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- Herausgeber: e-artnow Collections
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Passion and Pretense – 3 Classic Literary Romances is a treasury exploring the intricate dance of romance and societal facades. This anthology delves into the timeless human experience of love struggling against the backdrop of social expectations and personal ambition. Through a compelling array of narrative styles, from the penetrating psychological insights of a Russian master to the subtle irony of American high society tales, each story engages with the universal motif of love constrained by external forces. The collection shines in its ability to illustrate complex emotional landscapes with suspenseful dramas, artfully balancing the themes of passion and societal pressure without overshadowing the individual fortes of its contributors. Uniting the esteemed voices of Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the anthology embodies an impressive range of historical and cultural contexts while maintaining a thematic unity that transcends borders and time periods. These authors, each a luminary of their respective literary traditions, bring unique perspectives that together construct a rich tapestry of early 20th-century romance narratives. By addressing issues pertinent to their times and beyond, such as class, gender roles, and the pursuit of personal fulfilment, their stories engage in a broader dialogue that challenges our perceptions of traditional romance. This collection offers readers an opportunity to immerse themselves in the varied yet interconnected worlds of literary romance. It serves as a vital resource for understanding the nuances of love as depicted through diverse lenses, ensuring a deeper appreciation of the social constraints and personal aspirations that shape human relationships. Passion and Pretense is recommended for readers seeking both scholarly insight and the pleasure of beautifully told tales, fostering a richer engagement with the universal theme of romantic entanglement. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - An Introduction draws the threads together, discussing why these diverse authors and texts belong in one collection. - Historical Context explores the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped these works, offering insight into the shared (or contrasting) eras that influenced each writer. - A collective Analysis highlights common themes, stylistic variations, and significant crossovers in tone and technique, tying together writers from different backgrounds. - Reflection questions encourage readers to compare the different voices and perspectives within the collection, fostering a richer understanding of the overarching conversation.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026
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Passion and Pretense – 3 Classic Literary Romances
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection brings together Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Edith Wharton’s The Glimpses of the Moon to illuminate a shared literary preoccupation: the entanglement of feeling with social performance. Each work treats romance not as an isolated private experience but as an event shaped by rank, wealth, expectation, and self-fashioning. Read together, they trace how desire becomes legible through manners, rumor, aspiration, and display. The selection therefore proposes a sustained inquiry into passion under pressure, showing how intimacy is tested whenever love must move through a world governed by appearances and judgment.
The curatorial aim is to place three major novels of courtship, attachment, and social ambition in deliberate conversation across national traditions and historical settings. Tolstoy, Wharton, and Fitzgerald each examine the cost of pursuing emotional truth in societies that reward calculation, charm, and conformity. The through-line is not simply romance, but romance as a moral and social ordeal. By presenting these titles together, the collection highlights continuities between nineteenth-century realism and twentieth-century social fiction, while also tracing how changing cultures of money and prestige alter the language through which longing, loyalty, and disappointment are expressed.
A further purpose of the grouping is to reveal the distinct forms pretense can take. In these novels, concealment is not limited to deception between lovers; it extends to the public roles people inhabit, the stories they tell about themselves, and the ideals society projects onto marriage and desire. Anna Karenina explores the pressure of collective scrutiny with exceptional breadth, The Great Gatsby condenses longing into a bright and elusive social world, and The Glimpses of the Moon turns a cool, alert gaze toward romantic arrangement under economic strain. Together they map a spectrum of sincerity, performance, and compromise.
This collection differs from reading the works singly because it foregrounds comparison as a method of understanding. What might seem in one novel a private crisis appears, in relation to the others, as part of a larger literary argument about modern love and its conditions. The juxtaposition sharpens recurring concerns with status, spectacle, moral accountability, and the instability of desire when bound to aspiration. It also clarifies the range available within the romance tradition, from expansive social panorama to concentrated lyric intensity to finely ironic comedy of manners. The result is a coherent triptych rather than a set of isolated classics.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
The three novels speak to one another through their treatment of social worlds as active forces in emotional life. In all of them, feeling is mediated by setting: drawing rooms, gatherings, travel, leisure, and conversation become theaters in which attachment is declared, misread, or disguised. Reputation functions almost like an additional character, shaping what can be said and what must remain indirect. Across Tolstoy, Wharton, and Fitzgerald, the language of romance is therefore inseparable from the language of observation. Love appears not in a vacuum but under inspection, and the gaze of others continuously alters what the characters believe about themselves.
Recurring motifs deepen this dialogue. Wealth appears less as stable possession than as a climate that conditions fantasy and conduct. Luxury, movement, houses, parties, and cultivated surfaces suggest possibility while also exposing fragility. Another shared motif is distance: emotional distance between public role and private feeling, moral distance between ideal and action, and social distance between those who may approach one another and those who may not. These motifs create a common pattern in which desire reaches outward while structures of class and decorum pull inward. Romance becomes both invitation and test, a promise shadowed by compromise, calculation, and self-deception.
