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Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Part 7. Chapter 14.

Part 7. Chapter 14.

The doctor was not yet up, and the footman said that "he had been up late, and had given orders not to be waked, but would get up soon." The footman was cleaning the lamp-chimneys, and seemed very busy about them. This concentration of the footman upon his lamps, and his indifference to what was passing in Levin, at first astounded him, but immediately on considering the question he realized that no one knew or was bound to know his feelings, and that it was all the more necessary to act calmly, sensibly, and resolutely to get through this wall of indifference and attain his aim.

"Don't be in a hurry or let anything slip," Levin said to himself, feeling a greater and greater flow of physical energy and attention to all that lay before him to do. Having ascertained that the doctor was not getting up, Levin considered various plans, and decided on the following one: that Kouzma should go for another doctor, while he himself should go to the chemist's for opium, and if when he came back the doctor had not yet begun to get up, he would either by tipping the footman, or by force, wake the doctor at all hazards. At the chemist's the lank shopman sealed up a packet of powders for a coachman who stood waiting, and refused him opium with the same callousness with which the doctor's footman had cleaned his lamp chimneys. Trying not to get flurried or out of temper, Levin mentioned the names of the doctor and midwife, and explaining what the opium was needed for, tried to persuade him. The assistant inquired in German whether he should give it, and receiving an affirmative reply from behind the partition, he took out a bottle and a funnel, deliberately poured the opium from a bigger bottle into a little one, stuck on a label, sealed it up, in spite of Levin's request that he would not do so, and was about to wrap it up too. This was more than Levin could stand; he took the bottle firmly out of his hands, and ran to the big glass doors. The doctor was not even now getting up, and the footman, busy now in putting down the rugs, refused to wake him. Levin deliberately took out a ten rouble note, and, careful to speak slowly, though losing no time over the business, he handed him the note, and explained that Pyotr Dmitrievitch (what a great and important personage he seemed to Levin now, this Pyotr Dmitrievitch, who had been of so little consequence in his eyes before!) had promised to come at any time; that he would certainly not be angry! and that he must therefore wake him at once.

The footman agreed, and went upstairs, taking Levin into the waiting room.

Levin could hear through the door the doctor coughing, moving about, washing, and saying something. Three minutes passed; it seemed to Levin that more than an hour had gone by. He could not wait any longer.

"Pyotr Dmitrievitch, Pyotr Dmitrievitch!" he said in an imploring voice at the open door. "For God's sake, forgive me! See me as you are. It's been going on more than two hours already." "In a minute; in a minute!" answered a voice, and to his amazement Levin heard that the doctor was smiling as he spoke.

"For one instant." "In a minute." Two minutes more passed while the doctor was putting on his boots, and two minutes more while the doctor put on his coat and combed his hair.

"Pyotr Dmitrievitch!" Levin was beginning again in a plaintive voice, just as the doctor came in dressed and ready. "These people have no conscience," thought Levin. "Combing his hair, while we're dying!" "Good morning!" the doctor said to him, shaking hands, and, as it were, teasing him with his composure. "There's no hurry. Well now?" Trying to be as accurate as possible, Levin began to tell him every unnecessary detail of his wife's condition, interrupting his account repeatedly with entreaties that the doctor would come with him at once. "Oh, you needn't be in any hurry. You don't understand, you know. I'm certain I'm not wanted, still I've promised, and if you like, I'll come. But there's no hurry. Please sit down; won't you have some coffee?" Levin stared at him with eyes that asked whether he was laughing at him; but the doctor had no notion of making fun of him.

"I know, I know," the doctor said, smiling; "I'm a married man myself; and at these moments we husbands are very much to be pitied. I've a patient whose husband always takes refuge in the stables on such occasions." "But what do you think, Pyotr Dmitrievitch? Do you suppose it may go all right?" "Everything points to a favorable issue." "So you'll come immediately?" said Levin, looking wrathfully at the servant who was bringing in the coffee.

"In an hour's time." "Oh, for mercy's sake!" "Well, let me drink my coffee, anyway." The doctor started upon his coffee. Both were silent.

"The Turks are really getting beaten, though. Did you read yesterday's telegrams?" said the doctor, munching some roll.

"No, I can't stand it!" said Levin, jumping up. "So you'll be with us in a quarter of an hour." "In half an hour." "On your honor?" When Levin got home, he drove up at the same time as the princess, and they went up to the bedroom door together. The princess had tears in her eyes, and her hands were shaking. Seeing Levin, she embraced him, and burst into tears.

