PART 8

-7-

Agatha Mihalovna went out on tiptoe. The nurse pulled down the blind, chased the flies from under the muslin canopy of the cot and a bumble-bee buzzing against the window-pane, and sat down, waving a withered birch branch over mother and child.

“How hot it is! If the Lord would only send a drop of rain, she said.

'Yes, yes, sh..sh..sh!' was all Kitty answered, rocking to and fro and tenderly squeezing the plump little arm, which looked as if a piece of thread had been tied tightly round the wrist on Mitya still waved feebly as he opened and shut his eyes. This little arm agitated Kitty: she longed to kiss the little hand but was afraid to, for fear of waking the baby. At last the arm ceased waving and the eyes closed. Only from time to time, as he went on sucking, the baby lifted long curly lashes and gazed at its mother with dewy eyes that looked black in the dim light. The nurse stopped fanning them and began to doze off. From upstairs came the peal of the old prince's voice and Katavasov's boisterous laughter.

‘They seem all right without me,' thought Kitty. ‘But all the same it is provoking that Kostya's not back yet. He must have gone to the apiary again. Though it's a pity he's there so often, still I'm glad. It distracts his mind. He's altogether happier and better now than he was in the spring. He used to be so gloomy and worried that I felt alarmed about him. What a funny man he is!' she whispered, smiling.

She knew what was tormenting her husband. It was his want of faith. Although, if she had been asked whether she thought there could be no salvation for him in the future life unless he were a believer, she would have been compelled to agree, yet his unbelief did not make her unhappy; and she, who accepted the doctrine that there could be no salvation for an unbeliever, and to whom her husband’s soul was dearer than anything in the world, smiled when she thought of his scepticism and called him funny.

'Why does he keep on reading those philosophy books of his all the year round?' she wondered. 'If it's all written in those books, he can understand them. If what they say is all wrong, why read them> He says himself that he would like to believe. Then why doesn't he? It must be because he thinks too much. And he thinks too much because of being solitary. He's always alone, always. He can't talk about it all to us. He will be glad of these visitors, I think, especially Katavasov. He likes arguing with him,' she reflected, and immediately turned her mind to the problem of where to put Katavasov – should he have a separate room or share with Koznyshev? And here a thought suddenly struck her that made her start with agitation and even disturb Mitya, who gave her a severe look in consequence. 'I don't believe the laundry-woman has brought the washing back yet, and all the best sheets are in use. If I don't see to it, Agatha Mihalovna will give Sergei Ivanich the wrong sheets!' and the very idea of this sent the blood rushing to Kitty's face.

'Yes, I must see about it,' she decided, and, returning to her former train of thought, she remembered that there was something important, some spiritual question, that she had not yet got to the bottom of, and tried to recollect what it was. 'Oh yes, Kostya, an unbeliever,' she remembered again with a smile.

'Well, and if he is? I would rather have him that than see him like Madame Stahl, or as I wanted to be in those days abroad. No, he would never sham anything.'

And a recent instance of his goodness came vividly to her mind. A fortnight ago Dolly had received a penitent letter from her husband, imploring her to save his honour by selling her estate to pay his debts. Dolly had been in despair: she detested her husband, despised him, was sorry for him, made up her mind to refuse and to divorce him, but ended by agreeing to dispose of part of the estate. Here Kitty, with an involuntary smile of tenderness, recalled the shamefaced way her own husband had gone about his repeated awkward attempts to approach the subject, and how at length, having thought of the one means of helping Dolly without wounding her pride, he had suggested to Kitty that she should make over to her sister the portion of the estate that belonged to her - a device that had never occurred to Kitty.

'He an unbeliever indeed! With his heart, his dread of hurting anyone's feelings, even a child's! With him it's everything for others, nothing for himself. Sergei Ivanich quite seems to think it's Kostya's duty to be his steward. And it's the same with his sister. Now he has Dolly and her children on his hands as well. And then there are all these peasants who come to him every day, as if it were his business to be at their service. Yes, you cannot do better than try to be like your father,' she murmured, handing Mitya over to the nurse and touching his little cheek with her lips.

 

-8-

Ever since, by his beloved brother's deathbed, Levin had for the first time looked at the questions of life and death in the light of his new convictions, as he called them, which between the ages of twenty and thirty-four had imperceptibly replaced the beliefs of his childhood and youth, he had been stricken with horror, not so much at death, as at life, without the least conception of its origin, its purpose, its reason, its nature. The organism, its decay, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, evolution, were the terms that had superseded those of his early faith. These terms and the theories associated with them were very useful for intellectual purposes. But they gave no guidance for life, and Levin suddenly felt like a person who has exchanged his warm fur coat for a muslin garment, and out in the frost for the first time is immediately convinced, not by arguments but with his whole being that he is as good as naked and must inevitably perish miserably.

From that time, though he did not realize it and continued to live as before, Levin had never lost this sense of terror at his lack of knowledge.

He was vaguely conscious, too, that what he called his new convictions were not merely ignorance but that they were part of a whole order of ideas which actually stood in the way of the knowledge he needed.

In the early days of his marriage his new joys and responsibilities had completely stifled these thoughts; but latterly, while he was staying in Moscow after his wife's confinement, with nothing to do, the question that clamoured for solution had more and more often, more and more insistently, haunted Levin's mind.

For him the problem was this: 'If I do not accept the answers Christianity gives to the questions of my life, what answers do I accept?' And in the whole arsenal of his convictions he failed to find not only any kind of answer but anything resembling an answer. He was in the position of a man seeking food in a toyshop or at a gunsmith's.

Instinctively, unconsciously, in every book he read, in every conversation, in every person he met, he was on the look-out for their connexion with the questions that absorbed him and for a solution of these questions.