Their contrasts are equally productive. Anna Karenina offers broad moral and social range, embedding intimate feeling within an expansive vision of family, society, and ethical consequence. The Great Gatsby, by contrast, refines romance into a more concentrated image of yearning, illusion, and retrospective perception. The Glimpses of the Moon introduces a lighter tonal register on the surface, yet beneath its poise lies a disciplined scrutiny of economic dependence and emotional bargaining. These differences in scale, mood, and narrative pressure create a rich internal conversation. Each novel clarifies the others by showing a different proportion between tenderness, irony, aspiration, and judgment.
There are also meaningful lines of literary kinship among these authors. Wharton and Fitzgerald are often read within overlapping discussions of wealth, status, and the coded behavior of the privileged, and this proximity helps explain how naturally their novels answer one another here. Fitzgerald’s social brilliance and sense of glittering surfaces stand in revealing relation to Wharton’s precision about manners and transaction. Tolstoy’s presence extends the dialogue backward, offering a deeper realist inheritance in which emotional life is inseparable from moral seriousness and social form. The collection thus stages not a hierarchy, but a conversation across traditions of realism, irony, and romantic disillusion.
Taken together, these works also complicate the category of romance itself. None treats love as merely redemptive or merely destructive; instead, each investigates how ideals of authenticity can become entangled with vanity, need, hope, and the wish for recognition. The beloved may be a person, but also an image shaped by memory, fantasy, or social expectation. This ambiguity gives the collection its aesthetic coherence. Tolstoy’s searching gravity, Wharton’s controlled wit, and Fitzgerald’s luminous melancholy do not cancel one another. They establish a composite account of passion as an experience at once inward, theatrical, intimate, and historically conditioned.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
The continuing vitality of this collection lies in how clearly these novels describe problems that remain familiar: the pressure to perform a desirable self, the confusion of affection with status, and the vulnerability of private feeling to public judgment. Their settings may belong to earlier periods, yet their moral tensions remain strikingly current. Contemporary culture still rewards display, encourages aspiration through image, and links intimacy to economic and social calculation. For that reason, Anna Karenina, The Great Gatsby, and The Glimpses of the Moon retain more than canonical prestige. They remain active instruments for thinking about the relation between love, visibility, and value.
All three works have generated sustained critical attention because each appears to exceed the category of love story while fully inhabiting it. Anna Karenina has long been regarded as a touchstone of the realist novel and of the serious treatment of moral life. The Great Gatsby has become a central reference point in discussions of the American dream, desire, and self-invention. The Glimpses of the Moon has drawn enduring interest as a distinctive Wharton exploration of marriage, money, and social adaptation. Read together, they invite criticism to move beyond national labels toward a broader account of romance under modern conditions.
Their afterlives in culture have been extensive. Anna Karenina and The Great Gatsby in particular have circulated widely through adaptation and citation, becoming shorthand for certain forms of longing, glamour, and ruin. Wharton’s The Glimpses of the Moon has had a quieter but persistent presence in conversations about her representation of class, gender, and emotional negotiation. Across artistic and scholarly contexts, these novels continue to be invoked when discussing the relation between desire and structure, freedom and convention, sincerity and performance. Such continued reuse suggests not static reverence, but a durable capacity to illuminate changing debates about intimacy and society.
As a collection, these works make a renewed case for the classic romance as a form of social knowledge. They show that stories of attachment can also be studies of institutions, manners, aspiration, and ethical strain. Their endurance rests partly on stylistic distinction, but even more on the clarity with which they expose the bargains hidden within ideals of love. Bringing Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, and Wharton together underscores that this insight is not confined to one nation or one era. It belongs to a larger literary tradition in which passion and pretense remain inseparable, and in which romance reveals the deepest terms of belonging and exclusion.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina emerged from the charged atmosphere of post-Emancipation Russia, where the liberation of the serfs in 1861 had unsettled inherited relations between landowners, peasants, and the state. Aristocratic society still possessed prestige and institutional influence, yet its moral authority no longer seemed secure. Debates over legal reform, education, local self-government, and the proper direction of modernization animated public life. The novel’s social world reflects a ruling class trying to preserve ceremony and hierarchy while confronting new economic realities. Tolstoy writes from within this transition, attentive to how reform altered both domestic expectations and the cultural meaning of privilege.
Imperial Russia in the 1870s also remained an autocracy shaped by censorship, bureaucracy, and a powerful alliance among court society, military service, and the Orthodox moral order. Public conduct carried political implications because status was tied to proximity to institutions of state power. Marriage, inheritance, and reputation therefore functioned not merely as private matters but as mechanisms of social regulation. In Anna Karenina, the scrutiny faced by elite figures belongs to a culture where family stability underwrites public legitimacy. Tolstoy’s treatment of scandal and conformity gains force from this setting, in which personal choices are evaluated against the demands of rank, service, and national decorum.
The period also saw Russian anxiety about Europe and national identity. Westernizing reforms had introduced railways, administrative change, and new habits of sociability, yet many observers feared spiritual dislocation and moral imitation. Tolstoy registers these tensions by placing old landed values beside urban cosmopolitanism and by presenting modern mobility as both practical advance and existential disturbance. Agriculture, estate management, and questions of labor acquire political weight because they expose uncertainty about Russia’s future path. The countryside is not a simple refuge from the city but a contested arena where ideas of duty, productivity, and belonging are tested against imported models of progress and elite fashion.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby belongs to the United States of the 1920s, a decade marked by rapid economic expansion after the First World War, rising consumer culture, and intense social stratification beneath the rhetoric of opportunity. The novel’s glittering settings depend on new concentrations of wealth, speculative finance, and metropolitan leisure. Yet the era’s promise of self-invention existed alongside rigid distinctions of class, region, and inherited status. Fitzgerald’s portrait of Long Island society draws power from this contradiction. The book asks what happens when democratic mythology meets entrenched privilege, and when prosperity masks insecurity about who truly belongs within the nation’s most protected circles.
