Anna Karenina
he noticed that Sergey Ivanovitch, and many other people who worked for
the public welfare, were not led by an impulse of the heart to care for
the public good, but reasoned from intellectual considerations that it
was a right thing to take interest in public affairs, and consequently
took interest in them. Levin was confirmed in this generalization by
observing that his brother did not take questions affecting the public
welfare or the question of the immortality of the soul a bit more to
heart than he did chess problems, or the ingenious construction of a
new machine.
Besides this, Konstantin Levin was not at his ease with his brother,
because in summer in the country Levin was continually busy with work
on the land, and the long summer day was not long enough for him to get
through all he had to do, while Sergey Ivanovitch was taking a holiday.
But though he was taking a holiday now, that is to say, he was doing no
writing, he was so used to intellectual activity that he liked to put
into concise and eloquent shape the ideas that occurred to him, and
liked to have someone to listen to him. His most usual and natural
listener was his brother. And so in spite of the friendliness and
directness of their relations, Konstantin felt an awkwardness in
leaving him alone. Sergey Ivanovitch liked to stretch himself on the
grass in the sun, and to lie so, basking and chatting lazily.
“You wouldn’t believe,” he would say to his brother, “what a pleasure
this rural laziness is to me. Not an idea in one’s brain, as empty as a
drum!”
But Konstantin Levin found it dull sitting and listening to him,
especially when he knew that while he was away they would be carting
dung onto the fields not ploughed ready for it, and heaping it all up
anyhow; and would not screw the shares in the ploughs, but would let
them come off and then say that the new ploughs were a silly invention,
and there was nothing like the old Andreevna plough, and so on.
“Come, you’ve done enough trudging about in the heat,” Sergey
Ivanovitch would say to him.
“No, I must just run round to the counting-house for a minute,” Levin
would answer, and he would run off to the fields.
Chapter 2
Early in June it happened that Agafea Mihalovna, the old nurse and
housekeeper, in carrying to the cellar a jar of mushrooms she had just
pickled, slipped, fell, and sprained her wrist. The district doctor, a
talkative young medical student, who had just finished his studies,
came to see her. He examined the wrist, said it was not broken, was
delighted at a chance of talking to the celebrated Sergey Ivanovitch
Koznishev, and to show his advanced views of things told him all the
scandal of the district, complaining of the poor state into which the
district council had fallen. Sergey Ivanovitch listened attentively,
asked him questions, and, roused by a new listener, he talked fluently,
uttered a few keen and weighty observations, respectfully appreciated
by the young doctor, and was soon in that eager frame of mind his
brother knew so well, which always, with him, followed a brilliant and
eager conversation. After the departure of the doctor, he wanted to go
with a fishing rod to the river. Sergey Ivanovitch was fond of angling,
and was, it seemed, proud of being able to care for such a stupid
occupation.
Konstantin Levin, whose presence was needed in the plough land and
meadows, had come to take his brother in the trap.
It was that time of the year, the turning-point of summer, when the
crops of the present year are a certainty, when one begins to think of
the sowing for next year, and the mowing is at hand; when the rye is
all in ear, though its ears are still light, not yet full, and it waves
in gray-green billows in the wind; when the green oats, with tufts of
yellow grass scattered here and there among it, droop irregularly over
the late-sown fields; when the early buckwheat is already out and
hiding the ground; when the fallow lands, trodden hard as stone by the
cattle, are half ploughed over, with paths left untouched by the
plough; when from the dry dung-heaps carted onto the fields there comes
at sunset a smell of manure mixed with meadow-sweet, and on the
low-lying lands the riverside meadows are a thick sea of grass waiting
for the mowing, with blackened heaps of the stalks of sorrel among it.
It was the time when there comes a brief pause in the toil of the
fields before the beginning of the labors of harvest—every year
recurring, every year straining every nerve of the peasants. The crop
was a splendid one, and bright, hot summer days had set in with short,
dewy nights.
The brothers had to drive through the woods to reach the meadows.
Sergey Ivanovitch was all the while admiring the beauty of the woods,
which were a tangled mass of leaves, pointing out to his brother now an
old lime tree on the point of flowering, dark on the shady side, and
brightly spotted with yellow stipules, now the young shoots of this
year’s saplings brilliant with emerald. Konstantin Levin did not like
talking and hearing about the beauty of nature. Words for him took away
the beauty of what he saw. He assented to what his brother said, but he
could not help beginning to think of other things. When they came out
of the woods, all his attention was engrossed by the view of the fallow
land on the upland, in parts yellow with grass, in parts trampled and
checkered with furrows, in parts dotted with ridges of dung, and in
parts even ploughed. A string of carts was moving across it. Levin
counted the carts, and was pleased that all that were wanted had been
brought, and at the sight of the meadows his thoughts passed to the
mowing. He always felt something special moving him to the quick at the
hay-making. On reaching the meadow Levin stopped the horse.