What astounded and upset him most was that the majority of men of his circle and age who had, like himself, substituted science for religion, saw nothing to be distressed about and were perfectly content and happy. So that, apart from the principal problem, Levin was tormented by other questions too. Were these people sincere? he asked himself. Were they not counterfeiting? Or was it that they got from science some different, clearer answer than he did to the problems he was concerned with? And he took to studying diligently both the opinions of those people and the books which treated of these scientific explanations.

One thing he had discovered since these questions had begun to occupy his mind - namely, that he had been mistaken in supposing with his contemporaries at the university that religion had outlived its day and was now practically non-existent. The best people he knew were all believers: the old prince, Lvov, whom he liked so much, his brother Koznyshev, and all the women. His wife had a childlike faith just like his as a small boy, and ninety-nine out of a hundred of the Russian people, all the working-people whose lives inspired him with the greatest respect, believed.

Another thing was that, after reading a great many scientific books, he became convinced that the men who shared his views got no more out of their convictions than he did. Far from explaining the problems without a solution to which he felt he could not live, they set them aside and took up others of no interest to him, such as, for instance, the evolution of organisms, a mechanical explanation of the soul, and so forth.

Moreover, at the time of his wife's confinement an extraordinary thing had happened to him. He, an unbeliever, had prayed, and prayed with sincere faith. But that moment had passed, and he could not allot any place in his life to the state of mind he had been in then.

He could not admit that at that moment he had known the truth, and was now in error, for as soon as he began to reflect on it calmly it all fell to pieces. Nor could he admit that he had been mistaken then, for he valued his spiritual condition then and to attribute it to weakness would be to defile those moments. He was wretchedly divided against himself, and strained all his mental powers to put himself right.

​

-9-

There were days when these doubts fretted and harassed him more than others, but they never left him entirely. He read and thought, and the more he read and the more he thought the farther he felt from the goal he was pursuing.

During the latter part of his stay in Moscow, and after his return to the country, he became convinced that he would get no answer from the materialists, and so he went back to Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, the philosophers who gave a non-materialistic explanation of life.

Their ideas seemed to him fruitful while he was reading or was himself devising arguments to refute other theories, especially those of the materialists; but directly he began to read or himself devise solutions to life's problems, the same thing occurred every time. As long as he followed the fixed definitions given to such vague terms as spirit, will, freedom, substance, deliberately entering the verbal trap set for him by the philosophers, or by himself, he seemed to comprehend something. But he had only to forget the artificial train of reasoning, and to turn from real life to what had satisfied him so long as he kept to the given chain of argument, for the whole artificial edifice to tumble down like a house of cards, and it became evident that the edifice had been constructed of those same words transposed and regardless of something in life more important than reason.

When reading Schopenhauer one day he substituted the word love for the word will, and for a day or two this new philosophy cheered him, so long as he did not wander from it; but it, too, collapsed when he reviewed it in relation to real life, and proved to be a muslin garment with no warmth in it.

His brother Koznyshev advised him to read the theological works of Khomyakov. Levin read the second volume of Khomyakov's works and, in spite of the polemical, elegant, brilliant style which at first repelled him, he was impressed by its teaching about the church. He was struck in the beginning by the idea that apprehension of divine truth is not given to man in isolation but to the totality of men united by love – the Church. The thought rejoiced him of how much easier it was to believe in an existing, living Church embracing all the beliefs of men and having God at its head - a Church therefore holy and infallible – and from it to accept belief in God, the Creation, the Fall and Redemption, than to begin with some distant, mysterious God, the Creation, and so on. But afterwards, when he read a history of the Church by a Catholic writer, and another by a Greek Orthodox writer, and saw that the two Churches, in their very conception infallible, each repudiated the other, he became disenchanted with Khomyakov's doctrine of the Church, and this structure fell to pieces just as the philosophers' edifices had done.

All that spring he was not himself, and experienced some terrible moments.

'I cannot live without knowing what I am and why I am here. And that I can't know, so therefore I can't live,' Levin would say to himself.

'In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space an organic cell stands out, will hold together awhile and then burst, and that cell is Me.'

This was an agonizing fallacy, but it was the sole, the supreme result of centuries of human thought in that direction.

It was the ultimate belief on which all the systems of thought elaborated by the human mind in almost all their ramifications were based. It was the dominant conviction, and of all other explanations Levin had unconsciously chosen it, without knowing when or how, as being at any rate the clearest, and made it his own.

But it was not only a fallacy, it was the cruel jest of some evil power, some evil, inimical power, to which one could not submit.

He must escape from this power. And each man held the means of escape in his own hands. An end must be put to this dependence on evil. And there was one means - death.

And Levin, a happy father and husband, in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he had to hide a rope lest he be tempted to hang himself, and would not go out with a gun for fear of shooting himself.

But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself: and he went on living.

 

-10-

When Levin puzzled over what he was and what he was living for, he could find no answer and fell into despair; but when he left off worrying about the problem of his existence he seemed to know both what he was and for what he was living, for he acted and lived resolutely and unfalteringly. Indeed, latterly he was far more decided and unfaltering than ever before.

On his return to the country at the beginning of June, he returned also to his customary pursuits. The management of the estate, his relations with the peasants and the neighbouring gentry, the care of his household, and looking after his sister's and brother's affairs, of which he had the direction, his relations with his wife and her relatives, solicitude for the baby, and the new hobby of beekeeping which he had taken up with enthusiasm that spring, absorbed all his time.

These things occupied him now, not because he justified them to himself by any sort of general principles, as he had done in former days; on the contrary, disenchanted as he was on the one hand by the failure of his earlier efforts for the general welfare, and too much occupied on the other with his own thoughts and the mass of business with which he was burdened from all sides, he had completely abandoned all considerations of public weal and busied himself with all this work for no other reason than because it seemed to him that he must do what he was doing - that he could not do otherwise.