Prohibition forms a crucial background to Gatsby’s world, not only as a legal regime but as a sign of the period’s unstable moral politics. The attempt to regulate private behavior through constitutional amendment fostered corruption, informal economies, and glamorous forms of lawbreaking that blurred distinctions between respectability and criminality. Fitzgerald captures a society in which public virtue and private indulgence coexist comfortably, revealing how institutions can be hollowed out by money and spectacle. The novel also reflects postwar disillusionment: the generation shaped by 1918 inherited both exuberance and exhaustion. Pleasure becomes urgent partly because faith in older civic and moral certainties has weakened.
The Great Gatsby also belongs to an America transformed by urban growth, mass immigration, racial tension, and shifting gender codes. Although the novel remains focused on wealthy white society, that narrowness is itself historically revealing, exposing anxieties about status preservation during a period of demographic and cultural change. Women’s expanded public visibility after suffrage and the popular image of liberated modern femininity unsettled older expectations without erasing patriarchal structures. Fitzgerald places romance within this unstable social field, where desire is entangled with consumption, mobility, and surveillance. His characters move through a national order that celebrates novelty while defending invisible barriers of pedigree, accent, and address.
Edith Wharton’s The Glimpses of the Moon was published in the early 1920s, at the moment when prewar social codes were being reorganized by the aftermath of the First World War. The conflict had weakened old European aristocratic certainties, redistributed fortunes, and intensified transatlantic contact among titled families, nouveaux riches, and cosmopolitan professionals. Wharton examines marriage and money in a world where hospitality, travel, and elite networking have become both social pleasures and economic strategies. Her society appears mobile and sophisticated, but it is also precarious. Wartime disruption and inflation made dependence visible, compelling even polished people to treat intimacy as a response to financial instability.
Wharton’s perspective is particularly attuned to the social mechanics of class because the 1920s brought a renegotiation of legitimacy within Anglo-American high society. Titles, lineage, and old manners still carried symbolic power, yet cash from business, speculation, and inheritance increasingly determined access to luxury. The Glimpses of the Moon reflects this transition by showing how marriage can serve as both emotional aspiration and class instrument. The novel’s lightness of surface conceals a serious historical question: whether modern companionship can survive when social performance is expensive and economic inequality structures every setting. Wharton thus records a postwar elite culture balancing charm, exhaustion, and strategic self-display.
Across all three works, romance is inseparable from institutions that assign value unevenly: the imperial bureaucracy and landed order in Anna Karenina, the American class hierarchy and legal evasions of The Great Gatsby, and the moneyed transatlantic networks of The Glimpses of the Moon. Each novel stages private feeling under systems that convert reputation into social capital. Public debates about reform, morality, gender, and wealth do not merely surround these stories; they shape the conditions under which attachment becomes legible or condemned. Read together, the books trace how modern love is pressured by surveillance and inequality, even when society presents itself as polished, liberated, or progressive.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
Anna Karenina was formed within the great age of European realism, yet Tolstoy uses realist method not simply to document society but to test moral perception. His attention to gesture, routine, conversation, and labor reflects a nineteenth-century confidence that the ordinary world can disclose profound ethical truths. At the same time, the novel resists abstract systems, whether political doctrine or fashionable theory, in favor of lived experience. This stance places Tolstoy within broader debates about positivism, secularization, and the authority of feeling. Realism here becomes a mode of inquiry: how should one live when inherited beliefs remain powerful but no longer command unquestioned assent?
Scientific and technological change sharpened Tolstoy’s vision. Expanding rail networks compressed distance, reorganized time, and altered the relation between provincial estates and metropolitan centers. New print culture circulated ideas rapidly, while statistics, agronomy, and administrative rationalization promised mastery over social life. Tolstoy acknowledges such developments yet treats them with reserve, often emphasizing what technical progress cannot solve. His interest in farming methods, bodily rhythms, and seasonal labor reflects contemporary fascination with improvement, but he measures innovation against questions of conscience and community. Anna Karenina thus belongs to a century captivated by systems and speed, while warning that mechanized modernity may intensify alienation rather than relieve it.
The Great Gatsby stands at the intersection of literary modernism and Jazz Age glamour. Fitzgerald does not abandon narrative coherence, but he adapts modernist techniques of suggestion, fragmentation, and symbolic patterning to depict a culture built on surfaces. The novel’s compressed style, elliptical revelations, and charged imagery reflect an era fascinated by advertising, cinema, electric illumination, and the staged self. Language itself begins to shimmer like a commodity. Yet Fitzgerald also preserves the older romance of aspiration, setting lyrical yearning against the hard textures of business and social exclusion. This blend of enchantment and disillusion gives the book its distinctive position within early twentieth-century American aesthetics.
