Shame

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 Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Openly expressed jealousy, for the Mosuo, is considered aggressive in its implied intrusion upon the sacred autonomy of another person, and is thus met with ridicule and shame. Sadly, hostility toward this free expression of female sexual autonomy is not limited to narrow-minded anthropologists and thirteenth-century Italian explorers. Although the Mosuo have no history of trying to export their system or convincing anyone else of the superiority of their approach to love and sex, they have long suffered outside pressure to abandon their traditional beliefs, which outsiders seem to find threatening. Once the Chinese established full control of the area in 1956, government officials began making annual visits to lecture the people on the dangers of sexual freedom and convince them to switch to “normal” marriage. In a bit of dubious publicity reminiscent of Reefer Madness, Chinese government officials showed up one year with a portable generator and a film showing “actors dressed as Mosuo … who were in the last stages of syphilis, who had gone mad and lost most of their faces.” The audience response was not what the Chinese officials expected: their makeshift cinema was burned to the ground. But the officials didn’t give up. Yang Erche Namu recalls “meetings night after night where they harangued and criticized and interrogated…. [The Chinese officials] ambushed men on their way to their lovers’ houses, they dragged couples out of their beds and exposed people naked to their own relatives’ eyes.” When even these heavy-handed tactics failed to convince the Mosuo to abandon their system, government officials insisted on bringing (if not demonstrating) “decency” to the Mosuo. They cut off essential deliveries of seed grain and children’s clothing. Finally, literally starved into submission, many Mosuo agreed to participate in government-sponsored marriage ceremonies, where each was given “a cup of tea, a cigarette, pieces of candy, and a paper certificate.” 11 But the arm-twisting had little lasting effect. Travel writer Cynthia Barnes visited Lugu Lake in 2006 and found the Mosuo system still intact, though under pressure from Chinese tourists who, like Marco Polo 750 years earlier, mistake the sexual autonomy of Mosuo women for licentiousness. “Although their lack of coyness draws the world’s attention to the Mosuo,” Barnes writes, “sex is not the center of their universe.” She continues: I think of my parents’ bitter divorce, of childhood friends uprooted and destroyed because Mommy or Daddy decided to sleep with someone else. Lugu Lake, I think, is not so much a kingdom of women as a kingdom of family—albeit one blessedly free of politicians and preachers extolling “family values.” There’s no such thing as a “broken home,” no sociologists wringing their hands over “single mothers,” no economic devastation or shame and stigma when parents part.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Writing of the Matis people, anthropologist Philippe Erikson confirms, “Plural paternity … is more than a theoretical possibility…. Extramarital sex is not only widely practiced and usually tolerated, in many respects, it also appears mandatory. Married or not, one has a moral duty to respond to the sexual advances of opposite-sex cross-cousins (real or clas-sificatory), under pains of being labeled ‘stingy of one’s genitals,’ a breach of Matis ethics far more serious than plain infidelity [emphasis added].” 8 Being labeled a sexual cheapskate is no laughing matter, apparently. Erikson writes of one young man who cowered in the anthropologist’s hut for hours, hiding from his horny cousin, whose advances he couldn’t legitimately reject if she tracked him down. Even more serious, during Matis tattooing festivals, having sex with one’s customary partner(s) is expressly forbidden—under threat of extreme punishment, even death. 9 But if it’s true that S.E.Ex. played a central role in maintaining prehistoric social cohesion, we should find remnants of such shamelessly libidinous behavior throughout the world, past and present. We do. Among the Mohave, women were famous for their licentious habits and disinclination to stick with one man. 10 Caesar (yes, that Caesar) was scandalized to note that in Iron Age Britain, “Ten and even twelve have wives common to them, and particularly brothers among brothers….” 11 During his three months in Tahiti in 1769, Captain James Cook and his crew found that Tahitians “gratified every appetite and passion before witnesses.” In an account of Cook’s voyage first published in 1773, John Hawkesworth wrote of “[a] young man, nearly six feet high, perform[ing] the rites of Venus with a little girl about 11 or 12 years of age, before several of our people and a great number of natives, without the least sense of its being indecent or improper, but, as appeared, in perfect conformity to the custom of the place.” Some of the older islander women who were observing this amorous display apparently called out instructions to the girl, although Cook tells us, “Young as she was, she did not seem much to stand in need of [them].” 12 Samuel Wallis, another ship captain who spent time in Tahiti, reported, “The women in General are very handsome, some really great Beauties, yet their Virtue was not proof against a Nail.” The Tahitians’ fascination with iron resulted in a de-facto exchange of a single nail for a sexual tryst with a local woman. By the time Wallis set sail, most of his men were sleeping on deck, as there were no nails left from which to hang their hammocks.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  American ingenuity would mass-produce orgasms for women who were denied them in their “properly chaste,” sexually deprived lives: the first vibrators were invented by these enterprising physicians. