was restraining himself. 'It has limits.' 'What do you mean by that?' she cried, looking with terror at the undisguised hatred in his whole face, and especially in his cruel, menacing eyes. 'I mean to say . . .

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Receive him. Alexey Vronsky is the soul of honour, and he is going away to Tashkend.' 'Thank you, princess, for your sympathy and advice. But the question of whether my wife can or cannot see anyone she must decide herself.' He said this from habit, lifting his brows with dignity, and reflected immediately that whatever his words might be, there could be no dignity in his position. And he saw this by the suppressed, malicious, and ironical smile with which Betsy glanced at him after this phrase. XX A LEXEY A LEXANDROVITCH took leave of Betsy in the drawing-room, and went to his wife. She was lying down, but hearing his steps she sat up hastily in her former attitude, and looked in a scared way at him. He saw she had been crying. 'I am very grateful for your confidence in me.' He repeated gently in Russian the phrase he had said in Betsy's presence in French, and sat down beside her. When he spoke to her in Russian, using the Russian 'thou' of intimacy and affection, it was insufferably irritating to Anna. 'And I am very grateful for your decision. I, too, imagine that since he is going away, there is no sort of necessity for Count Vronsky to come here. However, if…' 'But I've said so already, so why repeat it?' Anna suddenly interrupted him with an irritation she could not succeed in repressing. 'No sort of necessity,' she thought, 'for a man to come and say good-bye to the woman he loves, for whom he was ready to ruin himself, and has ruined himself, and who cannot live without him. No sort of necessity!' She compressed her lips, and dropped her burning eyes to his hands with their swollen veins. They were rubbing each other. 'Let us never speak of it,' she added more calmly. 'I have left this question to you to decide, and I am very glad to see…' Alexey Alexandrovitch was beginning. 'That my wish coincides with your own,' she finished quickly, exasperated at his talking so slowly while she knew beforehand all he would say. 'Yes,' he assented; 'and Princess Tverskoy's interference in the most difficult private affairs is utterly uncalled for. She especially . . .' 'I don't believe a word of what's said about her,' said Anna quickly. 'I know she really cares for me.' Alexey Alexandrovitch sighed and said nothing. She played nervously with the tassel of her dressing-gown, glancing at him with that torturing sensation of physical repulsion for which she blamed herself, though she could not control it. Her only desire now was to be rid of his oppressive presence. 'I have just sent for the doctor,' said Alexey Alexandrovitch. 'I am very well; what do I want the doctor for?'

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  As he drove up to the Karenins' entrance he looked at his watch and saw it was ten minutes to nine. A high, narrow carriage with a pair of greys was standing at the entrance. He recognised Anna's carriage. 'She is coming to me,' thought Vronsky, and better she should. I don't like going into that house. But no matter; I can't hide myself,' he thought, and with that manner peculiar to him from childhood, as of a man who has nothing to be ashamed of, Vronsky got out of his sledge and went to the door. The door opened, and the hall-porter with a rug on his arm called the carriage. Vronsky, though he did not usually notice details, noticed at this moment the amazed expression with which the porter glanced at him. In the very doorway Vronsky almost ran up against Alexey Alexandrovitch. The gas jet threw its full light on the bloodless, sunken face under the black hat and on the white cravat, brilliant against the beaver of the coat. Karenin's fixed, dull eyes were fastened upon Vronsky's face. Vronsky bowed, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, chewing his lips, lifted his hand to his hat and went on. Vronsky saw him without looking round get into the carriage, pick up the rug and the opera-glass at the window and disappear. Vronsky went into the hall. His brows were scowling, and his eyes gleamed with a proud and angry light in them. 'What a position!' he thought. 'If he would fight, would stand up for his honour, I could act, could express my feelings; but this weakness or baseness . . . He puts me in the position of playing false, which I never meant and never mean to do.' Vronsky's ideas had changed since the day of his conversation with Anna in the Vrede garden. Unconsciously yielding to the weakness of Anna—who had surrendered herself up to him utterly, and simply looked to him to decide her fate, ready to submit to anything—he had long ceased to think that their tie might end as he had thought then. His ambitious plans had retreated into the background again, and feeling that he had got out of that circle of activity in which everything was definite, he had given himself entirely to his passion, and that passion was binding him more and more closely to her. He was still in the hall when he caught the sound of her retreating footsteps. He knew she had been expecting him, had listened for him, and was now going back to the drawing-room. 'No,' she cried, on seeing him, and at the first sound of her voice the tears came into her eyes. 'No; if things are to go on like this, the end will come much, much too soon.' 'What is it, dear one?' 'What? I've been waiting in agony for an hour, two hours. . . .

