The Station (Part One)

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 the French girl who had been their governess, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This had lasted three days now, and not only the husband and wife but all the members of their family and household were painfully conscious of it.

On the third day, Prince Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky — Stiva, as he was called in the world — woke at his usual hour, eight o'clock, not in his wife's bedroom but on the leather sofa in his study. He stretched his handsome, well-fed body, and smiled, remembering a pleasant dream about little decanters that were also women; and then he remembered why he was sleeping in the study, and the smile vanished. He remembered the moment when his wife had come in holding the unlucky note, and he, instead of being angry or denying it or asking forgiveness, had smiled his habitual, kindly, foolish smile. That smile he could not forgive himself.

He was a truthful man. He could not pretend that he repented of being unfaithful to his wife — a woman of thirty-three, worn out by bearing seven children, five of them living — when he, at thirty-four, was handsome, amorous and still young. He only regretted that he had not hidden it better. And the whole problem was more than he could solve. So he did what he always did with insoluble questions: he forgot about it in the business of the day. He drank his coffee, read his liberal newspaper — liberal not because he had thought about it, but because the majority of his set held those views — and went to his office, where he was president of a government board in Moscow, and where everyone liked him, for he was good-natured and gentle and absolutely indifferent to what he was doing, and so never made mistakes.

His wife, Darya Alexandrovna — Dolly — sat in her room among her open drawers, pretending to pack, telling herself that she would go to her mother's with the children, and knowing that she would not. She had loved him; she still loved him; and she was humiliated.

That morning a friend from the country came to Stiva's office: Konstantin Dmitrich Levin, a strong, broad-shouldered, shy man of thirty-two, who lived on his estate and farmed it himself, and despised the town and everything in it. He had come to Moscow for one purpose: to propose to Dolly's youngest sister, Princess Kitty Shcherbatskaya, who was eighteen. He had loved the whole Shcherbatsky family since his student days, when he had been in and out of their house; and now he loved Kitty, and believed she could never care for him — he, an awkward, ordinary man who did nothing but keep cattle and shoot snipe.

Stiva told him he would find Kitty at the skating rink in the Zoological Gardens. Levin went. He recognised her at once in the crowd, as one recognises a rose among nettles; everything was lit up by her. She was skating, a little unsteadily, smiling, with her small head in its fur cap. He went down to the ice and skated with her, and she was friendly and kind, and her eyes were frank and clear; and he went away happy, and then miserable, for he could not tell whether her kindness meant anything.

He dined with Stiva at the Anglia, where Stiva ordered oysters and turbot and Chablis with the pleasure of a connoisseur, and Levin, who hated such dinners, ate cabbage soup in his mind. Stiva told him that he had every hope — Dolly herself thought so. But there was a rival: Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky, a cavalry officer, rich, handsome, a brilliant young man of Petersburg society, who was paying attention to Kitty. And then Stiva, over the wine, confessed his own trouble with Dolly: "What's to be done? Your wife grows old, while you're full of life."

That evening Levin went to the Shcherbatskys' and found Kitty alone in the drawing room. He did not know how he said it, but he said it: "I wanted to say — I came here on purpose — to be my wife!" She breathed heavily, not looking at him. She felt ecstasy. Her soul was flooded with happiness. But then she remembered Vronsky. She lifted her clear, truthful eyes, and seeing his desperate face, she answered hastily: "That cannot be — forgive me."

Vronsky came in a little later, and Levin, standing by the wall, saw the handsome, calm officer with his short-cropped black hair and his white, even teeth, saw how Kitty looked at him, and understood. He went away. Vronsky did not mean to marry Kitty; he had never thought of it. He enjoyed her admiration and was charmed by her, as one is charmed by a pleasant song, and he had no idea that his behaviour had a name — that it was courting a girl with no intention of marrying her, one of the evil actions common among brilliant young men such as he.

The next morning Vronsky went to the station of the Petersburg railway to meet his mother, who was arriving by the express. There he met Stiva Oblonsky, who was meeting his sister, Anna Arkadyevna Karenina, coming from Petersburg to make peace between him and his wife.