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical tinkerers designed all sorts of devices to provoke the necessary nervous paroxysms in their patients. Some were diesel powered; others ran on steam, like little locomotives that could. Some were huge contraptions hanging from the rafters on chains and pulleys, like engine blocks at an auto shop. Others sported pistons thrusting dildos through holes in tables or involved high-pressure water directed at the patient’s genitalia like a fire brigade called in to douse the consuming flames of female passion. And all the while, the good doctors never publicly admitted that what they were doing was more sex than medicine. But perhaps even more dumbfounding than their silence on being paid to provoke nervous paroxysms like so many Chippendale’s studs is the fact that these same medical authorities managed to maintain the conviction that female sexuality was a weak and reluctant thing. The medical monopoly on providing socially acceptable extramarital orgasms to women was assured by a strict prohibition against women or girls masturbating themselves to orgasm. In 1850, the New Orleans Medical & Surgical Journal declared masturbation public enemy number one, waring: “Neither plague, nor war, nor smallpox, nor a crowd of similar evils, have resulted more disastrously for humanity than the habit of masturbation: it is the destroying element of civilized society.” Children and adults were warned that masturbation was not only sinful, but very dangerous—sure to result in severe health consequences, including blindness, infertility, and insanity. Besides, these authorities intoned, “normal” women had little sexual desire anyway. In his Psychopathia Sexualis, published in 1886, German neurologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing declared what everyone already thought they knew: “If [a woman] is normally developed mentally and well-bred, her sexual desire is small. If this were not so, the whole world would become a brothel and marriage and a family impossible.” 2 To have suggested that women enjoyed, indeed needed regular orgasmic release, would have been shocking to men and humiliating to most women. Perhaps it still is. While the anti-masturbation frenzy has roots deep in Judeo-Christian history, it found unfortunate medical support in Simon André Tissot’s A Treatise on the Disease Produced by Onanism, published in 1758.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  A well-known moral guide of the Middle Ages, the Speculum Doctrinale (Mirror of Doctrine), written by Vincent of Beauvais, declared, “A man who loves his wife very much is an adulterer. Any love for someone else’s wife, or too much love for one’s own, is shameful.” The author went on to advise, “The upright man should love his wife with his judgment, not his affections.” 13 Vincent of Beauvais would have enjoyed the company of Daniel Defoe (of London), famous still as the author of Robinson Crusoe. Defoe scandalized Britain in 1727 with the publication of a nonfiction essay with the catchy title Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom. Apparently that title was a bit much. For a later edition, he toned it down to A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed. This was no desert island adventure but a moralizing lecture on the physical and spiritual dangers of enjoying sex with one’s spouse. Defoe would have appreciated the Nayar people, native to southern India, who have a type of marriage that doesn’t necessarily include any sexual activity at all, has no expectation of permanence, and no cohabitation—indeed the bride may never see the groom again once the marriage ritual has been performed. But since divorce is not permitted in this system, the stability of these marriages must be exemplary, according to the anthropological surveys. As these examples show, many qualities considered essential components of marriage in contemporary Western usage are anything but universal: sexual exclusivity, property exchange, even the intention to stay together for long. None of these are expected in many of the relationships evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists insist on calling marriage. Now consider the confusion created by the words mate and mating. A mate sometimes refers to a sexual partner in a given copulation; other times, it refers to a partner in a recognized marriage, with whom children are raised and all sorts of behavioral and economic patterns are established. To mate with someone could mean to join together “till death do us part,” or it could refer to nothing more than a quickie with “Julio down by the schoolyard.” When evolutionary psychologists tell us that men and women have different innate cognitive or emotional “modules,” which determine their reactions to a mate’s infidelity, we suppose that this refers to a mate in a long-term relationship.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Nobel Prize–winning economist Elinor Ostrom’s studies of commons management in small-scale communities led her to conclude that, “all communities have some form of monitoring to gird against cheating or using more than a fair share of the resource.” 6 Despite how it’s been spun by economists and others arguing against local resource management, the real tragedy of the commons doesn’t pose a threat to resources controlled by small groups of interdependent individuals. Forget the commons. We need to confront the tragedies of the open seas, skies, rivers, and forests. Fisheries around the world are collapsing because no one has the authority, power, and motivation to stop international fleets from strip-mining waters everybody (and thus, nobody) owns. Toxins from Chinese smokestacks burning illegally mined Russian coal lodge in Korean lungs, while American cars burning Venezuelan petroleum melt glaciers in Greenland. What allows these chain-linked tragedies is the absence of local, personal shame. The false certainty that comes from applying Malthusian economics, the prisoner’s dilemma, and the tragedy of the commons to pre-agricultural societies requires that we ignore the fine-grain contours of life in small-scale communities where nobody “could have escaped public scrutiny and judgment,” in Rousseau’s words. These tragedies become inevitable only when the group size exceeds our species’ capacity for keeping track of one another, a point that’s come to be known as Dunbar’s number. In primate communities, size definitely matters. Noticing the importance of grooming behavior in social primates, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar plotted overall group size against the neocortical development of the brain. Using this correlation, he predicted that humans start losing track of who’s doing what to whom when group size hits about 150 individuals. In Dunbar’s words, “The limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.” 7 Other anthropologists had arrived at the same number by observing that when group sizes grew much beyond that, they tend to split into two smaller groups. Writing several years before Dunbar’s paper was published in 1992, Marvin Harris noted, “With 50 people per band or 150 per village, everybody knew everybody else intimately, so that the bonding of reciprocal exchange could hold people together. People gave with the expectation of taking and took with the expectation of giving.” 