Android Karenina

“Do you paint?” said Golenishtchev, turning round quickly to Vronsky.

“Yes, I used to study long ago, and now I have begun to do a little,” said Vronsky, reddening.

“He has great talent,” said A

CHAPTER 5

ANNA, IN THAT PERIOD of her emancipation and rapid return to health, after her dangerous confinement and delivery, had felt herself unpardonably happy and full of the joy of life. The memory of all that had happened after her illness: her reconciliation with her husband, its breakdown, the news of Vronsky’s wound, his visit, the preparations for divorce, the departure from her husband’s house, the parting from her son, traveling to the moon inside an ovoid canister shot from a giant ca

One consolatory reflection upon her conduct had occurred to her at the first moment of the final rupture, and when now she recalled all the past, she remembered that one reflection. “I have inevitably made that man wretched, but I don’t want to profit by his misery,” she mused, while Android Karenina’s slim fingers braided her hair into charming plaits. “I too am suffering, and shall suffer; I am losing what I prized above everything-I am losing my good name and my son. I have done wrong, and so I don’t want happiness, I don’t want a divorce, and shall suffer from my shame and the separation from my child.”

Android Karenina nodded kindly, her eyebank glittering from deep red to sympathetic lilac. But she knew as well as her mistress that, although A

The desire for life, waxing stronger with recovered health, was so intense, and the conditions of life were so new and pleasant, that A

Vronsky, meanwhile, in spite of the complete realization of what he had so long desired, was not perfectly happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand out of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the mistake men make in picturing to themselves happiness as the realization of their desires. For a time after joining his life to hers, after unwinding the hot-whip from his thigh and do

Relations with the society of the place-foreign and Russian-were equally out of the question owing to the irregularity of their position. The inspection of the various panoramas, of Earth’s blue-green magnificence or the starry sprawl of distant galaxies, had not for Vronsky, a Russian and a sensible man, the immense significance Englishmen are able to attach to that pursuit.

And just as the hungry stomach eagerly accepts every object it can get, hoping to find nourishment in it, Vronsky quite unconsciously clutched first at politics, then at new books, and then at pictures. He began to understand the semi-mystical art of painting with groznium-based pigments, how the artist could push the little pools of color around the canvas with subtle flicks of the brush, how the individual droplets would attract each other, creating luminous patterns as singular as fingerprints or snowflakes. Vronsky concentrated on these studies; with this technique he began to paint A