The morning dew was still lying on the thick undergrowth of the grass,
and that he might not get his feet wet, Sergey Ivanovitch asked his
brother to drive him in the trap up to the willow tree from which the
carp was caught. Sorry as Konstantin Levin was to crush down his mowing
grass, he drove him into the meadow. The high grass softly turned about
the wheels and the horse’s legs, leaving its seeds clinging to the wet
axles and spokes of the wheels. His brother seated himself under a
bush, arranging his tackle, while Levin led the horse away, fastened
him up, and walked into the vast gray-green sea of grass unstirred by
the wind. The silky grass with its ripe seeds came almost to his waist
in the dampest spots.
Crossing the meadow, Konstantin Levin came out onto the road, and met
an old man with a swollen eye, carrying a skep on his shoulder.
“What? taken a stray swarm, Fomitch?” he asked.
“No, indeed, Konstantin Dmitrich! All we can do to keep our own! This
is the second swarm that has flown away.... Luckily the lads caught
them. They were ploughing your field. They unyoked the horses and
galloped after them.”
“Well, what do you say, Fomitch—start mowing or wait a bit?”
“Eh, well. Our way’s to wait till St. Peter’s Day. But you always mow
sooner. Well, to be sure, please God, the hay’s good. There’ll be
plenty for the beasts.”
“What do you think about the weather?”
“That’s in God’s hands. Maybe it will be fine.”
Levin went up to his brother.
Sergey Ivanovitch had caught nothing, but he was not bored, and seemed
in the most cheerful frame of mind. Levin saw that, stimulated by his
conversation with the doctor, he wanted to talk. Levin, on the other
hand, would have liked to get home as soon as possible to give orders
about getting together the mowers for next day, and to set at rest his
doubts about the mowing, which greatly absorbed him.
“Well, let’s be going,” he said.
“Why be in such a hurry? Let’s stay a little. But how wet you are! Even
though one catches nothing, it’s nice. That’s the best thing about
every part of sport, that one has to do with nature. How exquisite this
steely water is!” said Sergey Ivanovitch. “These riverside banks always
remind me of the riddle—do you know it? ‘The grass says to the water:
we quiver and we quiver.’”
“I don’t know the riddle,” answered Levin wearily.
Chapter 3
“Do you know, I’ve been thinking about you,” said Sergey Ivanovitch.
“It’s beyond everything what’s being done in the district, according to
what this doctor tells me. He’s a very intelligent fellow. And as I’ve
told you before, I tell you again: it’s not right for you not to go to
the meetings, and altogether to keep out of the district business. If
decent people won’t go into it, of course it’s bound to go all wrong.
We pay the money, and it all goes in salaries, and there are no
schools, nor district nurses, nor midwives, nor drugstores—nothing.”
“Well, I did try, you know,” Levin said slowly and unwillingly. “I
can’t! and so there’s no help for it.”
“But why can’t you? I must own I can’t make it out. Indifference,
incapacity—I won’t admit; surely it’s not simply laziness?”
“None of those things. I’ve tried, and I see I can do nothing,” said
Levin.
He had hardly grasped what his brother was saying. Looking towards the
plough land across the river, he made out something black, but he could
not distinguish whether it was a horse or the bailiff on horseback.
“Why is it you can do nothing? You made an attempt and didn’t succeed,
as you think, and you give in. How can you have so little
self-respect?”
“Self-respect!” said Levin, stung to the quick by his brother’s words;
“I don’t understand. If they’d told me at college that other people
understood the integral calculus, and I didn’t, then pride would have
come in. But in this case one wants first to be convinced that one has
certain qualifications for this sort of business, and especially that
all this business is of great importance.”
“What! do you mean to say it’s not of importance?” said Sergey
Ivanovitch, stung to the quick too at his brother’s considering
anything of no importance that interested him, and still more at his
obviously paying little attention to what he was saying.
“I don’t think it important; it does not take hold of me, I can’t help
it,” answered Levin, making out that what he saw was the bailiff, and
that the bailiff seemed to be letting the peasants go off the ploughed
land. They were turning the plough over. “Can they have finished
ploughing?” he wondered.
“Come, really though,” said the elder brother, with a frown on his
handsome, clever face, “there’s a limit to everything. It’s very well
to be original and genuine, and to dislike everything conventional—I
know all about that; but really, what you’re saying either has no
meaning, or it has a very wrong meaning. How can you think it a matter
of no importance whether the peasant, whom you love as you assert....”
“I never did assert it,” thought Konstantin Levin.
“...dies without help? The ignorant peasant-women starve the children,
and the people stagnate in darkness, and are helpless in the hands of
every village clerk, while you have at your disposal a means of helping
them, and don’t help them because to your mind it’s of no importance.”
And Sergey Ivanovitch put before him the alternative: either you are so
undeveloped that you can’t see all that you can do, or you won’t
sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever it is, to do it.
Konstantin Levin felt that there was no course open to him but to
submit, or to confess to a lack of zeal for the public good. And this
mortified him and hurt his feelings.
“It’s both,” he said resolutely: “I don’t see that it was possible....”
“What! was it impossible, if the money were properly laid out, to
provide medical aid?”
“Impossible, as it seems to me.... For the three thousand square miles
of our district, what with our thaws, and the storms, and the work in