Anna Karenina полностью

Vronsky entered the theatre at half-past eight. The performance was in full swing. An old usher helped Vronsky off with his fur coat and, recognizing him, called him ‘your highness’ and suggested that he not take a tag but simply ask for Fyodor. There was no one in the bright corridor except the usher and two lackeys with fur coats in their hands, listening by the door. From behind the closed door came the sounds of the orchestra’s careful staccato accompaniment and one female voice distinctly pronouncing a musical phrase. The door opened to allow the usher to slip in, and the concluding phrase clearly struck Vronsky’s ear. The door closed at once and he did not hear the end of the phrase or the cadenza, but he could tell by the thunder of applause behind the door that it was over. When he entered the hall, brightly lit by chandeliers and bronze gas brackets, the noise still continued. On stage the singer, her bare shoulders and diamonds gleaming, bent over and, with the help of the tenor who held her hand, smilingly picked up the bouquets that had been awkwardly thrown across the footlights, then went over to a gentleman with glistening, pomaded hair parted in the middle, who reached his long arms across the footlights, holding out something or other - and all the audience in the stalls as well as in the boxes stirred, stretched forward, shouted and applauded. The conductor on his podium helped to hand it on and straightened his white tie. Vronsky went into the middle of the stalls, stopped and began to look around. Tonight he paid less attention than ever to the habitual surroundings, to the stage, to the noise, to this whole familiar, uninteresting, motley flock of spectators in the tightly packed theatre.

As usual, there were the same sort of ladies in the boxes with the same sort of officers behind them; the same multi-coloured women, uniforms, frock coats, God knows who they were; the same dirty crowd in the gallery; and in all this crowd, in the boxes and front rows, there were about forty real men and women. And to these oases Vronsky at once paid attention, and with them he at once entered into contact.

The act ended as he came in, and therefore, without going to his brother’s box, he walked up to the front row and stopped by the footlights with Serpukhovskoy, who, bending his knee and tapping his heel against the wall, had seen him from a distance and summoned him with a smile.

Vronsky had not yet seen Anna; he purposely did not look her way. But from the direction of all eyes he knew where she was. He looked around surreptitiously, but not for her; expecting the worst, his eyes were seeking Alexei Alexandrovich. To his good fortune, Alexei Alexandrovich was not in the theatre this time.

‘How little of the military is left in you!’ Serpukhovskoy said to him. ‘A diplomat, an artist, something of that sort.’

‘Yes, I put on a tailcoat as soon as I got home,’ Vronsky replied, smiling and slowly taking out his opera-glasses.

‘In that, I confess, I envy you. When I come back from abroad and put this on,’ he tapped his epaulettes, ‘I regret my lost freedom.’

Serpukhovskoy had long since given up on Vronsky’s career, but he loved him as before and now was especially amiable with him.

‘Too bad you were late for the first act.’

Vronsky, listening with one ear, transferred his opera-glasses from the baignoire to the dress circle and scanned the boxes. Next to a lady in a turban and a bald old man, who blinked angrily into the lenses of the moving opera-glasses, Vronsky suddenly saw Anna’s head, proud, strikingly beautiful, and smiling in its frame of lace. She was in the fifth baignoire, twenty steps away from him. She was sitting at the front and, turning slightly, was saying something to Yashvin. The poise of her head on her beautiful, broad shoulders, the glow of restrained excitement in her eyes and her whole face reminded him of her exactly as he had seen her at the ball in Moscow. But his sense of this beauty was quite different now. His feeling for her now had nothing mysterious in it, and therefore her beauty, though it attracted him more strongly than before, at the same time offended him. She was not looking in his direction, but Vronsky could sense that she had seen him.

When Vronsky again looked in that direction through his opera-glasses, he noticed that Princess Varvara was especially red, laughed unnaturally and kept turning to look at the neighbouring box, while Anna, tapping on the red velvet with a folded fan, gazed off somewhere and did not see or want to see what was happening in that box. Yashvin’s face wore the expression it had when he was losing at cards. He sulkily put the left side of his moustache further and further into his mouth, glancing sidelong at the same neighbouring box.