Thus after having given his word not to attend a soirée at Prince Anatol Kuragin’s, Pierre Bezúkhof goes there, becomes intoxicated, then with the aid of another gay spirit, Dolokhof, fastens a police-agent to the back of a tame young bear, and throws them both into the river. Dolokhof is degraded; Pierre escapes with a few months’ exile from the capital. In the same way Bezúkhof is perfectly convinced that Elen Kurágina’s beauty and the dazzling whiteness of her shoulders do not hinder her from being dangerous on account of her coquetry; he has heard mysterious rumors concerning her equivocal relations with his brother, the last of the debauchees; he is perfectly convinced that it would be foolish to the last degree to marry this admirable character, and that the best way of not committing this folly is to give up seeing her charming face, her seductive snowy complexion. Unhappily for him, her marble shoulders, neck, and bosom, one evening, came close to his poor near-sighted eyes, and all “is so near to his lips that he had scarcely to bend a hair’s breadth to impress them upon it.” Pierre Bezúkhof does not depart more: he allows himself to be married, partly through infatuation, partly through feebleness.
The marriage almost from the very first turns out ill. The rake Dolokhof has returned, and never leaves Bezúkhof’s house. Pierre long puts up with a situation, the meaning of which he does not suspect: the inevitable anonymous letter comes to open his eyes. At first he refuses to believe what he has been told; but at the club where he meets Dolokhof, it is sufficient for him to find himself face to face with his wife’s lover, for his jealousy to burst forth with a flash like a discharge of electricity. The first pretext gives Pierre cause for a quarrel, and a duel follows. Dolokhof is a crack marksman: he has no sort of feebleness. Pierre Bezúkhof is near-sighted, awkward: he has never fired a pistol in his life. But, as if by judgment of God, it is Dolokhof who falls.
Returning home, Pierre Bezúkhof tries vainly to sleep, so as to forget all that has just passed. He cannot close his eyes. “He got up, and began to pace up and down the room with uneven steps. Now he thought of the early days of their marriage, of her beautiful shoulders, of her languishing, passionate gaze; now he pictured Dolokhof standing by her, handsome, impudent, with his diabolic smile, just as he had seen him at the club dinner; now he saw him pale, shivering, vanquished, and sinking on the snow.
“‘And, after all, I have killed her lover,’ he said to himself; ‘yes, my wife’s lover! How could that be?’ ‘It happened because you married her,’ said an inward voice. ‘But in what respect am I to blame?’—‘You are to blame because you married her without loving her,’ continued the voice; ‘you deceived her, since you willingly blinded yourself.’ At this instant, the moment when he said with so much difficulty, ‘I love you,’ came back to his memory. ‘Yes, there was the trouble. I felt then that I had not the right to say it.’”
If any one wishes to be assured of the passage which I have just quoted, he must open “My Religion,” and there read the commentary on adultery, and the condemnation of divorce according to the books of Matthew (xix.), Mark (x.), Luke (xvi.), and Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians. According to Tolstoï, marriage is indissoluble. Nothing, not even a wife’s unfaithfulness, authorizes a man to repudiate her; and, if he puts her away, he cannot marry another without himself committing the crime of adultery. We shall see this theory more clearly brought out in the romance of “Anna Karénina;” but even here Tolstoï makes his hero Bezúkhof conform to it. He will not allow him to claim the hand of another woman until the day when Elen’s unexpected death shall have broken the bond which he had imprudently allowed to be tied. He exalts this imprudence into a crime. He thinks that the chief culprit was he who did not fear to contract a loveless marriage, or to seek in this marriage mere gratification of pride and lust.
But Pierre acknowledges his fault to no purpose: his conscience will not speak as soon as his wrath is again stirred up by his wife’s impudent cynicism and truly mad provocations. Elen comes into her husband’s library in a rich and brilliant dishabille, with her calm and imposing air, “though on her slightly prominent forehead a deep line of fury was drawn.” She reproaches her husband for the scandal which he has caused, twits him as though he were an imbecile, and declares that the man of whom he was jealous was a thousand times his superior. She claims that she has the right to berate him; “for I can say up and down that a woman with such a husband as you who would not have a lover would be a rare exception, and I have none.” Pierre, as he listens, feels a moral discomfort, which torments him, the sting of physical pain.
“‘We had better part,’ he said, in a choking voice.
“‘Part? By all means, on condition that you give me enough of your fortune,’ replied Elen.
“Pierre leaped to his feet, and, losing control of himself, flew at her.
“‘I will kill you!’ he cried; and seizing a piece of marble from the table, he made a step towards Elen, brandishing it with a force which even startled himself.