"Well, my dear Lizaveta Petrovna?" she queried, clasping the hand of the midwife, who came out to meet them with a beaming and anxious face.

"She's going on well," she said; "persuade her to lie down. She will be easier so." From the moment when he had waked up and understood what was going on, Levin had prepared his mind to bear resolutely what was before him, and without considering or anticipating anything, to avoid upsetting his wife, and on the contrary to soothe her and keep up her courage. Without allowing himself even to think of what was to come, of how it would end, judging from his inquiries as to the usual duration of these ordeals, Levin had in his imagination braced himself to bear up and to keep a tight rein on his feelings for five hours, and it had seemed to him he could do this. But when he came back from the doctor's and saw her sufferings again, he fell to repeating more and more frequently: "Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!" He sighed, and flung his head up, and began to feel afraid he could not bear it, that he would burst into tears or run away. Such agony it was to him. And only one hour had passed.

But after that hour there passed another hour, two hours, three, the full five hours he had fixed as the furthest limit of his sufferings, and the position was still unchanged; and he was still bearing it because there was nothing to be done but bear it; every instant feeling that he had reached the utmost limits of his endurance, and that his heart would break with sympathy and pain.

But still the minutes passed by and the hours, and still hours more, and his misery and horror grew and were more and more intense.

All the ordinary conditions of life, without which one can form no conception of anything, had ceased to exist for Levin. He lost all sense of time. Minutes—those minutes when she sent for him and he held her moist hand, that would squeeze his hand with extraordinary violence and then push it away—seemed to him hours, and hours seemed to him minutes. He was surprised when Lizaveta Petrovna asked him to light a candle behind a screen, and he found that it was five o'clock in the afternoon. If he had been told it was only ten o'clock in the morning, he would not have been more surprised. Where he was all this time, he knew as little as the time of anything. He saw her swollen face, sometimes bewildered and in agony, sometimes smiling and trying to reassure him. He saw the old princess too, flushed and overwrought, with her gray curls in disorder, forcing herself to gulp down her tears, biting her lips; he saw Dolly too and the doctor, smoking fat cigarettes, and Lizaveta Petrovna with a firm, resolute, reassuring face, and the old prince walking up and down the hall with a frowning face. But why they came in and went out, where they were, he did not know. The princess was with the doctor in the bedroom, then in the study, where a table set for dinner suddenly appeared; then she was not there, but Dolly was. Then Levin remembered he had been sent somewhere. Once he had been sent to move a table and sofa. He had done this eagerly, thinking it had to be done for her sake, and only later on he found it was his own bed he had been getting ready. Then he had been sent to the study to ask the doctor something. The doctor had answered and then had said something about the irregularities in the municipal council. Then he had been sent to the bedroom to help the old princess to move the holy picture in its silver and gold setting, and with the princess's old waiting maid he had clambered on a shelf to reach it and had broken the little lamp, and the old servant had tried to reassure him about the lamp and about his wife, and he carried the holy picture and set it at Kitty's head, carefully tucking it in behind the pillow. But where, when, and why all this had happened, he could not tell. He did not understand why the old princess took his hand, and looking compassionately at him, begged him not to worry himself, and Dolly persuaded him to eat something and led him out of the room, and even the doctor looked seriously and with commiseration at him and offered him a drop of something.

All he knew and felt was that what was happening was what had happened nearly a year before in the hotel of the country town at the deathbed of his brother Nikolay. But that had been grief— this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.

"Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!" he repeated to himself incessantly, feeling, in spite of his long and, as it seemed, complete alienation from religion, that he turned to God just as trustfully and simply as he had in his childhood and first youth.

All this time he had two distinct spiritual conditions. One was away from her, with the doctor, who kept smoking one fat cigarette after another and extinguishing them on the edge of a full ash tray, with Dolly, and with the old prince, where there was talk about dinner, about politics, about Marya Petrovna's illness, and where Levin suddenly forgot for a minute what was happening, and felt as though he had waked up from sleep; the other was in her presence, at her pillow, where his heart seemed breaking and still did not break from sympathetic suffering, and he prayed to God without ceasing. And every time he was brought back from a moment of oblivion by a scream reaching him from the bedroom, he fell into the same strange terror that had come upon him the first minute. Every time he heard a shriek, he jumped up, ran to justify himself, remembered on the way that he was not to blame, and he longed to defend her, to help her. But as he looked at her, he saw again that help was impossible, and he was filled with terror and prayed: "Lord, have mercy on us, and help us!" And as time went on, both these conditions became more intense; the calmer he became away from her, completely forgetting her, the more agonizing became both her sufferings and his feeling of helplessness before them. He jumped up, would have liked to run away, but ran to her.

