Fear

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)

  She laid down the opera-glass, and would have moved away, but at that moment an officer galloped up and made some announcement to the Tsar. Anna craned forward, listening. 'Stiva! Stiva!' she cried to her brother. But her brother did not hear her. Again she would have moved away. 'Once more I offer you my arm if you want to be going,' said Alexey Alexandrovitch, reaching towards her hand. She drew back from him with aversion, and without looking in his face answered— 'No, no, let me be, I'll stay.' She saw now that from the place of Vronsky's accident an officer was running across the course towards the pavilion. Betsy waved her handkerchief to him. The officer brought the news that the rider was not killed, but the horse had broken its back. On hearing this Anna sat down hurriedly, and hid her face in her fan. Alexey Alexandrovitch saw that she was weeping, and could not control her tears, nor even the sobs that were shaking her bosom. Alexey Alexandrovitch stood so as to screen her, giving her time to recover herself. 'For the third time I offer you my arm,' he said to her after a little time, turning to her. Anna gazed at him and did not know what to say. Princess Betsy came to her rescue. 'No, Alexey Alexandrovitch; I brought Anna and I promised to take her home,' put in Betsy. 'Excuse me, princess,' he said, smiling courteously, but looking her very firmly in the face, 'but I see that Anna's not very well, and I wish her to come home with me.' Anna looked about her in a frightened way, got up submissively, and laid her hand on her husband's arm. 'I'll send to him and find out, and let you know,' Betsy whispered to her. As they left the pavilion, Alexey Alexandrovitch, as always, talked to those he met, and Anna had, as always, to talk and answer; but she was utterly beside herself, and moved hanging on her husband's arm as though in a dream. 'Is he killed or not? Is it true? Will he come or not? Shall I see him today?' she was thinking. She took her seat in her husband's carriage in silence, and in silence drove out of the crowd of carriages. In spite of all he had seen, Alexey Alexandrovitch still did not allow himself to consider his wife's real condition. He merely saw the outward symptoms. He saw that she was behaving unbecomingly, and considered it his duty to tell her so. But it was very difficult for him not to say more, to tell her nothing but that. He opened his mouth to tell her she had behaved unbecomingly, but he could not help saving something utterly different.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'We must get a divorce. I will write to him. I see I cannot go on like this . . . But I will come with you to Moscow.' 'You talk as if you were threatening me. But I desire nothing so much as never to be parted from you,' said Vronsky, smiling. But as he said these words there gleamed in his eyes not merely a cold look, but the vindictive look of a man persecuted and made cruel. She saw the look and correctly divined its meaning. 'If so, it's a calamity!' that glance told her. It was a moment's impression, but she never forgot it. Anna wrote to her husband asking him about a divorce, and towards the end of November, taking leave of Princess Varvara, who wanted to go to Petersburg, she went with Vronsky to Moscow. Expecting every day an answer from Alexey Alexandrovitch, and after that the divorce, they now established themselves together like married people. Anna Karenina PART VII I T HE Levins had been three months in Moscow. The date had long passed on which, according to the most trustworthy calculations of people learned in such matters, Kitty should have been confined. But she was still about, and there was nothing to show that her time was any nearer than two months ago. The doctor, the monthly nurse, and Dolly and her mother, and most of all Levin, who could not think of the approaching event without terror, began to be impatient and uneasy. Kitty was the only person who felt perfectly calm and happy. She was distinctly conscious now of the birth of a new feeling of love for the future child, for her to some extent actually existing already, and she brooded blissfully over this feeling. He was not by now altogether a part of herself, but sometimes lived his own life independently of her. Often this separate being gave her pain, but at the same time she wanted to laugh with a strange new joy. All the people she loved were with her, and all were so good to her, so attentively caring for her, so entirely pleasant was everything presented to her, that if she had not known and felt that it must all soon be over, she could not have wished for a better and pleasanter life. The only thing that spoiled the charm of this manner of life was that her husband was not here as she loved him to be, and as he was in the country. She liked his serene, friendly, and hospitable manner in the country. In the town he seemed continually uneasy and on his guard, as though he were afraid someone would be rude to him, and still more to her.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Alexey Alexandrovitch was not jealous. Jealousy according to his notions was an insult to one's wife, and one ought to have confidence in one's wife. Why one ought to have confidence—that is to say complete conviction that his young wife would always love him—he did not ask himself. But he had had no experience of lack of confidence, because he had confidence in her, and told himself that he ought to have it. Now, though his conviction that jealousy was a shameful feeling, and that one ought to feel confidence, had not broken down, he felt that he was standing face to face with something illogical and irrational, and did not know what was to be done. Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife's loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself. All his life Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived and worked in official spheres, having to do with the reflection of life. And every time he had stumbled against life itself he had shrunk away from it. Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man who, while calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge, should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below. That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived. For the first time the question presented itself to him of the possibility of his wife's loving someone else, and he was horrified at it. He did not undress, but walked up and down with his regular tread over the resounding parquet of the dining-room, where one lamp was burning, over the carpet of the dark drawing-room, in which the light was reflected on the big new portrait of himself hanging over the sofa, and across her boudoir, where two candles burned, lighting up the portraits of her parents and woman friends, and the pretty knick-knacks of her writing-table, that he knew so well. He walked across her boudoir to the bedroom door, and turned back again. At each turn in his walk, especially at the parquet of the lighted dining-room, he halted and said to himself, 'Yes, this I must decide and put a stop to; I must express my view of it and my decision.' And he turned back again. 'But express what—what decision?' he said to himself in the drawing-room, and he found no reply. 'But after all,' he asked himself before turning into the boudoir, 'what has occurred? Nothing. She was talking a long while with him. But what of that?

