Part One

Chapter 1

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its
own way.

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had
discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French
girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced
to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with
him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only
the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family
and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the
house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that
the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in
common with one another than they, the members of the family and
household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the
husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all
over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper,
and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for
her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time;
the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.

Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch
Oblonsky—Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable world—woke up at
his usual hour, that is, at eight o’clock in the morning, not in his
wife’s bedroom, but on the leather-covered sofa in his study. He turned
over his stout, well-cared-for person on the springy sofa, as though he
would sink into a long sleep again; he vigorously embraced the pillow
on the other side and buried his face in it; but all at once he jumped
up, sat up on the sofa, and opened his eyes.

“Yes, yes, how was it now?” he thought, going over his dream. “Now, how
was it? To be sure! Alabin was giving a dinner at Darmstadt; no, not
Darmstadt, but something American. Yes, but then, Darmstadt was in
America. Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, and the
tables sang, Il mio tesoro—not Il mio tesoro though, but something
better, and there were some sort of little decanters on the table, and
they were women, too,” he remembered.

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