Sometimes, when again and again she called upon him, he blamed her; but seeing her patient, smiling face, and hearing the words, "I am worrying you," he threw the blame on God; but thinking of God, at once he fell to beseeching God to forgive him and have mercy.


Part 7. Chapter 14.

The doctor was not yet up, and the footman said that "he had been up late, and had given orders not to be waked, but would get up soon." The footman was cleaning the lamp-chimneys, and seemed very busy about them. This concentration of the footman upon his lamps, and his indifference to what was passing in Levin, at first astounded him, but immediately on considering the question he realized that no one knew or was bound to know his feelings, and that it was all the more necessary to act calmly, sensibly, and resolutely to get through this wall of indifference and attain his aim. Ši antgalio susikaupimas ant jo lempų ir abejingumas Levinui einantiems dalykams iš pradžių jį apstulbino, tačiau iškart svarstydamas klausimą suprato, kad niekas nežinojo ir neprivalėjo žinoti jo jausmų ir kad visa tai buvo labiau reikia elgtis ramiai, protingai ir ryžtingai, kad patektum per šią abejingumo sieną ir pasiektum savo tikslą.

"Don't be in a hurry or let anything slip," Levin said to himself, feeling a greater and greater flow of physical energy and attention to all that lay before him to do. Having ascertained that the doctor was not getting up, Levin considered various plans, and decided on the following one: that Kouzma should go for another doctor, while he himself should go to the chemist's for opium, and if when he came back the doctor had not yet begun to get up, he would either by tipping the footman, or by force, wake the doctor at all hazards. S'étant assuré que le médecin ne se levait pas, Levin envisagea divers plans et décida le suivant: que Kouzma irait chercher un autre médecin, tandis que lui-même devait aller chercher de l'opium chez le pharmacien, et si à son retour pas encore commencé à se lever, il réveillerait à tout hasard le médecin soit en renversant le valet de pied, soit de force. At the chemist's the lank shopman sealed up a packet of powders for a coachman who stood waiting, and refused him opium with the same callousness with which the doctor's footman had cleaned his lamp chimneys. Chez le pharmacien, le maigre commerçant scella un paquet de poudres pour un cocher qui attendait, et lui refusa l'opium avec la même insensibilité avec laquelle le valet de pied du docteur avait nettoyé ses cheminées de lampes. Trying not to get flurried or out of temper, Levin mentioned the names of the doctor and midwife, and explaining what the opium was needed for, tried to persuade him. Essayant de ne pas s'emballer ou de ne pas se mettre en colère, Levin a mentionné les noms du médecin et de la sage-femme, et expliquant pourquoi l'opium était nécessaire, a essayé de le persuader. The assistant inquired in German whether he should give it, and receiving an affirmative reply from behind the partition, he took out a bottle and a funnel, deliberately poured the opium from a bigger bottle into a little one, stuck on a label, sealed it up, in spite of Levin's request that he would not do so, and was about to wrap it up too. This was more than Levin could stand; he took the bottle firmly out of his hands, and ran to the big glass doors. C'était plus que ce que Levin pouvait supporter; il prit fermement la bouteille des mains et courut vers les grandes portes vitrées. The doctor was not even now getting up, and the footman, busy now in putting down the rugs, refused to wake him. Le médecin ne se levait même pas maintenant, et le valet de pied, occupé maintenant à poser les tapis, refusa de le réveiller. Levin deliberately took out a ten rouble note, and, careful to speak slowly, though losing no time over the business, he handed him the note, and explained that Pyotr Dmitrievitch (what a great and important personage he seemed to Levin now, this Pyotr Dmitrievitch, who had been of so little consequence in his eyes before!) Levin a délibérément sorti un billet de dix roubles, et, prenant soin de parler lentement, bien que ne perdant pas de temps sur l'affaire, il lui a tendu la note, et a expliqué que Pyotr Dmitrievitch (quel grand et important personnage il semblait à Levin maintenant, ce Pyotr Dmitrievitch, qui avait eu si peu d'importance à ses yeux auparavant!) Levinas sąmoningai išėmė dešimties rublių kupiūrą ir, atsargiai kalbėdamas lėtai, nors ir neprarasdamas laiko verslui, padavė jam raštelį ir paaiškino, kad Pjotras Dmitrijevičius (koks puikus ir svarbus asmuo jis dabar atrodė Levinui, šis Pjotras) Dmitrijevičius, kuris jo akyse anksčiau turėjo tiek mažai pasekmių!) had promised to come at any time; that he would certainly not be angry! and that he must therefore wake him at once.

