liked, but it was distasteful to him.  A man could not be prevented from making himself a big wax doll, and kissing it.  But if the man were to come with the doll and sit before a man in love, and begin caressing his doll as the lover caressed the woman he loved, it would be distasteful to the lover.  Just such a distasteful sensation was what Mihailov felt at the sight of Vronsky’s painting:  he felt it both ludicrous and irritating, both pitiable and offensive.

Vronsky’s interest in painting and the Middle Ages did not last long.  He had enough taste for painting to be unable to finish his picture.  The picture came to a standstill.  He was vaguely aware that its defects, inconspicuous at first, would be glaring if he were to go on with it.  The same experience befell him as Golenishtchev, who felt that he had nothing to say, and continually deceived himself with the theory that his idea was not yet mature, that he was working it out and collecting materials.  This exasperated and tortured Golenishtchev, but Vronsky was incapable of deceiving and torturing himself, and even more incapable of exasperation.  With his characteristic decision, without explanation or apology, he simply ceased working at painting.

But without this occupation, the life of Vronsky and of Anna, who wondered at his loss of interest in it, struck them as intolerably tedious in an Italian town.  The palazzo suddenly seemed so obtrusively old and dirty, the spots on the curtains, the cracks in the floors, the broken plaster on the cornices became so disagreeably obvious, and the everlasting sameness of Golenishtchev, and the Italian professor and the German traveler became so wearisome, that they had to make some change.  They resolved to go to Russia, to the country.  In Petersburg Vronsky intended to arrange a partition of the land with his brother, while Anna meant to see her son.  The summer they intended to spend on Vronsky’s great family estate.

Chapter 14

Levin had been married three months.  He was happy, but not at all in the way he had expected to be.  At every step he found his former dreams disappointed, and new, unexpected surprises of happiness.  He was happy; but on entering upon family life he saw at every step that it was utterly different from what he had imagined.  At every step he experienced what a man would experience who, after admiring the smooth, happy course of a little boat on a lake, should get himself into that little boat.  He saw that it was not all sitting still, floating smoothly; that one had to think too, not for an instant to forget where one was floating; and that there was water under one, and that one must row; and that his unaccustomed hands would be sore; and that it was only to look at it that was easy; but that doing it, though very delightful, was very difficult.