Formerly (and this had been so almost from childhood, increasing as be reached full maturity), whenever he had tried to do anything for the general good, for the good of humanity, for Russia, for the province, for the village as a whole, he had observed that the idea of it had been pleasant but the activity it entailed had always been incoherent. There had never been full conviction of its absolute necessity, and the work itself, from at first appearing so great, had grown less and less, till it vanished into nothing. But now, since his marriage, when he had begun to confine himself more and more to living for himself, though he no longer found any delight at the thought of the work he was doing, he felt confident of its usefulness, saw that it succeeded far better than in the old days, and that it was always growing instead of getting smaller. Now, involuntarily as it were, he cut deeper and deeper into the soil, so that like a ploughshare he could not be drawn out without turning up the furrow.

For his family to live as his father and forefathers had been accustomed to live – that is, at the same cultural level – and so to bring up his children, was an undoubted necessity. It was just as necessary as eating when one was hungry. And for that, just as a meal has to be cooked, so Pokrovskoe must be farmed in such a manner as to yield an income. As surely as one must pay one's debts, so surely was it necessary to keep the patrimony in such a condition that when his son inherited it he would thank his father, as Levin had thanked his grandfather for all he had built and planted. And to do this he must not lease out the land but must farm it himself, must breed cattle, manure the fields, and plant woods.

It was as impossible not to look after the interests of his brother and sister, and of all the peasants who came to him for advice and were accustomed to do so, as it is impossible to fling down a child one is carrying in one's arms. Then he had to see to the comforts of his sister-in-law and her children, whom he had invited to stay with them, and of his wife and baby, and it was impossible not to spend at least a small portion of each day with them.

And all this, together with shooting and his new hobby of beekeeping, filled up that life of his which seemed to have no meaning at all when he began to think about it.

But besides knowing thoroughly what it was he had to do, Levin knew in just the same way how he had to do it all, and which of any two matters was the more important.

He knew he must hire labourers as cheaply as possible; but to take men in bond for less than they were worth by advancing them money, he must not do, though this would be very profitable. There was no harm in selling peasants straw in times of shortage, even though he felt sorry for them; but the inn and the tavern must be abolished, even though they were a source of income. The stealing of timber must be punished as severely as possible, but he would exact no fines if the peasants drove their cattle on to his fields, and though it riled the watchmen and made the peasants not afraid to graze their cattle on his land, the strayed cattle must not be impounded.

He must make a loan to Piotr to get him out of the claws of a moneylender who was charging him ten per cent a month; but he could not let off peasants who did not pay their rent, nor let them fall into arrears. The bailiff was not to be excused for failing to have the small meadow mown and wasting the grass; but the two hundred acres which had been planted with young trees must not be mown at all. No mercy must be shown a labourer who went home in a busy season because his father had died - sorry as Levin might be for the man: part of his pay must be deducted for those costly months of idleness; but old house-servants who were of no use for anything must have their monthly allowance.

Levin knew, too, that when he got home he must first of all go to his wife, who was unwell, and that the peasants who had been waiting three hours to see him could wait a little longer; yet he knew that he must forgo the pleasure of hiving a swarm and let the old beekeeper do it without him, while he went to talk to the peasants who had come after him to the apiary.

Whether he was acting rightly or wrongly he did not know - indeed, far from laying down the law, he now avoided talking or thinking about it.

Deliberation led to doubts and prevented him from seeing what he ought and ought not to do. But when he did not think, but just lived, he never ceased to be aware of the presence in his soul of an infallible judge who decided which of two possible courses of action was the better and which the worse, and instantly let him know if he did what he should not.

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and for what purpose he had been placed in the world. He was tormented by this ignorance to the extent of fearing suicide, yet at the same time he was resolutely cutting his own individual and definite path through life.

 

-11-

The day Koznyshev arrived at Pokrovskoe was one of Levin's most wretched days.

It was the most pressingly busy season of the year, when an extraordinary tension of self-sacrificing labour manifests itself among the whole peasantry, quite unknown in any other conditions of life, and which would be highly esteemed if the people who exhibited this quality prized it themselves, and if it were not repeated every year, and if it did not produce such very simple results.

Reaping or binding the rye and oats, carting them, mowing the meadows, reploughing the fallow land, threshing the seed, and sowing the winter corn - all labours that seem simple and commonplace enough; but to get it all done, everyone, from the oldest to the youngest, for those three or four weeks must toil incessantly, three times as hard as usual, living on rye-beer, onions, and black bread, threshing and carting the sheaves at night, and not giving more than two or three hours in the twenty-four to sleep. And every year this is done all over Russia.

Having lived the greater part of his life in the country and in close contact with the peasants, Levin always felt infected by this general quickening of energy at this busy time.

In the early morning he rode out to where the first rye was being sown, then to see the oats carted and stacked, and returning home when his wife and sister-in-law were getting up he drank his coffee with them, and afterwards departed on foot to the out-farm, where the new threshing-machine was to be started to thresh the seed-corn.

All that day, while talking to the bailiff and the peasants, at home with his wife, with Dolly, her children, and his father-in-law, Levin's thoughts were busy with the one and only subject, outside his farming, that interested him at this time, and in everything he sought a bearing on his questions: 'What am I? Where am I? And why am I here?'