The footman agreed, and went upstairs, taking Levin into the waiting room.

Levin could hear through the door the doctor coughing, moving about, washing, and saying something. Three minutes passed; it seemed to Levin that more than an hour had gone by. He could not wait any longer.

"Pyotr Dmitrievitch, Pyotr Dmitrievitch!" he said in an imploring voice at the open door. "For God's sake, forgive me! See me as you are. Voyez-moi tel que vous êtes. It's been going on more than two hours already." Cela dure déjà depuis plus de deux heures. " "In a minute; in a minute!" answered a voice, and to his amazement Levin heard that the doctor was smiling as he spoke.

"For one instant." "In a minute." Two minutes more passed while the doctor was putting on his boots, and two minutes more while the doctor put on his coat and combed his hair.

"Pyotr Dmitrievitch!" Levin was beginning again in a plaintive voice, just as the doctor came in dressed and ready. "These people have no conscience," thought Levin. "Combing his hair, while we're dying!" "Good morning!" the doctor said to him, shaking hands, and, as it were, teasing him with his composure. lui dit le médecin en lui serrant la main et, pour ainsi dire, le taquinant avec son sang-froid. "There's no hurry. Well now?" Trying to be as accurate as possible, Levin began to tell him every unnecessary detail of his wife's condition, interrupting his account repeatedly with entreaties that the doctor would come with him at once. Essayant d'être aussi précis que possible, Levin commença à lui dire tous les détails inutiles de l'état de sa femme, interrompant son récit à plusieurs reprises avec des prières que le médecin viendrait avec lui immédiatement. "Oh, you needn't be in any hurry. You don't understand, you know. I'm certain I'm not wanted, still I've promised, and if you like, I'll come. But there's no hurry. Please sit down; won't you have some coffee?" Levin stared at him with eyes that asked whether he was laughing at him; but the doctor had no notion of making fun of him.

"I know, I know," the doctor said, smiling; "I'm a married man myself; and at these moments we husbands are very much to be pitied. I've a patient whose husband always takes refuge in the stables on such occasions." "But what do you think, Pyotr Dmitrievitch? Do you suppose it may go all right?" "Everything points to a favorable issue." "So you'll come immediately?" said Levin, looking wrathfully at the servant who was bringing in the coffee.

"In an hour's time." "Oh, for mercy's sake!" "Well, let me drink my coffee, anyway." The doctor started upon his coffee. Le médecin a commencé son café. Both were silent.

"The Turks are really getting beaten, though. Did you read yesterday's telegrams?" said the doctor, munching some roll. dit le docteur en grignotant du pain.

"No, I can't stand it!" said Levin, jumping up. "So you'll be with us in a quarter of an hour." "In half an hour." "On your honor?" When Levin got home, he drove up at the same time as the princess, and they went up to the bedroom door together. The princess had tears in her eyes, and her hands were shaking. Seeing Levin, she embraced him, and burst into tears.

"Well, my dear Lizaveta Petrovna?" she queried, clasping the hand of the midwife, who came out to meet them with a beaming and anxious face. demanda-t-elle en serrant la main de la sage-femme, qui sortit à leur rencontre avec un visage rayonnant et anxieux.

"She's going on well," she said; "persuade her to lie down. She will be easier so." Elle sera plus facile ainsi. " From the moment when he had waked up and understood what was going on, Levin had prepared his mind to bear resolutely what was before him, and without considering or anticipating anything, to avoid upsetting his wife, and on the contrary to soothe her and keep up her courage. Without allowing himself even to think of what was to come, of how it would end, judging from his inquiries as to the usual duration of these ordeals, Levin had in his imagination braced himself to bear up and to keep a tight rein on his feelings for five hours, and it had seemed to him he could do this. Sans se permettre même de penser à ce qui allait arriver, à comment cela finirait, à en juger par ses enquêtes sur la durée habituelle de ces épreuves, Levin s'était préparé dans son imagination pour supporter et garder un contrôle serré sur ses sentiments. pendant cinq heures, et il lui avait semblé qu'il pouvait le faire. But when he came back from the doctor's and saw her sufferings again, he fell to repeating more and more frequently: "Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!" Mais quand il revint de chez le médecin et revit ses souffrances, il se mit à répéter de plus en plus fréquemment: «Seigneur, aie pitié de nous, et secoure-nous! He sighed, and flung his head up, and began to feel afraid he could not bear it, that he would burst into tears or run away. Il soupira, leva la tête et commença à avoir peur de ne pas pouvoir le supporter, de fondre en larmes ou de s'enfuir. Such agony it was to him. And only one hour had passed.

