Excerpt from the novel: Two Lives

Graceful is what is beautiful, beautifully expressed. And if this is true, then the art of dressing well must be one of the fine arts, at least as much as dancing. That is why I look at a woman dressed with taste with aesthetic pleasure, as at an artist whom we enjoy discerning in his creations. And dressing well is not as easy as people usually think. This requires many, many conditions, and I even think that it is as difficult as being a great musician, or a great painter, and maybe even a great person. True, well-dressed women are more common in the world than Napoleons and Byrons; but this is only because nature itself is a woman, and therefore, in her gifts, she is more generous to her fair sex than to ours. And to prove that I am speaking without exaggeration, let us try to count all the qualities that a woman needs to have in order to dress well, in the true sense of the word. 1. Beauty, at least some degree of beauty; - without this there can be no talk of grace. 2. Taste, that is, a quality that cannot be bought or learned, which is given to few, and which, even when given by nature, still needs to be developed happily and correctly. Hence: 3. Upbringing and education. Here, probably, many will be of the opposite opinion with me. - “Who hasn’t happened, they will say, to meet a beautifully dressed woman, without education or upbringing?” But to talk about clothing in this way is to not understand its deep meaning. Of course, an uneducated woman can be dressed in a fashionable and even befitting manner; but is that all? – The beauty of clothing does not lie in fashion or even prettiness; it does not lie in silks or blondes, not in ostriches and not in diamonds. Clothing, like a word, in addition to external harmony, also has its own internal meaning, understandable to those who understand. This meaning should be in harmony not only with the face and fashion, but with the whole being of a woman. She whose clothes have no meaning is dressed badly. A woman whose manners contradict the expectations aroused by her clothing is poorly dressed. A woman whose appearance does not agree with the turn of her mind and the nature of her courtesy is poorly dressed. In a word, everything that violates internal and external harmony is all bad, everything is indecent or unbecoming, everything is meaningless and ungraceful. Therefore, for beautiful, harmonious clothing, you also need 4. Grace of manners. But this quality, without which there is neither a well-made dress nor a well-placed dress, this grace of manners, which spreads such a charming atmosphere around a woman, acts like a deception only for the first minute, if it is not combined with another, with spiritual grace. And therefore, for a woman’s outfit to be beautiful for more than the first minute, she must have more 5. Inner grace, the grace of the mind and spiritual movements, which presupposes an inner life that is harmonious, harmonious, beautiful, i.e., But in order to feel beauty and comprehend it in all its depth and in all its subtleties, in addition to the poetry of the heart, you must also have 7. Knowledge of the human heart, which (let us note by the way) is the basis of all worldly wisdom and which cannot be had without 8. Knowledge of ourselves, which is, no more and no less, the foundation of all wisdom and all virtue. But all this is not enough to dress well. – For a woman’s beautiful outfit to be a wonderful expression of her inner beauty, it is not enough to have beauty, to understand beauty and to love beauty; besides beauty she must also have 9 . Constant elevation of mind and character. For without this there is no human power that could distract a woman from vanity; and where there is vanity, there the desire to please is stronger than the need for inner harmony; there is a desire to please about the truth; there may be brilliance, there may even be momentary charm, but there cannot be the charm of a deep, poetic life, harmoniously expressed in a beautiful appearance. Without a special, innate and carefully nurtured sublimity of mind and character, every woman will be more or less vain, and will prefer the approval of many to the few, and the number of admirers will be more valuable to her than their quality. She will want to shine in front of everyone, turn weak heads, and will dress beautifully for ordinary people, but meaningless for a thinking person. The crowd will be crazy about her, that is, in her natural position; a thinking person will pass by it indifferently: a person with a soul will not notice it. Thus, clothing has its own physiognomy, suggests its own Lavaters and, just like the face, can serve as a mirror of the soul. But in order for clothes to serve as a mirror of the soul, it does not prevent a woman from having, by the way, one more quality - You see from everything that has been said that dressing with taste, with meaning, gracefully, poetically, harmoniously, etc., etc., in one word: dressing well, cannot be a common property of women anywhere, in any state. Therefore, I hope that the Moscow beauties will not take any special offense when