Page 1476 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

or simply nothing but the whims of the composer,
exceedingly complex but disconnected sounds. And these
fragmentary musical expressions, though sometimes
beautiful, were disagreeable, because they were utterly

unexpected and not led up to by anything. Gaiety and
grief and despair and tenderness and triumph followed one
another without any connection, like the emotions of a
madman. And those emotions, like a madman’s, sprang up
quite unexpectedly.
During the whole of the performance Levin felt like a
deaf man watching people dancing, and was in a state of
complete bewilderment when the fantasia was over, and
felt a great weariness from the fruitless strain on his
attention. Loud applause resounded on all sides. Everyone
got up, moved about, and began talking. Anxious to
throw some light on his own perplexity from the
impressions of others, Levin began to walk about, looking
for connoisseurs, and was glad to see a well-known
musical amateur in conversation with Pestsov, whom he
knew.
‘Marvelous!’ Pestsov was saying in his mellow bass.
‘How are you, Konstantin Dmitrievitch? Particularly
sculpturesque and plastic, so to say, and richly colored is
that passage where you feel Cordelia’s approach, where

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