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'He an unbeliever indeed! With his heart, his dread of offending anyone, even a child! Everything for others, nothing for himself. Sergey Ivanovitch simply considers it as Kostya's duty to be his steward. And it's the same with his sister. Now Dolly and her children are under his guardianship; all these peasants who come to him every day, as though he were bound to be at their service.' 'Yes, only be like your father, only like him,' she said, handing Mitya over to the nurse, and putting her lips to his cheek. VIII E VER since, by his beloved brother's deathbed, Levin had first glanced into the questions of life and death in the light of these new convictions, as he called them, which had during the period from his twentieth to his thirty-fourth year imperceptibly replaced his childish and youthful beliefs—he had been stricken with horror, not so much of death, as of life, without any knowledge of whence, and why, and how, and what it was. The physical organisation, its decay, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, evolution, were the words which usurped the place of his old belief. These words and the ideas associated with them were very well for intellectual purposes. But for life they yielded nothing, and Levin felt suddenly like a man who has changed his warm fur cloak for a muslin garment, and going for the first time into the frost is immediately convinced, not by reason, but by his whole nature, that he is as good as naked, and that he must infallibly perish miserably. From that moment, though he did not distinctly face it, and still went on living as before, Levin had never lost this sense of terror at his lack of knowledge. He vaguely felt, too, that what he called his new convictions were not merely lack of knowledge, but that they were part of a whole order of ideas, in which no knowledge of what he needed was possible. At first, marriage, with the new joys and duties bound up with it, had completely crowded out these thoughts. But of late, while he was staying in Moscow after his wife's confinement, with nothing to do, the question that clamoured for solution had more and more often, more and more insistently, haunted Levin's mind. The question was summed up for him thus; 'If I do not accept the answers Christianity gives to the problems of my life, what answers do I accept?'

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Then she heard the carriage brought round, the door opened, and he came out again. But he went back into the porch again, and someone was running upstairs. It was the valet running up for his gloves that had been forgotten. She went to the window and saw him take the gloves without looking, and touching the coachman on the back he said something to him. Then without looking up at the window he settled himself in his usual attitude in the carriage, with his legs crossed, and drawing on his gloves he vanished round the corner. XXVII 'H E has gone! It is over!' Anna said to herself, standing at the window; and in answer to this question the impressions of the darkness when the candle had flickered out, and of her fearful dream mingling into one, filled her heart with cold terror. 'No, that cannot be!' she cried, and crossing the room she rang the bell. She was so afraid now of being alone, that without waiting for the servant to come in, she went out to meet him. 'Inquire where the count has gone,' she said. The servant answered that the count had gone to the stable. 'His honour left word that if you cared to drive out, the carriage would be back immediately.' 'Very good. Wait a minute. I'll write a note at once. Send Mihail with the note to the stables. Make haste.' She sat down and wrote— 'I was wrong. Come back home; I must explain. For God's sake come! I'm afraid.' She sealed it up and gave it to the servant. She was afraid of being left alone now, she followed the servant out of the room, and went to the nursery. 'Why, this isn't it, this isn't he! Where are his blue eyes, his sweet shy smile?' was her first thought when she saw her chubby, rosy little girl with her black, curly hair instead of Seryozha, whom in the tangle of her ideas she had expected to see in the nursery. The little girl sitting at the table was obstinately and violently battering on it with a cork, and staring aimlessly at her mother with her pitch-black eyes. Answering the English nurse that she was quite well,' and that she was going to the country tomorrow, Anna sat down by the little girl and began spinning the cork to show her. But the child's loud, ringing laugh, and the motion of her eyebrows, recalled Vronsky so vividly that she got up hurriedly, restraining her sobs, and went away. 'Can it be all over? No, it cannot be!' she thought. 'He will come back. But how can he explain that smile, that excitement after he had been talking to her? But even if he doesn't explain, I will believe. If I don't believe, there's only one thing left for me, and I can't.' She looked at her watch.