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'What a shame of you not to let us know!' he repeated. 'I had no time; I am very busy,' Alexey Alexandrovitch responded dryly. 'Come to my wife, she does so want to see you.' Alexey Alexandrovitch unfolded the rug in which his frozen feet were wrapped, and getting out of his carriage made his way over the snow to Darya Alexandrovna. 'Why, Alexey Alexandrovitch, what are you cutting us like this for?' said Dolly, smiling. 'I was very busy. Delighted to see you!' he said in a tone clearly indicating that he was annoyed by it. 'How are you?' 'Tell me, how is my darling Anna?' Alexey Alexandrovitch mumbled something and would have gone on. But Stepan Arkadyevitch stopped him. 'I tell you what we'll do tomorrow. Dolly, ask him to dinner. We'll ask Koznishev and Pestsov, so as to entertain him with our Moscow celebrities.' 'Yes, please, do come,' said Dolly; 'we will expect you at five, or six o'clock, if you like. How is my darling Anna? How long . . .' 'She is quite well,' Alexey Alexandrovitch mumbled, frowning. 'Delighted !' and he moved away towards his carriage. 'You will come?' Dolly called after him. Alexey Alexandrovitch said something which Dolly could not catch in the noise of the moving carriages. 'I shall come round tomorrow!' Stepan Arkadyevitch shouted to him. Alexey Alexandrovitch got into his carriage, and buried himself in it so as neither to see nor be seen. 'Queer fish!' said Stepan Arkadyevitch to his wife, and glancing at his watch, he made a motion of his hand before his face, indicating a caress to his wife and children, and walked jauntily along the pavement. 'Stiva! Stiva!' Dolly called, reddening. He turned round. 'I must get coats, you know, for Grisha and Tanya. Give me the money.' 'Never mind; you tell them I'll pay the bill!' and he vanished, nodding genially to an acquaintance who drove by. VII T HE next day was Sunday. Stepan Arkadyevitch went to the Grand Theatre to a rehearsal of the ballet, and gave Masha Tchibisov, a pretty dancing-girl whom he had just taken under his protection, the coral necklace he had promised her the evening before, and behind the scenes in the dim daylight of the theatre, managed to kiss her pretty little face, radiant over her present. Besides the gift of the necklace, he wanted to arrange with her about meeting after the ballet.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Before the mare had time to move, Vronsky stepped with an agile, vigorous movement into the steel-toothed stirrup, and lightly and firmly seated himself on the creaking leather of the saddle. Getting his right foot in the stirrup, he smoothed the double reins, as he always did, between his fingers, and Cord let go. As though she did not know which foot to put first, Frou-Frou started, dragging at the reins with her long neck, and as though she were on springs, shaking her rider from side to side. Cord quickened his step, following him. The excited mare, trying to shake off her rider first on one side and then the other, pulled at the reins, and Vronsky tried in vain with voice and hand to soothe her. They were just reaching the dammed-up stream on their way to the starting-point. Several of the riders were in front and several behind, when suddenly Vronsky heard the sound of a horse galloping in the mud behind him, and he was overtaken by Mahotin on his white-legged, lop-eared Gladiator. Mahotin smiled, showing his long teeth, but Vronsky looked angrily at him. He did not like him, and regarded him now as his most formidable rival. He was angry with him for galloping past and exciting his mare. Frou-Frou started into a gallop, her left foot forward, made two bounds, and fretting at the tightened reins, passed into a jolting trot, bumping her rider up and down. Cord too scowled, and followed Vronsky almost at a trot. XXV T HERE were seventeen officers in all riding in this race. The racecourse was a large three-mile ring of the form of an ellipse in front of the pavilion. On this course nine obstacles had been arranged: the stream, a big and solid barrier five feet high, just before the pavilion, a dry ditch, a ditch full of water, a precipitous slope, an Irish barricade (one of the most difficult obstacles, consisting of a mound fenced with brushwood, beyond which was a ditch out of sight for the horses, so that the horse had to clear both obstacles or might be killed); then two more ditches filled with water, and one dry one; and the end of the race was just facing the pavilion. But the race began not in the ring, but two hundred yards away from it, and in that part of the course was the first obstacle, a dammed-up stream, seven feet in breadth, which the racers could leap or wade through as they preferred. Three times they were ranged ready to start, but each time some horse thrust itself out of line, and they had to begin again. The umpire who was starting them, Colonel Sestrin, was beginning to lose his temper, when at last for the fourth time he shouted 'Away!' and the racers started. Every eye, every opera-glass, was turned on the brightly coloured group of riders at the moment they were in line to start. 'They're off!

