Page 1027 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

exhortation to Pilate. Matthew, chapter xxvii,’ he said,
feeling his lips were beginning to tremble with emotion.
He moved away and stood behind them.
For the few seconds during which the visitors were

gazing at the picture in silence Mihailov too gazed at it
with the indifferent eye of an outsider. For those few
seconds he was sure in anticipation that a higher, juster
criticism would be uttered by them, by those very visitors
whom he had been so despising a moment before. He
forgot all he had thought about his picture before during
the three years he had been painting it; he forgot all its
qualities which had been absolutely certain to him—he
saw the picture with their indifferent, new, outside eyes,
and saw nothing good in it. He saw in the foreground
Pilate’s irritated face and the serene face of Christ, and in
the background the figures of Pilate’s retinue and the face
of John watching what was happening. Every face that,
with such agony, such blunders and corrections had grown
up within him with its special character, every face that
had given him such torments and such raptures, and all
these faces so many times transposed for the sake of the
harmony of the whole, all the shades of color and tones
that he had attained with such labor—all of this together
seemed to him now, looking at it with their eyes, the

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