Vronsky went into the carriage to his mother. In the doorway he stepped aside to let a lady pass. With the trained eye of a man of the world, he saw at once that she belonged to the best society. He begged her pardon, and was going on, but felt he must look at her once more — not because she was very beautiful, but because in the expression of her charming face, as she passed close to him, there was something peculiarly caressing and soft. As he looked round, she too turned her head. Her shining grey eyes, that looked dark from the thick lashes, rested with friendly attention on his face, as though she were recognising him, and then turned away to the passing crowd. In that brief look Vronsky had time to notice the suppressed eagerness which played over her face and flitted between her brilliant eyes and the faint smile that curved her red lips. It was as though her nature were so brimming over with something that, against her will, it showed itself now in the flash of her eyes, and now in her smile. She deliberately shrouded the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in the faintly perceptible smile.

She was Anna Karenina, and she had travelled from Petersburg in the same compartment as his mother, who introduced them. Anna and the old Countess had talked the whole way, Anna about her eight-year-old son and the old lady about hers.

As they came out onto the platform, there was a commotion. A guard, drunk or muffled up against the frost, had not heard the train shunting backward, and had been crushed under the wheels. People ran past them; there was talk of his wife and children. "Is it not possible to do something for her?" said Anna, in agitation. Vronsky glanced at her, and went back, and gave two hundred roubles for the widow. Anna saw it, and was troubled that it was done for her. In the carriage, her lips trembled. "It's a bad omen," she said.

Anna went to Dolly. She did not lecture her or excuse her brother. She listened, and wept with her, and told her that Stiva was ashamed, that he was weak but he loved her; and she reminded her of their children and of the love she had had for him. And by evening the husband and wife were reconciled, and Stiva was calling Dolly "my dear" and asking for tea in the drawing room.

Kitty adored Anna at once. Anna was to go to the great ball that week, and Kitty begged her to wear lilac. "Why, you wish me to wear lilac?" Kitty was certain that at the ball Vronsky would propose to her.

At the ball, Kitty wore a pink tulle dress over a pink slip, with a black velvet ribbon round her neck. She had never looked so lovely. Anna was in black velvet, cut low, with Venetian lace and a wreath of pansies in her black hair; and Kitty, who had pictured her in lilac, saw that her charm was just that she always stood out against her dress, that her dress was never noticeable on her. Kitty danced the first waltz with Vronsky, and waited for the mazurka, at which she was sure everything would be decided. Then she saw Vronsky dancing with Anna.

She saw in Anna's face the brilliance of excitement that Kitty knew so well in herself, that came from the intoxication of admiration; and she saw whose admiration it was. Every time Vronsky spoke to Anna, a light came into her eyes, and a smile of happiness curved her lips. And Vronsky — Kitty saw it with horror — had a look of humble submission and fear, like a clever dog that has done wrong. Kitty refused five gentlemen for the mazurka, saying she was engaged, and sat by herself in despair, and the whole ball became a nightmare. Anna danced the mazurka with Vronsky. Something terrible and cruel had happened in her charm.

Levin, meanwhile, had gone to see his elder brother Nikolai, who had squandered his fortune and lived in a cheap lodging with a woman he had taken from a brothel, Marya Nikolaevna. Nikolai was thin, coughing, in consumption, bitter and suspicious and full of half-mad schemes for a workers' co-operative; and Levin, sitting with him, felt pity and love, and could do nothing. Then he went home to the country, to his estate of Pokrovskoe, to his dog and his cows and his books, and told himself that he would stop thinking of happiness and of marriage, and would live like his father and grandfather, honestly and usefully.

Anna went back to Petersburg. In the train, by the light of a little reading lamp, she tried to read an English novel and could not, and the snowstorm beat against the window, and she felt strange, as if she were someone else. At a station where the train stopped, she went out onto the platform in the blizzard, and a man in a military greatcoat stood beside her and touched his cap. It was Vronsky.

"I didn't know you were going. Why are you going?" she said.

"Why am I going?" he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. "You know that I have come to be where you are. I can't help it."

And at that moment the wind, as though it had mastered all obstacles, sent the snow flying from the carriage roofs and clanked some loose sheet of iron, and the hoarse whistle of the engine roared mournfully ahead. All the awfulness of the snowstorm seemed to her now more splendid.

At Petersburg, her husband met her on the platform. Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin was a high official, a statesman of importance, some twenty years older than his wife, a dry, upright, cold, honourable man with a high, weary voice. "My God! Why have his ears become like that?" she thought, looking at his cold and distinguished figure, and especially the ears that struck her at that moment as propping up the brim of his round hat. And when her son Seryozha ran to meet her at home, he too was a disappointment: she had imagined him better than he was. Then she felt ashamed of these thoughts, and put them away.