Anna Karenina полностью

And, the question about the content of the picture having led him to one of his favourite themes, Golenishchev began to expound:

‘I don’t understand how they can be so grossly mistaken. Christ found His definitive realization in the art of the old masters. Which means, if they want to portray not God but some revolutionary or wise man, they should take someone from history - Socrates, Franklin, Charlotte Corday,²³ only not Christ. They take the very person who cannot be taken for art, and then ...’

‘And is it true that this Mikhailov lives in such poverty?’ asked Vronsky, thinking that he, as a Russian Maecenas, ought to help the artist regardless of whether his picture was good or bad.

‘Hardly. He’s a remarkable portraitist. Have you seen his portrait of Mme Vassilchikov? But it seems he no longer wants to paint portraits, and perhaps he really is in need. What I’m saying is...’

‘Couldn’t we ask him to paint a portrait of Anna Arkadyevna?’ said Vronsky.

‘Why of me?’ said Anna. ‘I don’t want any portrait after yours. Better of Annie’ (so she called her little girl). ‘And here she is,’ she added, looking out the window at the beautiful Italian wet nurse who had taken the child to the garden, and at once glancing surreptitiously at Vronsky. This beautiful wet nurse, from whom Vronsky had painted the head for his picture, was the only secret grief in Anna’s life. While painting her, he had admired her beauty and medievalness, and Anna did not dare admit to herself that she was afraid of being jealous of her, and therefore she especially pampered and spoiled both the woman and her little son.

Vronsky also glanced out the window and then into Anna’s eyes, and, turning at once to Golenishchev, said:

‘And do you know this Mikhailov?’

‘I’ve met him. But he’s an odd fellow and totally uneducated. You know, one of those wild new people you meet so often now, one of those freethinkers who are brought up d’emblée^am with notions of unbelief, negation and materialism. It used to be,’ Golenishchev went on, not noticing or not wishing to notice that both Anna and Vronsky also wanted to talk, ‘it used to be that a freethinker was a man who had been brought up with notions of religion, law, morality, and had arrived at freethinking by himself, through his own toil and struggle. But now a new type of self-made freethinkers has appeared, who grow up and never even hear that there were laws of morality, religion, that there were authorities, but who grow up right into notions of the negation of everything - that is, as wild men. He’s like that. It seems he’s the son of a Moscow major-domo and received no education. When he entered the Academy and made a reputation for himself, being far from stupid, he wanted to get educated. And he turned to what he thought was a source of education — the magazines. You understand, in older times a man who wanted to get educated, a Frenchman, let’s say, would start by studying the classics - theologians, tragedians, historians, philosophers - and you can imagine all the mental labour that confronted him. But with us, now, he comes straight to nihilistic literature, very quickly learns the whole essence of its negative teaching, and there he is. And that’s not all: some twenty years ago he’d have found signs of a struggle with authorities, with age-old views, in this literature, and from this struggle he’d have understood that something else existed; but now he comes straight to a literature that doesn’t even deign to argue with the old views, but says directly: There is nothing, evolution, selection, the struggle for existence - and that’s all. In my article I ...’

‘You know what,’ said Anna, who had long been cautiously exchanging glances with Vronsky, and who knew that he was not interested in the artist’s education but was concerned only with the thought of helping him and commissioning the portrait. ‘You know what?’ she resolutely interrupted the loquacious Golenishchev. ‘Let’s go and see him!’

Golenishchev recovered himself and willingly agreed. But since the artist lived in a remote quarter, they decided to take a carriage.

An hour later Anna, sitting beside Golenishchev and with Vronsky in the front seat, drove up to a new, ugly house in a remote quarter. Learning from the caretaker’s wife, who came to meet them, that Mikhailov received people in his studio, but was now in his apartment two steps away, they sent her to him with their cards, asking permission to see his pictures.

X

The artist Mikhailov was working as usual when the cards of Count Vronsky and Golenishchev were brought to him. In the morning he had worked on the big picture in his studio. Returning home, he got angry with his wife for being unable to handle the landlady, who was demanding money.

‘I’ve told you twenty times, don’t get into explanations. You’re a fool as it is, and when you start speaking Italian you come out a triple fool,’ he told her, after a lengthy argument.