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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 leathercovered 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.
- Writer