Modernity in Fitzgerald’s America was inseparable from technologies of movement and communication. Automobiles, telephones, recorded music, and mass-circulation journalism reconfigured social tempo, making encounter more frequent and identity more performative. The Great Gatsby absorbs this accelerated environment: people appear as if already mediated by rumor, display, and consumption. Such conditions help explain the novel’s concern with reinvention. The self becomes a project assembled from style, possessions, and narrative control. Fitzgerald’s art responds by making perception unstable; what seems immediate is often already theatrical. In this sense, the novel translates technological modernity into an aesthetic of brilliance and uncertainty, where intimacy competes with image-making.
The Glimpses of the Moon engages the refined comedy of manners while adapting it to postwar instability. Wharton draws on traditions of social observation, wit, and formal poise, yet her light touch carries a distinctly modern awareness of emotional strain and economic contingency. The novel’s settings of hotels, villas, and borrowed luxury evoke a world organized by circulation rather than rootedness. Wharton’s aesthetic interest lies in how environment scripts behavior: interiors, travel routes, and guest lists become moral instruments. Her prose remains lucid and controlled, but beneath that control runs a skeptical intelligence examining whether elegance can still provide ethical form in an age increasingly governed by liquidity and display.
Intellectually, Wharton’s novel belongs to a period preoccupied with psychology, companionate marriage, and the relation between authenticity and performance. After the war, private life was often imagined as a site for personal fulfillment rather than mere social duty, yet economic necessity continued to shape romantic choice. Wharton explores this contradiction without adopting simple sentiment or simple satire. She understands that modern subjects absorb the language of sincerity even while maneuvering within transactional systems. Her aesthetic therefore depends on tonal balance: irony reveals social games, while sympathy registers the genuine longing those games can distort. The result is a distinctly twentieth-century comedy, alert to both self-fashioning and vulnerability.
Taken together, the anthology traces an arc from high realism to modern social stylization. Tolstoy investigates moral life through exhaustive social texture and philosophical seriousness; Fitzgerald condenses experience into luminous symbols and rhythmic brevity; Wharton refines comedy into a study of class performance under pressure. Across these differences, all three works engage rival ideals of love: spiritual union, romantic self-creation, and pragmatic companionship. They also share an interest in the relation between environment and consciousness, showing how landscapes of estates, roads, mansions, and resorts mediate desire. The anthology therefore situates literary romance within broader artistic debates about realism, modernity, and the limits of self-knowledge.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Twentieth-century upheavals repeatedly changed the way Anna Karenina was read. The Russian Revolution and the fall of the imperial order turned Tolstoy’s aristocratic world into a historical artifact, prompting readers to see the novel both as a critique of elite hypocrisy and as a record of a vanished ruling class. Later ideological climates alternately emphasized social conditions, spiritual questioning, or the politics of family life. As debates about women’s autonomy and the burdens of respectability intensified, the novel’s treatment of judgment acquired renewed urgency. Adaptations across stage and screen often highlighted passion and scandal, but scholarship increasingly restored the broader context of reform, labor, faith, and modernity.
The Great Gatsby underwent one of the most striking critical reversals in modern literary history. Initially received as a sharp but limited portrait of its moment, it gained stature after the Great Depression made the extravagance of the 1920s appear historically emblematic rather than merely fashionable. Mid-century readers turned the novel into a defining account of American aspiration, while postwar teaching culture established it as a canonical text. Subsequent interpretation widened further, reading its parties and romance through the lenses of class formation, consumer capitalism, and national myth. Film and popular culture often magnified its opulence, yet critics continued to insist on the book’s austerity and moral unease beneath the glitter.
The Glimpses of the Moon has experienced a more uneven afterlife, often overshadowed by Edith Wharton’s graver social fiction, yet later reassessment has recognized its historical precision and tonal daring. Changing scholarly interest in gender, marriage, and the economics of intimacy encouraged critics to value the novel not as a minor diversion but as a sophisticated postwar study of precarity among the privileged. Its comedy now appears less escapist than diagnostic, exposing how affection and calculation mingle in modern courtship. Adaptations and renewed editions have helped recover its place within Wharton’s career, especially for readers interested in transatlantic culture and the emotional consequences of financial dependence.
Read together in the twenty-first century, these three romances invite comparison across empires, markets, and social codes. Contemporary criticism often emphasizes how each work links desire to systems of inequality, asking whether love can remain meaningful when class advantage shapes visibility, choice, and forgiveness. New historical scholarship has also made readers more attentive to infrastructures once taken for granted: railways in Tolstoy, mass culture in Fitzgerald, and elite mobility in Wharton. Meanwhile, feminist and materialist approaches continue to debate the balance between personal agency and structural constraint in all three books. Their durability lies in this openness: each era finds its own conflicts already latent within their social worlds.
Passion and Pretense – 3 Classic Literary Romances
Passion, Desire, and Consequence
Society, Status, and the Performance of Love
Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina
PART 1
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 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 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 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.
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 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 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.
Stepan Arkadyevitch could not answer, as the barber was at work on his upper lip, and he raised one finger. Matvey nodded at the looking-glass.
"Alone. Is the room to be got ready upstairs?"
