CAPTIONS
ANNA KARENINA - 'And suddenly from that mysterious and terrible, unearthly world in which he had lived for those twenty-two hours, Levin felt himself instantly transported into the former, ordinary world, but radiant now with such a new light that he could not bear it. The taut strings all snapped. Sobs and tears of joy, which he could never have forseen, rose in him with such force, heaving his whole body, that for a long time they prevented him from speaking. Falling on his knees beside the bed, he held his wife's hand to his lips, kissing it, and the hand responded to his kisses with a week movement of the fingers. And meanwhile, there at the foot of the bed, in the deft hands of Lizaveta Petrovna, like a small flame over a lamp, wavered the life of a human being who had never existed before and who, with the same right, with the same importance for itself, would live and produce it's own kind.....Earlier, if Levin had been told that Kitty had died and that he had died with her, and that they had angels for children, and that God was there before them - none of it would have surprised him; but now, having come back to the world of reality, he made great mental efforts to understand that she was alive and well, and that the being shrieking so desperately was his son. Kitty was alive, her sufferings were over. And he was inexpressibly happy. That he understood, and in that he was fully happy. But the baby? Whence, why and who was he?...He simply could not understand, could not get accustomed to this thought. It seemed to him something superfluous, an over-abundance, and for a long time he could not get used to it.'
YOUNG STALIN - 'Shaumian helped organize a solution to the problem of Vedenev: the railway boss was sitting in his office when a pistol, pointed through his window, shot him through the heart. No one was caught. But this shot marked the start of a new era in which 'all tender feeling for family, friendship, love, gratitude and even honour, must', according to the much-read Revolutionary Catechism of the nihilist Nechaev, 'be squashed by the sole passion for revolutionary work'. The amoral rules- or rather the lack of them - were described by both sides as konspiratsia, the 'world apart' that is vividly drawn in Dostoevsky's novel the Devils. Without understanding konspiratsia it is impossible to understand the Soviet Union itself: Stalin never left this world. Konspiratsia became the ruling spirit of his Soviet state - and of his state of mind.'
TENDER IS THE NIGHT - 'On the shore of the French Riviera, about half-way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stood a large, proud, rose-coloured hotel. Deferential palms cooled its flushed facade, and before it stretched out a short dazzling beach. Now it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; in 1925 it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April; only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse's Hotel des Etrangers and Cannes, five miles away. The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quivering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea- plants through the clear shadows. Before eight a man had come down to the beach in a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application to his person of the chillly water, and much grunting and loud breathing, had floundered a minute in the sea. When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. Merchantmen crawled westward on the horizon; bus boys shouted in the hotel court; the dew dried upon the pines. In another hour the horns of motors began to blow down from the winding road along the low range of the Maures, which separates the littoral from true Provencal France.'
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