Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 11
Chapter 11
ON entering the studio, Mihailov once more scanned his visitors and noted down
in his imagination Vronsky’s expression too, and especially his jaws. Although
his artistic sense was unceasingly at work collecting materials, although he felt a
continually increasing excitement as the moment of criticizing his work drew nearer,
he rapidly and subtly formed, from imperceptible signs, a mental image of these
three persons.
That fellow (Golenishtchev) was a Russian living here. Mihailov did not remember
his surname nor where he had met him, nor what he had said to him. He
only remembered his face as he remembered all the faces he had ever seen; but
he remembered, too, that it was one of the faces laid by in his memory in the immense
class of the falsely consequential and poor in expression. The abundant hair
and very open forehead gave an appearance of consequence to the face, which had
only one expression–a petty, childish, peevish expression, concentrated just above
the bridge of the narrow nose. Vronsky and Madame Karenina must be, Mihailov
supposed, distinguished and wealthy Russians, knowing nothing about art, like all
those wealthy Russians, but posing as amateurs and connoisseurs. “Most likely
they’ve already looked at all the antiques, and now they’re making the round of
the studios of the new people, the German humbug, and the cracked Pre-Raphaelite
English fellow, and have only come to me to make the point of view complete,” he
thought. He was well acquainted with the way dilettanti have (the cleverer they
were the worse he found them) of looking at the works of contemporary artists with
the sole object of being in a position to say that art is a thing of the past, and that the
more one sees of the new men the more one sees how inimitable the works of the
great old masters have remained. He expected all this; he saw it all in their faces, he
saw it in the careless indifference with which they talked among themselves, stared
at the lay figures and busts, and walked about in leisurely fashion, waiting for him
to uncover his picture. But in spite of this, while he was turning over his studies,
pulling up the blinds and taking off the sheet, he was in intense excitement, especially
as, in spite of his conviction that all distinguished and wealthy Russians were
certain to be beasts and fools, he liked Vronsky, and still more Anna.
“Here, if you please,” he said, moving on one side with his nimble gait and pointing
to his picture, “it’s the exhortation to Pilate. Matthew, chapter xxvii,” he said,
feeling his lips were beginning to tremble with emotion. He moved away and stood
behind them.
For the few seconds during which the visitors were gazing at the picture in silence
Mihailov too gazed at it with the indifferent eye of an outsider. For those few seconds
he was sure in anticipation that a higher, juster criticism would be uttered by them,
by those very visitors whom he had been so despising a moment before. He forgot all
he had thought about his picture before during the three years he had been painting
it; he forgot all its qualities which had been absolutely certain to him–he saw the
picture with their indifferent, new, outside eyes, and saw nothing good in it. He
saw in the foreground Pilate’s irritated face and the serene face of Christ, and in
the background the figures of Pilate’s retinue and the face of John watching what
was happening. Every face that, with such agony, such blunders and corrections
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