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  In October there were the provincial elections in the Kashinsky province, where were the estates of Vronsky, Sviazhsky, Koznishev, Oblonsky, and a small part of Levin's land. These elections were attracting public attention from several circumstances connected with them, and also from the people taking part in them. There had been a great deal of talk about them, and great preparations were being made for them. Persons who never attended the elections were coming from Moscow, from Petersburg, and from abroad to attend these. Vronsky had long before promised Sviazhsky to go to them. Before the elections Sviazhsky, who often visited Vozdvizhenskoe, drove over to fetch Vronsky. On the day before there had been almost a quarrel between Vronsky and Anna over this proposed expedition. It was the very dullest autumn weather, which is so dreary in the country, and so, preparing himself for a struggle, Vronsky, with a hard and cold expression, informed Anna of his departure as he had never spoken to her before. But, to his surprise, Anna accepted the information with great composure, and merely asked when he would be back. He looked intently at her, at a loss to explain this composure. She smiled at his look. He knew that way she had of withdrawing into herself, and knew that it only happened when she had determined upon something without letting him know her plans. He was afraid of this; but he was so anxious to avoid a scene that he kept up appearances, and half sincerely believed in what he longed to believe in—her reasonableness. 'I hope you won't be dull?' 'I hope not,' said Anna. 'I got a box of books yesterday from Gautier's. No, I shan't be dull.' 'She's trying to take that tone, and so much the better,' he thought, 'or else it would be the same thing over and over again.' And he set off for the elections without appealing to her for a candid explanation. It was the first time since the beginning of their intimacy that he had parted from her without a full explanation. From one point of view this troubled him, but on the other side he felt that it was better so. 'At first there will be, as this time, something undefined kept back, and then she will get used to it. In any case I can give up anything for her, but not my masculine independence,' he thought. XXVI I N September Levin moved to Moscow for Kitty's confinement.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  She has gone away from us for ever. She is . . .' Suddenly the shadow of the screen wavered, pounced on the whole cornice, the whole ceiling; other shadows from the other side swooped to meet it, for an instant the shadows flitted back, but then with fresh swiftness they darted forward, wavered, mingled, and all was darkness. 'Death!' she thought. And such horror came upon her that for a long while she could not realise where she was, and for a long while her trembling hands could not find the matches and light another candle, instead of the one that had burned down and gone out. 'No, anything—only to live! Why, I love him! Why, he loves me ! This has been before and will pass,' she said, feeling that tears of joy at the return to life were trickling down her cheeks. And to escape from her panic she went hurriedly to his room. He was asleep there, and sleeping soundly. She went up to him, and holding the light above his face, she gazed a long while at him. Now when he was asleep, she loved him so that at the sight of him she could not keep back tears of tenderness. But she knew that if he waked up he would look at her with cold eyes, convinced that he was right, and that before telling him of her love, she would have to prove to him that he had been wrong in his treatment of her. Without waking him, she went back, and after a second dose of opium she fell towards morning into a heavy, incomplete sleep, during which she never quite lost consciousness. In the morning she was waked by a horrible nightmare, which had recurred several times in her dreams, even before her connection with Vronsky. A little old man with unkempt beard was doing something bent down over some iron, muttering meaningless French words, and she, as she always did in this nightmare (it was what made the horror of it), felt that this peasant was taking no notice of her, but was doing something horrible with the iron—over her. And she waked up in a cold sweat. When she got up, the previous day came back to her as though veiled in mist. 'There was a quarrel. Just what has happened several times. I said I had a headache, and he did not come in to see me. Tomorrow we're going away, I must see him and get ready for the journey,' she said to herself. And learning that he was in his study, she went down to him.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'There's something familiar about that hideous peasant,' thought Anna. And remembering her dream, she moved away to the opposite door, shaking with terror. The conductor opened the door and let in a man and his wife. 'Do you wish to get out?' Anna made no answer. The conductor and her two fellow-passengers did not notice under her veil her panic-stricken face. She went back to her corner and sat down. The couple seated themselves on the opposite side, and intently but surreptitiously scrutinised her clothes. Both husband and wife seemed repulsive to Anna. The husband asked, would she allow him to smoke, obviously not with a view to smoking but to getting into conversation with her. Receiving her assent, he said to his wife in French something about caring less to smoke than to talk. They made inane and affected remarks to one another, entirely for her benefit. Anna saw clearly that they were sick of each other, and hated each other. And no one could have helped hating such miserable monstrosities. A second bell sounded, and was followed by moving of luggage, noise, shouting and laughter. It was so clear to Anna that there was nothing for anyone to be glad of, that this laughter irritated her agonisingly, and she would have liked to stop up her ears not to hear it. At last the third bell rang, there was a whistle and a hiss of steam, and a clank of chains, and the man in her carriage crossed himself. 