"And suddenly, from the mysterious and awful far-away world in which he had been living for the last twenty-two hours, Lyovin felt himself all in an instant borne back to the old every-day world, now flooded by such a radiance of happiness that he could not bear it. The strained strings snapped, sobs and tears of joy which he had never foreseen rose up with such violence that his whole body shook. . . . Falling on his knees before the bed, he held his wife's hand before his lips and kissed it, and the hand, with a weak movement of the fingers, responded to his kiss. [The whole chapter is magnificent imagery.
What slight figures of speech there are, shade into direct description. But now we are ready for a summation by means of a simile.] And meanwhile, there at the foot of the bed, in the deft hands of the midwife, like a flickering light on the oil of a lamp, there flickered the life of a human being which had never existed before and which would now . . . live and create in its own image."
We shall mark later the image of the light in connection with Anna's death, in the chapter of her suicide. Death is the delivery of the soul. Thus childbirth and soulbirth (death) are expressed in the same terms of mystery, terror, and beauty.
Kitty's delivery and Anna's death meet at this point.
The birth of faith in Lyovin, the pangs of faith birth.
"Lyovin with big steps strode along the highroad, absorbed not so much in his tangled thoughts as in his spiritual condition, unlike anything he had experienced before. . . .
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[A peasant with whom he had been talking had said of another peasant that he—that other peasant—lived for his belly, and then had said that one must not live for one's belly, but for truth, for God, for one's soul.]
" 'Can I have found a solution for myself, can my sufferings be over?' thought Lyovin striding along the dusty road. . . . He was breathless with emotion. He turned off the road into the forest and sat down on the grass in the shade of an aspen. He took his hat off his hot head and lay propped on his elbow in the lush fluffy woodland grass [which Mrs. Garnett has trampled upon with flat feet: it is not 'feathery grass.']
" 'Yes, I must make it clear to myself,' he thought as he followed the movements of a small green bug creeping up a blade of witch-grass: it was interrupted in its progress by a leaf of gout-wort. 'What have I discovered?' he asked himself [referring to his spiritual condition] and bending aside the leaf out of the beetle's way and turning down another blade of grass to help it cross over onto it. 'What is it makes me glad? What have I discovered?'
" 'I have only found out what I knew all along. I have been set free from falsity, I have found the Master.' "
But what we must mark is not so much the ideas. After all we should always bear in mind that literature is not a pattern of ideas but a pattern of images. Ideas do not matter much in comparison to a book's imagery and magic. What interests us here is not what Lyovin thought, or what Leo thought, but that little bug that expresses so neatly the turn, the switch, the gesture of thought.
We now come to the last chapters of the Lyovin line—to Lyovin's final conversion—but again let us keep an eye on the imagery and leave the ideas to pile up as they please. The word, the expression, the image is the true function of literature.
Not ideas.
At Lyovin's estate the family and the guests had been on an
outing. Then it is time to go back.
"Kitty's father and Sergey, Lyovin's half brother, got into the
small cart and drove off; storm clouds were gathering; the
rest of the party hastened homeward on foot.
"But the storm-rack, now white, then black, moved upon
them so quickly that they had to walk fast to get home
before the rain. The foremost clouds, lowering and as black
as soot-laden smoke, moved with extraordinary swiftness
over the sky. The party was two hundred paces from the
house, the wind of the storm was already blowing and now
every second the downpour might come.
"The children ran ahead with frightened and gleeful yells.
Dolly, struggling as best she could with her skirts that
clung round her legs, was more running than walking, her
eyes fixed on the children. The men holding onto their hats
strode with long steps beside her. They were just at the
steps of the porch when a big raindrop fell and splattered
on the rim of the iron gutter. The children ran into the
shelter of the house talking excitedly.
Nabokov's notes on Anna Karenin, part eight, chapter 12,
with his caution that "literature isnot a pattern of ideas ..."
'Is my wife home?' Lyovin asked of the housekeeper who
had met them in the hall with kerchiefs and lap-robes that she was about to send to the picnickers.
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" 'We thought she was with you,' she said.
" 'And the baby?'
" 'They must be all in the grove, the nurse too.'
"Lyovin snatched up the lap-robes and coats and ran towards the grove.
"In that brief interval of time the thunderhead had engulfed the sun so completely that the day was as dark as during an eclipse. Stubbornly the wind tried to stop him as though insisting on its rights [the pathetic fallacy of the wind, as on Anna's train trip; but direct imagery will now turn into a comparison], and tearing the leaves and flowers off lime-trees, and turning back the foliage of the white birch branches so as to reveal, hideously and strangely, their nakedness, the wind twisted and tossed everything to one side—acacias, flowers, burdocks, long grass, tall tree-tops. The peasant girls working in the garden ran shrieking into the shelter of the servants' quarters. The downpour had already flung its livid veil over all the distant forest and over half the near fields, and was rapidly swooping down upon the grove. The wet of the rain as it spurted up in tiny drops upon touching the ground could be smelled in the air. Bending his head* and struggling with the wind that strove to snatch the wraps he was carrying away from him [pathetic fallacy continued], Lyovin was nearing the grove, and had just caught sight of something white from behind an oak-tree, when there was a sudden flash, the whole earth seemed on fire, and the sky seemed to split in two. Opening his blinded eyes, Lyovin gazed through the thick veil of rain and to his horror the first thing he saw was the uncannily changed position of the green crest of the familiar oak-tree in the middle of the grove. [Compare the scene of the race, Vronski feeling "his changed position" when his horse broke its back while jumping an obstacle in the race.]
" 'Can it have been struck?' he hardly had time to think when, moving more and more rapidly, the foliage of the oak vanished behind other trees, and he heard the crash of the great tree falling upon the others.
"The blaze of lightning, the sound of thunder and the sudden chill that ran through him were all merged for him in one pang of terror. 'My God, my God, not on them,' he said.
"And though he thought at once how senseless was his prayer that the falling oak should not have killed them since it had already fallen, he repeated it, knowing that he could do nothing better than utter this senseless prayer. . . .
"They were at the other end of the grove, under an old lime-tree; they were calling him. Two figures in dark dresses (the dresses had been of a light color when they had started out)† stood bending over something. They were Kitty and the nurse. The rain had almost stopped. It was beginning to clear up when he reached them. The nurse's skirt was dry but Kitty was drenched, and her soaked clothes clung to her. Both stood bending in the same position as when the storm broke, over a baby carriage protected by a green umbrella. 'Alive? Safe? Thank God,' he said. His soaked boots slipped and sloshed in the puddles as he ran up to them. . . . [He was angry with his wife.] They gathered up the baby's wet diapers." [Wet from the rain? This is not clear. Note how Jove's shower has been transformed into a beloved babe's wet diaper. The forces of nature have surrendered to the power of family life. The pathetic fallacy has been replaced by the smile of a happy family.]