passage from A.K.

My first summer reading list book is Anna Karenina. I devoured the book last year and am doing so again. Tolstoy’s knowledge of the human heart amazes me. I’ll be posting my favorite passages as I go. In this passage Konstantin Levin has just arrived at his home in the country after a number of days in Moscow:

The study was slowly lit up as the candle was brought in. The familiar details came out: the stag’s horns, the bookshelves, the looking-glass, the stove with its ventilator, which had long wanted mending, his father’s sofa, a large table, on the table an open book, a broken ash-tray, a manuscript-book with his handwritings. As he saw all this, there came over him for an instant a doubt of the possibility of arranging the new life, of which he had been dreaming on the road. All these traces of his life seemed to clutch him, and say to him: “No, you’re not going to get away from us, and you’re not going to be different, but you’re going to be the same as you’ve always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation of happiness which you won’t get, and which isn’t possible for you.”

This the things said to him, but another voice in his heart was telling him that he must not fall under the say of the past, and that one can do anything with oneself. And hearing that voice, he went into the corner where stood his two heavey dumb-bells, and began brandishing them like a gymnast, trying to restore his confident temper. There was a creak of steps at the door. He hastily put down the dumb-bells.

Filed under: Art