'It would be interesting to ask him what meaning he attaches to that,' thought Anna, looking angrily at him. She looked past the lady out of window at the people who seemed whirling by as they ran beside the train or stood on the platform. The train, jerking at regular intervals at the junctions of the rails, rolled by the platform, past a stone wall, a signal-box, past other trains; the wheels, moving more smoothly and evenly, resounded with a slight clang on the rails. The window was lighted up by the bright evening sun, and a slight breeze fluttered the curtain. Anna forgot her fellow-passengers, and to the light swaying of the train she fell to thinking again, as she breathed the fresh air. 'Yes, what did I stop at? That I couldn't conceive a position in which life would not be a misery, that we are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?' 'That's what reason is given man for, to escape from what worries him,' said the lady in French, lisping affectedly, and obviously pleased with her phrase. The words seemed an answer to Anna's thoughts. 'To escape from what worries him,' repeated Anna.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The rustle of the countess's silk skirt drew his attention off. 'Well now, we can sit quietly,' said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, slipping hurriedly with an agitated smile between the table and the sofa, 'and talk over our tea.' After some words of preparation, Countess Lidia Ivanovna, breathing hard and flushing crimson, gave into Alexey Alexandrovitch's hands the letter she had received. After reading the letter, he sat a long while in silence. 'I don't think I have the right to refuse her,' he said, timidly lifting his eyes. 'Dear friend, you never see evil in anyone!' 'On the contrary, I see that all is evil. But whether it is just . . .' His face showed irresolution, and a seeking for counsel, support, and guidance in a matter he did not understand. 'No,' Countess Lidia Ivanovna interrupted him; 'there are limits to everything. I can understand immorality,' she said, not quite truthfully, since she never could understand that which leads women to immorality; 'but I don't understand cruelty: to whom? to you! How can she stay in the town where you are? No, the longer one lives the more one learns. And I'm learning to understand your loftiness and her baseness.' 'Who is to throw a stone?' said Alexey Alexandrovitch, unmistakably pleased with the part he had to play. 'I have forgiven all, and so I cannot deprive her of what is exacted by love in her—by her love for her son . . . ' 'But is that love, my friend? Is it sincere? Admitting that you have forgiven—that you forgive—have we the right to work on the feelings of that angel? He looks on her as dead. He prays for her, and beseeches God to have mercy on her sins. And it is better so. But now what will he think?' 'I had not thought of that,' said Alexey Alexandrovitch, evidently agreeing. Countess Lidia Ivanovna hid her face in her hands and was silent. She was praying. 'If you ask my advice,' she said, having finished her prayer and uncovered her face, 'I do not advise you to do this. Do you suppose I don't see how you are suffering, how this has torn open your wounds?

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  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 offence. 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 incident. But this simple incident for some reason struck every one 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 my 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 Arkadye vitch. 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 glancing down at once recognised Vronsky, and a strange feeling of pleasure and at the same time of dread of something stirred in her heart. He was standing still, not taking off his coat, pulling something out of his pocket. At the instant when she was just facing the stairs, he raised his eyes, caught sight of her, and into the expression of his face there passed a shade of embarrassment and dismay. With a slight inclination of her head she passed, hearing behind her Stepan Arkadyevitch's loud voice calling him to come up, and the quiet, soft, and composed voice of Vronsky refusing. When Anna returned with the album, he was already gone, and Stepan Arkadyevitch was telling them that he had called to inquire about the dinner they were giving next day to a celebrity who had just arrived. 'And nothing would induce him to come up. What a queer fellow he is!' added Stepan Arkadyevitch. Kitty blushed. She thought that she was the only person who knew why he had come, and why he would not come up.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'Oh no, of course; but. . .' and Stepan Arkadyevitch paused in confusion. He understood at last that they were talking of religion. 'I fancy he will fall asleep immediately,' said Alexey Alexandrovitch in a whisper full of meaning, going up to Lidia Ivanovna. Stepan Arkadyevitch looked round. Landau was sitting at the window, leaning on his elbow and the back of his chair, his head drooping. Noticing that all eyes were turned on him he raised his head and smiled a smile of childlike artlessness. 'Don't take any notice,' said Lidia Ivanovna, and she lightly moved a chair up for Alexey Alexandrovitch. 'I have observed . . . ' she was beginning, when a footman came into the room with a letter. Lidia Ivanovna rapidly ran her eyes over the note, and excusing herself, wrote an answer with extraordinary rapidity, handed it to the man, and came back to the. table. 'I have observed,' she went on, 'that Moscow people, especially the men, are more indifferent to religion than anyone.' 'Oh no, countess, I thought Moscow people had the reputation of being the firmest in the faith,' answered Stepan Arkadyevitch. 'But as far as I can make out, you are unfortunately one of the indifferent ones,' said Alexey Alexandrovitch, turning to him with a weary smile. 'How anyone can be indifferent!' said Lidia Ivanovna. 