"Inform Darya Alexandrovna: where she orders."
"Darya Alexandrovna?" Matvey repeated, as though in doubt.
"Yes, inform her. Here, take the telegram; give it to her, and then do what she tells you."
"You want to try it on," Matvey understood, but he only said, "Yes sir."
Stepan Arkadyevitch was already washed and combed and ready to be dressed, when Matvey, stepping deliberately in his creaky boots, came back into the room with the telegram in his hand. The barber had gone.
"Darya Alexandrovna told me to inform you that she is going away. Let him do—that is you—do as he likes," he said, laughing only with his eyes, and putting his hands in his pockets, he watched his master with his head on one side. Stepan Arkadyevitch was silent a minute. Then a good-humored and rather pitiful smile showed itself on his handsome face.
"Eh, Matvey?" he said, shaking his head.
"It's all right, sir; she will come round," said Matvey.
"Come round?"
"Yes, sir."
"Do you think so? Who's there?" asked Stepan Arkadyevitch, hearing the rustle of a woman's dress at the door.
"It's I," said a firm, pleasant, woman's voice, and the stern, pockmarked face of Matrona Philimonovna, the nurse, was thrust in at the doorway.
"Well, what is it, Matrona?" queried Stepan Arkadyevitch, going up to her at the door.
Although Stepan Arkadyevitch was completely in the wrong as regards his wife, and was conscious of this himself, almost every one in the house (even the nurse, Darya Alexandrovna's chief ally) was on his side.
"Well, what now?" he asked disconsolately.
"Go to her, sir; own your fault again. Maybe God will aid you. She is suffering so, it's sad to see her; and besides, everything in the house is topsy-turvy. You must have pity, sir, on the children. Beg her forgiveness, sir. There's no help for it! One must take the consequences…"
"But she won't see me."
"You do your part. God is merciful; pray to God, sir, pray to God."
"Come, that'll do, you can go," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, blushing suddenly. "Well now, do dress me." He turned to Matvey and threw off his dressing-gown decisively.
Matvey was already holding up the shirt like a horse's collar, and, blowing off some invisible speck, he slipped it with obvious pleasure over the well-groomed body of his master.
Chapter 3
When he was dressed, Stepan Arkadyevitch sprinkled some scent on himself, pulled down his shirt-cuffs, distributed into his pockets his cigarettes, pocketbook, matches, and watch with its double chain and seals, and shaking out his handkerchief, feeling himself clean, fragrant, healthy, and physically at ease, in spite of his unhappiness, he walked with a slight swing on each leg into the dining-room, where coffee was already waiting for him, and beside the coffee, letters and papers from the office.
He read the letters. One was very unpleasant, from a merchant who was buying a forest on his wife's property. To sell this forest was absolutely essential; but at present, until he was reconciled with his wife, the subject could not be discussed. The most unpleasant thing of all was that his pecuniary interests should in this way enter into the question of his reconciliation with his wife. And the idea that he might be led on by his interests, that he might seek a reconciliation with his wife on account of the sale of the forest—that idea hurt him.
When he had finished his letters, Stepan Arkadyevitch moved the office-papers close to him, rapidly looked through two pieces of business, made a few notes with a big pencil, and pushing away the papers, turned to his coffee. As he sipped his coffee, he opened a still damp morning paper, and began reading it.
Stepan Arkadyevitch took in and read a liberal paper, not an extreme one, but one advocating the views held by the majority. And in spite of the fact that science, art, and politics had no special interest for him, he firmly held those views on all these subjects which were held by the majority and by his paper, and he only changed them when the majority changed them—or, more strictly speaking, he did not change them, but they imperceptibly changed of themselves within him.
Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn. And for him, living in a certain society—owing to the need, ordinarily developed at years of discretion, for some degree of mental activity—to have views was just as indispensable as to have a hat. If there was a reason for his preferring liberal to conservative views, which were held also by many of his circle, it arose not from his considering liberalism more rational, but from its being in closer accordance with his manner of life. The liberal party said that in Russia everything is wrong, and certainly Stepan Arkadyevitch had many debts and was decidedly short of money. The liberal party said that marriage is an institution quite out of date, and that it needs reconstruction; and family life certainly afforded Stepan Arkadyevitch little gratification, and forced him into lying and hypocrisy, which was so repulsive to his nature. The liberal party said, or rather allowed it to be understood, that religion is only a curb to keep in check the barbarous classes of the people; and Stepan Arkadyevitch could not get through even a short service without his legs aching from standing up, and could never make out what was the object of all the terrible and high-flown language about another world when life might be so very amusing in this world. And with all this, Stepan Arkadyevitch, who liked a joke, was fond of puzzling a plain man by saying that if he prided himself on his origin, he ought not to stop at Rurik and disown the first founder of his family—the monkey. And so Liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch's, and he liked his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it diffused in his brain. He read the leading article, in which it was maintained that it was quite senseless in our day to raise an outcry that radicalism was threatening to swallow up all conservative elements, and that the government ought to take measures to crush the revolutionary hydra; that, on the contrary, "in our opinion the danger lies not in that fantastic revolutionary hydra, but in the obstinacy of traditionalism clogging progress," etc., etc. He read another article, too, a financial one, which alluded to Bentham and Mill, and dropped some innuendoes reflecting on the ministry. With his characteristic quickwittedness he caught the drift of each innuendo, divined whence it came, at whom and on what ground it was aimed, and that afforded him, as it always did, a certain satisfaction. But today that satisfaction was embittered by Matrona Philimonovna's advice and the unsatisfactory state of the household. He read, too, that Count Beist was rumored to have left for Wiesbaden, and that one need have no more gray hair, and of the sale of a light carriage, and of a young person seeking a situation; but these items of information did not give him, as usual, a quiet, ironical gratification. Having finished the paper, a second cup of coffee and a roll and butter, he got up, shaking the crumbs of the roll off his waistcoat; and, squaring his broad chest, he smiled joyously: not because there was anything particularly agreeable in his mind—the joyous smile was evoked by a good digestion.
