Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

Part One

Chapter 1

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house.
The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on
an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in
their family, and she had announced to her husband that
she could not go on living in the same house with him. This
position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only
the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of
their family and household, were painfully conscious of it.
Every person in the house felt that there was no sense in
their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one
another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room,
the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess
quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook
had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.
Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch
Oblonsky—Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable
world— woke up at his usual hour, that is, at eight o’clock
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in the morning, not in his wife’s bedroom, but on the
leather-covered sofa in his study. He turned over his stout,
well-cared-for person on the springy sofa, as though he
would sink into a long sleep again; he vigorously embraced
the pillow on the other side and buried his face in it; but all
at once he jumped up, sat up on the sofa, and opened his
eyes.
‘Yes, yes, how was it now?’ he thought, going over his
dream. ‘Now, how was it? To be sure! Alabin was giving a
dinner at Darmstadt; no, not Darmstadt, but something
American. Yes, but then, Darmstadt was in America. Yes,
Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, and the tables
sang, Il mio tesoro—not Il mio tesoro though, but something better, and there were some sort of little decanters on
the table, and they were women, too,’ he remembered.
Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a smile. ‘Yes, it was nice, very nice. There was
a great deal more that was delightful, only there’s no putting it into words, or even expressing it in one’s thoughts
awake.’ And noticing a gleam of light peeping in beside one
of the serge curtains, he cheerfully dropped his feet over the
edge of the sofa, and felt about with them for his slippers, a
present on his last birthday, worked for him by his wife on
gold-colored morocco. And, as he had done every day for
the last nine years, he stretched out his hand, without getting up, towards the place where his dressing-gown always
hung in his bedroom. And thereupon he suddenly remembered that he was not sleeping in his wife’s room, but in his
study, and why: the smile vanished from his face, he knitted

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his brows.
‘Ah, ah, ah! Oo!…’ he muttered, recalling everything that
had happened. And again every detail of his quarrel with
his wife was present to his imagination, all the hopelessness
of his position, and worst of all, his own fault.
‘Yes, she won’t forgive me, and she can’t forgive me. And
the most awful thing about it is that it’s all my fault—all
my fault, though I’m not to blame. That’s the point of the
whole situation,’ he reflected. ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ he kept repeating
in despair, as he remembered the acutely painful sensations
caused him by this quarrel.
Most unpleasant of all was the first minute when, on
coming, happy and good-humored, from the theater, with a
huge pear in his hand for his wife, he had not found his wife
in the drawing-room, to his surprise had not found her in
the study either, and saw her at last in her bedroom with the
unlucky letter that revealed everything in her hand.
She, his Dolly, forever fussing and worrying over household details, and limited in her ideas, as he considered, was
sitting perfectly still with the letter in her hand, looking
at him with an expression of horror, despair, and indignation.
‘What’s this? this?’ she asked, pointing to the letter.
And at this recollection, Stepan Arkadyevitch, as is so often the case, was not so much annoyed at the fact itself as at
the way in which he had met his wife’s words.
There happened to him at that instant what does happen
to people when they are unexpectedly caught in something
very disgraceful. He did not succeed in adapting his face to
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the position in which he was placed towards his wife by the
discovery of his fault. Instead of being hurt, denying, defending himself, begging forgiveness, instead of remaining
indifferent even—anything would have been better than
what he did do—his face utterly involuntarily (reflex spinal action, reflected Stepan Arkadyevitch, who was fond
of physiology)—utterly involuntarily assumed its habitual,
good-humored, and therefore idiotic smile.
This idiotic smile he could not forgive himself. Catching
sight of that smile, Dolly shuddered as though at physical
pain, broke out with her characteristic heat into a flood of
cruel words, and rushed out of the room. Since then she had
refused to see her husband.
‘It’s that idiotic smile that’s to blame for it all,’ thought
Stepan Arkadyevitch.
‘But what’s to be done? What’s to be done?’ he said to
himself in despair, and found no answer.