8 Recent authors, including Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling The Tipping Point, have popularized the idea of 150 being a limit to organically functioning groups. Having evolved in small, intimate bands where everybody knows our name, human beings aren’t very good at dealing with the dubious freedoms conferred by anonymity. When communities grow beyond the point where every individual has at least a passing acquaintance with everyone else, our behavior changes, our choices shift, and our sense of the possible and of the acceptable grows ever more abstract. The same argument can be made concerning the tragic misunderstanding of human nature that underlies communism: community ownership doesn’t work in large-scale societies where people operate in anonymity.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  You want me to go and see her, to ask her here, and to rehabilitate her in society; but do understand that I cannot do so. I have daughters growing up, and I must live in the world for my husband's sake. Well, I'm ready to come and see Anna Arkadyevna: she will understand that I can't ask her here, or I should have to do so in such a way that she would not meet people who look at things differently; that would offend her. I can't raise her…' 'Oh, I don't regard her as fallen more than hundreds of women you do receive!' Vronsky interrupted her still more gloomily, and he got up in silence, understanding that his sister-in-law's decision was not to be shaken. 'Alexey! don't be angry with me. Please understand that I'm not to blame,' began Varya, looking at him with a timid smile. 'I'm not angry with you,' he said still as gloomily; 'but I'm sorry in two ways. I'm sorry, too, that this means breaking up our friendship —if not breaking up, at least weakening it. You will understand that for me, too, it cannot be otherwise.' And with that he left her. Vronsky knew that further efforts were useless, and that he had to spend these few days in Petersburg as though in a strange town, avoiding every sort of relation with his own old circle in order not to be exposed to the annoyances and humiliations which were so intolerable to him. One of the most unpleasant features of his position in Petersburg was that Alexey Alexandrovitch and his name seemed to meet him everywhere. He could not begin to talk of anything without the conversation turning on Alexey Alexandrovitch, he could not go anywhere without risk of meeting him. So at least it seemed to Vronsky, just as it seems to a man with a sore finger that he is continually, as though on purpose, grazing his sore finger on everything. Their stay in Petersburg was the more painful to Vronsky that he perceived all the time a sort of new mood that he could not understand in Anna. At one time she would seem in love with him, and then she would become cold, irritable, and impenetrable. She was worrying over something, and keeping something back from him, and did not seem to notice the humiliations which poisoned his existence, and for her, with her delicate intuition, must have been still more unbearable. XXIX O NE of Anna's objects in coming back to Russia had been to see her son. From the day she left Italy the thought of it had never ceased to agitate her.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Standing still, and looking at the tops of the aspen-trees waving in the wind, with their freshly washed, brightly shining leaves in the cold sunshine, she knew that they would not forgive her, that everyone and everything would be merciless to her now as was that sky, that green. And again she felt that everything was split in two in her soul. 'I mustn't, mustn't think,' she said to herself. 'I must get ready. To go where? When? Whom to take with me? Yes, to Moscow by the evening train. Annushka and Seryozha, and only the most necessary things. But first I must write to them both.' She went quickly indoors into her boudoir, sat down at the table, and wrote to her husband:—'After what has happened, I cannot remain any longer in your house. I am going away, and taking my son with me. I don't know the law, and so I don't know with which of the parents the son should remain; but I take him with me because I cannot live without him. Be generous, leave him me.' Up to this point she wrote rapidly and naturally, but the appeal to his generosity, a quality she did not recognise in him, and the necessity of winding up the letter with something touching, pulled her up. 'Of my fault and my remorse I cannot speak, because . . . ' She stopped again, finding no connection in her ideas. 'No,' she said to herself, 'there's no need of anything,' and tearing up the letter she wrote it again, leaving out the allusion to generosity, and sealed it up. Another letter had to be written to Vronsky. 'I have told my husband,' she wrote, and she sat a long while unable to write more. It was so coarse, so unfeminine. 'And what more am I to write to him?' she said to herself. Again a flush of shame spread over her face; she recalled his composure, and a feeling of anger against him impelled her to tear the sheet with the phrase she had written into tiny bits. 'No need of anything,' she said to herself, and closing her blotting-case she went upstairs, told the governess and the servants that she was going that day to Moscow, and at once set to work to pack up her things. XVI A LL the rooms of the summer villa were full of porters, gardeners, and footmen going to and fro carrying out things. Cupboards and chests were open; twice they had sent to the shop for cord, pieces of newspaper were tossing about on the floor. Two trunks, some bags and strapped-up rugs, had been carried down into the hall. The carriage and two hired cabs were waiting at the steps.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'I'm very glad you're at home. You never put in an appearance anywhere, and I haven't seen you ever since Anna has been ill. I have heard all about it—your anxiety. Yes, you're a wonderful husband!' she said, with a meaning and affable air, as though she were bestowing an order of magnanimity on him for his conduct to his wife. Alexey Alexandrovitch bowed frigidly, and kissing his wife's hand, asked how she was. 'Better, I think,' she said, avoiding his eyes. 'But you're rather a feverish-looking colour,' he said, laying stress on the word 'feverish'. 'We've been talking too much,' said Betsy. 'I feel it's selfishness on my part, and I am going away.' She got up, but Anna, suddenly flushing, quickly caught at her hand. 