But this joyous smile at once recalled everything to him, and he grew thoughtful.
Two childish voices (Stepan Arkadyevitch recognized the voices of Grisha, his youngest boy, and Tanya, his eldest girl) were heard outside the door. They were carrying something, and dropped it.
"I told you not to sit passengers on the roof," said the little girl in English; "there, pick them up!"
"Everything's in confusion," thought Stepan Arkadyevitch; "there are the children running about by themselves." And going to the door, he called them. They threw down the box, that represented a train, and came in to their father.
The little girl, her father's favorite, ran up boldly, embraced him, and hung laughingly on his neck, enjoying as she always did the smell of scent that came from his whiskers. At last the little girl kissed his face, which was flushed from his stooping posture and beaming with tenderness, loosed her hands, and was about to run away again; but her father held her back.
"How is mamma?" he asked, passing his hand over his daughter's smooth, soft little neck. "Good morning," he said, smiling to the boy, who had come up to greet him. He was conscious that he loved the boy less, and always tried to be fair; but the boy felt it, and did not respond with a smile to his father's chilly smile.
"Mamma? She is up," answered the girl.
Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed. "That means that she's not slept again all night," he thought.
"Well, is she cheerful?"
The little girl knew that there was a quarrel between her father and mother, and that her mother could not be cheerful, and that her father must be aware of this, and that he was pretending when he asked about it so lightly. And she blushed for her father. He at once perceived it, and blushed too.
"I don't know," she said. "She did not say we must do our lessons, but she said we were to go for a walk with Miss Hoole to grandmamma's."
"Well, go, Tanya, my darling. Oh, wait a minute, though," he said, still holding her and stroking her soft little hand.
He took off the mantelpiece, where he had put it yesterday, a little box of sweets, and gave her two, picking out her favorites, a chocolate and a fondant.
"For Grisha?" said the little girl, pointing to the chocolate.
"Yes, yes." And still stroking her little shoulder, he kissed her on the roots of her hair and neck, and let her go.
"The carriage is ready," said Matvey; "but there's some one to see you with a petition."
"Been here long?" asked Stepan Arkadyevitch.
"Half an hour."
"How many times have I told you to tell me at once?"
"One must let you drink your coffee in peace, at least," said Matvey, in the affectionately gruff tone with which it was impossible to be angry.
"Well, show the person up at once," said Oblonsky, frowning with vexation.
The petitioner, the widow of a staff captain Kalinin, came with a request impossible and unreasonable; but Stepan Arkadyevitch, as he generally did, made her sit down, heard her to the end attentively without interrupting her, and gave her detailed advice as to how and to whom to apply, and even wrote her, in his large, sprawling, good and legible hand, a confident and fluent little note to a personage who might be of use to her. Having got rid of the staff captain's widow, Stepan Arkadyevitch took his hat and stopped to recollect whether he had forgotten anything. It appeared that he had forgotten nothing except what he wanted to forget—his wife.
"Ah, yes!" He bowed his head, and his handsome face assumed a harassed expression. "To go, or not to go!" he said to himself; and an inner voice told him he must not go, that nothing could come of it but falsity; that to amend, to set right their relations was impossible, because it was impossible to make her attractive again and able to inspire love, or to make him an old man, not susceptible to love. Except deceit and lying nothing could come of it now; and deceit and lying were opposed to his nature.
"It must be some time, though: it can't go on like this," he said, trying to give himself courage. He squared his chest, took out a cigarette, took two whiffs at it, flung it into a mother-of-pearl ashtray, and with rapid steps walked through the drawing room, and opened the other door into his wife's bedroom.
Chapter 4
Darya Alexandrovna, in a dressing jacket, and with her now scanty, once luxuriant and beautiful hair fastened up with hairpins on the nape of her neck, with a sunken, thin face and large, startled eyes, which looked prominent from the thinness of her face, was standing among a litter of all sorts of things scattered all over the room, before an open bureau, from which she was taking something. Hearing her husband's steps, she stopped, looking towards the door, and trying assiduously to give her features a severe and contemptuous expression. She felt she was afraid of him, and afraid of the coming interview. She was just attempting to do what she had attempted to do ten times already in these last three days—to sort out the children's things and her own, so as to take them to her mother's—and again she could not bring herself to do this; but now again, as each time before, she kept saying to herself, "that things cannot go on like this, that she must take some step" to punish him, put him to shame, avenge on him some little part at least of the suffering he had caused her. She still continued to tell herself that she should leave him, but she was conscious that this was impossible; it was impossible because she could not get out of the habit of regarding him as her husband and loving him. Besides this, she realized that if even here in her own house she could hardly manage to look after her five children properly, they would be still worse off where she was going with them all. As it was, even in the course of these three days, the youngest was unwell from being given unwholesome soup, and the others had almost gone without their dinner the day before. She was conscious that it was impossible to go away; but, cheating herself, she went on all the same sorting out her things and pretending she was going.