Standing in the cool of the newly-thatched barn, with its wattled walls of hazel which had not yet shed its fragrant leaves pressed against the freshly stripped aspens of the joists under the thatch, he gazed now through the open doorway in which the dry, bitter chaff-dust rushed and whirled at the grass round the threshing-floor in the hot sunshine and at the fresh straw that had just been brought in from the shed, now at the parti-coloured heads of the white-breasted swallows that flew chirping in under the roof and, fluttering their wings, paused in the doorway, now at the peasants bustling about in the dark and dusty interior; and strange thoughts came into his head.

'What is all this being done for?' he wondered. 'Why am I standing here, making them work? Why are they all bustling about, trying so hard to show me their zeal? Why is my old friend Matriona toiling so? (I remember being her doctor when the beam fell on her in the fire),' he thought, looking at a haggard old woman who was raking up the grain, stepping painfully with her bare, sun-blackened feet over the rough, uneven barn-floor. 'She recovered then, but to-day or to-morrow, or in ten years' time, she will be dead and buried and nothing will be left of her, or of that pretty girl in the red skirt, husking corn with such nimble, dexterous grace. They'll bury her, and this piebald gelding, and very soon too,” he reflected, gazing at the horse breathing heavily through dilated nostrils, its belly rising and falling, as it trod the slanting wheel that turned under it. 'They will carry it off, and Fiodr, who is feeding the machine, his curly beard full of chaff and his shirt torn on his white shoulder. But now he loosens the sheaves and gives directions, shouts at the women, and with a swift movement puts the strap right on the fly-wheel. And what's more, not only they but I, too, shall be buried, and nothing will be left. What is it all for?'

He thought this, and at the same time looked at his watch to reckon how much they could thresh in an hour. He had to know that so as to set them their day's task accordingly.

‘They've been at it nearly an hour, and only just started on the third rick,' he thought. He walked over to the man who was feeding the machine, and, shouting above the din, told him to feed it more evenly. 'You put in too much at a time, Fiodr! It gets jammed, you see, and doesn't go well. Feed it in evenly!'

Fiodr, black with the dust that stuck to his perspiring face, shouted something in reply but still did not do as Levin wanted him to.

Levin went up to the drum, motioned Fiodr aside and himself began feeding the machine.

He worked on until the peasants' dinner-hour, which was not long in coming, and then, in company with Fiodr, left the barn and began chatting, stopping beside a neat yellow stack of rye laid on the threshing-floor for seed.

Fiodr came from a distant village, the very one where Levin had once let land to be worked cooperatively. At present a former house-porter had it.

Levin got talking with Fiodr about this land and asked if Platon, a well-to-do and worthy peasant belonging to the same village, might not take it for the coming year.

'It's a high rent. It wouldn't pay Platon, Constantine Dmitrich, answered the peasant, picking the ears of rye off the front of his damp shirt.

'Then how does Kirilov make it pay?'

'Oh, Mityuka' (as he contemptuously called the house-porter), ‘he could make anything pay! He'll squeeze a fellow until he gets what he wants. He won't spare a Christian. But Uncle Fokanich' (so he called the old peasant Platon), ‘do you suppose he'd flay the skin off a man? He'll give credit, and sometimes he'll let a man off. And go short himself, too. He's that sort of person.'

‘But why should he let anyone off ?

‘Oh well, of course, folks are different. One man lives for his own wants and nothing else – take Mityuka, who only thinks of stuffing his belly - but Fokanich is an upright old man. He thinks of his soul. He does not forget God.'

'Not forget God? And how does he live for his soul?' Levin almost shouted.

'Why, that's plain enough: it's living rightly, in God's way. Folks are all different, you see. Take yourself, now, you wouldn't wrong a man either ...'

'Yes, yes, good-bye!' stammered Levin, deeply agitated, and, turning away, he took his stick and walked rapidly towards the house.

A novel joyous feeling enveloped Levin. At the peasant's words about Platon living for his soul, rightly, in God's way, dim but important thoughts crowded into his mind, as if they had broken loose from some place where they had been locked up, and all rushing forward towards one goal, whirled in his head, blinding him with their light.

 

-12-

Levin strode along the highroad, attending not so much to his thoughts (he could not yet disentangle them) as to a mental condition he had never known before.

The peasant's words had the effect of an electric spark, suddenly transforming and welding into one a whole series of disjointed, impotent, separate ideas that had never ceased to occupy his mind. They had been in his mind, though he had been unaware of it, even while he was talking to Fiodr about letting the land. .

He felt something new in his soul and took a delight in probing it, not yet knowing what this new something was.

'Not to live for one's own needs, but for God! For what God? For God. And could anything be more senseless than what he said? He said we must not live for our own wants - that it, we must not live for what we understand, what we are attracted by, what we desire, but must live for something incomprehensible, for God, whom no one can know or define. Well? Didn't I understand those senseless words of Fiodr's? And understanding them, did I doubt the truth of them? Did I think them stupid, obscure, unsound?

'No, I understood them just as he understands them: understood fully and more clearly than I understand anything in life; and never in my life have I doubted them, nor could doubt them. And not only I but everyone – the whole world – understands nothing but this one thing fully: about this alone men have no doubt and are always agreed.

‘Fiodr says that Kirilov lives for his belly. That is intelligible and rational. All of us as rational beings can't do anything else but live for our bellies. And all of a sudden this same Fiodr declares that it is wrong to live for one's belly; we must live for truth, for God, and a hint is enough to make me understand what he means! And I and millions of men, men who lived centuries ago and men living now - peasants, the poor in spirit and the sages, those who have thought and written about it, in their obscure words saying the same thing - we are all agreed on this one point: what it is we should live for and what is good. The only knowledge I and all men possess that is firm, incontestable, and clear is here, and it cannot be explained by reason - this knowledge is outside the sphere of reason: it has no causes and can have no effects.

'If goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness; if it has consequences - a reward – it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.