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Mihailov fancied that the picture had made an impression on them too. He went up to them. 'How marvellous Christ's expression is!' said Anna. Of all she saw she liked that expression most of all, and she felt that it was the centre of the picture, and so praise of it would be pleasant to the artist. 'One can see that He is pitying Pilate.' This again was one of the million true reflections that could be found in his picture and in the figure of Christ. She said that He was pitying Pilate. In Christ's expression there ought to be indeed an expression of pity, since there is an expression of love, of heavenly peace, of readiness for death, and of a sense of the vanity of words. Of course there is the expression of an official in Pilate and of pity in Christ, seeing that one is the incarnation of the fleshly and the other of the spiritual life. All this and much more flashed into Mihailov's thoughts. 'Yes, and how that figure is done—what atmosphere! One can walk round it,' said Golenishtchev, unmistakably betraying by his remark that he did not approve of the meaning and idea of the figure. 'Yes, there's a wonderful mastery!' said Vronsky. 'How those figures in the background stand out. There you have technique,' he said, addressing Golenishtchev, alluding to a conversation between them about Vronsky's despair of attaining this technique. 'Yes, yes, marvellous!' Golenishtchev and Anna assented. In spite of the excited condition in which he was, the sentence about technique had sent a pang to Mihailov's heart, and looking angrily at Vronsky he suddenly scowled. He had often heard this word technique, and was utterly unable to understand what was understood by it. He knew that by this term was understood a mechanical facility for painting or drawing, entirely apart from its subject. He had noticed often that even in actual praise technique was opposed to essential quality, as though one could paint well something that was bad. He knew that a great deal of attention and care was necessary in taking off the coverings, to avoid injuring the creation itself, and to take off all the coverings; but there was no art of painting—no technique of any sort—about it. If to a little child or to his cook were revealed what he saw, it or she would have been able to peel the wrappings off what was seen. And the most experienced and adroit painter could not by mere mechanical facility paint anything if the lines of the subject were not revealed to him first.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'I know no man more strict in the performance of his duties,' said Darya Alexandrovna, irritated by Vronsky's tone of superiority. 'For my part,' pursued Vronsky, who was evidently for some reason or other keenly affected by this conversation, 'such as I am, I am, on the contrary, extremely grateful for the honour they have done me, thanks to Nikolay Ivanitch' (he indicated Sviazhsky), 'in electing me a justice of the peace. I consider that for me the duty of being present at the session, of judging some peasants' quarrel about a horse, is as important as anything I can do. And I shall regard it as an honour if they elect me for the district council. It's only in that way I can pay for the advantages I enjoy as a landowner. Unluckily they don't understand the weight that the big landowners ought to have in the state.' It was strange to Darya Alexandrovna to hear how serenely confident he was of being right at his own table. She thought how Levin, who believed the opposite, was just as positive in his opinions at his own table. But she loved Levin, and so she was on his side. 'So we can reckon upon you, count, for the coming elections?' said Sviazhsky. 'But you must come a little beforehand, so as to be on the spot by the eighth. If you would do me the honour to stop with me.' 'I rather agree with your beau-frère,' said Anna, 'though not quite on the same ground as he,' she added with a smile. 