'I am not so much indifferent on that subject as I am waiting in suspense,' said Stepan Arkadyevitch, with his most deprecating smile. 'I hardly think that the time for such questions has come yet for me.' Alexey Alexandrovitch and Lidia Ivanovna looked at each other. 'We can never tell whether the time has come for us or not,' said Alexey Alexandrovitch severely. 'We ought not to think whether we are ready or not ready. God's grace is not guided by human considerations: sometimes it comes not to those that strive for it, and comes to those that are unprepared, like Saul.' 'No, I believe it won't be just yet,' said Lidia Ivanovna, who had been meanwhile watching the movements of the Frenchman. Landau got up and came to them. 'Do you allow me to listen?' he asked. 'Oh yes; I did not want to disturb you,' said Lidia Ivanovna, gazing tenderly at him; 'sit here with us.' 'One has only not to close one's eyes to shut out the light,' Alexey Alexandrovitch went on. 'Ah, if you know the happiness we know, feeling His presence ever in our hearts!' said Countess Lidia Ivanovna with a rapturous smile. 'But a man may feel himself unworthy sometimes to rise to that height,' said Stepan Arkadyevitch, conscious of hypocrisy in admitting this religious height, but at the same time unable to bring himself to acknowledge his free-thinking views before a person who, by a single word to Pomorsky, might procure him the coveted appointment. 'That is, you mean that sin keeps him back?' said Lidia Ivanovna.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'Here's Lavrenty,' said Vronsky, looking out of window; 'now we can go, if you like.' The old butler, who had travelled with the countess, came to the carriage to announce that everything was ready, and the countess got up to go. 'Come; there's not such a crowd now,' said Vronsky. The maid took a handbag and the lapdog, the butler and a porter the other baggage. Vronsky gave his mother his arm; but just as they were getting out of the carriage several men ran suddenly by with panic-stricken faces. The stationmaster too ran by in his extraordinary coloured cap. Obviously something unusual had happened. The crowd who had left the train were running back again. 'What? . . . What? . . . Where? . . . Flung himself! . . . Crushed! . . .' was heard among the crowd. Stepan Arkadyevitch, with his sister on his arm, turned back. They too looked scared, and stopped at the carriage door to avoid the crowd. The ladies got in, while Vronsky and Stepan Arkadyevitch followed the crowd to find out details of the disaster. A guard, either drunk or too much muffled up in the bitter frost, had not heard the train moving back, and had been crushed. 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 Karenin 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. 'Now let us be off,' said Vronsky coming in. They went out together. Vronsky was in front with his mother. Behind walked Madame Karenin with her brother. Just as they were going out of the station the stationmaster 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.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Having attained success and an established position in the world, he had long ago forgotten this feeling; but the habitual bent of feeling reasserted itself, and dread of his own cowardice proved even now so strong, that Alexey Alexandrovitch spent a long while thinking over the question of duelling in all its aspects, and hugging the idea of a duel, though he was fully aware beforehand that he would never under any circumstances fight one. 'There's no doubt our society is still so barbarous (it's not the same in England) that very many'—and among these were those whose opinion Alexey Alexandrovitch particularly valued—'look favourably on the duel; but what result is attained by it? Suppose I call him out,' Alexey Alexandrovitch went on to himself, and vividly picturing the night he would spend after the challenge, and the pistol aimed at him, he shuddered, and knew that he never would do it—'suppose I call him out. Suppose I am taught,' he went on musing, 'to shoot; I press the trigger,' he said to himself, closing his eyes, 'and it turns out I have killed him,' Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself, and he shook his head as though to dispel such silly ideas. 'What sense is there in murdering a man in order to define one's relation to a guilty wife and son? I should still just as much have to decide what I ought to do with her. But what is more probable and what would doubtless occur—I should be killed or wounded. I, the innocent person, should be the victim— killed or wounded. It's even more senseless. But apart from that, a challenge to fight would be an act hardly honest on my side. Don't I know perfectly well that my friends would never allow me to fight a duel— would never allow the life of a statesman, needed by Russia, to be exposed to danger? Knowing perfectly well beforehand that the matter would never come to real danger, it would amount to my simply trying to gain a certain sham reputation by such a challenge. That would be dishonest, that would be false, that would be deceiving myself and others. A duel is quite irrational, and no one expects it of me. My aim is simply to safeguard my reputation, which is essential for the uninterrupted pursuit of my public duties.' Official duties, which had always been of great consequence in Alexey Alexandrovitch's eyes, seemed of special importance to his mind at this moment.