I tell them that. Vronsky, the hero of my story, could not find a single well-dressed lady on Tverskoy Boulevard the whole evening, although there were many ladies, because it was a day of celebration. However, I think that without insulting the honor of Moscow, we can admit that the ladies here dress especially badly. Vronsky, who had recently returned from foreign lands, with still fresh memories and an unhappy desire to compare, felt this vividly. He found more sophistication than taste, more negligence than simplicity, and in general there were more contradictions in clothes than decoration. Under a fashionable hat there is an unironed dress. The dress is slim, but the belt is on one side and the shoe is awkward. There, in one outfit, there is a mixture of ten-year-old outfits, and barely emerging fashion on the ruins of a long-forgotten outfit. There are no anachronisms, but for that there is no simplicity. There is simplicity, but no neatness: either the heels are out of place, or wrinkled, or the gloves are unclean, or the shoes are worn out, and sometimes even worn down on one side! - There is silk, and blond hair, and diamonds, and feathers, and glitter and fashion, and everything together is discordant and tasteless. There is taste and simplicity, but the corset is so tight that it interferes with the naturalness of movements, so that, despite all the beauty of the beauty’s outfit, you want her to dress up worse in order to appear better. “Vronsky rarely saw a well-shod foot, and with a sad feeling he noted that if Moscow ladies don’t know how to dress at all, then they put on shoes, my God!” their shoes are even worse. Occasionally, however, he happened to come across beautiful and slender shoes; but the shoe, folded on the outside, was almost always so narrow that it made it difficult to walk, or the dress was so short that the leg underneath it looked like it was on display; and on thin transparent stockings a sign was embroidered with thick threads: BEAUTIFUL LEGS SHOWING HERE. Sometimes, rarely, Vronsky found the whole outfit beautiful - but only with a different face; sometimes it was becoming, but it was so strictly fashionable, so slavishly new, that the woman in it seemed like that doll that is sent every day with fashion from Paris to London. And this slavery, this puppetry, gave the pretty face, often not stupid, a touch of some kind of mechanicalness, not at all captivating to the eye, and even less attractive to the imagination. In general, the more Vronsky looked at the outfits of those walking, the less he found them to his heart, and in frustration he was ready to leave the boulevard, when suddenly two legs flashed before his eyes, which greatly excited his curiosity; - the legs are inexpressibly slender and shod with all the beauty of the most refined taste. He raised his eyes higher, while the lady passed by, leaning on the gentleman’s arm, so that Vronsky could no longer see her face, but he saw her waist, her slender waist, aristocratically graceful and thinly wrapped in a wide, blue, loose belt. An involuntary feeling forced Vronsky to follow her. There is nothing easier than to describe her outfit: a white dress without whimsical details, a straw hat without feathers, without flowers, without bows, without any decorations; a Turkish shawl thrown carelessly - and that’s all that can be said about her outfit. But how to express this harmony and harmony, this noble simplicity, this musical beauty, with which her entire being seemed to be permeated, so that her clothes, her flexible figure, her slender movements and the grace of her step, all seemed like one graceful creation, one beautiful thought, one happy dream. In the cut of her dress and in the picturesqueness of her hair, all the demands of fashion were by some kind of luck, or more correctly, by some kind of magic, agreed with the requirements of the most discriminating, most artistic taste. There was nothing in her outfit where one could notice the boundary between fashion and taste, between art and nature, and looking at her, a secular observer, of course, would think about whether the beauty’s face so happily fell into today’s fashion, or whether the outfit was adapted with skill and taste to her beautiful face. Her face, when Vronsky examined it, aroused in him a feeling in which two usually different movements of the soul were combined: pleasure and sadness; - aesthetic pleasure, which inspires us with everything bright in nature, everything right in the arts; musical and as yet unnamed sadness, which is also aroused in us by the phenomenon of art or nature, only when, in the midst of its beautiful forms, we discover a feeling that we can understand only with a lonely movement of the heart, but are unable to convey it or even name it to another; for for the rare, for the chosen, people often have neither a general concept nor a ready-made name. Her facial features, thin, noble, regular, seemed transparent: her musical, cheerful, fantastic movements of the soul were so purely and clearly expressed through them. She might be reminiscent of Canova's Magdalene, if the penitent