'I'm afraid that we have too many of these public duties in these latter days. Just as in old days there were so many government functionaries that one had to call in a functionary for every single thing, so now everyone's doing some sort of public duty Alexey has been here now six months, and he's a member, I do believe, of five or six different public bodies. Du train que cela va, the whole time will be wasted on it. And I'm afraid that with such a multiplicity of these bodies, they'll end in being a mere form. How many are you a member of, Nikolay Ivanitch?' she turned to Sviazhsky—'over twenty, I fancy.' Anna spoke lightly, but irritation could be discerned in her tone. Darya Alexandrovna, watching Anna and Vronsky, attentively, detected it instantly.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Considering and rejecting the duel, Alexey Alexandrovitch turned to divorce—another solution selected by several of the husbands he remembered. Passing in mental review all the instances he knew of divorces (there were plenty of them in the very highest society with which he was very familiar), Alexey Alexandrovitch could not find a single example in which the object of divorce was that which he had in view. In all these instances the husband had practically ceded or sold his unfaithful wife, and the very party which, being in fault, had not the right to contract a fresh marriage, had formed counterfeit, pseudo-matrimonial ties with a self- styled husband. In his own case, Alexey Alexandrovitch saw that a legal divorce, that is to say, one in which only the guilty wife would be repudiated, was impossible of attainment. He saw that the complex conditions of the life they led made the coarse proofs of his wife's guilt, required by the law, out of the question; he saw that a certain refinement in that life would not admit of such proofs being brought forward, even if he had them, and that to bring forward such proofs would damage him in the public estimation more than it would her. An attempt at divorce could lead to nothing but a public scandal, which would be a perfect godsend to his enemies for calumny and attacks on his high position in society. His chief object, to define the position with the least amount of disturbance possible, would not be attained by divorce either. Moreover, in the event of divorce, or even of an attempt to obtain a divorce, it was obvious that the wife broke off all relations with the husband and threw in her lot with the lover. And in spite of the complete, as he supposed, contempt and indifference he now felt for his wife, at the bottom of his heart Alexey Alexandrovitch still had one feeling left in regard to her—a disinclination to see her free to throw in her lot with Vronsky, so that her crime would be to her advantage. The mere notion of this so exasperated Alexey Alexandrovitch, that directly it rose to his mind he groaned with inward agony, and got up and changed his place in the carriage, and for a long while after he sat with scowling brows, wrapping his numbed and bony legs in the fleecy rug. 'Apart from formal divorce, one might still do like Karibanov, Paskudin, and that good fellow Dram—that is, separate from one's wife,' he went on thinking, when he had regained his composure. But this step too presented the same drawback of public scandal as a divorce, and what was more, a separation, quite as much as a regular divorce, flung his wife into the arms of Vronsky.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The snipe showed themselves in numbers. They kept flying up from just under the dogs, from under the sportmen's legs, and Levin might have retrieved his ill-luck. But the more he shot, the more he felt disgraced in the eyes of Veslovsky, who kept popping away merrily and indiscriminately, killing nothing, and not in the slightest abashed by his ill-success. Levin, in feverish haste, could not restrain himself, got more and more out of temper, and ended by shooting almost without a hope of hitting. Laska, indeed, seemed to understand this. She began looking more languidly, and gazed back at the sportsmen, as it were, with perplexity or reproach in her eyes. Shots fol lowed shots in rapid succession. The smoke of the powder hung about the sportsmen, while in the great roomy net of the game-bag there were only three light little snipe. And of these one had been killed by Veslovsky alone, and one by both of them together. Meanwhile from the other side of the marsh came the sound of Stepan Arkadyevitch's shots, not