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Chapter 11.
On entering the studio, Mihailov once more scanned his visitors
and noted down in his imagination Vronsky’s expression too, and espe-
cially his jaws. Although his artistic sense was unceasingly at work
collecting materials, although he felt a continually increasing excite-
ment as the moment of criticizing his work drew nearer, he rapidly and
subtly formed, from imperceptible signs, a mental image of these three
persons.
That fellow (Golenishtchev) was a Russian living here. Mihailov
did not remember his surname nor where he had met him, nor what he
had said to him. He only remembered his face as he remembered all
the faces he had ever seen; but he remembered, too, that it was one of
the faces laid by in his memory in the immense class of the falsely
consequential and poor in expression. The abundant hair and very
open forehead gave an appearance of consequence to the face, which
had only one expression—a petty, childish, peevish expression, con-
centrated just above the bridge of the narrow nose. Vronsky and Ma-
dame Karenina must be, Mihailov supposed, distinguished and wealthy
Russians, knowing nothing about art, like all those wealthy Russians,
but posing as amateurs and connoisseurs. “Most likely they’ve already
looked at all the antiques, and now they’re making the round of the
studios of the new people, the German humbug, and the cracked Pre-
Raphaelite English fellow, and have only come to me to make the point
of view complete,” he thought. He was well acquainted with the way
dilettanti have (the cleverer they were the worse he found them) of
looking at the works of contemporary artists with the sole object of
being in a position to say that art is a thing of the past, and that the
more one sees of the new men the more one sees how inimitable the
works of the great old masters have remained. He expected all this; he
saw it all in their faces, he saw it in the careless indifference with which
they talked among themselves, stared at the lay figures and busts, and
walked about in leisurely fashion, waiting for him to uncover his pic-
ture. But in spite of this, while he was turning over his studies, pulling
up the blinds and taking off the sheet, he was in intense excitement,
especially as, in spite of his conviction that all distinguished and wealthy
Russians were certain to be beasts and fools, he liked Vronsky, and still
more Anna.
“Here, if you please,” he said, moving on one side with his nimble
gait and pointing to his picture, “it’s the exhortation to Pilate. Mat-
thew, 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