Anna Karenina
of misery in Levin akin to the mortifying helplessness one experiences
in dreams when one tries to use physical force. He felt this frequently
as he talked to his most good-natured solicitor. This solicitor did, it
seemed, everything possible, and strained every nerve to get him out of
his difficulties. “I tell you what you might try,” he said more than
once; “go to so-and-so and so-and-so,” and the solicitor drew up a
regular plan for getting round the fatal point that hindered
everything. But he would add immediately, “It’ll mean some delay,
anyway, but you might try it.” And Levin did try, and did go. Everyone
was kind and civil, but the point evaded seemed to crop up again in the
end, and again to bar the way. What was particularly trying, was that
Levin could not make out with whom he was struggling, to whose interest
it was that his business should not be done. That no one seemed to
know; the solicitor certainly did not know. If Levin could have
understood why, just as he saw why one can only approach the booking
office of a railway station in single file, it would not have been so
vexatious and tiresome to him. But with the hindrances that confronted
him in his business, no one could explain why they existed.
But Levin had changed a good deal since his marriage; he was patient,
and if he could not see why it was all arranged like this, he told
himself that he could not judge without knowing all about it, and that
most likely it must be so, and he tried not to fret.
In attending the elections, too, and taking part in them, he tried now
not to judge, not to fall foul of them, but to comprehend as fully as
he could the question which was so earnestly and ardently absorbing
honest and excellent men whom he respected. Since his marriage there
had been revealed to Levin so many new and serious aspects of life that
had previously, through his frivolous attitude to them, seemed of no
importance, that in the question of the elections too he assumed and
tried to find some serious significance.
Sergey Ivanovitch explained to him the meaning and object of the
proposed revolution at the elections. The marshal of the province in
whose hands the law had placed the control of so many important public
functions—the guardianship of wards (the very department which was
giving Levin so much trouble just now), the disposal of large sums
subscribed by the nobility of the province, the high schools, female,
male, and military, and popular instruction on the new model, and
finally, the district council—the marshal of the province, Snetkov, was
a nobleman of the old school,—dissipating an immense fortune, a
good-hearted man, honest after his own fashion, but utterly without any
comprehension of the needs of modern days. He always took, in every
question, the side of the nobility; he was positively antagonistic to
the spread of popular education, and he succeeded in giving a purely
party character to the district council which ought by rights to be of
such an immense importance. What was needed was to put in his place a
fresh, capable, perfectly modern man, of contemporary ideas, and to
frame their policy so as from the rights conferred upon the nobles, not
as the nobility, but as an element of the district council, to extract
all the powers of self-government that could possibly be derived from
them. In the wealthy Kashinsky province, which always took the lead of
other provinces in everything, there was now such a preponderance of
forces that this policy, once carried through properly there, might
serve as a model for other provinces for all Russia. And hence the
whole question was of the greatest importance. It was proposed to elect
as marshal in place of Snetkov either Sviazhsky, or, better still,
Nevyedovsky, a former university professor, a man of remarkable
intelligence and a great friend of Sergey Ivanovitch.
The meeting was opened by the governor, who made a speech to the
nobles, urging them to elect the public functionaries, not from regard
for persons, but for the service and welfare of their fatherland, and
hoping that the honorable nobility of the Kashinsky province would, as
at all former elections, hold their duty as sacred, and vindicate the
exalted confidence of the monarch.
When he had finished with his speech, the governor walked out of the
hall, and the noblemen noisily and eagerly—some even
enthusiastically—followed him and thronged round him while he put on
his fur coat and conversed amicably with the marshal of the province.
Levin, anxious to see into everything and not to miss anything, stood
there too in the crowd, and heard the governor say: “Please tell Marya
Ivanovna my wife is very sorry she couldn’t come to the Home.” And
thereupon the nobles in high good-humor sorted out their fur coats and
all drove off to the cathedral.
In the cathedral Levin, lifting his hand like the rest and repeating
the words of the archdeacon, swore with most terrible oaths to do all
the governor had hoped they would do. Church services always affected
Levin, and as he uttered the words “I kiss the cross,” and glanced
round at the crowd of young and old men repeating the same, he felt
touched.
On the second and third days there was business relating to the
finances of the nobility and the female high school, of no importance
whatever, as Sergey Ivanovitch explained, and Levin, busy seeing after
his own affairs, did not attend the meetings. On the fourth day the
auditing of the marshal’s accounts took place at the high table of the
marshal of the province. And then there occurred the first skirmish
between the new party and the old. The committee who had been deputed
to verify the accounts reported to the meeting that all was in order.