But after that hour there passed another hour, two hours, three, the full five hours he had fixed as the furthest limit of his sufferings, and the position was still unchanged; and he was still bearing it because there was nothing to be done but bear it; every instant feeling that he had reached the utmost limits of his endurance, and that his heart would break with sympathy and pain. Mais après cette heure, il passa une autre heure, deux heures, trois, les cinq heures complètes qu'il avait fixées comme la limite la plus éloignée de ses souffrances, et la situation était toujours inchangée; et il le portait encore parce qu'il n'y avait rien d'autre à faire que de le supporter; à chaque instant, le sentiment qu'il avait atteint les limites extrêmes de son endurance, et que son cœur se briserait de sympathie et de douleur.

But still the minutes passed by and the hours, and still hours more, and his misery and horror grew and were more and more intense.

All the ordinary conditions of life, without which one can form no conception of anything, had ceased to exist for Levin. Toutes les conditions ordinaires de la vie, sans lesquelles on ne peut se faire aucune idée de quoi que ce soit, avaient cessé d'exister pour Levin. He lost all sense of time. Minutes—those minutes when she sent for him and he held her moist hand, that would squeeze his hand with extraordinary violence and then push it away—seemed to him hours, and hours seemed to him minutes. Les minutes - ces minutes où elle le faisait appeler et qu'il tenait sa main moite, qui lui serrait la main avec une violence extraordinaire puis la repoussait - lui paraissaient des heures, et les heures lui paraissaient des minutes. He was surprised when Lizaveta Petrovna asked him to light a candle behind a screen, and he found that it was five o'clock in the afternoon. If he had been told it was only ten o'clock in the morning, he would not have been more surprised. Where he was all this time, he knew as little as the time of anything. He saw her swollen face, sometimes bewildered and in agony, sometimes smiling and trying to reassure him. Il vit son visage enflé, parfois perplexe et à l'agonie, parfois souriant et essayant de le rassurer. He saw the old princess too, flushed and overwrought, with her gray curls in disorder, forcing herself to gulp down her tears, biting her lips; he saw Dolly too and the doctor, smoking fat cigarettes, and Lizaveta Petrovna with a firm, resolute, reassuring face, and the old prince walking up and down the hall with a frowning face. Il vit aussi la vieille princesse, rouge et surmenée, avec ses boucles grises en désordre, se forçant à avaler ses larmes, se mordant les lèvres; il vit aussi Dolly et le médecin, fumant de grosses cigarettes, et Lizaveta Petrovna avec un visage ferme, résolu et rassurant, et le vieux prince marchant dans le couloir avec un visage fronçant les sourcils. But why they came in and went out, where they were, he did not know. The princess was with the doctor in the bedroom, then in the study, where a table set for dinner suddenly appeared; then she was not there, but Dolly was. Princesė buvo pas gydytoją miegamajame, tada kabinete, kur staiga pasirodė vakarienei padengtas stalas; tada jos nebuvo, bet Dolly. Then Levin remembered he had been sent somewhere. Puis Levin se souvint qu'il avait été envoyé quelque part. Once he had been sent to move a table and sofa. He had done this eagerly, thinking it had to be done for her sake, and only later on he found it was his own bed he had been getting ready. Il avait fait cela avec empressement, pensant que cela devait être fait pour elle, et ce n'est que plus tard qu'il découvrit que c'était son propre lit qu'il préparait. Then he had been sent to the study to ask the doctor something. The doctor had answered and then had said something about the irregularities in the municipal council. Le médecin avait répondu, puis avait dit quelque chose sur les irrégularités du conseil municipal. Then he had been sent to the bedroom to help the old princess to move the holy picture in its silver and gold setting, and with the princess's old waiting maid he had clambered on a shelf to reach it and had broken the little lamp, and the old servant had tried to reassure him about the lamp and about his wife, and he carried the holy picture and set it at Kitty's head, carefully tucking it in behind the pillow. Puis il avait été envoyé dans la chambre pour aider la vieille princesse à déplacer le tableau sacré dans son cadre d'argent et d'or, et avec la vieille servante de la princesse, il avait grimpé sur une étagère pour l'atteindre et avait cassé la petite lampe, et Le vieux serviteur avait essayé de le rassurer sur la lampe et sur sa femme, et il porta la sainte image et la posa sur la tête de Kitty, la glissant soigneusement derrière l'oreiller. But where, when, and why all this had happened, he could not tell. He did not understand why the old princess took his hand, and looking compassionately at him, begged him not to worry himself, and Dolly persuaded him to eat something and led him out of the room, and even the doctor looked seriously and with commiseration at him and offered him a drop of something.

