LITERARY
GENIUS
In keeping with this week’s pseudo-theme of femininity,
I have chosen a selection from Anna Karenina,
which is widely regarded as one of Leo Tolstoy’s finest
achievements. It is similar to Age of Innocence
in that it takes an uncompromising look at one nation’s
high society. Here, it is 19th-century Russia’s. The
main character, Anna, becomes infatuated with dashing military
hero Vronsky, and struggles to conceal and live with the ensuing
affair.
FROM ANNA KARENINA
Leo Tolstoy
Chapter XXII
BEFORE VRONSKY LEFT for the elections, Anna, having reflected
that the scenes that repeatedly took place between them whenever
he went away could only alienate him and not bind him to her
more closely, made up her mind to exert every effort possible
to endure their separation calmly. But the chilly, stern look
he gave her when he came to tell her he was going away hurt
her, and even before he left, her composure was destroyed.
Later on, as she meditated in solitude on that look, which
expressed his right to freedom, she came to only one conclusion,
as she always did: an awareness of her own degradation.
He has the right to leave wherever and whenever he wants to,
she thought. Not only to go away, but to leave me. He has
every right, and I have none at all. But since he knows that
he oughtn’t to do it…But what did he do? He looked
at me with a chilly, severe expression. Of course it’s
indefinite, and intangible, but it was not there before, and
that look means a great deal. That look proves that he has
begun to grow cold.
And though she was sure that he had begun to grow cold there
was still nothing she could do; it was impossible for her
to change her relations with him. It was just as it had been
before—it was by love alone, by her charms, that she
could hold him. And just as before, it was only by busying
herself during the day and taking morphia at night that she
could stifle the terrifying thoughts of what would happen
if he fell out of love with her. There was, to be sure, one
other means left: not to hold him, for which she wanted nothing
beyond his love, but to unite herself with him by putting
herself in such a position that he could not abandon her.
This means was divorce and marriage. And she began to desire
that; she made up her mind to agree to it the very first time
either he or Stiva brought it up.
With thoughts like these she spent five days without him—the
five days he was supposed to be away.
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Lincoln’s address initially closed with a question for
the south: “Shall it be peace or sword?” After
a suggestion from his secretary of state William H. Seward,
he moderated his tone and ended on these now famous words:
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends.
We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained,
it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords
of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot
grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this
broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again
touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our
nature.
Four years later, Lincoln ended his second inaugural address
with similar loquacity:
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that
this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.
Photo by Alexander Gardner
November 8, 1863 |