frequent, but, as Levin fancied, well-directed, for almost after each they heard 'Krak, Krak, apporte !' This excited Levin still more. The snipe were floating continually in the air over the reeds. Their whirring wings close to the earth, and their harsh cries high in the air, could be heard on all sides; the snipe that had risen first and flown up into the air, settled again before the sportsmen. Instead of two hawks there were now dozens of them hovering with shrill cries over the marsh. After walking through the larger half of the marsh, Levin and Veslovsky reached the place where the peasants' mowing-grass was divided into long strips reaching to the reeds, marked off in one place by the trampled grass, in another by a path mown through it. Half of these strips had already been mown. Though there was not so much hope of finding birds in the uncut part as the cut part, Levin had promised Stepan Arkadyevitch to meet him, and so he walked on with his companion through the cut and uncut patches. 'Hi, sportsmen!' shouted one of a group of peasants, sitting on an unharnessed cart; 'come and have some lunch with us! Have a drop of wine!' Levin looked round. 'Come along, it's all right!' shouted a good-humoured-looking bearded peasant with a red face, showing his white teeth in a grin, and holding up a greenish bottle that flashed in the sunlight. 'Qu'est-ce qu'ils disent? asked Veslovsky. 'They invite you to have some vodka. Most likely they've been dividing the meadow into lots. I should have some,' said Levin, not without some guile, hoping Veslovsky would be tempted by the vodka, and would go away to them. 'Why do they offer it?' 'Oh, they're merry-making. Really, you should join them.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Anna, forgetting her inward agitation in the work of packing, was standing at a table in her boudoir, packing her travelling-bag, when Annushka called her attention to the rattle of some carriage driving up. Anna looked out of window and saw Alexey Alexandrovitch's courier on the steps, ringing at the front door bell. 'Run and find out what it is,' she said, and with a calm sense of being prepared for anything, she sat down in a low chair, folding her hands on her knees. A footman brought in a thick packet directed in Alexey Alexandrovitch's hand. 'The courier has orders to wait for an answer,' he said. 'Very well,' she said, and as soon as he had left the room she tore open the letter with trembling fingers. A roll of unfolded notes done up in a wrapper fell out of it. She disengaged the letter and began reading it at the end. 'Preparations shall be made for your arrival here. . . . I attach particular significance to compliance . . .' she read. She ran on, then back, read it all through, and once more read the letter all though again from the beginning. When she had finished she felt that she was cold all over, and that a fearful calamity, such as she had not expected, had burst upon her. In the morning she had regretted that she had spoken to her husband, and wished for nothing so much as that those words could be unspoken. And here this letter regarded them as unspoken, and gave her what she had wanted. But now this letter seemed to her more awful than anything she had been able to conceive. 'He's right!' she said; 'of course, he's always right; he's a Christian, he's generous! Yes, vile, base creature! And no one understands it except me, and no one ever will; and I can't explain it. They say he's so religious, so high-principled, so upright, so clever; but they don't see what I've seen. They don't know how he has crushed my life for eight years, crushed everything that was living in me—he has not once even thought that I'm a live woman who must have love. They don't know how at every step he's humiliated me, and been just as pleased with himself. Haven't I striven, striven with all my strength, to find something to give meaning to my life? Haven't I struggled to love him, to love my son when I could not love my husband? But the time came when I knew that I couldn't cheat myself any longer, that I was alive, that I was not to blame, that God has made me so that I must love and live.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'But I don't care to know!' she almost shrieked. 'I don't care to. Do I regret what I have done? No, no, no! If it were all to do again from the beginning, it would be the same. For us, for you and for me, there is only one thing that matters, whether we love each other. Other people we need not consider. Why are we living here apart and not seeing each other? Why can't I go? I love you, and I don't care for anything,' she said in Russian, glancing at him with a peculiar gleam in her eyes that he could not understand. 