All he knew and felt was that what was happening was what had happened nearly a year before in the hotel of the country town at the deathbed of his brother Nikolay. Tout ce qu'il savait et ressentait, c'était que ce qui se passait était ce qui s'était passé près d'un an auparavant dans l'hôtel de la ville de campagne sur le lit de mort de son frère Nikolay. But that had been grief— this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. Pourtant, ce chagrin et cette joie étaient pareils en dehors de toutes les conditions ordinaires de la vie; c'étaient pour ainsi dire des trous en boucle dans cette vie ordinaire à travers laquelle surgissaient des aperçus de quelque chose de sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it. Et dans la contemplation de ce sublime quelque chose, l'âme s'éleva à des hauteurs inconcevables dont elle n'avait auparavant aucune idée, tandis que la raison traînait, incapable de la suivre.

"Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!" he repeated to himself incessantly, feeling, in spite of his long and, as it seemed, complete alienation from religion, that he turned to God just as trustfully and simply as he had in his childhood and first youth. il se répétait sans cesse, se sentant, malgré son éloignement long et, comme il semblait, complet de la religion, qu'il se tournait vers Dieu avec autant de confiance et de simplicité que dans son enfance et sa première jeunesse.

All this time he had two distinct spiritual conditions. One was away from her, with the doctor, who kept smoking one fat cigarette after another and extinguishing them on the edge of a full ash tray, with Dolly, and with the old prince, where there was talk about dinner, about politics, about Marya Petrovna's illness, and where Levin suddenly forgot for a minute what was happening, and felt as though he had waked up from sleep; the other was in her presence, at her pillow, where his heart seemed breaking and still did not break from sympathetic suffering, and he prayed to God without ceasing. L'un était loin d'elle, avec le médecin, qui fumait une grosse cigarette après l'autre et les éteignait au bord d'un cendrier plein, avec Dolly, et avec le vieux prince, où on parlait de dîner, de politique, de La maladie de Marya Petrovna, et où Levin oublia soudainement pendant une minute ce qui se passait, et se sentit comme s'il s'était réveillé de son sommeil; l'autre était en sa présence, à son oreiller, où son cœur semblait se briser et ne se brisait toujours pas de la souffrance sympathique, et il priait Dieu sans cesse. And every time he was brought back from a moment of oblivion by a scream reaching him from the bedroom, he fell into the same strange terror that had come upon him the first minute. Et chaque fois qu'il était ramené d'un moment d'oubli par un cri qui lui parvenait de la chambre, il tombait dans la même terreur étrange qui lui était venue à la première minute. Every time he heard a shriek, he jumped up, ran to justify himself, remembered on the way that he was not to blame, and he longed to defend her, to help her. Chaque fois qu'il entendait un cri, il sursautait, courait pour se justifier, se rappelait en chemin qu'il n'était pas à blâmer, et il aspirait à la défendre, à l'aider. But as he looked at her, he saw again that help was impossible, and he was filled with terror and prayed: "Lord, have mercy on us, and help us!" And as time went on, both these conditions became more intense; the calmer he became away from her, completely forgetting her, the more agonizing became both her sufferings and his feeling of helplessness before them. Et avec le temps, ces deux conditions sont devenues plus intenses; plus il s'éloignait d'elle, l'oubliant complètement, plus ses souffrances et son sentiment d'impuissance devenaient angoissants devant eux. He jumped up, would have liked to run away, but ran to her.

Sometimes, when again and again she called upon him, he blamed her; but seeing her patient, smiling face, and hearing the words, "I am worrying you," he threw the blame on God; but thinking of God, at once he fell to beseeching God to forgive him and have mercy. Parfois, quand elle l'appelait encore et encore, il la blâmait; mais voyant son visage patient et souriant, et entendant les mots: «Je vous inquiète», il rejeta le blâme sur Dieu; mais pensant à Dieu, il se mit aussitôt à implorer Dieu de lui pardonner et d'avoir pitié.