Magdalene could be imagined cheerful and laughing. The man who led her by the arm seemed to be between fifties and sixties. He was dressed simply, but not without dapperness. In general, both he and she were an extraordinary phenomenon on Tverskoy Boulevard. But the most remarkable thing about them was precisely what could be least noticed: they walked among the strollers, drawing almost no one’s attention to themselves, and it was not easy for Vronsky to find out who they were, because no one understood who he was talking about. Finally, however, there was one old retired general who could give him some idea about them. “Now I know who you are talking about,” he said to Vronsky, after many unsuccessful guesses. “An elderly man with a young lady? tall? neck straight? does your back bend? in a word, a foreign figure, that is, not Russian - or - how should I say?.... foreign? – This is Velsky and his daughter; I knew him before. He was abroad for five years and recently returned; terrible weirdo; Anglomaniac; but by the way, he is a pleasant person, an educated person, and, one might say, an intelligent person.” The general who reasoned in this way belonged to those people in Moscow who themselves are distinguished by ignorance, stupidity, and especially by some incomprehensible weight of emptiness, but for this they give others a reputation for education, intelligence and courtesy. – Strange Moscow! But this strangeness also has its meaning; and a sufficient reason can be found for it; and it even gives hopes for the future, hopes that are born not from the direct action of circumstances, but by ricochet, like a cannonball that is shot lower on the water so that it bounces higher. I hope that readers will not draw further conclusions about Velsky from the general’s words. True, it had some peculiarities; but this does not mean that he was a terrible eccentric. The general called him an Anglomaniac in the sense in which Russian merchants sell German champagne. Velsky had many non-Moscow habits and generally loved to create his own way of life, then only following accepted customs when they coincided with his thoughts. Despite the antiquity of his nobility, he modeled his life habits on the model of the middle class of educated Europe, adopting some from the English, others from the Germans, others from the French, without neglecting, however, the Russians, when they did not interfere with his tastes and were included in the meaning that he tried to give to his life. Instead of a doorman, there was a bell attached to his porch. Instead of a flock of lackeys, he had the smallest number of servants, and those who were free. There was nothing superfluous in his rooms, but everything was necessary, everything was comfortable. The furniture was characterized by the luxury of grace, peace and cleanliness, not gold. On his desk there was always the latest foreign newspaper and several literary magazines. In his office there was all the wonderful news of science and literature. His cuisine was Russian, that is, not ancient Russian, not a multitude of dishes endlessly and without taste, but new Russian, eclectic European, that is, the way the Russian enlightenment should be over time. His small carriage was pulled by two horses and almost always without a footman. Not many people noticed the dapperness of his dress - it was so simple and monotonous. In general, neatness, peace, taste, simplicity and English convenience were the distinctive character of all his luxuries. Brought up in the midst of such habits, under the supervision of an intelligent and enlightened father, having spent five years in foreign lands, in the circle of the most selective societies, in an atmosphere of fine arts and mental aristocracy; Gifted with the happiest abilities and a beauty that is not common, Sofya Velskaya, seventeen years old, would be one of the wonderful girls in the most educated lands, and even more so in Russia. Despite this, however, Moscow did not like her at first. And in fact, there was not much in common between her and the majority of Moscow ladies. What occupied her did not occupy them; and their conversations were not to her heart. What was important to them seemed unimportant to her; and what was curious to her made them yawn. She could not laugh when others laughed, and, poor thing, she almost always laughed alone. She did not spin phrases, did not look for maxims, spoke simply as she thought, and only what she thought - and therefore she was known as narrow-minded. She listened when people spoke to her, and could not speak when she was not listened to or understood - and therefore she was known as strange. Not finding people after her heart, she remained silent as long as she could, and therefore became known as proud. She did not count on the effect of her behavior, and therefore she became known as both sentimental and cold. She did not admire the courtesies of the Moscow gentlemen, and therefore was considered empty. She involuntarily felt bored in the midst of societies dissimilar to her, and therefore became known as boring. To this we must also add that Sophia was shy.