'If you have not changed to me, why don't you look at me?' He looked at her. He saw all the beauty of her face and full dress, always so becoming to her. But now her beauty and elegance were just what irritated him. 'My feeling cannot change, you know, but I beg you, I entreat you,' he said again in French, with a note of tender supplication in his voice, but with coldness in his eyes. She did not hear his words, but she saw the coldness of his eves, and answered with irritation— 'And I beg you to explain why I should not go.' 'Because it might cause you…' He hesitated. 'I don't understand. Yashvin n' est pas compromettant, and Princess Varvara is no worse than others. Oh, here she is!' XXXIII V RONSKY for the first time experienced a feeling of anger against Anna, almost a hatred for her wilfully refusing to understand her own position. This feeling was aggravated by his being unable to tell her plainly the cause of his anger. If he had told her directly what he was thinking, he would have said— 'In that dress, with a princess only too well known to everyone, to show yourself at the theatre is equivalent not merely to acknowledging your position as a fallen woman, but is flinging down a challenge to society, that is to say, cutting yourself off from it for ever.' He could not say that to her. 'But how can she fail to see it, and what is going on in her?' he said to himself. He felt at the same time that his respect for her was diminished while his sense of her beauty was intensified. He went back scowling to his rooms, and sitting down beside Yashvin, who, with his long legs stretched out on a chair, was drinking brandy and seltzer water, he ordered a glass of the same for himself. 'You were talking of Lankovsky's Powerful.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He knew all the difficulties connected with this course, but he had said he would do it, and now he must carry out his threat. Countess Lidia Ivanovna had hinted that this was the best way out of his position, and of late the obtaining of divorces had been brought to such perfection, that Alexey Alexandro vitch saw a possibility of overcoming the formal difficulties. Misfortunes never come singly, and the affairs of the reorganisation of the native tribes, and of the irrigation of the lands of the Zaraisky province, had brought such official worries upon Alexey Alexandrovitch, that he had been of late in a continual condition of extreme irritability. He did not sleep the whole night, and his fury growing in a sort of vast, arithmetical progression, reached its highest limits in the morning. He dressed in haste, and as though carrying his cup full of wrath, and fearing to spill any over, fearing to lose with his wrath the energy necessary for the interview with his wife, he went into her room directly he heard she was up. Anna, who thought she knew her husband so well was amazed at his appearance when he went in to her. His brow was lowering, and his eyes stared darkly before him, avoiding her eyes; his mouth was tightly and contemptuously shut. In his walk, in his gestures, in the sound of his voice there was a determination and firmness such as his wife had never seen in him. He went into her room, and without greeting her, walked straight up to her writing-table, and taking her keys, opened a drawer. 'What do you want?' she cried. 'Your lover's letters,' he said. 'They're not here,' she said, shutting the drawer; but from that action he saw he had guessed right, and roughly pushing away her hand, he quickly snatched a portfolio in which he knew she used to put her most important papers. She tried to pull the portfolio away, but he pushed her back. 'Sit down! I have to speak to you,' he said, putting the portfolio under his arm, and squeezing it so tightly with his elbow that his shoulder stood up. Amazed and intimidated, she gazed at him in silence. 'I told you that I would not allow you to receive your lover in this house.' 'I had to see him to . . . ' She stopped, not finding a reason. 'I do not enter into the details of why a woman wants to see her lover.' 'I meant, I only . . .' she said, flushing hotly. This coarseness of his angered her, and gave her courage. 'Surely you must feel how easy it is for you to insult me?' she said. 'An honest man and an honest woman may be insulted, but to tell a thief he's a thief is simply la constatation d'un fait.'

