Translation by: Rosamund Bartlett

Oxford University Press, 2014

EISBN: 978–0–19–923208–6

1

ALL happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Everything was confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had found out that the husband was having an affair with the French governess formerly in their house, and had announced to the husband that she could not live with him in the same house. This situation had been going on now for three days, and was acutely felt by the couple themselves, as well as by the members of the family and the household. The members of the family and the household all felt there was no point in their living together and that people meeting by chance at any coaching inn had more connection to each other than they did, the members of the family and the Oblonsky household. The wife had not left her rooms, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children were running about the house as if lost; the English governess had quarrelled with the housekeeper and written a note to a friend, asking her to find her a new position; the cook had walked out the day before, right in the middle of dinner; the scullery-maid and the coachman had given notice.

On the third day after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyich Oblonsky—Stiva, as he was called in society—woke up at the usual time, that is to say, at eight o’clock in the morning, not in his wife’s bedroom but in his study, on the morocco leather sofa. He turned over his plump, well-groomed body on the springs of the sofa as if wanting to go back to sleep for a long time, clasped the pillow tightly from the other side, and nestled his cheek against it; then suddenly he leapt up, sat down on the sofa, and opened his eyes.

‘Yes, yes, what was going on?’ he thought, remembering his dream. ‘Yes, what was going on? Yes! Alabin was giving a dinner in Darmstadt; no, it wasn’t Darmstadt but something American. Yes, but Darmstadt was in America there. Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, yes—and the tables were singing Il mio tesoro, except it wasn’t Il mio tesoro but something better, and there were some little decanters and they were women,’ he remembered.

Stepan Arkadyich’s eyes twinkled merrily, and he smiled as he became lost in thought. ‘Yes, it was good, very good. There was a lot of other excellent stuff in it too, but you couldn’t put it into words or express it in thoughts even if you were awake.’ And noticing the shaft of light seeping in at the side of one of the cloth blinds, he jauntily threw his feet down from the sofa, felt about with them for the gold morocco slippers which his wife had embroidered (a birthday present the previous year), and from an old habit of nine years’ duration stretched out his hand without getting up towards the place where his dressing-gown hung in the bedroom. And that was when he suddenly remembered how and why he came to be sleeping in his study rather than his wife’s bedroom; the smile vanished from his face and his brow became furrowed.

‘Oh, oh, oh! O-o-oh! …’ he groaned, as he remembered everything that had happened. And once again all the details of the quarrel with his wife, the utter hopelessness of his situation, and, most agonizing of all, his own guilt, loomed into his imagination.

‘Yes! She won’t forgive me and can’t forgive me. And the worst thing of all is that the blame is all mine, all mine, and yet I’m not to blame. That’s the whole tragedy of it,’ he thought. ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ he kept repeating in despair as he remembered what for him were the most painful impressions from this quarrel.

Most unpleasant of all had been that first moment when, after returning happy and contented from the theatre, with an enormous pear in his hand for his wife, he had not found her in the drawing room; to his surprise he had not found his wife in the study either, and had finally caught sight of her in the bedroom, with the unfortunate note which revealed everything in her hand.

Dolly, the eternally anxious, bustling, and, as he thought, not very bright Dolly, was sitting motionless with the note in her hand, and looking at him with an expression of horror, despair, and anger.

‘What is this? This?’ she asked, pointing to the note. And as often happens, it was not the event itself which mortified Stepan Arkadyich when he remembered this so much as the way in which he had responded to what his wife had said.

What happened to him at that moment was what happens to people when they are unexpectedly caught out doing something thoroughly shameful. He had not managed to compose his face to suit the situation in which he now found himself in front of his wife after the revelation of his guilt. Instead of taking offence, denying everything, asking for forgiveness, or even remaining impassive—anything would have been better than what he did!—his face had suddenly broken quite involuntarily (‘reflexes of the brain,’ thought Stepan Arkadyich, who loved physiology) into his usual, good-natured and therefore stupid smile.

He could not forgive himself that stupid smile. When she saw that smile, Dolly had flinched as if from physical pain, exploded with her usual hot temper into a torrent of harsh words, and run out of the room. Since then she had not wanted to see her husband.

‘That stupid smile is to blame for everything,’ thought Stepan Arkadyich. ‘But what is to be done? What is to be done?’ he asked himself in despair, and could find no answer.