'No, wait a minute, please. I must tell you . . . no, you.' She turned to Alexey Alexandrovitch, and her neck and brow were suffused with crimson. 'I won't and can't keep anything secret from you,' she said. Alexey Alexandrovitch cracked his fingers and bowed his head. 'Betsy's been telling me that Count Vronsky wants to come here to say good-bye before his departure for Tashkend.' She did not look at her husband, and was evidently in haste to have everything out, however hard it might be for her. 'I told her I could not receive him.' 'You said, my dear, that it would depend on Alexey Alexandrovitch,' Betsy corrected her. 'Oh no, I can't receive him; and what object would there . . .' She stopped suddenly, and glanced inquiringly at her husband (he did not look at her). 'In short, I don't wish it . . . ' Alexey Alexandrovitch advanced and would have taken her hand. Her first impulse was to jerk back her hand from the damp hand with big swollen veins that sought hers, but with an obvious effort to control herself she pressed his hand. 'I am very grateful to you for your confidence, but . . .' he said, feeling with confusion and annoyance that what he could decide easily and clearly by himself, he could not discuss before Princess Tverskoy, who to him stood for the incarnation of that brute force which would inevitably control him in the life he led in the eyes of the world, and hinder him from giving way to his feeling of love and forgiveness. He stopped short, looking at Princess Tverskoy. 'Well, good-bye, my darling,' said Betsy, getting up. She kissed Anna, and went out. Alexey Alexandrovitch escorted her out. 'Alexey Alexandrovitch! I know you are a truly magnanimous man,' said Betsy, stopping in the little drawing-room, and with special warmth shaking hands with him once more. 'I am an outsider, but I so love her and respect you that I venture to advise.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  For some time, is it? How's your farming getting on?' Levin knew that his elder brother took little interest in farming, and only put the question in deference to him, and so he only told him about the sale of his wheat and money matters. Levin had meant to tell his brother of his determination to get married, and to ask his advice; he had indeed firmly resolved to do so. But after seeing his brother, listening to his conversation with the professor, hearing afterwards the unconsciously patronising tone in which his brother questioned him about agricultural matters (their mother's property had not been divided, and Levin took charge of both their shares), Levin felt that he could not for some reason begin to talk to him of his intention of marrying. He felt that his brother would not look at it as he would have wished him to. 'Well, how is your district council doing,' asked Sergey Ivanovitch, who was greatly interested in these local boards and attached great importance to them. 'I really don't know.' 'What! Why, surely you're a member of the board?' 'No, I'm not a member now; I've resigned,' answered Levin, 'and I no longer attend the meetings.' 'What a pity!' commented Sergey Ivanovitch, frowning. Levin in self-defence began to describe what took place in the meetings in his district. 'That's how it always is!' Sergey Ivanovitch interrupted him. 'We Russians are always like that. Perhaps it's our strong point, really, the faculty of seeing our own shortcomings; but we overdo it, we comfort ourselves with irony which we always have on the tip of our tongues. All I say is, give such rights as our local self-government to any other European people—why, the Germans or the English would have worked their way to freedom from them, while we simply turn them into ridicule.' 'But how can it be helped?' said Levin penitently. 'It was my last effort. And I did try with all my soul. I can't. I'm no good at it.' 'It's not that you're no good at it,' said Sergey Ivanovitch, 'it is that you don't look at it as you should.' 'Perhaps not,' Levin answered dejectedly. 'Oh! do you know brother Nikolay's turned up again?' This brother Nikolay was the elder brother of Konstantin Levin, and half-brother of Sergey Ivanovitch; a man utterly ruined, who had dissipated the greater part of his fortune, was living in the strangest and lowest company, and had quarrelled with his brothers. 'What did you say?' Levin cried with horror. 'How do you know?' 'Prokofy saw him in the street.' 'Here in Moscow? Where is he? Do you know?' Levin got up from his chair, as though on the point of starting off at once. 'I am sorry I told you,' said Sergey Ivanovitch, shaking his nead at his younger brother's excitement.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  All this would have been very well, if there had been no exaggeration. But the princess saw that her daughter was rushing into extremes, and so indeed she told her. ' Il ne faut jamais rien outrer,' she said to her. Her daughter made her no reply, only in her heart she thought that one could not talk about exaggeration where Christianity was concerned. What exaggeration could there be in the practice of a doctrine wherein one was bidden to turn the other cheek when one was smitten, and give one's cloak if one's coat were taken? But the princess disliked this exaggeration, and disliked even more the fact that she felt her daughter did not care to show her all her heart. Kitty did in fact conceal her new views and feelings from her mother. She concealed them not because she did not respect or did not love her mother, but simply because she was her mother. She would have revealed them to anyone sooner than to her mother. 'How is it Anna Pavlovna's not been to see us for so long?' the princess said one day of Madame Petrov. 'I've asked her, but she seems put out about something.' 'No, I've not noticed it, maman,' said Kitty, flushing hotly. 'Is it long since you went to see them?' 'We're meaning to make an expedition to the mountains tomorrow,' answered Kitty. 'Well, you can go,' answered the princess, gazing at her daughter's embarrassed face and trying to guess the cause of her embarrassment. That day Varenka came to dinner and told them that Anna Pavlovna had changed her mind and given up the expedition for the morrow. And the princess noticed again that Kitty reddened. 'Kitty, haven't you had some misunderstanding with the Petrovs?' said the princess, when they were left alone. 