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Updated: May 28, 2025
"Oh, you've come," he said, addressing a tall old footman of his mother's, standing at the door; "come here." Besides the charm Oblonsky had in general for everyone, Vronsky had felt of late specially drawn to him by the fact that in his imagination he was associated with Kitty. "Well, what do you say? Shall we give a supper on Sunday for the diva?" he said to him with a smile, taking his arm.
And suddenly both of them felt that though they were friends, though they had been dining and drinking together, which should have drawn them closer, yet each was thinking only of his own affairs, and they had nothing to do with one another. Oblonsky had more than once experienced this extreme sense of aloofness, instead of intimacy, coming on after dinner, and he knew what to do in such cases.
Next day Betsy herself came to him in the morning, and announced that she had heard through Oblonsky as a positive fact that Alexey Alexandrovitch had agreed to a divorce, and that therefore Vronsky could see Anna.
Even Sergey Ivanovitch, who had come out too onto the steps, seemed to him unpleasant with the show of cordiality with which he met Stepan Arkadyevitch, though Levin knew that his brother neither liked nor respected Oblonsky.
There is no attempt at varnishing or veneering the surface of a lax moral order. The idea prevails among critics that Tolstoy himself appears in this novel under the character of Levin. The Oblonsky family was plunged into miserable confusion, for the wife, through detecting a flirtation between her husband and the French governess, declared she would no longer live with him.
As a student and a friend of the Shcherbatsky family, belonging like his own to the old nobility of Moscow, Konstantin Levin at first thought himself in love with Dolly, the eldest, but she married Oblonsky; then with Natalie, who married Lyof, a diplomat; and finally his passion settled on Kitty, who had been only a child when he left the University.
"Come in!" he said aloud, collecting his papers, and putting them in the blotting-paper. "There, you see, you're talking nonsense, and he's at home!" responded Stepan Arkadyevitch's voice, addressing the servant, who had refused to let him in, and taking off his coat as he went, Oblonsky walked into the room. "Well, I'm awfully glad I've found you!
You want a man's work, too, always to have a defined aim, and love and family life always to be undivided and that's not how it is. All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow." Levin sighed and made no reply. He was thinking of his own affairs, and did not hear Oblonsky.
"Why you ought to know Vronsky is that he's one of your rivals." "Who's Vronsky?" said Levin, and his face was suddenly transformed from the look of childlike ecstasy which Oblonsky had just been admiring to an angry and unpleasant expression. "Vronsky is one of the sons of Count Kirill Ivanovitch Vronsky, and one of the finest specimens of the gilded youth of Petersburg.
"Striving for God, saving the soul by fasting," said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, with disgusted contempt, "those are the crude ideas of our monks.... Yet that is nowhere said. It is far simpler and easier," she added, looking at Oblonsky with the same encouraging smile with which at court she encouraged youthful maids of honor, disconcerted by the new surroundings of the court.
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