'It is just this that I know, and that we all know.

'And I sought for miracles - complained that I did not see a miracle which would convince me. But here is a miracle, the one possible, everlasting miracle, surrounding me on all sides, and I never noticed it! 'What could be a greater miracle than that?

Can I have found the solution to everything? Are my sufferings really at an end?' thought Levin, striding along the dusty road, oblivious of heat and fatigue, filled with a feeling of relief after his long travail. The sensation was so joyous that it seemed almost incredible. He was breathless with emotion and, incapable of going farther, left the road and turned into the forest to sit down on the uncut grass in the shade of the aspens. Taking off his hat from his perspiring head, he stretched himself out, leaning on his elbow in the lush, feathery, woodland grass.

'Yes, I must bethink myself and consider it carefully,' he thought, gazing intently at the untrodden grass before him, and following the movements of a little green beetle crawling up a stalk of couch-grass and hindered in its ascent by a leaf of goutwort. “Let me go back to the beginning,' he said to himself, bending the leaf out of the beetle's way and twisting another blade of grass for it to cross over on to. 'What makes me so happy? What have I discovered?

'I used to say that in my body, that in the body of this grass and of this beetle (there, it didn't want to go on to the other blade of grass – it has spread its wings and flown away) a transformation of matter takes place in conformity with certain physical, chemical, and physiological laws. And in all of us, including these aspens and the clouds and the misty patches in the sky, evolution is proceeding. Evolution from what? Into what? An unending evolution and struggle? ... As if there could be any sort of tendency and struggle in the infinite! And I was surprised that in spite of the utmost efforts of my reason in that direction I could not discover the meaning of life, the meaning of my own impulses and yearnings. But the meaning of my impulses is so clear that they form the very foundation of my existence, and I marvelled and rejoiced when the peasant put it into words for me: to live for God, for my soul.

'I have discovered nothing. I have simply opened my eyes to what I knew. I have come to the recognition of that Power that not only in the past gave me life but now too gives me life. I have been set free from fallacy, I have found the Master.'

And he briefly went over the whole progress of his thoughts during the last two years, beginning with the plain confronting of death at the sight of his beloved brother lying hopelessly ill.

Then, for the first time, realizing that for every man, and himself too, there was nothing ahead but suffering, death, eternal oblivion, he had decided that to live under such conditions was impossible - he must either find an explanation to the problem of existence which would make life seem something other than the cruel irony of a malevolent spirit, or he must shoot himself.

But he had done neither the one nor the other: he had gone on living, thinking and feeling, had even at that very time married, had experienced many joys and been happy whenever he was not pondering on the meaning of his life.

What did that show? It showed that he had been living rightly, but thinking wrongly.

He had been living (without being aware of it) on those spiritual truths that he had imbibed with his mother's milk, yet in thinking he had not only refused to acknowledge these truths but had studiously ignored them.

Now it was clear to him that he could only live by virtue of the beliefs in which he had been brought up.

'What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life had it not been for those beliefs, had I not known that one must live for God and not for one's own needs? I should have robbed, lied, murdered. Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my life would ever have existed for me.' And try as he would he was unable to picture to himself the brutal creature he would have been if he had not known what he was living for.

'I was in search of an answer to my question. But reason could not give an answer to my question - reason is incommensurable with the problem. The answer has been given me by life itself, through my knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. And this knowledge I did not acquire in any way: it was given to me as it is to everybody - given, because I could not have got it from anywhere.

'Where did I get it from? Would reason ever have proved to me that I must love my neighbour instead of strangling him? I was told that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and the law demanding that I should strangle all who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one's neighbour reason could never discover, because it's unreasonable.

'Yes, pride,' he said to himself, rolling over on his stomach and beginning to tie blades of grass into knots, trying not to break them.

'And not merely pride of intellect, but folly of intellect! And most of all - dishonesty of mind, sheer dishonesty. Sheer intellectual fraud, he repeated.

 

-13-

And Levin remembered a recent scene between Dolly and her children. The children, left to themselves, had started making raspberry jam over lighted candles, and pouring jets of milk into each other's mouths. Their mother catching them at these antics had tried in front of Levin to impress on them that they were wasting what had cost their elders a large amount of labour, undertaken for their sakes, that if they broke the cups they would have nothing to drink their tea out of, and that if they spilt the milk they would have nothing to eat, and die of hunger.

And Levin had been struck by the passive, weary scepticism with which the children listened to these remarks from their mother. They were only sorry to have their interesting game interrupted, and did not believe a word of what their mother was saying. They could not believe it indeed, because they could not take in the magnitude of all they habitually enjoyed, and so could not conceive that what they were destroying was the very thing they lived by.

'That all happens by itself,' they thought. 'And there's nothing interesting or important about it, because those things always have been and always will be. And it's always the same. We don't need to worry, it's all done for us. We want to invent something new of our own. It was quite a good idea to put raspberries in a cup and cook them over a candle, and squirt milk into each other's mouths like fountains. That was fun, and something new, and not a bit worse than drinking out of cups.

'Don't we - didn't I? - do just the same, searching by the aid of reason to discover the significance of the forces of nature and the purpose of human life?' he thought.

‘And don't all the theories of philosophy do the same, trying by the path of thought, which is strange and not natural to man, to bring him to a knowledge of what he has known long ago, and knows so surely that without it he could not live? Is it not plainly evident in the development of every philosopher's theory that he knows beforehand, just as positively as the peasant Fiodr and not a whit more clearly than he, the real meaning of life, and is simply trying by a dubious intellectual process to come back to what everyone knows?

‘Supposing now that the children were left to get things for themselves, make the cups, milk the cows, and so on – would they play pranks? No, they would starve to death! Well then, give us over to our passions and thoughts, without any idea of the one God, of the Creator, or without any idea of what is right, any explanation of moral evil!