Seeing her husband, she dropped her hands into the drawer of the bureau as though looking for something, and only looked round at him when he had come quite up to her. But her face, to which she tried to give a severe and resolute expression, betrayed bewilderment and suffering.
"Dolly!" he said in a subdued and timid voice. He bent his head towards his shoulder and tried to look pitiful and humble, but for all that he was radiant with freshness and health. In a rapid glance she scanned his figure that beamed with health and freshness. "Yes, he is happy and content!" she thought; "while I…. And that disgusting good nature, which every one likes him for and praises—I hate that good nature of his," she thought. Her mouth stiffened, the muscles of the cheek contracted on the right side of her pale, nervous face.
"What do you want?" she said in a rapid, deep, unnatural voice.
"Dolly!" he repeated, with a quiver in his voice. "Anna is coming today."
"Well, what is that to me? I can't see her!" she cried.
"But you must, really, Dolly…"
"Go away, go away, go away!" she shrieked, not looking at him, as though this shriek were called up by physical pain.
Stepan Arkadyevitch could be calm when he thought of his wife, he could hope that she would come round, as Matvey expressed it, and could quietly go on reading his paper and drinking his coffee; but when he saw her tortured, suffering face, heard the tone of her voice, submissive to fate and full of despair, there was a catch in his breath and a lump in his throat, and his eyes began to shine with tears.
"My God! what have I done? Dolly! For God's sake!…. You know…." He could not go on; there was a sob in his throat.
She shut the bureau with a slam, and glanced at him.
"Dolly, what can I say?…. One thing: forgive…Remember, cannot nine years of my life atone for an instant…."
She dropped her eyes and listened, expecting what he would say, as it were beseeching him in some way or other to make her believe differently.
"—instant of passion?" he said, and would have gone on, but at that word, as at a pang of physical pain, her lips stiffened again, and again the muscles of her right cheek worked.
"Go away, go out of the room!" she shrieked still more shrilly, "and don't talk to me of your passion and your loathsomeness."
She tried to go out, but tottered, and clung to the back of a chair to support herself. His face relaxed, his lips swelled, his eyes were swimming with tears.
"Dolly!" he said, sobbing now; "for mercy's sake, think of the children; they are not to blame! I am to blame, and punish me, make me expiate my fault. Anything I can do, I am ready to do anything! I am to blame, no words can express how much I am to blame! But, Dolly, forgive me!"
She sat down. He listened to her hard, heavy breathing, and he was unutterably sorry for her. She tried several times to begin to speak, but could not. He waited.
"You remember the children, Stiva, to play with them; but I remember them, and know that this means their ruin," she said—obviously one of the phrases she had more than once repeated to herself in the course of the last few days.
She had called him "Stiva," and he glanced at her with gratitude, and moved to take her hand, but she drew back from him with aversion.
"I think of the children, and for that reason I would do anything in the world to save them, but I don't myself know how to save them. By taking them away from their father, or by leaving them with a vicious father—yes, a vicious father…. Tell me, after what…has happened, can we live together? Is that possible? Tell me, eh, is it possible?" she repeated, raising her voice, "after my husband, the father of my children, enters into a love affair with his own children's governess?"
"But what could I do? what could I do?" he kept saying in a pitiful voice, not knowing what he was saying, as his head sank lower and lower.
"You are loathsome to me, repulsive!" she shrieked, getting more and more heated. "Your tears mean nothing! You have never loved me; you have neither heart nor honorable feeling! You are hateful to me, disgusting, a stranger—yes, a complete stranger!" With pain and wrath she uttered the word so terrible to herself—stranger.
He looked at her, and the fury expressed in her face alarmed and amazed him. He did not understand how his pity for her exasperated her. She saw in him sympathy for her, but not love. "No, she hates me. She will not forgive me," he thought.
"It is awful! awful!" he said.
At that moment in the next room a child began to cry; probably it had fallen down. Darya Alexandrovna listened, and her face suddenly softened.
She seemed to be pulling herself together for a few seconds, as though she did not know where she was, and what she was doing, and getting up rapidly, she moved towards the door.
"Well, she loves my child," he thought, noticing the change of her face at the child's cry, "my child: how can she hate me?"
"Dolly, one word more," he said, following her.
"If you come near me, I will call in the servants, the children! They may all know you are a scoundrel! I am going away at once, and you may live here with your mistress!"
And she went out, slamming the door.
Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed, wiped his face, and with a subdued tread walked out of the room. "Matvey says she will come round; but how? I don't see the least chance of it. Ah, oh, how horrible it is! And how vulgarly she shouted," he said to himself, remembering her shriek and the words—"scoundrel" and "mistress." "And very likely the maids were listening! Horribly vulgar! horrible!" Stepan Arkadyevitch stood a few seconds alone, wiped his face, squared his chest, and walked out of the room.
