ANNA KARENINA
by Leo Tolstoy
Translated by Constance Garnett
Contents
| PART ONE |
| PART TWO |
| PART THREE |
| PART FOUR |
| PART FIVE |
| PART SIX |
| PART SEVEN |
| PART EIGHT |
PART ONE
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 haddiscovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, whohad been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband thatshe could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairshad now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, butall 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 livingtogether, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn hadmore in common with one another than they, the members of the family andhousehold of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husbandhad 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 friendasking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked offthe day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman hadgiven 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, thatis, at eight o’clock in the morning, not in his wife’s bedroom, buton 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 longsleep again; he vigorously embraced the pillow on the other side and buried hisface in it; but all at once he jumped up, sat up on the sofa, and opened hiseyes.
“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 inAmerica. Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, and the tables sang,Il mio tesoro—not Il mio tesoro though, but somethingbetter, and there were some sort of little decanters on the table, and theywere 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 wasdelightful, only there’s no putting it into words, or even expressing itin one’s thoughts awake.” And noticing a gleam of light peeping inbeside one of the serge curtains, he cheerfully dropped his feet over the edgeof the sofa, and felt about with them for his slippers, a present on his lastbirthday, worked for him by his wife on gold-colored morocco. And, as he haddone every day for the last nine years, he stretched out his hand, withoutgetting up, towards