The marshal of the province got up, thanked the nobility for their
confidence, and shed tears. The nobles gave him a loud welcome, and
shook hands with him. But at that instant a nobleman of Sergey
Ivanovitch’s party said that he had heard that the committee had not
verified the accounts, considering such a verification an insult to the
marshal of the province. One of the members of the committee
incautiously admitted this. Then a small gentleman, very young-looking
but very malignant, began to say that it would probably be agreeable to
the marshal of the province to give an account of his expenditures of
the public moneys, and that the misplaced delicacy of the members of
the committee was depriving him of this moral satisfaction. Then the
members of the committee tried to withdraw their admission, and Sergey
Ivanovitch began to prove that they must logically admit either that
they had verified the accounts or that they had not, and he developed
this dilemma in detail. Sergey Ivanovitch was answered by the spokesman
of the opposite party. Then Sviazhsky spoke, and then the malignant
gentleman again. The discussion lasted a long time and ended in
nothing. Levin was surprised that they should dispute upon this subject
so long, especially as, when he asked Sergey Ivanovitch whether he
supposed that money had been misappropriated, Sergey Ivanovitch
answered:
“Oh, no! He’s an honest man. But those old-fashioned methods of
paternal family arrangements in the management of provincial affairs
must be broken down.”
On the fifth day came the elections of the district marshals. It was
rather a stormy day in several districts. In the Seleznevsky district
Sviazhsky was elected unanimously without a ballot, and he gave a
dinner that evening.
Chapter 27
The sixth day was fixed for the election of the marshal of the
province.
The rooms, large and small, were full of noblemen in all sorts of
uniforms. Many had come only for that day. Men who had not seen each
other for years, some from the Crimea, some from Petersburg, some from
abroad, met in the rooms of the Hall of Nobility. There was much
discussion around the governor’s table under the portrait of the Tsar.
The nobles, both in the larger and the smaller rooms, grouped
themselves in camps, and from their hostile and suspicious glances,
from the silence that fell upon them when outsiders approached a group,
and from the way that some, whispering together, retreated to the
farther corridor, it was evident that each side had secrets from the
other. In appearance the noblemen were sharply divided into two
classes: the old and the new. The old were for the most part either in
old uniforms of the nobility, buttoned up closely, with spurs and hats,
or in their own special naval, cavalry, infantry, or official uniforms.
The uniforms of the older men were embroidered in the old-fashioned way
with epaulets on their shoulders; they were unmistakably tight and
short in the waist, as though their wearers had grown out of them. The
younger men wore the uniform of the nobility with long waists and broad
shoulders, unbuttoned over white waistcoats, or uniforms with black
collars and with the embroidered badges of justices of the peace. To
the younger men belonged the court uniforms that here and there
brightened up the crowd.
But the division into young and old did not correspond with the
division of parties. Some of the young men, as Levin observed, belonged
to the old party; and some of the very oldest noblemen, on the
contrary, were whispering with Sviazhsky, and were evidently ardent
partisans of the new party.
Levin stood in the smaller room, where they were smoking and taking
light refreshments, close to his own friends, and listening to what
they were saying, he conscientiously exerted all his intelligence
trying to understand what was said. Sergey Ivanovitch was the center
round which the others grouped themselves. He was listening at that
moment to Sviazhsky and Hliustov, the marshal of another district, who
belonged to their party. Hliustov would not agree to go with his
district to ask Snetkov to stand, while Sviazhsky was persuading him to
do so, and Sergey Ivanovitch was approving of the plan. Levin could not
make out why the opposition was to ask the marshal to stand whom they
wanted to supersede.
Stepan Arkadyevitch, who had just been drinking and taking some lunch,
came up to them in his uniform of a gentleman of the bedchamber, wiping
his lips with a perfumed handkerchief of bordered batiste.
“We are placing our forces,” he said, pulling out his whiskers, “Sergey
Ivanovitch!”
And listening to the conversation, he supported Sviazhsky’s contention.
“One district’s enough, and Sviazhsky’s obviously of the opposition,”
he said, words evidently intelligible to all except Levin.
“Why, Kostya, you here too! I suppose you’re converted, eh?” he added,
turning to Levin and drawing his arm through his. Levin would have been
glad indeed to be converted, but could not make out what the point was,
and retreating a few steps from the speakers, he explained to Stepan
Arkadyevitch his inability to understand why the marshal of the
province should be asked to stand.
_“O sancta simplicitas!”_ said Stepan Arkadyevitch, and briefly and
clearly he explained it to Levin. If, as at previous elections, all the
districts asked the marshal of the province to stand, then he would be
elected without a ballot. That must not be. Now eight districts had
agreed to call upon him: if two refused to do so, Snetkov might decline
to stand at all; and then the old party might choose another of their
party, which would throw them completely out in their reckoning. But if
only one district, Sviazhsky’s, did not call upon him to stand, Snetkov
would let himself be balloted for. They were even, some of them, going
to vote for him, and purposely to let him get a good many votes, so
that the enemy might be thrown off the scent, and when a candidate of
the other side was put up, they too might give him some votes. Levin