It was Friday, and in the dining room the German watchmaker was winding up the clock. Stepan Arkadyevitch remembered his joke about this punctual, bald watchmaker, "that the German was wound up for a whole lifetime himself, to wind up watches," and he smiled. Stepan Arkadyevitch was fond of a joke: "And maybe she will come round! That's a good expression, 'come round,'" he thought. "I must repeat that."
"Matvey!" he shouted. "Arrange everything with Darya in the sitting room for Anna Arkadyevna," he said to Matvey when he came in.
"Yes, sir."
Stepan Arkadyevitch put on his fur coat and went out onto the steps.
"You won't dine at home?" said Matvey, seeing him off.
"That's as it happens. But here's for the housekeeping," he said, taking ten roubles from his pocketbook. "That'll be enough."
"Enough or not enough, we must make it do," said Matvey, slamming the carriage door and stepping back onto the steps.
Darya Alexandrovna meanwhile having pacified the child, and knowing from the sound of the carriage that he had gone off, went back again to her bedroom. It was her solitary refuge from the household cares which crowded upon her directly she went out from it. Even now, in the short time she had been in the nursery, the English governess and Matrona Philimonovna had succeeded in putting several questions to her, which did not admit of delay, and which only she could answer: "What were the children to put on for their walk? Should they have any milk? Should not a new cook be sent for?"
"Ah, let me alone, let me alone!" she said, and going back to her bedroom she sat down in the same place as she had sat when talking to her husband, clasping tightly her thin hands with the rings that slipped down on her bony fingers, and fell to going over in her memory all the conversation. "He has gone! But has he broken it off with her?" she thought. "Can it be he sees her? Why didn't I ask him! No, no, reconciliation is impossible. Even if we remain in the same house, we are strangers—strangers forever!" She repeated again with special significance the word so dreadful to her. "And how I loved him! my God, how I loved him!…. How I loved him! And now don't I love him? Don't I love him more than before? The most horrible thing is," she began, but did not finish her thought, because Matrona Philimonovna put her head in at the door.
"Let us send for my brother," she said; "he can get a dinner anyway, or we shall have the children getting nothing to eat till six again, like yesterday."
"Very well, I will come directly and see about it. But did you send for some new milk?"
And Darya Alexandrovna plunged into the duties of the day, and drowned her grief in them for a time.
Chapter 5
Stepan Arkadyevitch had learned easily at school, thanks to his excellent abilities, but he had been idle and mischievous, and therefore was one of the lowest in his class. But in spite of his habitually dissipated mode of life, his inferior grade in the service, and his comparative youth, he occupied the honorable and lucrative position of president of one of the government boards at Moscow. This post he had received through his sister Anna's husband, Alexey Alexandrovitch Karenin, who held one of the most important positions in the ministry to whose department the Moscow office belonged. But if Karenin had not got his brother- in-law this berth, then through a hundred other personages— brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, and aunts—Stiva Oblonsky would have received this post, or some other similar one, together with the salary of six thousand absolutely needful for him, as his affairs, in spite of his wife's considerable property, were in an embarrassed condition.
Half Moscow and Petersburg were friends and relations of Stepan Arkadyevitch. He was born in the midst of those who had been and are the powerful ones of this world. One-third of the men in the government, the older men, had been friends of his father's, and had known him in petticoats; another third were his intimate chums, and the remainder were friendly acquaintances. Consequently the distributors of earthly blessings in the shape of places, rents, shares, and such, were all his friends, and could not overlook one of their own set; and Oblonsky had no need to make any special exertion to get a lucrative post. He had only not to refuse things, not to show jealousy, not to be quarrelsome or take offense, all of which from his characteristic good nature he never did. It would have struck him as absurd if he had been told that he would not get a position with the salary he required, especially as he expected nothing out of the way; he only wanted what the men of his own age and standing did get, and he was no worse qualified for performing duties of the kind than any other man.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was not merely liked by all who knew him for his good humor, but for his bright disposition, and his unquestionable honesty. In him, in his handsome, radiant figure, his sparkling eyes, black hair and eyebrows, and the white and red of his face, there was something which produced a physical effect of kindliness and good humor on the people who met him. "Aha! Stiva! Oblonsky! Here he is!" was almost always said with a smile of delight on meeting him. Even though it happened at times that after a conversation with him it seemed that nothing particularly delightful had happened, the next day, and the next, every one was just as delighted at meeting him again.
After filling for three years the post of president of one of the government boards at Moscow, Stepan Arkadyevitch had won the respect, as well as the liking, of his fellow-officials, subordinates, and superiors, and all who had had business with him. The principal qualities in Stepan Arkadyevitch which had gained him this universal respect in the service consisted, in the first place, of his extreme indulgence for others, founded on a consciousness of his own shortcomings; secondly, of his perfect liberalism—not the liberalism he read of in the papers, but the liberalism that was in his blood, in virtue of which he treated all men perfectly equally and exactly the same, whatever their fortune or calling might be; and thirdly—the most important point—his complete indifference to the business in which he was engaged, in consequence of which he was never carried away, and never made mistakes.
