Anna Karenina

"Alexey Alexandrovitch had forgotten the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, but she had not forgotten him." At his "bitterest moment of his lonely despair she came to him, and without waiting to be announced, walked straight into his study. She found him as he was sitting with his head in both hands." "J'ai forcé la consigne," she said. "I have heard all! Alexey Alexandrovitch! Dear friend!" She squeezed his hand, "gazing with her fine pensive eyes into his." Karenin got up, disengaging his hand. "I'm seeing no one because I'm unwell, countess." But when she looked at him with pity, "Alexey Alexandrovitch felt that she was sorry for him and was preparing to cry. And he too was softened; he snatched her plump hand and proceeded to kiss it." "You ought not to give way to grief," she said. "Your sorrow is a great one, but you ought to find consolation." "I am crushed, I am annihilated, I am no longer a man!" said Karenin. "My position is so awful because I can find nowhere, I cannot find within me strength to support me." "You will find support; seek it—not in me, though I beseech you to believe in my friendship. Our support is love, that love that He has vouchsafed us. His burden is light." "Although there was in these words a flavor of that sentimental emotion at her own lofty feelings, and that new mystical fervor which had lately gained ground in Petersburg," it was pleasant to him to hear this. "I am weak. I am crushed. I foresaw nothing, and now I understand nothing." "It's not the loss of what I have not now, it's not that!" Karenin continued. "I do not grieve for that. But I cannot help feeling humiliated before other people for the position I am placed in. It is wrong, but I can't help it, I can't help it." "Not you it was performed that noble act of forgiveness, at which I was moved to ecstasy, and everyone else too, but He, working within your heart," said Countess Lidia. "And so you cannot be ashamed of your act." Karenin had previously opposed her new religious doctrine, but "now for the first time he heard her words with pleasure, and did not inwardly oppose them." After she prayed: "I am very, very grateful to you, both for your deeds and for your words." "Now I will enter upon my duties," she said. "I am going to Seryozha. Only in the last extremity shall I apply to you." "Countess Lidia Ivanovna went into Seryozha's part of the house, and dropping tears on the scared child's cheeks, she told him that his father was a saint and his mother was dead." She took over managing Karenin's household. "All her arrangements had to be modified because they could not be carried out, and they were modified by Korney, Alexey Alexandrovitch's valet, who, though no one was aware of the fact, now managed Karenin's household." But "Lidia Ivanovna's help was none the less real; she gave Alexey Alexandrovitch moral support" and "almost turned him to Christianity—that is, from an indifferent and apathetic believer she turned him into an ardent and steadfast adherent of the new interpretation of Christian doctrine." "It was easy for Alexey Alexandrovitch to believe in this teaching." Like Lidia, he was "completely devoid of vividness of imagination, that spiritual faculty in virtue of which the conceptions evoked by the imagination become so vivid that they must needs be in harmony with other conceptions, and with actual fact." He believed "that death, though existing for unbelievers, did not exist for him, and that, as he was possessed of the most perfect faith, of the measure of which he was himself the judge, therefore there was no sin in his soul, and he was experiencing complete salvation here on earth." The narrator notes: "the erroneousness and shallowness of this conception of his faith was dimly perceptible to Alexey Alexandrovitch, and he knew that when, without the slightest idea that his forgiveness was the action of a higher power, he had surrendered directly to the feeling of forgiveness, he had felt more happiness than now." "But for Alexey Alexandrovitch it was a necessity to think in that way; it was such a necessity for him in his humiliation to have some elevated standpoint, however imaginary, from which, looked down upon by all, he could look down on others, that he clung, as to his one salvation, to his delusion of salvation."