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Come, tell us how does your land do—does it pay?' said Levin, and at once in Sviazhsky's eyes he detected that fleeting expression of alarm which he had noticed whenever he had tried to penetrate beyond the outer chambers of Sviazhsky's mind. Moreover, this question on Levin's part was not quite in good faith. Madame Sviazhsky had just told him at tea that they had that summer invited a German expert in book-keeping from Moscow, who for a consideration of five hundred roubles had investigated the management of their property, and found that it was costing them a loss of three thousand odd roubles. She did not remember the precise sum, but it appeared that the German had worked it out to the fraction of a farthing. The grey-whiskered landowner smiled at the mention of the profits of Sviazhsky's farming, obviously aware how much gain his neighbour and marshal was likely to be making. 'Possibly it does not pay,' answered Sviazhsky. 'That merely proves either that I'm a bad manager, or that I've sunk my capital for the increase of my rents.' 'Oh, rent!' Levin cried with horror. 'Rent there may be in Europe, where land has been improved by the labour put into it; but with us all the land is deteriorating from the labour put into it—in other words, they're working it out; so there's no question of rent.' 'How no rent? It's a law.' 'Then we're outside the law; rent explains nothing for us, but simply muddles us. No, tell me how there can be a theory of rent? . . . ' 'Will you have some junket? Masha, pass us some junket or raspberries.' He turned to his wife. 'Extraordinarily late the raspberries are lasting this year.' And in the happiest frame of mind Sviazhsky got up and walked off, apparently supposing the conversation to have ended at the very point when to Levin it seemed that it was only just beginning. Having lost his antagonist, Levin continued the conversation with the grey-whiskered landowner, trying to prove to him that all the difficulty arises from the fact that we don't find out the peculiarities and habits of our labourer; but the landowner, like all men who think independently and in isolation, was slow in taking in any other person's idea, and particularly partial to his own.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  She could not guess that that expression arose from the first idea that presented itself to Vronsky—that a duel was now inevitable. The idea of a duel had never crossed her mind, and so she put a different interpretation on this passing expression of hardness. When she got her husband's letter, she knew then at the bottom of her heart that everything would go on in the old way, that she would not have the strength of will to forego her position, to abandon her son, and to join her lover. The morning spent at Princess Tverskoy's had confirmed her still more in this. But this interview was still of the utmost gravity for her. She hoped that this interview would transform her position, and save her. If on hearing this news he were to say to her resolutely, passionately, without an instant's wavering: 'Throw up everything and come with me!' she would give up her son and go away with him. But this news had not produced what she had expected in him; he simply seemed as though he were resenting some affront. 'It was not in the least painful for me. It happened of itself,' she said irritably; 'and see . . .' She pulled her husband's letter out of her glove. 'I understand, I understand,' he interrupted her, taking the letter, but not reading it, and trying to soothe her. 'The one thing I longed for, the one thing I prayed for, was to cut short this position, so as to devote my life to your happiness.' 'Why do you tell me that?' she said. 'Do you suppose I can doubt it? If I doubted . . . ' 'Who's that coming?' said Vronsky suddenly pointing to two ladies walking towards them. 'Perhaps they know us!' and he hurriedly turned off, drawing her after him into a side path. 'Oh, I don't care!' she said. Her lips were quivering. And he fancied that her eyes looked with strange fury at him from under the veil. 'I tell you that's not the point—I can't doubt that; but see what he writes to me. Read it.' She stood still again.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Alexey Vronsky's frowning face turned white, and his prominent lower jaw quivered, which happened rarely with him. Being a man of very warm heart, he was seldom angry; but when he was angry, and when his chin quivered, then, as Alexander Vronsky knew, he was dangerous. Alexander Vronsky smiled gaily. 