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Holding his head bent down before him, and struggling with the wind that strove to tear the wraps away from him, Levin was moving up to the copse and had just caught sight of something white behind the oak-tree, when there was a sudden flash, the whole earth seemed on fire, and the vault of heaven seemed crashing overhead. Opening his blinded eyes, Levin gazed through the thick veil of rain that separated him now from the copse, and to his horror the first thing he saw was the green crest of the familiar oak-tree in the middle of the copse uncannily changing its position. 'Can it have been struck?' Levin hardly had time to think when, moving more and more rapidly, the oak-tree vanished behind the other trees, and he heard the crash of the great tree falling upon the others. The flash of lightning, the crash of thunder, and the instantaneous chill that ran through him were all merged for Levin in one sense of terror. 'My God! my God! not on them!' he said. And though he thought at once how senseless was his prayer that they should not have been killed by the oak which had fallen now, he repeated it, knowing that he could do nothing better than utter this senseless prayer. Running up to the place where they usually went, he did not find them there. They were at the other end of the copse under an old lime-tree; they were calling him. Two figures in dark dresses (they had been light summer dresses when they started out) were standing bending over something. It was Kitty with the nurse. The rain was already ceasing, and it was beginning to get light when Levin reached them. The nurse was not wet on the lower part of her dress, but Kitty was drenched through, and her soaked clothes clung to her. Though the rain was over, they still stood in the same position in which they had been standing when the storm broke. Both stood bending over a perambulator with a green umbrella. 'Alive? Unhurt? Thank God!' he said, splashing with his soaked boots through the standing water and running up to them. Kitty's rosy wet face was turned towards him, and she smiled timidly under her shapeless sopped hat. 'Aren't you ashamed of yourself? I can't think how you can be so reckless!' he said angrily to his wife. 'It wasn't my fault, really. We were just meaning to go, when he made such a to-do that we had to change him. We were just. . .' Kitty began defending herself. Mitya was unharmed, dry, and still fast asleep. 'Well, thank God! I don't know what I'm saying!'

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  But as he looked at her, he saw again that help was impossible, and he was filled with terror and prayed: 'Lord, have mercy on us, and help us!' And as time went on, both these conditions became more intense; the calmer he became away from her, completely forgetting her, the more agonising became both her sufferings and his feeling of helplessness before them. He jumped up, would have liked to run away, but ran to her. Sometimes, when again and again she called upon him, he blamed her; but seeing her patient, smiling face, and hearing the words, 'I am worrying you,' he threw the blame on God; but thinking of God, at once he fell to beseeching God to forgive him and have mercy. XV H E did not know whether it was late or early. The candles had all burned out. Dolly had just been in the study and had suggested to the doctor that he should lie down. Levin sat listening to the doctor's stories of a quack mesmeriser and looking at the ashes of his cigarette. There had been a period of repose, and he had sunk into oblivion. He had completely forgotten what was going on now. He heard the doctor's chat and understood it. Suddenly there came an unearthly shriek. The shriek was so awful that Levin did not even jump up, but holding his breath, gazed in terrified inquiry at the doctor. The doctor put his head on one side, listened, and smiled approvingly. Everything was so extraordinary that nothing could strike Levin as strange. 'I suppose it must be so,' he thought, and still sat where he was. Whose scream was this? He jumped up, ran on tip-toe to the bedroom, edged round Lizaveta Petrovna and the princess, and took up his position at Kitty's pillow. The scream had subsided, but there was some change now. What it was he did not see and did not comprehend, and he had no wish to see or comprehend. But he saw it by the face of Lizaveta Petrovna. Livaveta Petrovna's face was stern and pale, and still as resolute, though her jaws were twitching, and her eyes were fixed intently on Kitty. Kitty's swollen and agonised face, a tress of hair clinging to her moist brow, was turned to him and sought his eyes. Her lifted hands asked for his hands. Clutching his chill hands in her moist ones, she began squeezing them to her face. 'Don't go, don't go! I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid!' she said rapidly. 'Mamma, take my earrings. They bother me. You're not afraid? Quick, quick, Lizaveta Petrovna . . . ' She spoke quickly, very quickly, and tried to smile. But suddenly her face was drawn, she pushed him away. 'Oh, this is awful! I'm dying, I'm dying! Go away!' she shrieked, and again he heard that unearthly scream.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'It will be over today, you will see,' said Marya Nikolaevna. Though it was said in a whisper, the sick man, whose hearing Levin had noticed was very keen, must have heard. Levin said hush to her, and looked round at the sick man. Nikolay had heard; but these words produced no effect on him. His eyes had still the same intense, reproachful look. 'Why do you think so?' Levin asked her, when she had followed him into the corridor. 'He has begun picking at himself,' said Marya Nikolaevna. 'How do you mean?' 