‘A fine thing!’ Shcherbatsky said, laughing. ‘I’m just ready to begin.’
‘I thought the same not long ago, but now I know that I’ll die soon.’
Levin said what he had really been thinking lately. He saw either death or the approach of it everywhere. But his undertaking now occupied him all the more. He had to live his life to the end, until death came. Darkness covered everything for him; but precisely because of this darkness he felt that his undertaking was the only guiding thread in this darkness, and he seized it and held on to it with all his remaining strength.
Part Four
I
The Karenins, husband and wife, went on living in the same house, met every day, but were completely estranged from each other. Alexei Alexandrovich made it a rule to see his wife every day, so as to give the servants no grounds for conjecture, but he avoided dining at home. Vronsky never visited Alexei Alexandrovich’s house, but Anna saw him elsewhere and her husband knew it.
The situation was painful for all three of them, and none of them would have been able to live even one day in that situation had they not expected that it would change and that it was only a temporary, grievous difficulty which would pass. Alexei Alexandrovich expected that this passion would pass, as all things pass, that everyone would forget about it and his name would remain undisgraced. Anna, upon whom the situation depended and for whom it was most painful of all, endured it because she not only expected but was firmly convinced that it would all resolve and clarify itself very soon. She decidedly did not know what would resolve this situation, but was firmly convinced that this something would now come very soon. Vronsky, involuntarily yielding to her, also expected something independent of himself which would clear up all the difficulties.
In the middle of winter Vronsky spent a very dull week. He was attached to a foreign prince who came to Petersburg,1 and had to show him the sights of Petersburg. Vronsky himself was of impressive appearance; besides that, he possessed the art of bearing himself with dignified respect and was accustomed to dealing with people of this sort; that was why he had been attached to the prince. But he found the duty very burdensome. The prince wished to miss nothing of which he might be asked at home whether he had seen it in Russia; and he himself wished to take advantage, as far as possible, of Russian pleasures. Vronsky’s duty was to be his guide in the one and the other. In the morning they went around seeing the sights; in the evening they partook of national pleasures. The prince enjoyed a health remarkable even among princes; by means of gymnastics and good care of his body, he had attained to such strength that, despite the intemperance with which he gave himself up to pleasure, he was as fresh as a big, green, waxy Dutch cucumber. The prince travelled a great deal and found that one of the main advantages of the modern ease of communication was the accessibility of national pleasures. He had been to Spain, where he had given serenades and become close with a Spanish woman who played the mandolin. In Switzerland he had shot a
Vronsky, who was, so to speak, his chief master of ceremonies, went to great lengths in organizing all the pleasures offered to the prince by various people. There were trotting races, and pancakes, and bear hunts, and troikas, and gypsies, and carousing with a Russian smashing of crockery. And the prince adopted the Russian spirit with extreme ease, smashed whole trays of crockery, sat gypsy girls on his knees and seemed to be asking: ‘What else, or is this all that makes up the Russian spirit?’
