Page 1021 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

quarreled with his wife. ‘Oh! damn them all!’ he thought
as he went on working. He was making a sketch for the
figure of a man in a violent rage. A sketch had been made
before, but he was dissatisfied with it. ‘No, that one was

better...where is it?’ He went back to his wife, and
scowling, and not looking at her, asked his eldest little girl,
where was that piece of paper he had given them? The
paper with the discarded sketch on it was found, but it was
dirty, and spotted with candle-grease. Still, he took the
sketch, laid it on his table, and, moving a little away,
screwing up his eyes, he fell to gazing at it. All at once he
smiled and gesticulated gleefully.
‘That’s it! that’s it!’ he said, and, at once picking up the
pencil, he began rapidly drawing. The spot of tallow had
given the man a new pose.
He had sketched this new pose, when all at once he
recalled the face of a shopkeeper of whom he had bought
cigars, a vigorous face with a prominent chin, and he
sketched this very face, this chin on to the figure of the
man. He laughed aloud with delight. The figure from a
lifeless imagined thing had become living, and such that it
could never be changed. That figure lived, and was clearly
and unmistakably defined. The sketch might be corrected
in accordance with the requirements of the figure, the

1020 of 1759