'Why has she given up sending the children and coming to see us?' Kitty answered that nothing had happened between them, and that she could not tell why Anna Pavlovna seemed displeased with her. Kitty answered perfectly truly. She did not know the reason Anna Pavlovna had changed to her, but she guessed it. She guessed at something which she could not tell her mother, which she did not put into words to herself. It was one of those things which one knows but which one can never speak of even to oneself, so terrible and shameful would it be to be mistaken.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  But there was no chance of doing anything; and twisting the smooth paper-knife in her little hands, she forced herself to read. The hero of the novel was already almost reaching his English happiness, a baronetcy and an estate, and Anna was feeling a desire to go with him to the estate, when she suddenly felt that he ought to feel ashamed, and that she was ashamed of the same thing. But what had he to be ashamed of? 'What have I to be ashamed of?' she asked herself in injured surprise. She laid down the book and sank against the back of the chair, tightly gripping the paper-cutter in both hands. There was nothing. She went over all her Moscow recollections. All were good, pleasant. She remembered the ball, remembered Vronsky and his face of slavish adoration, remembered all her conduct with him: there was nothing shameful. And for all that, at the same point in her memories, the feeling of shame was intensified, as though some inner voice, just at the point when she thought of Vronsky, were saying to her, 'Warm, very warm, hot.' 'Well, what is it?' she said to herself resolutely, shifting her seat in the lounge. 'What does it mean? Am I afraid to look it straight in the face? Why, what is it? Can it be that between me and this officer boy there exists, or can exist, any other relations than such as are common with every acquaintance?' She laughed contemptuously and took up her book again; but now she was definitely unable to follow what she read. She passed the paper-knife over the window-pane, then laid its smooth, cool surface to her cheek, and almost laughed aloud at the feeling of delight that all at once without cause came over her. She felt as though her nerves were strings being strained tighter and tighter on some sort of screwing peg. She felt her eyes opening wider and wider, her fingers and toes twitching nervously, something within oppressing her breathing, while all shapes and sounds seemed in the uncertain half-light to strike her with unaccustomed vividness. Moments of doubt were continually coming upon her, when she was uncertain whether the train were going forwards or backwards, or were standing still altogether; whether it were Annushka at her side or a stranger. 'What's that on the arm of the chair, a fur cloak or some beast? And what am I myself? Myself or some other woman?' She was afraid of giving way to this delirium.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  She sent word to her husband that she had come, went to her own room, and occupied herself in sorting out her things, expecting he would come to her. But an hour passed; he did not come. She went into the dining-room on the pretext of giving some directions, and spoke loudly on purpose, expecting him to come out there; but he did not come, though she heard him go to the door of his study as he parted from the chief secretary. She knew he usually went out quickly to his office, and she wanted to see him before that, so that their attitude to one another might be defined. She walked across the drawing-room and went resolutely to him. When she went into his study he was in official uniform, obviously ready to go out, sitting at a little table on which he rested his elbows, looking dejectedly before him. She saw him before he saw her, and she saw that he was thinking of her. On seeing her, he would have risen, but changed his mind, then his face flushed hotly—a thing Anna had never seen before, and he got up quickly and went to meet her, looking not at her eyes, but above them at her forehead and hair. He went up to her, took her by the hand, and asked her to sit down. 'I am very glad you have come,' he said, sitting down beside her, and obviously wishing to say something, he stuttered. Several times he tried to begin to speak, but stopped. In spite of the fact that, preparing herself for meeting him, she had schooled herself to despise and reproach him, she did not know what to say to him, and she felt sorry for him. And so the silence lasted for some time. 'Is Seryozha quite well?' he said, and not waiting for an answer, he added: 'I shan't be dining at home today, and I have got to go out directly.' 'I had thought of going to Moscow,' she said. 'No, you did quite, quite right to come here,' he said, and was silent again. Seeing that he was powerless to begin the conversation, she began herself. 'Alexey Alexandrovitch,' she said, looking at him and not dropping her eyes under his persistent gaze at her hair, 'I'm a guilty woman, I'm a bad woman, but I am the same as I was, as I told you then, and I have come to tell you that I can change nothing.' 'I have asked you no question about that,' he said, all at once, resolutely and with hatred looking her straight in the face; 'that was as I had supposed.' Under the influence of anger he apparently regained complete possession of all his faculties.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Levin found himself, like the majority of his contemporaries, in the vaguest position in regard to religion. Believe he could not, and at the same time he had no firm conviction that it was all wrong. And consequently, not being able to believe in the significance of what he was doing nor to regard it with indifference as an empty formality, during the whole period of preparing for the sacrament he was conscious of a feeling of discomfort and shame at doing what he did not himself understand, and what, as an inner voice told him, was therefore false and wrong. During the service he would first listen to the prayers, trying to attach some meaning to them not discordant with his own views; then feeling that he could not understand and must condemn them, he tried not to listen to them, but to attend to the thoughts, observations, and memories which floated through his brain with extreme vividness during this idle time of standing in church. He had stood through the litany, the evening service and the midnight service, and the next day he got up earlier than usual, and without having tea he went at eight o'clock in the morning to the church for the morning service and the confession. There was no one in the church but a beggar soldier, two old women, and the church officials. A young deacon, whose long back showed in two distinct halves through his thin undercassock, met him, and at once going to a little table at the wall read the exhortation. During the reading, especially at the frequent and rapid repetition of the same words, 'Lord, have mercy on us!' which resounded with an echo, Levin felt that thought was shut and sealed up, and that it must not be touched or stirred now or confusion would be the result; and so standing behind the deacon he went on thinking of his own affairs, neither listening nor examining what was said. 