Anna Karenina полностью

But the longer he listened to the King Lear fantasia, the further he felt from any possibility of forming some definite opinion for himself. The musical expression of feeling was ceaselessly beginning, as if gathering itself up, but it fell apart at once into fragments of new beginnings of musical expressions and sometimes into extremely complex sounds, connected by nothing other than the mere whim of the composer. But these fragments of musical expressions, good ones on occasion, were unpleasant because they were totally unexpected and in no way prepared for. Gaiety, sadness, despair, tenderness and triumph appeared without justification, like a madman’s feelings. And, just as with a madman, these feelings passed unexpectedly.

All through the performance Levin felt like a deaf man watching people dance. He was in utter perplexity when the piece ended and felt great fatigue from such strained but in no way rewarded attention. Loud applause came from all sides. Everybody stood up, began walking, talking. Wishing to explain his perplexity by means of other people’s impressions, Levin began to walk about, looking for connoisseurs, and was glad to see one well-known connoisseur talking with Pestsov, whom he knew.

‘Amazing!’ Pestsov’s dense bass said. ‘Good afternoon, Konstantin Dmitrich. Particularly graphic and, so to speak, sculptural and rich in colour is the place where you feel Cordelia approaching, where a woman, das ewig Weibliche,^cx8 enters the struggle with fate. Don’t you think?’

‘But what does Cordelia have to do with it?’ Levin asked timidly, forgetting completely that the fantasia portrayed King Lear on the heath.

‘Cordelia comes in ... here!’ said Pestsov, tapping his fingers on the satiny playbill he was holding and handing it to Levin.

Only then did Levin remember the title of the fantasia, and he hastened to read Shakespeare’s verses in Russian translation, printed on the back of the bill.

‘You can’t follow without it,’ said Pestsov, addressing Levin, since his interlocutor had left and there was no one else for him to talk to.

During the entr‘acte an argument arose between Levin and Pestsov about the virtues and shortcomings of the Wagnerian trend in music.⁹ Levin maintained that the mistake of Wagner and all his followers lay in their music wishing to cross over to the sphere of another art, just as poetry is mistaken when it describes facial features, something that should be done by painting, and he gave as an example of such a mistake a sculptor who decided to carve in marble the phantoms of poetic images emerging around the figure of a poet on a pedestal.¹⁰ ‘The sculptor gave these phantoms so little of the phantasmic that they’re even holding on to the stairs,’ said Levin. He liked the phrase, but he did not remember whether he might not have used it before, and precisely with Pestsov, and having said it, he became embarrassed.

Pestsov maintained that art is one and that it can reach its highest manifestations only by uniting all its forms.

The second part of the concert Levin could not hear at all. Pestsov stood next to him and spent almost the whole time talking to him, denouncing the piece for its superfluous, cloying, affected simplicity and comparing it with the Pre-Raphaelites in painting. On the way out Levin met still more acquaintances, with whom he talked about politics, music and mutual acquaintances. Among others he met Count Bohl, whom he had completely forgotten to visit.

‘Well, you can go now,’ Natalie said to him when he told her of it. ‘Maybe they won’t receive you, and then you can come and fetch me at the meeting. I’ll still be there.’

VI

‘Perhaps they’re not receiving?’ said Levin, entering the front hall of Countess Bohl’s house.

‘They are. Please come in,’ said the porter, resolutely helping him out of his coat.

‘How annoying,’ thought Levin, sighing as he removed a glove and shaped his hat. ‘Well, why am I going? And what shall I talk about with them?’

Passing through the first drawing room, Levin met Countess Bohl in the doorway. With a preoccupied and stern face, she was ordering a servant to do something. Seeing Levin, she smiled and invited him into the next small drawing room, from which voices came. In this drawing room, in armchairs, sat the countess’s two daughters and a Moscow colonel of Levin’s acquaintance. Levin went up to them and, after the greetings, sat down by the sofa, holding his hat on his knee.

‘How is your wife’s health? Were you at the concert? We couldn’t go. Mama had to be at a panikhida.’¹¹

‘Yes, I heard ... Such a sudden death,’ said Levin.

The countess came in, sat on the sofa and also asked about his wife and the concert.

Levin answered her and repeated the remark about the suddenness of Mme Apraksin’s death.

‘Though she always had weak health.’

‘Did you go to the opera yesterday?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Lucca was very good.’¹²