‘Daryalov fought a duel...’
In his youth Karenin’s thoughts had been especially drawn to duelling, precisely because he was physically a timid man and knew it very well. Alexei Alexandrovich could not think without horror of a pistol pointed at him, and had never in his life used any weapon. In his youth this horror had made him think often about duelling and measure himself against a situation in which he would have to put his life in danger. Having achieved success and a firm position in life, he had long forgotten this feeling; yet the habit of the feeling claimed its own, and the fear of cowardliness proved so strong in him even now that Alexei Alexandrovich pondered and mentally fondled the question of a duel for a long time from all sides, though he knew beforehand that he would not fight under any circumstances.
‘No doubt our society is still so savage (a far cry from England) that a great many’ - and among the many were those whose opinion Alexei Alexandrovich especially valued - ‘would look favourably upon a duel. But what result would be achieved? Suppose I challenge him,’ Alexei Alexandrovich went on to himself and, vividly imagining the night he would spend after the challenge and the pistol pointed at him, he shuddered and realized that he would never do it. ‘Suppose I challenge him to a duel. Suppose they teach me how,’ he went on thinking. ’‘They place me, I pull the trigger,’ he said to himself, shutting his eyes, ‘and it turns out that I’ve killed him.‘ Alexei Alexandrovich shook his head to drive these foolish thoughts away. ’ What is the sense of killing a man in order to define one’s attitude towards a criminal wife and a son? I’ll have to decide what I am to do with her just the same. But what is still more likely and what would undoubtedly happen, is that I would be killed or wounded. I, the innocent one, the victim, would be killed or wounded. Still more senseless. But not only that: a challenge to a duel would be a dishonest act on my part. Do I not know beforehand that my friends would never allow me to go as far as a duel, would not allow the life of a statesman, needed by Russia, to be put in danger? What would it mean? It would mean that I, knowing beforehand that the thing would never go as far as danger, merely wanted to give myself a certain false glitter by this challenge. It is dishonest, it is false, it is deceiving others and myself. A duel is unthinkable, and no one expects it of me. My goal consists in safeguarding my reputation, which I need for the unimpeded continuation of my activity.’ His official activity, of great importance in his eyes even before, now presented itself as especially important.
Having considered and rejected a duel, Alexei Alexandrovich turned to divorce - another way out chosen by some of the husbands he remembered. Going through all the cases of divorce he could remember (there were a great many in the highest society, which he knew so well), he did not find a single one in which the purpose of the divorce was the same as the one he had in mind. In all these cases the husband had yielded up or sold the unfaithful wife, and the very side which, being guilty, had no right to remarry, had entered into fictional, quasi-legitimate relations with a new consort. And in his own case Alexei Alexandrovich saw that to obtain a legal divorce - that is, one in which the guilty wife would simply be rejected - was impossible. He saw that the complex conditions of life in which he found himself did not allow for the possibility of the coarse proofs the law demanded to establish the wife’s criminality; he saw that there was a certain refinement of that life which also did not allow for the use of such proofs, if there were any, that the use of these proofs would harm him more than it would her in the eyes of society.
An attempt at divorce could only lead to a scandalous court trial, which would be a godsend for his enemies, for the slandering and humiliation of his high position in society. Nor could the chief goal - to define the situation with the least disturbance - be achieved through divorce. Besides that, divorce, or even an attempt at divorce, implied that the wife had broken relations with her husband and joined with her lover. And in Alexei Alexandrovich’s soul, despite what now seemed to him an utter, contemptuous indifference to his wife, there remained one feeling with regard to her - an unwillingness that she be united with Vronsky unhindered, that her crime be profitable for her. This one thought so vexed him that, merely imagining it, he groaned with inner pain, got up, changed his position in the carriage and, frowning, spent a long time after that wrapping his chilled and bony legs in a fluffy rug.