'It's wonderful what expression there is in her hand,' he thought, remembering how they had been sitting the day before at a corner table. They had nothing to talk about, as was almost always the case at this time, and laying her hand on the table she kept opening and shutting it, and laughed herself as she watched her action. He remembered how he had kissed it and then had examined the lines on the pink palm. 'Have mercy on us again!' thought Levin, crossing himself, bowing, and looking at the supple spring of the deacon's back bowing before him. 'She took my hand then and examined the lines. "You've got a splendid hand,"' she said. And he looked at his own hand and the short hand of the deacon. 'Yes, now it will soon be over,' he thought.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The celebrated physician, a very handsome man, still youngish, asked to examine the patient. He maintained, with peculiar satisfaction, it seemed, that maiden modesty is a mere relic of barbarism, and that nothing could be more natural than for a man still youngish to handle a young girl naked. He thought it natural because he did it every day, and felt and thought, as it seemed to him, no harm as he did it, and consequently he considered modesty in the girl not merely as a relic of barbarism, but also as an insult to himself. There was nothing for it but to submit, since, although all the doctors had studied in the same school, had read the same books, and learned the same science, and though some people said this celebrated doctor was a bad doctor, in the princess's household and circle it was for some reason accepted that this celebrated doctor alone had some special knowledge, and that he alone could save Kitty. After a careful examination and sounding of the bewildered patient, dazed with shame, the celebrated doctor, having scrupulously washed his hands, was standing in the drawing-room talking to the prince. The prince frowned and coughed, listening to the doctor. As a man who had seen something of life, and neither a fool nor an invalid, he had no faith in medicine, and in his heart was furious at the whole farce, especially as he was perhaps the only one who fully comprehended the cause of Kitty's illness. 'Conceited blockhead!' he thought, as he listened to the celebrated doctor's chatter about his daughter's symptoms. The doctor was meantime with difficulty restraining the expression of his contempt for this old gentleman, and with difficulty condescending to the level of his intelligence. He perceived that it was no good talking to the old man, and that the principal person in the house was the mother. Before her he decided to scatter his pearls. At that instant the princess came into the drawing-room with the family doctor. The prince withdrew, trying not to show how ridiculous he thought the whole performance. The princess was distracted, and did not know what to do. She felt she had sinned against Kitty. 'Well, doctor, decide our fate,' said the princess. Tell me everything.' 'Is there hope?' she meant to say, but her lips quivered, and she could not utter the question. 'Well, doctor?' 'Immediately, princess. I will talk it over with my colleague, and then I will have the honour of laying my opinion before you.' 'So we had better leave you?' 'As you please.' The princess went out with a sigh. When the doctors were left alone, the family doctor began timidly explaining his opinion, that there was a commencement of tuberculous trouble, but . . . and so on. The celebrated doctor listened to him, and in the middle of his sentence looked at his big gold watch. 'Yes,' said he. 'But . . .

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  His eyes were wide open as though he had never been asleep. The heaviness in his head and the weariness in his limbs that he had felt a minute before had suddenly gone. 'You may trample me in the mud,' he heard Alexey Alexandrovitch's words and saw him standing before him, and saw Anna's face with its burning flush and glittering eyes, gazing with love and tenderness not at him but at Alexey Alexandrovitch; he saw his own, as he fancied, foolish and ludicrous figure when Alexey Alexandrovitch took his hands away from his face. He stretched out his legs again and flung himself on the sofa in the same position and shut his eyes. 'To sleep! To forget!' he repeated to himself. But with his eyes shut he saw more distinctly than ever Anna's face as it had been on the memorable evening before the races. 'That is not and will not be, and she wants to wipe it out of her memory. But I cannot live without it. How can we be reconciled? how can we be reconciled?' he said aloud, and unconsciously began to repeat these words. This repetition checked the rising up of fresh images and memories, which he felt were thronging in his brain. But repeating words did not check his imagination for long. Again in extraordinarily rapid succession his best moments rose before his mind, and then his recent humiliation. 'Take away his hands,' Anna's voice says. He takes away his hands and feels the shame-struck and idiotic expression of his face. He still lay down, trying to sleep, though he felt there was not the smallest hope of it, and kept repeating stray words from some chain of thought, trying by this to check the rising flood of fresh images. He listened, and heard in a strange, mad whisper words repeated: 'I did not appreciate it, did not make enough of it. I did not appreciate it, did not make enough of it.' 'What's this? Am I going out of my mind?' he said to himself. 'Perhaps. What makes men go out of their minds; what makes men shoot themselves?' he answered himself, and opening his eyes, he saw with wonder an embroidered cushion beside him, worked by Varya, his brother's wife. He touched the tassel of the cushion, and tried to think of Varya, of when he had seen her last. But to think of anything extra neous was an agonising effort. 