Anna Karenina

nna and Vronsky had long been exchanging glances, regretting their
friend’s flow of cleverness. At last Vronsky, without waiting for the
artist, walked away to another small picture.

“Oh, how exquisite! What a lovely thing! A gem! How exquisite!” they
cried with one voice.

“What is it they’re so pleased with?” thought Mihailov. He had
positively forgotten that picture he had painted three years ago. He
had forgotten all the agonies and the ecstasies he had lived through
with that picture when for several months it had been the one thought
haunting him day and night. He had forgotten, as he always forgot, the
pictures he had finished. He did not even like to look at it, and had
only brought it out because he was expecting an Englishman who wanted
to buy it.

“Oh, that’s only an old study,” he said.

“How fine!” said Golenishtchev, he too, with unmistakable sincerity,
falling under the spell of the picture.

Two boys were angling in the shade of a willow-tree. The elder had just
dropped in the hook, and was carefully pulling the float from behind a
bush, entirely absorbed in what he was doing. The other, a little
younger, was lying in the grass leaning on his elbows, with his
tangled, flaxen head in his hands, staring at the water with his dreamy
blue eyes. What was he thinking of?

The enthusiasm over this picture stirred some of the old feeling for it
in Mihailov, but he feared and disliked this waste of feeling for
things past, and so, even though this praise was grateful to him, he
tried to draw his visitors away to a third picture.

But Vronsky asked whether the picture was for sale. To Mihailov at that
moment, excited by visitors, it was extremely distasteful to speak of
money matters.

“It is put up there to be sold,” he answered, scowling gloomily.

When the visitors had gone, Mihailov sat down opposite the picture of
Pilate and Christ, and in his mind went over what had been said, and
what, though not said, had been implied by those visitors. And, strange
to say, what had had such weight with him, while they were there and
while he mentally put himself at their point of view, suddenly lost all
importance for him. He began to look at his picture with all his own
full artist vision, and was soon in that mood of conviction of the
perfectibility, and so of the significance, of his picture—a conviction
essential to the most intense fervor, excluding all other interests—in
which alone he could work.

Christ’s foreshortened leg was not right, though. He took his palette
and began to work. As he corrected the leg he looked continually at the
figure of John in the background, which his visitors had not even
noticed, but which he knew was beyond perfection. When he had finished
the leg he wanted to touch that figure, but he felt too much excited
for it. He was equally unable to work when he was cold and when he was
too much affected and saw everything too much. There was only one stage
in the transition from coldness to inspiration, at which work was
possible. Today he was too much agitated. He would have covered the
picture, but he stopped, holding the cloth in his hand, and, smiling
blissfully, gazed a long while at the figure of John. At last, as it
were regretfully tearing himself away, he dropped the cloth, and,
exhausted but happy, went home.

Vronsky, Anna, and Golenishtchev, on their way home, were particularly
lively and cheerful. They talked of Mihailov and his pictures. The word
talent, by which they meant an inborn, almost physical, aptitude
apart from brain and heart, and in which they tried to find an
expression for all the artist had gained from life, recurred
particularly often in their talk, as though it were necessary for them
to sum up what they had no conception of, though they wanted to talk of
it. They said that there was no denying his talent, but that his talent
could not develop for want of education—the common defect of our
Russian artists. But the picture of the boys had imprinted itself on
their memories, and they were continually coming back to it. “What an
exquisite thing! How he has succeeded in it, and how simply! He doesn’t
even comprehend how good it is. Yes, I mustn’t let it slip; I must buy
it,” said Vronsky.