'Like this,' she said, tugging at the folds of her woollen skirt. Levin noticed, indeed, that all that day the patient pulled at himself, as it were, trying to snatch something away. Marya Nikolaevna's prediction came true. Towards night the sick man was not able to lift his hands, and could only gaze before him with the same intensely concentrated expression in his eyes. Even when his brother or Kitty bent over him, so that he could see them, he looked just the same. Kitty sent for the priest to read the prayer for the dying. While the priest was reading it, the dying man did not show any sign of life; his eyes were closed. Levin, Kitty, and Marya Nikolaevna stood at the bedside. The priest had not quite finished reading the prayer when the dying man stretched, sighed, and opened his eyes. The priest, on finishing the prayer, put the cross to the cold forehead, then slowly returned it to the stand, and after standing for two minutes more in silence, he touched the huge, bloodless hand that was turning cold. 'He is gone,' said the priest, and would have moved away; but sud denly there was a faint stir in the moustaches of the dead man that seemed glued together, and quite distinctly in the hush they heard from the bottom of the chest the sharply defined sounds— 'Not quite . . . soon.' And a minute later the face brightened, a smile came out under the moustaches, and the women who had gathered round began carefully laying out the corpse. The sight of his brother, and the nearness of death, revived in Levin that sense of horror in face of the insoluble enigma, together with the nearness and inevitability of death, that had come upon him that autumn evening when his brother had come to him. This feeling was now even stronger than before; even less than before did he feel capable of apprehending the meaning of death, and its inevitability rose up before him more terrible than ever. But now, thanks to his wife's presence, that feeling did not reduce him to despair.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The child ill, yet she had thought of coming herself. Their daughter ill, and this hostile tone. The innocent festivities over the election, and this gloomy, burdensome love to which he had to return struck Vronsky by their contrast. But he had to go, and by the first train that night he set off home. XXXII B EFORE Vronsky's departure for the elections, Anna had reflected that the scenes constantly repeated between them each time he left home, might only make him cold to her instead of attaching him to her, and resolved to do all she could to control herself so as to bear the parting with composure. But the cold, severe glance with which he had looked at her when he came to tell her he was going had wounded her, and before he had started her peace of mind was destroyed. In solitude afterwards, thinking over that glance which had expressed his right to freedom, she came, as she always did, to the same point—the sense of her own humiliation. 'He has the right to go away when and where he chooses. Not simply to go away, but to leave me. He has every right, and I have none. But knowing that, he ought not to do it. What has he done, though? . . . He looked at me with a cold, severe expression. Of course that is something indefinable, impalpable, but it has never been so before, and that glance means a great deal,' she thought. 'That glance shows the beginning of indifference.' And though she felt sure that a coldness was beginning, there was nothing she could do, she could not in any way alter her relations to him. Just as before, only by love and by charm could she keep him. And so, just as before, only by occupation in the day, by morphine at night, could she stifle the fearful thought of what would be if he ceased to love her. It is true there was still one means; not to keep him—for that she wanted nothing more than his love—but to be nearer to him, to be in such a position that he would not leave her. That means was divorce and marriage. And she began to long for that, and made up her mind to agree to it the first time he or Stiva approached her on the subject. Absorbed in such thoughts, she passed five days without him, the five days that he was to be at the elections. Walks, conversation with Princess Varvara, visits to the hospital, and, most of all, reading—reading of one book after another—filled up her time. But on the sixth day, when the coachman came back without him, she felt that now she was utterly incapable of stifling the thought of him and of what he was doing there, just at that time her little girl was taken ill.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Konstantin said to her, for the sake of saying something. 'Only you mustn't be polite and stiff with her. It frightens her. No one ever spoke to her so but the justices of the peace who tried her for trying to get out of a house of ill-fame. Mercy on us, the senselessness in the world!' he cried suddenly. 'These new institutions, these justices of the peace, rural councils, what hideousness it all is!' And he began to enlarge on his encounters with the new institutions. Konstantin Levin heard him, and the disbelief in the sense of all public institutions, which he shared with him, and often expressed, was distasteful to him now from his brother's lips. 'In another world we shall understand it all,' he said lightly. 'In another world! Ah, I don't like that other world! I don't like it,' he said, letting his scared eyes rest on his brother's eyes. 'Here one would think that to get out of all the baseness and the mess, one's own and other people's, would be a good thing, and yet I'm afraid of death, awfully afraid of death.' He shuddered. 