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Chapter 2
Stepan Arkadyevitch was a truthful man in his relations with himself. He was incapable of deceiving himself
and persuading himself that he repented of his conduct.
He could not at this date repent of the fact that he, a handsome, susceptible man of thirty-four, was not in love with
his wife, the mother of five living and two dead children,
and only a year younger than himself. All he repented of
was that he had not succeeded better in hiding it from his
wife. But he felt all the difficulty of his position and was sorry for his wife, his children, and himself. Possibly he might
have managed to conceal his sins better from his wife if he
had anticipated that the knowledge of them would have had
such an effect on her. He had never clearly thought out the
subject, but he had vaguely conceived that his wife must
long ago have suspected him of being unfaithful to her, and
shut her eyes to the fact. He had even supposed that she, a
worn-out woman no longer young or good-looking, and in
no way remarkable or interesting, merely a good mother,
ought from a sense of fairness to take an indulgent view. It
had turned out quite the other way.
‘Oh, it’s awful! oh dear, oh dear! awful!’ Stepan
Arkadyevitch kept repeating to himself, and he could think
of nothing to be done. ‘And how well things were going up
till now! how well we got on! She was contented and happy
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in her children; I never interfered with her in anything; I
let her manage the children and the house just as she liked.
It’s true it’s bad her having been a governess in our house.
That’s bad! There’s something common, vulgar, in flirting
with one’s governess. But what a governess!’ (He vividly recalled the roguish black eyes of Mlle. Roland and her smile.)
‘But after all, while she was in the house, I kept myself in
hand. And the worst of it all is that she’s already…it seems
as if ill-luck would have it so! Oh, oh! But what, what is to
be done?’
There was no solution, but that universal solution which
life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the
day—that is, forget oneself. To forget himself in sleep was
impossible now, at least till nighttime; he could not go back
now to the music sung by the decanter-women; so he must
forget himself in the dream of daily life.
‘Then we shall see,’ Stepan Arkadyevitch said to himself, and getting up he put on a gray dressing-gown lined
with blue silk, tied the tassels in a knot, and, drawing a deep
breath of air into his broad, bare chest, he walked to the
window with his usual confident step, turning out his feet
that carried his full frame so easily. He pulled up the blind
and rang the bell loudly. It was at once answered by the appearance of an old friend, his valet, Matvey, carrying his
clothes, his boots, and a telegram. Matvey was followed by
the barber with all the necessaries for shaving.
‘Are there any papers from the office?’ asked Stepan
Arkadyevitch, taking the telegram and seating himself at

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the looking-glass.
‘On the table,’ replied Matvey, glancing with inquiring
sympathy at his master; and, after a short pause, he added
with a sly smile, ‘They’ve sent from the carriage-jobbers.’
Stepan Arkadyevitch made no reply, he merely glanced
at Matvey in the looking-glass. In the glance, in which their
eyes met in the looking-glass, it was clear that they understood one another. Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes asked: ‘Why
do you tell me that? don’t you know?’
Matvey put his hands in his jacket pockets, thrust out
one leg, and gazed silently, good-humoredly, with a faint
smile, at his master.
‘I told them to come on Sunday, and till then not to trouble you or themselves for nothing,’ he said. He had obviously
prepared the sentence beforehand.
Stepan Arkadyevitch saw Matvey wanted to make a joke
and attract attention to himself. Tearing open the telegram,
he read it through, guessing at the words, misspelt as they
always are in telegrams, and his face brightened.
‘Matvey, my sister Anna Arkadyevna will be here tomorrow,’ he said, checking for a minute the sleek, plump hand
of the barber, cutting a pink path through his long, curly
whiskers.
‘Thank God!’ said Matvey, showing by this response that
he, like his master, realized the significance of this arrival—
that is, that Anna Arkadyevna, the sister he was so fond of,
might bring about a reconciliation between husband and
wife.
‘Alone, or with her husband?’ inquired Matvey.
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Stepan