“Just try to build up anything without those conceptions!

'We destroy because we have had our fill spiritually. Exactly like the children!

'Whence comes the joyful knowledge I have in common with the peasant, that alone gives me peace of mind? Where did I get it?

'Here am I, a Christian, brought up in the knowledge of God, brimful of the spiritual blessings Christianity has given me, overflowing with them and living on these blessings, and like the children I don't understand, and destroy - or rather, try to destroy that by which I live. But directly an important moment in life comes, like for children when they are cold and hungry, I run to Him, and even less than the children when their mother scolds them for their childish mischief do I feel that my childish essays at wanton madness should be reckoned against me.

'Yes, what I know, I know not by my reason but because it has been given to me, revealed to me, and I know it with my heart, by my faith in the chief things which the Church proclaims.

'The Church? The Church!' repeated Levin to himself. He rolled over on his other side and, leaning on his elbow, fell to gazing into the distance at a herd of cattle going down to the farther bank of the river.

But can I believe in all the Church professes?' he asked in order to test himself and bring up everything that could destroy his present sense of security. He purposely made himself think of those teachings of the Church which had always seemed to him strange and had most alienated him. 'The Creation? Yes, but how did I explain existence? By existence? By nothing? ... The devil and sin? And how do I explain evil? ... The Atonement? ...

'But I know nothing, nothing, and cannot know other than what I have been told with the rest.'

And it seemed to him now that there was not a single article of faith which could disturb the main thing - belief in God, in goodness, as the one goal of man's destiny.

At the back of every article of faith of the Church could be put belief in serving truth rather than one's personal needs. And each of these dogmas not only did not violate that creed but was essential for the fulfilment of the greatest of miracles, continually manifest upon earth – the miracle that made it possible for the world with its millions of individual human beings, sages and simpletons, children and old men, everyone, peasants, Lvov, Kitty, beggars and kings, to comprehend with certainty one and the same truth and live that life of the spirit, the only life that is worth living and which alone we prize.

Lying on his back, he was now gazing high up into the cloudless sky. 'Do I not know that that is infinite space, and not a rounded vault? But however much I screw up my eyes and strain my sight I cannot see it except as round and circumscribed, and in spite of my knowing about infinite space I am incontestably right when I see a firm blue vault, far more right than when I strain my eyes to see beyond it.'

Levin ceased thinking and, as it were, only hearkened to mystic voices that seemed to be joyfully and earnestly conferring among themselves.

'Can this be faith?' he wondered, afraid to believe in his happiness. 'My God, I thank Thee!' he breathed, gulping down the sobs that rose within him and with both hands brushing away the tears that filled his eyes.

 

-14-

Levin looked before him and saw a herd of cattle, then he caught sight of his trap with Raven in the shafts, and the coachman, who drove up to the herd and spoke to the herdsman. After that, close by, ne heard the sound of wheels and the snorting of the sleek horse; but he was so engrossed in his thoughts that he did not even wonder why the coachman was coming towards him, until the latter had driven up quite near and called:

'The mistress sent me! Your brother has come, and another gentleman with him!'

Levin got into the trap and took the reins.

He felt as though he had just awakened from a deep sleep and it took him a long while to collect his faculties. He stared at the sleek horse, flecked with lather between its haunches and on its neck where the harness rubbed, stared at Ivan the coachman sitting beside him, and remembered that he had been expecting his brother and that his wife was probably worried at his long absence, and tried to guess who the visitor could be who had come with his brother. And his brother, his wife, and the unknown visitor appeared to him in a different light now. He fancied now that his relations with all men would be different.

"With my brother there will be none of that aloofness there always used to be between us – there will be no more disputes; with Kitty no more quarrels; to the visitor, whoever he may be, I shall be friendly and nice; and with the servants, with Ivan, it will all be different.'

Tightly holding in the good horse, which was snorting impatiently and pulling at the reins, Levin looked round at Ivan sitting beside him not knowing what to do with his idle hands and continually pushing down his shirt as the wind puffed it out. Levin tried to think of something to say to start a conversation with him. He was about to remark that Ivan had pulled the saddle-girth too high, but that would have sounded like a reproof, and Levin longed for a warm, friendly exchange.

‘Bear to the right, sir, there's a stump there,' said the coachman, pulling the rein Levin held.

'Have the goodness to leave it alone, and don't give me lessons!' said Levin, annoyed at the coachman's interference. Such interference always made him angry, and as he spoke he could not help thinking sorrowfully how mistaken had been his conclusion that his new spiritual condition could all of a sudden alter his character once in contact with reality.

When they were still a quarter of a mile from the house Levin saw Grisha and Tanya running to meet him.

'Uncle Kostya! Mama's coming, and grandpapa, and Sergei Ivanich, and another man!' they cried, clambering into the trap.

'Who is it?'

'An awfully dreadful man! And he goes like this with his arms, said Tanya, standing up in the trap and imitating Katavasov.

'Is he old or young?' asked Levin laughing, as Tanya's performance reminded him of someone, he did not know whom. 'I hope it's not some tiresome person!' he thought.

As soon as they were round the bend in the road and saw the little party coming towards them, Levin recognized Katavasov in a straw hat, walking along swinging his arms just as Tanya had shown him.

Katavasov was very fond of discussing metaphysics, his notions of which were acquired from natural science writers who had never studied philosophy, and during his last stay in Moscow Levin had had many arguments with him.

The first thing Levin recalled as he saw him was one occasion when Katavasov had obviously considered that he came off victorious.

‘But this time I will on no account argue or lightly express my opinions,' he thought.