'But do drink something. Would you like some champagne? Or shall we go somewhere? Let's go to the Gypsies! Do you know I have got so fond of the Gypsies and Russian songs.' His speech had begun to falter, and he passed abruptly from one subject to another. Konstantin with the help of Masha persuaded him not to go out anywhere, and got him to bed hopelessly drunk. Masha promised to write to Konstantin in case of need, and to persuade Nikolay Levin to go and stay with his brother. XXVI I N the morning Konstantin Levin left Moscow, and towards evening he reached home. On the journey in the train he talked to his neighbours about politics and the new railways, and, just as in Moscow, he was overcome by a sense of confusion of ideas, dissatisfaction with himself, shame of something or other.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  At the same time as the traveller there was announced a provincial marshal of nobility on a visit to Petersburg, with whom Alexey Alexandrovitch had to have some conversation. After his departure, he had to finish the daily routine of business with his secretary, and then he still had to drive round to call on a certain great personage on a matter of grave and serious import. Alexey Alexandrovitch only just managed to be back by five o'clock, his dinner-hour, and after dining with his secretary, he invited him to drive with him to his country villa and to the races. Though he did not acknowledge it to himself, Alexey Alexandrovitch always tried nowadays to secure the presence of a third person in his interviews with his wife. XXVII A NNA was upstairs, standing before the looking-glass, and, with Annushka's assistance, pinning the last ribbon on her gown when she heard carriage wheels crunching the gravel at the entrance. 'It's too early for Betsy,' she thought, and glancing out of window she caught sight of the carriage and the black hat of Alexey Alexandrovitch, and the ears that she knew so well sticking up each side of it. 'How unlucky! Can he be going to stay the night?' she wondered, and the thought of all that might come of such a chance struck her as so awful and terrible, that without dwelling on it for a moment, she went down to meet him with a bright and radiant face; and conscious of the presence of that spirit of falsehood and deceit in herself that she had come to know of late, she abandoned herself to that spirit and began talking, hardly knowing what she was saying. 'Ah, how nice of you!' she said, giving her husband her hand, and greeting Sludin, who was like one of the family, with a smile. 'You're staying the night, I hope?' was the first word the spirit of falsehood prompted her to utter; 'and now we'll go together. Only it's a pity I've promised Betsy. She's coming for me.' Alexey Alexandrovitch knit his brows at Betsy's name. 'Oh, I'm not going to separate the inseparables,' he said in his usual bantering tone. 'I'm going with Mihail Vassilievitch. I'm ordered exercise by the doctors too. I'll walk, and fancy myself at the springs again.' 'There's no hurry,' said Anna. 'Would you like tea?' She rang. 'Bring in tea, and tell Seryozha that Alexey Alexandrovitch is here. Well, tell me, how have you been? Mihail Vassilievitch, you've not been to see me before. Look how lovely it is out on the terrace,' she said, turning first to one and then to the other.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The chief reason why the prince was so particularly disagreeable to Vronsky was that he could not help seeing himself in him. And what he saw in this mirror did not gratify his self-esteem. He was a very stupid and very self-satisfied and very healthy and very well-washed man, and nothing else. He was a gentleman—that was true, and Vronsky could not deny it. He was equable and not cringing with his superiors, was free and ingratiating in his behaviour with his equals, and was contemptuously indulgent with his inferiors. Vronsky was himself the same, and regarded it as a great merit to be so. But for this prince he was an inferior, and his contemptuous and indulgent attitude to him revolted him. 'Brainless beef! can I be like that?' he thought. Be that as it might, when, on the seventh day, he parted from the prince, who was starting for Moscow, and received his thanks, he was happy to be rid of his uncomfortable position and the unpleasant reflection of himself. He said goodbye to him at the station on their return from a bear-hunt, at which they had had a display of Russian prowess kept up all night. II W HEN he got home, Vronsky found there a note from Anna. She wrote, 'I am ill and unhappy. I cannot come out, but I cannot go on longer without seeing you. Come in this evening. Alexey Alexandrovitch goes to the council at seven and will be there till ten.' Thinking for an instant of the strangeness of her bidding him come straight to her, in spite of her husband's insisting on her not receiving him, he decided to go. Vronsky had that winter got his promotion, was now a colonel, had left the regimental quarters, and was living alone. After having some lunch, he lay down on the sofa immediately, and in five minutes memories of the hideous scenes he had witnessed during the last few days were confused together and joined on to a mental image of Anna and of the peasant who had played an important part in the bear-hunt, and Vronsky fell asleep. He waked up in the dark, trembling with horror, and made haste to light a candle. 'What was it? What? what was the dreadful thing I dreamed? Yes, yes; I think a little dirty man with a dishevelled beard was stooping down doing something, and all of a sudden he began saying some strange words in French. Yes, there was nothing else in the dream,' he said to himself. 'But why was it so awful?' He vividly recalled the peasant again and those incomprehensible French words the peasant had uttered, and a chill of horror ran down his spine. 'What nonsense!' thought Vronsky, and glanced at his watch. It was half-past eight already. He rang up his servant, dressed in haste, and went out on to the steps, completely forgetting the dream and only worried at being late.