Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 10
Chapter 10
THE artist Mihailov was, as always, at work when the cards of Count Vronsky and
Golenishtchev were brought to him. In the morning he had been working in his
studio at his big picture. On getting home he flew into a rage with his wife for not
having managed to put off the landlady, who had been asking for money.
“I’ve said it to you twenty times, don’t enter into details. You’re fool enough at
all times, and when you start explaining things in Italian you’re a fool three times as
foolish,” he said after a long dispute.
“Don’t let it run so long; it’s not my fault. If I had the money...”
“Leave me in peace, for God’s sake!” Mihailov shrieked, with tears in his voice,
and, stopping his ears, he went off into his working room, the other side of a partition
wall, and closed the door after him. “Idiotic woman!” he said to himself, sat down
to the table, and, opening a portfolio, he set to work at once with peculiar fervor at a
sketch he had begun.
Never did he work with such fervor and success as when things went ill with him,
and especially when he quarreled with his wife. “Oh! damn them all!” he thought
as he went on working. He was making a sketch for the figure of a man in a violent
rage. A sketch had been made before, but he was dissatisfied with it. “No, that one
was better...where is it?” He went back to his wife, and scowling, and not looking at
her, asked his eldest little girl, where was that piece of paper he had given them? The
paper with the discarded sketch on it was found, but it was dirty, and spotted with
candle-grease. Still, he took the sketch, laid it on his table, and, moving a little away,
screwing up his eyes, he fell to gazing at it. All at once he smiled and gesticulated
gleefully.
“That’s it! that’s it!” he said, and, at once picking up the pencil, he began rapidly
drawing. The spot of tallow had given the man a new pose.
He had sketched this new pose, when all at once he recalled the face of a shopkeeper
of whom he had bought cigars, a vigorous face with a prominent chin, and
he sketched this very face, this chin on to the figure of the man. He laughed aloud
with delight. The figure from a lifeless imagined thing had become living, and such
that it could never be changed. That figure lived, and was clearly and unmistakably
defined. The sketch might be corrected in accordance with the requirements of the
figure, the legs, indeed, could and must be put differently, and the position of the left
hand must be quite altered; the hair too might be thrown back. But in making these
corrections he was not altering the figure but simply getting rid of what concealed
the figure. He was, as it were, stripping off the wrappings which hindered it from
being distinctly seen. Each new feature only brought out the whole figure in all its
force and vigor, as it had suddenly come to him from the spot of tallow. He was
carefully finishing the figure when the cards were brought him.
“Coming, coming!”
He went in to his wife.
“Come, Sasha, don’t be cross!” he said, smiling timidly and affectionately at her.
“You were to blame. I was to blame. I’ll make it all right.” And having made peace
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