child, by now he loathed this child.
He did not even wish for
' 'Doctor, what is it, what is it? Good Lord!' he said, snatching at the doctor's arm as the latter came out.
' 'Well,' said the doctor, 'it's the end,' and the doctor's face was so grave as he said it that Lyovin took the end as meaning her death. ' [Of course, what the doctor meant was: it will be over in a minute now.]
Now comes the part that stresses the beauty of this natural phenomenon. Mark incidentally that the whole history of literary fiction as an evolutionary process may be said to be a gradual probing of deeper and deeper layers of life. It is quite impossible to imagine either Homer in the ninth century b.c. or Cervantes in the seventeenth century of our era—it is quite impossible to imagine them describing in such wonderful detail childbirth. The question is not whether certain events or emotions are or are not suitable ethically or esthetically. The point I want to make is that the artist, like the scientist, in the process of evolution of art and science, is always casting around, understanding a little more than his predecessor, penetrating further with a keener and more brilliant eye—and this is the artistic result.
'Beside himself he hurried to the bedroom. The first thing he saw was the face of the midwife. It was even more frowning and stern. Kitty's face was not there. In the place where it had been was something that was fearful in its strained distortion and in the sounds that came from it. [Now comes the beauty of the thing.] He fell down with his head on the wooden framework of the bed, feeling that his heart was bursting. The awful scream never paused, it became still more awful, and as though it had reached the utmost limit of terror, suddenly it ceased. Lyovin could not believe his ears, but there could be no doubt; the scream had ceased and he heard a subdued stir and bustle, and hurried breathing, and her voice, gasping, alive, tender, and blissful, uttered softly, 'It's over!'
'He lifted his head. Exhausted, with her hands lying on the quilt, most lovely and serene, she looked at him in silence and tried to smile, and could not.
'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
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.
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
with his caution that 'literature
'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.'
