Anna
Karenina es una novela del ruso León Tolstoy, publicada en
capítulos entre 1875 y 1877 en The Russian Messenger.
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 leather-covered sofa in his
study. He turned over his stout, well-cared-for person on the elastic 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 considered 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… (Paragraphs from Anna Karenina,
chapter 1, by Leo Tolstoy, in easier English)
Palabras reemplazadas
Springy pondered
Vocabulario
Serge: sarga.
El
libro
Tolstoi consideraba Anna Karenina su primera novela
en serio. Fyodor Dostoyevsky la declaró una obra de arte sin
puntos débiles. Vladimir Nabokov admiró el mágico estilo del autor. William
Faulkner la describió como la mejor novela jamás escrita.
Recursos
Ana Karenina, to read online.
También recomendable, de otro autor ruso, La
madre, de Máximo Gorki.
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