'No, I must sleep!' He moved the cushion up, and pressed his head into it, but he had to make an effort to keep his eyes shut. He jumped up and sat down. That's all over for me,' he said to himself. 'I must think what to do. What is left?' His mind rapidly ran through his life apart from his love of Anna. 'Ambition? Serpuhovskoy? Society? The court?' He could not come to a pause anywhere.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'No, I'm not nice at all. Come, tell me . . . Stop a minute, let's sit down,' said Kitty, making her sit down again beside her. 'Tell me, isn't it humiliating to think that a man has disdained your love, that he hasn't cared for it? . . .' 'But he didn't disdain it; I believe he cared for me, but he was a dutiful son …' 'Yes, but if it hadn't been on account of his mother, if it had been his own doing? . . .' said Kitty, feeling she was giving away her secret, and that her face, burning with the flush of shame, had betrayed her already. 'In that case he would have done wrong, and I should not have regretted him,' answered Varenka, evidently realising that they were now talking not of her, but of Kitty. 'But the humiliation,' said Kitty, 'the humiliation one can never forget, can never forget,' she said, remembering her look at the last ball during the pause in the music. 'Where is the humiliation? Why, you did nothing wrong?' 'Worse than wrong—shameful.' Varenka shook her head and laid her hand on Kitty's hand. 'Why, what is there shameful?' she said. 'You didn't tell a man, who didn't care for you, that you loved him, did you?' 'Of course not; I never said a word, but he knew it. No, no; there are looks, there are ways. I can't forget it, if I live a hundred years.' 'Why so? I don't understand. The whole point is whether you love him now or not,' said Varenka, who called everything by its name. 'I hate him; I can't forgive myself.' 'Why, what for?' 'The shame, the humiliation!' 'Oh! if everyone were as sensitive as you are!' said Varenka. 'There isn't a girl who hasn't been through the same. And it's all so unimportant.' 'Why, what is important?' said Kitty, looking into her face with inquisitive wonder. 'Oh, there's so much that's important,' said Varenka, smiling. 'Why, what?' 'Oh, so much that's more important,' answered Varenka, not knowing what to say. But at that instant they heard the princess's voice from the window. 'Kitty, it's cold! Either get a shawl, or come indoors.' 'It really is time to go in!' said Varenka, getting up. 'I have to go on to Madame Berthe's; she asked me to.' Kitty held her by the hand, and with passionate curiosity and entreaty her eyes asked her: 'What is it, what is this of such importance that gives you such tranquillity? You know, tell me!' But Varenka did not even know what Kitty's eyes were asking her. She merely thought that she had to go to see Madame Berthe too that evening, and to make haste home in time for maman's tea at twelve o'clock. She went indoors, collected her music, and saying good-bye to everyone, was about to go. 'Allow me to see you home,' said the colonel.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  What is it you want?' He was not at all the same as Konstantin had been fancying him. The worst and most tiresome part of his character, what made all relations with him so difficult, had been forgotten by Konstantin Levin when he thought of him, and now, when he saw his face, and especially that nervous twitching of his head, he remembered it all. 'I didn't want to see you for anything,' he answered timidly. 'I've simply come to see you.' His brother's timidity obviously softened Nikolay. His lips twitched. 'Oh, so that's it?' he said. 'Well, come in; sit down. Like some supper? Masha, bring supper for three. No, stop a minute. Do you know who this is?' he said, addressing his brother, and indicating the gentleman in the jerkin: 'This is Mr. Kritsky, my friend from Kiev, a very remarkable man. He's persecuted by the police, of course, because he's not a scoundrel.' And he looked round in the way he always did at everyone in the room. Seeing that the woman standing in the doorway was moving to go, he shouted to her, 'Wait a minute, I said.' And with the inability to express himself, the incoherence that Konstantin knew so well, he began, with another look round at everyone, to tell his brother Krit sky's story: how he had been expelled the university for starting a benefit society for the poor students and Sunday-schools; and how he had afterwards been a teacher in a peasant school, and how he had been driven out of that too, and had afterwards been condemned for something. 'You're of the Kiev university?' said Konstantin Levin to Kritsky, to break the awkward silence that followed. 'Yes, I was of Kiev,' Kritsky replied angrily, his face darkening. 'And this woman,' Nikclay Levin interrupted him, pointing to her, 'is the partner of my life, Marya Nikolaevna. I took her out of a bad house,' and he jerked his neck saying this; 'but I love her and respect her, and anyone who wants to know me,' he added, raising his voice and knitting his brows, 'I beg to love her and respect her. She's just the same as my wife, just the same. So now you know whom you've got to do with. And if you think you're lowering yourself, well, here's the floor, there's the door.' And again his eyes travelled inquiringly over all of them. 'Why I should be lowering myself, I don't understand.' 'Then, Masha, tell them to bring supper: three portions, spirits and wine…. No, wait a minute. . . . No, it doesn't matter. . . . Go along.' XXV 'S O you see,' pursued Nikolay Levin, painfully wrinkling his forehead and twitching. It was obviously difficult for him to think of what to say and do. 'Here, do you see?' . . . He pointed to some sort of iron bars, fastened together with strings, lying in a corner of the room. 'Do you see that?