Getting out of the trap, he exchanged greetings with his brother and Katavasov, and asked where Kitty was.

'She has taken Mitya to the woods, to sleep there, because it is so hot in the house,' said Dolly.

Levin had always advised his wife against taking the baby into the woods, thinking it unsafe, and he was not pleased to hear this news.

'She carries that son of hers about from pillar to post,' said the old prince, with a smile. 'I told her to try putting him in the ice-cellar.'

She meant to come to the apiary. She thought you were there. That's where we're going,' said Dolly.

'Well, and what are you doing?' said Koznyshev, falling behind the rest and walking beside his brother.

'Oh, nothing in particular. Busy as usual with the farm,' Levin replied. “You've come for a good stay, I hope? We have been expecting you for such a long time.'

'Only for about a couple of weeks. There is so much to do in Moscow.'

At these words the brothers' eyes met, and Levin, in spite of the desire he always felt, and now more than ever, to be on affectionate and especially free-and-easy terms with his brother, felt awkward when he looked at him. He dropped his eyes and did not know what to say.

Running over in his mind the subjects that might be agreeable to Koznyshev and keep him off the Serbian war and the Slavonic question, at which he had hinted by alluding to all he had to do in Moscow, Levin began about Koznyshev's book.

'Well, have there been reviews of your book?' he asked. Koznyshev smiled at the premeditation of the question. 'No one is interested in that now, and I least of all,' he replied.

‘Look over there, Darya Alexandrovna! We shall have a shower,' he added, pointing with his umbrella to some white clouds that had made their appearance above the aspens.

And these words were enough to re-establish the old relationship - if not unfriendly, at least cool – between the brothers, which Levin had so much wanted to get away from.

Levin joined Katavasov. 'It was nice of you to make up your mind to come,' he said.

*I've been meaning to for a long while. Now we'll have some talks. and we'll see! Have you read Spencer?'

'I haven't finished him yet,' replied Levin. 'However, I don't think I need him now.'

“How's that? That sounds interesting! Why not?'

'I mean I've finally come to the conclusion that in him and his like I shall never find the solution to the problems that interest me. Now ...

But he was suddenly struck by the serene expression of Katavasov's jolly face, and felt so anxious not to spoil his own exalted mood to which the conversation was obviously damaging that, recollecting his resolution, he broke off. 'But we can talk about that by and by,' he added. “If we're going to the apiary, it's this way - along this little path,' he said, addressing the others too.

Going along the narrow footpath to a little uncut glade bright all down one side with thick clusters of wild pansies with tall dark green tufts of hellebore between them, Levin settled his guests in the deep cool shade of the young aspens, on a bench and some tree stumps specially put there for visitors to the apiary who might be afraid of the bees, while he himself went to the hut to fetch bread, cucumbers, and fresh honey for the whole party.

Trying to move as gently as possible and listening to the bees that hummed past him more and more frequently, he walked along the little path to the hut. As he reached the door a bee got caught in his beard and started buzzing angrily, but he extricated it carefully. Going into the shady passage of the hut, he took down his veil, which hung on a peg on the wall, put it on and, thrusting his hands in his pockets, went into the fenced-in apiary where -ranged in rows and tied with bast to stakes - in the middle of a space where the grass had been mown, stood all the hives he knew so well, the old stocks each with its own history, while along the wattle fence stood the new swarms hived that year. Bees and drones jostled in front of the hives, dancing before his eyes, whirling over the same spot. Between them flew the working bees, making straight for the wood and the flowering lime-trees or returning laden to the hives.

His ears rang with many different sounds – a busy working bee flying swiftly past, a buzzing idle drone, excited sentinel bees guarding their treasure from an enemy and ready to sting. On the farther side of the fence an old man was planing a hoop for a cask, not noticing Levin, who stood still in the middle of the apiary and did not call him.

He was glad of this chance to be alone, to recover from the reality which had already brought low his mood of spiritual elation. He remembered that in quite a short space of time he had lost his temper with Ivan, shown coolness to his brother, and talked thoughtlessly with Katavasov.

'Can it have been only a transitory mood, and will it pass and leave no trace?' he wondered.

But at that very moment, returning to his mood, he felt with joy that something new and important had happened to him. The spiritual peace he had found was still unharmed, though everyday life had shrouded it for a time.

Just as the bees, now circling round him, threatened and distracted his attention, robbing him of complete physical calm and compelling him to shrink to avoid them, so had the petty cares that had beset him from the moment he took his seat in the trap restricted his spiritual freedom; but that lasted only so long as he was in the midst of them. Just as his physical powers remained intact, in spite of the bees, so his newly realized spiritual powers were intact also.

 

-15-

'Kostya, do you know whom Sergei Ivanich came across in the train?' said Dolly, after she had distributed cucumbers and honey among the children. 'Vronsky! He's going to Serbia.'

'Yes, and not alone either. He's taking a whole squadron with him at his own expense,' Katavasov put in.

That is like him,' said Levin. 'Are volunteers still going out then?' he added, glancing at Koznyshev. Koznyshev did not answer. With the blunt side of a knife he was carefully trying to extricate from a bowl in which lay a wedge of white honeycomb a live bee that had got stuck in the running honey.

‘I should say so! You ought to have seen what went on at the station yesterday!' said Katavasov, crunching off a chunk of cucumber.

'What on earth is it all about? For heaven's sake, do explain to me, Sergei Ivanich, where all these volunteers are going and whom they are fighting,' said the old prince, evidently continuing a conversation that had been started in Levin's absence.

'The Turks, of course,' Koznyshev replied with a quiet smile, rescuing the bee, dark with honey and helplessly kicking, and shifting it from the knife to a stout aspen leaf.

