Anna Karenina

The next day Nikolay receives the sacrament and extreme unction. His "great eyes, fastened on the holy image," express "such passionate prayer and hope that it was awful to Levin to see it." Levin knows this desperate faith will only make parting from life more bitter. He knows Nikolay's unbelief came from "the contemporary scientific interpretation of natural phenomena" crushing out faith—and that "his present return was not a legitimate one... but simply a temporary, interested return to faith in a desperate hope of recovery." During the sacrament, Levin—"an unbeliever"—prays too: "If Thou dost exist, make this man to recover... and Thou wilt save him and me." After extreme unction, "the sick man became suddenly much better." He doesn't cough for an hour, smiles, kisses Kitty's hand "thanking her with tears," says he feels strong, has an appetite. He asks for a cutlet. "Levin and Kitty were for that hour both in the same state of excitement, happy, though fearful of being mistaken." "Is he better?" "Yes, much." "It's wonderful." "There's nothing wonderful in it." "Anyway, he's better." "This self-deception was not of long duration." Half an hour later his cough wakes him. "And all at once every hope vanished in those about him and in himself." Now he asks for iodine to inhale, "and the same look of passionate hope with which he had taken the sacrament was now fastened on his brother, demanding from him the confirmation of the doctor's words that inhaling iodine worked wonders." "Is Katya not here?" he gasps. "No; so I can say it.... It was for her sake I went through that farce." On the tenth day, Kitty is unwell—headache, sickness, can't get up. The doctor says it's from fatigue and excitement. That day Nikolay looks at her sternly, smiles contemptuously when she says she's been unwell. He's continually groaning. "How do you feel?" "Worse. In pain!" "In pain, where?" "Everywhere." "It will be over today, you will see," Marya Nikolaevna whispers. She tells Levin: "He has begun picking at himself"—tugging at his clothes, "as it were, trying to snatch something away." Towards night "the sick man was not able to lift his hands, and could only gaze before him with the same intensely concentrated expression in his eyes." Kitty sends for the priest to read the prayer for the dying. "While the priest was reading it, the dying man did not show any sign of life; his eyes were closed." When the prayer ends, the priest puts the cross to "the cold forehead," then touches "the huge, bloodless hand that was turning cold." "He is gone," says the priest. But suddenly "there was a faint stir in the mustaches of the dead man" and "quite distinctly in the hush they heard from the bottom of the chest the sharply defined sounds: 'Not quite ... soon.'" "And a minute later the face brightened, a smile came out under the mustaches, and the women who had gathered round began carefully laying out the corpse." "The sight of his brother, and the nearness of death, revived in Levin that sense of horror in face of the insoluble enigma." But now, "thanks to his wife's presence, that feeling did not reduce him to despair." Despite death, "he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer." "The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life." "The doctor confirmed his suppositions in regard to Kitty. Her indisposition was a symptom that she was with child."