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He had not intended to go away next day, but he now determined to go home early in the morning. Besides, the sister-in-law with her low-necked bodice aroused in him a feeling akin to shame and remorse for some utterly base action. Most important of all—he must get back without delay: he would have to make haste to put his new project to the peasants before the sowing of the winter wheat, so that the sowing might be undertaken on a new basis. He had made up his mind to revolutionise his whole system. XXIX T HE carrying out of Levin's plan presented many difficulties; but he struggled on, doing his utmost, and attained a result which, though not what he desired, was enough to enable him, without self-deception, to believe that the attempt was worth the trouble. One of the chief difficulties was that the process of cultivating the land was in full swing, that it was impossible to stop everything and begin it all again from the beginning, and the machine had to be mended while in motion. When on the evening that he arrived home he informed the bailiff of his plans, the latter with visible pleasure agreed with what he said so long as he was pointing out that all that had been done up to that time was stupid and useless. The bailiff said that he had said so a long while ago, but no heed had been paid him. But as for the proposal made by Levin—to take a part as shareholder with his labourers in each agricultural undertaking—at this the bailiff simply expressed a profound despondency, and offered no definite opinion, but began immediately talking of the urgent necessity of carrying the remaining sheaves of rye the next day, and of sending the men out for the second ploughing, so that Levin felt that this was not the time for discussing it. On beginning to talk to the peasants about it, and making a proposition to cede them the land on new terms, he came into collision with the same great difficulty that they were so much absorbed by the current work of the day, that they had not time to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed scheme. The simple-hearted Ivan, the cowherd, seemed completely to grasp Levin's proposal—that he should with his family take a share of the profits of the cattle-yard—and he was in complete sympathy with the plan. But when Levin hinted at the future advantages, Ivan's face expressed alarm and regret that he could not hear all he had to say, and he made haste to find himself some task that would admit of no delay: he either snatched up the fork to pitch the hay out of the pens, or ran to get water or to clear out the dung.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Catching sight of her, he came to meet her, his lips falling into their habitual sarcastic smile, and his big, tired eyes looking straight at her. An unpleasant sensation gripped at her heart when she met his obstinate and weary glance, as though she had expected to see him different. She was especially struck by the feeling of dissatisfaction with herself that she experienced on meeting him. That feeling was an intimate, familiar feeling, like a consciousness of hypocrisy, which she experienced in her relations with her husband. But hitherto she had not taken note of the feeling, now she was clearly and painfully aware of it. 'Yes, as you see, your tender spouse, as devoted as the first year after marriage, burned with impatience to see you,' he said in his deliberate, high-pitched voice, and in that tone which he almost always took with her, a tone of jeering at anyone who should say in earnest what he said. 'Is Seryozha quite well?' she asked. 'And is this all the reward,' said he, 'for my ardour? He's quite well….' XXXI V RONSKY had not even tried to sleep all that night. He sat in his armchair, looking straight before him or scanning the people who got in and out. If he had indeed on previous occasions struck and impressed people who did not know him by his air of unhesitating composure, he seemed now more haughty and self-possessed than ever. He looked at people as if they were things. A nervous young man, a clerk in a law-court, sitting opposite him, hated him for that look. The young man asked him for a light, and entered into conversation with him, and even pushed against him, to make him feel that he was not a thing, but a person. But Vronsky gazed at him exactly as he did at the lamp, and the young man made a wry face, feeling that he was losing his self-possession under the oppression of this refusal to recognise him as a person. Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself a king, not because he believed that he had made an impression on Anna—he did not yet believe that,—but because the impression she had made on him gave him happiness and pride. What would come of it all he did not know, he did not even think. He felt that all his forces, hitherto dissipated, wasted, were centred on one thing, and bent with fearful energy on one blissful goal.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Just as in the game of cat and mouse, the hands raised for him were dropped to bar the way for Anna. One of the first ladies of Petersburg society whom Vronsky saw was his cousin Betsy. 'At last!' she greeted him joyfully. 'And Anna? How glad I am! Where are you stopping? I can fancy after your delightful travels you must find our poor Petersburg horrid. I can fancy your honeymoon in Rome. How about the divorce? Is that all over?' Vronsky noticed that Betsy's enthusiasm waned when she learned that no divorce had as yet taken place. 'People will throw stones at me, I know,' she said, 'but I shall come and see Anna; yes, I shall certainly come. You won't be here long, I suppose?' And she did certainly come to see Anna the same day, but her tone was not at all the same as in former days. She unmistakably prided herself on her courage, and wished Anna to appreciate the fidelity of her friendship. She only stayed ten minutes, talking of society gossip, and on leaving she said— 'You've never told me when the divorce is to be? Supposing I'm ready to fling my cap over the mill, other starchy people will give you the cold shoulder until you're married. And that's so simple nowadays. C a se fait. So you're going on Friday? Sorry we shan't see each other again.' From Betsy's tone Vronsky might have grasped what he had to expect from the world; but he made another effort in his own family. His mother he did not reckon upon. He knew that his mother, who had been so enthusiastic over Anna at their first acquaintance, would have no mercy on her now for having ruined her son's career. But he had more hope of Varya, his brother's wife. He fancied she would not throw stones, and would go simply and directly to see Anna, and would receive her in her own house. The day after his arrival Vronsky went to her, and finding her alone, expressed his wishes directly. 'You know, Alexey,' she said after hearing him, 'how fond I am of you, and how ready I am to do anything for you; but I have not spoken, because I knew I could be of no use to you and to Anna Arkadyevna,' she said, articulating the name 'Anna Arkadyevna' with particular care. 'Don't suppose, please, that I judge her. Never; perhaps in her place I should have done the same. I don't and can't enter into that,' she said, glacing timidly at his gloomy face. 'But one must call things by their names.