“But who has declared war on the Turks? Ivan Ivanich Ragozov and the Countess Lydia Ivanovna, in collaboration with Madame Stahl?'

'No one has declared war, but people sympathize with their suffering brethren and are eager to help them,' said Koznyshev.

‘But the prince is not talking of help but of war,' Levin put in, coming to the assistance of his father-in-law. 'The prince means that private individuals cannot take part in war without the sanction of the government.'

'Kostya, mind! There's a bee - I'm afraid we shall get stung,' said Dolly, warding off a wasp.

"That's not a bee, it's a wasp,' said Levin.

'Well, come along, give us your theory,' Katavasov said to Levin with a smile, evidently wanting to challenge him to a discussion. 'Why have private individuals no right to go to war?'

'Oh, my theory's this: on the one hand war is such a bestial, cruel, dreadful affair that no man - to say nothing of a Christian - can take upon himself personally the responsibility of beginning a war: that can only be done by a government, whose business it is to look to these things when they become inevitable. On the other hand, both political science and common sense teach us that in matters of state, especially in the matter of war, private citizens must renounce their personal individual will.'

Koznyshev and Katavasov, both ready with their rejoinders, began speaking together. 'But the point is, my dear fellow, that there may be cases when the Government does not carry out the will of the people and then the public asserts its will,' said Katavasov.

But Koznyshev evidently did not approve of this reply. He frowned at Katavasov's words and began differently:

'It is a pity you put the question that way. There is no declaration of war in this case but simply an expression of humane Christian feeling. Our brothers, men of the same blood, the same faith, are being massacred. Even supposing they were not our brothers, our co-religionists, but merely children, women, and old people, feeling is aroused and Russians fly to help check these atrocities. Imagine you were walking along the street and saw some drunken men beating a woman or a child - I don't think you would stop to inquire whether war had been declared on the men: you would rush at them and defend the victim.'

'Yes, but I should not kill them,' said Levin. "You might.'

'I don't know. If I saw such a sight, I might yield to my immediate impulse; but I can't say beforehand. But there is no immediate impulse in the case of the oppression of the Slavonic people, nor can there be.'

'Possibly not for you; but there is with others,' said Koznyshev, frowning with displeasure. 'There is still a racial memory among the people of Orthodox Christians groaning under the yoke of the “infidel Musulman”. The people have heard of the sufferings of their brethren and have spoken.'

That may be,' said Levin evasively, 'only I don't see it. I'm one of the people myself, and I don't feel it.'

‘Nor do I,' said the prince. 'I was staying abroad and reading the papers, and I confess, up to the time of the Bulgarian atrocities, I couldn't make out why all Russia suddenly grew so fond of our Slavonic brethren, when I felt not the slightest affection for them. I was very much upset - I thought I must be a monster, or that the waters of Karlsbad were having that effect on me. But since I came home my mind's been set at rest. I see that there are other people besides myself who are only interested in Russia, and not in their brotherSlavs. Kostya, for example.'

'Personal opinions don't count in this matter,' said Koznyshev. There is no room for personal opinions when all Russia - the whole nation - has expressed its will.'

'But, excuse me, I don't see that. The people don't know a thing about it,' said the old prince.

‘Oh, Papa! ... how can you say that? What about in church last Sunday?' remarked Dolly, who was following the conversation. 'Get me a cloth, please,' she said to the old bee-keeper who was smiling at the children. 'It can't be that all ...'

‘But what was there in church on Sunday? The priest had been told to read that. He read it. The people didn't understand a word of it and sighed, just as they do at any sermon,' went on the prince. "Then they were told that there was to be a collection for some salutary object, so they each produce their kopeck, but what for – they have no idea!

'The people cannot help knowing. A consciousness of their destiny always exists in the people, and at moments like the present that consciousness finds utterance,' said Koznyshev, glancing at the old beekeeper.

The handsome old man, with his black beard in which the grey was beginning to show and his thick silvery hair, stood there motionless, a bowl of honey in his hand, looking down from his great height at the gentlefolk with a mild, placid air, clearly neither understanding nor caring to understand what they were talking about.

'That is so, no doubt,' he said with a significant shake of his head at Koznyshev's words.

'Here, ask him about it. He knows nothing and has no ideas,' said Levin. 'Have you heard about the war, Mihalich?' he asked, addressing the old man. 'What they read in church? What do you think now? Ought we to fight for the Christians?'

'Why should we bother our heads? Alexander Nikolayevich our Emperor has thought about it for us, as he always does. He knows best. ... Shall I bring a bit more bread? Give the wee lad some more?' he asked Dolly, pointing to Grisha, who was finishing his crust.

'I don't need to ask,' said Koznyshev. 'We have seen and still see hundreds upon hundreds of men throwing up everything to serve the righteous cause - men from every corner of Russia, openly and clearly declaring their thought and aim. They bring their halfpence or enlist themselves, and say straight out what for. What does that mean?'

'It means, to my mind,' said Levin, beginning to get excited, that in a nation of eighty millions there will always be found, not hundreds, as now, but tens of thousands of men who have lost caste, a restless crew ready for anything – to join Pugachev's robber band, to go to Khiva, or to Serbia ... anywhere.'

'I tell you it's not a case of hundreds, and they are not a “restless crew” but the best representatives of the people!' said Koznyshev, as heatedly as if he were defending the last penny of his fortune. ‘And what about the donations? There at any rate is the whole people directly expressing its will.'

'That word "people” is so vague,' said Levin. 'Parish clerks, teachers, and perhaps one in a thousand of the peasantry may know what it's all about. The rest of our eighty million, like Mihalich here, far from expressing their will, haven't the faintest idea what there is for them to express their will about! What right then have we to say that this is the people's will?'