'I only wanted to give you mother's letter. Answer it, and don't worry about anything just before the race. Bonne chance,' he added, smiling, and he moved away from him. But after him another friendly greeting brought Vronsky to a standstill. 'So you won't recognise your friends! How are you, mon cher?' said Stepan Arkadyevitch, as conspicuously brilliant in the midst of all the Petersburg brilliance as he was in Moscow, his face rosy, and his whiskers sleek and glossy. 'I came up yesterday, and I'm delighted that I shall see your triumph. When shall we meet?' 'Come tomorrow to the mess-room,' said Vronsky, and squeezing him by the sleeve of his coat, with apologies, he moved away to the centre of the racecourse, where the horses were being led for the great steeplechase. The horses who had run in the last race were being led home, steaming and exhausted, by the stable-boys, and one after another the fresh horses for the coming race made their appearance, for the most part English racers, wearing horse-cloths, and looking with their drawn-up bellies like strange, huge birds. On the right was led in Frou-Frou, lean and beautiful, lifting up her elastic, rather long pasterns, as though moved by springs. Not far from her they were taking the rug off the lop-eared Gladiator. The strong, exquisite, perfectly correct lines of the stallion, with his superb hind-quarters and excessively short pasterns almost over his hoofs, attracted Vronsky's attention in spite of himself. He would have gone up to his mare, but he was again detained by an acquaintance. 'Oh, there's Karenin!' said the acquaintance with whom he was chatting. 'He's looking for his wife, and she's in the middle of the pavilion. Didn't you see her?' 'No,' answered Vronsky, and without even glancing round towards the pavilion where his friend was pointing out Madame Karenin, he went up to his mare. Vronsky had not had time to look at the saddle, about which he had to give some direction, when the competitors were summoned to the pavilion to receive their numbers and places in the row at starting. Seventeen officers, looking serious and severe, many with pale faces, met together in the pavilion and drew the numbers. Vronsky drew the number seven.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'A sham! with what object?' said Varenka gently. 'Oh, it's so idiotic! so hateful! There was no need whatever for me. . . . Nothing but sham!' she said, opening and shutting the parasol. 'But with what object?' 'To seem better to people, to myself, to God; to deceive everyone. No! now I won't descend to that. I'll be bad; but anyway not a liar, a cheat.' 'But who is a cheat?' said Varenka reproachfully. 'You speak as if…' But Kitty was in one of her gusts of fury, and she would not let her finish. 'I don't talk about you, not about you at all. You're perfection. Yes, yes, I know you're all perfection; but what am I to do if I'm bad? This would never have been if I weren't bad. So let me be what I am, I won't be a sham. What have I to do with Anna Pavlovna? Let them go their way, and me go mine. I can't be different. . . . And yet it's not that, it's not that.' 'What is not that?' asked Varenka in bewilderment. 'Everything. I can't act except from the heart, and you act from principle. I liked you simply, but you most likely only wanted to save me, to improve me.' 'You are unjust,' said Varenka. 'But I'm not speaking of other people, I'm speaking of myself.' 'Kitty,' they heard her mother's voice, 'come here, show papa your necklace.' Kitty, with a haughty air, without making peace with her friend, took the necklace in a little box from the table and went to her mother. 'What's the matter? Why are you so red?' her mother and father said to her with one voice. 'Nothing,' she answered. 'I'll be back directly,' and she ran back. 'She's still here,' she thought. 'What am I to say to her? Oh dear! what have I done, what have I said? Why was I rude to her? What am I to do? What am I to say to her?' thought Kitty, and she stopped in the doorway. Varenka in her hat and with the parasol in her hands was sitting at the table, examining the spring which Kitty had broken. She lifted her head. 'Varenka, forgive me, do forgive me,' whispered Kitty, going up to her. 'I don't remember what I said. I . . .' 'I really didn't mean to hurt you,' said Varenka smiling. Peace was made.