RKS Literature: Passage of the Day from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin; Count Vronsky’s View of Himself

“In his Petersburg world people were divided into two quite distinct classes. One – the lower class – commonplace, stupid, and above all, ridiculous people, who believed that a husband should live with the one woman to whom he was married, that young girls should be virtuous, woman chaste and men virile, self-controlled and strong; that children should be brought up to earn their bread and pay their debts, and other such nonsense. These were the old-fashioned ridiculous people. But there was another class: the real people, the kind to which his set belonged, in which the important thing was to be elegant, handsome, broad-minded, gay and ready to surrender unblushingly to every passion and to laugh at everything else.”