by Anna Karenina (tr Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky) (Penguin Classics) (epub)
It was that time when a short break comes in the farm work, before the beginning of the harvest, annually repeated and annually calling on all the strength of the peasantry. The crops were excellent, and clear, hot summer days set in, with short, dewy nights.
The brothers had to pass through a wood in order to reach the meadows. Sergei Ivanovich kept admiring the beauty of the wood overgrown with leaves, pointing out to his brother now an old linden, dark on its shady side, rippling with yellow stipules and ready to flower, now the brilliant emerald of that year’s young shoots on the trees. Konstantin Levin did not like talking or hearing about the beauty of nature. For him words took away the beauty of what he saw. He agreed with his brother, but involuntarily began thinking of other things. When they reached the other side of the wood, all his attention was absorbed by the sight of a fallow field on a hillock, in some places yellow with grass, in others trodden down and cut criss–cross or dotted with heaps, or even ploughed under. A file of carts moved across the field. Levin counted the carts and was pleased that they were bringing out all that was necessary, and at the sight of the meadows his thoughts turned to the mowing. He always experienced something that especially touched him to the quick during the haymaking. Driving up to the meadow, Levin stopped the horse.
The morning dew lingered below in the thick undergrowth of the grass, and Sergei Ivanovich, to avoid getting his feet wet, asked to be taken across the meadow in the cabriolet, to that willow bush where the perch took the bait so well. Sorry as Konstantin Levin was to crush his grass, he drove into the meadow. The tall grass softly twined around the wheels and the horse’s legs, leaving its seeds on the wet spokes and hubs.
His brother sat down under the bush, sorting his fishing rods, while Levin led the horse away, tied it up, and went into the enormous grey–green sea of the meadow, unstirred by the wind. The silky grass with its ripening seeds reached his waist in the places flooded in spring.
Cutting across the meadow, Konstantin Levin came out on the road and met an old man with a swollen eye, carrying a hive of bees.
‘Did you catch it, Fomich?’ he asked.
‘Catch it, Konstantin Dmitrich! I’ll be happy to keep the one I have. It’s the second time a swarm got away … Thanks be, the boys rode after it.
Yours are ploughing. They unhitched a horse and rode after it…’
‘Well, what do you say, Fomich – shall we mow or wait?’
‘There, now! We’d say wait till St Peter’s.[1] But you always mow earlier. Why not? The grass is fine, thank God. The cattle will have plenty.’
‘And the weather, what do you think?’
‘That’s God’s doing. Maybe the weather’ll hold.’
Levin went back to his brother. He had caught nothing, but Sergei Ivanovich was not bored and seemed in the most cheerful spirits. Levin saw that he had been stirred by the conversation with the doctor and wanted to talk. Levin, on the contrary, wanted to get home quickly, to arrange for mowers to be called in by tomorrow and resolve the doubt concerning the mowing, which greatly preoccupied him.
‘Let’s go then,’ he said.
‘What’s the hurry? Let’s sit here. How soaked you are, though! I’m not catching anything, but it’s nice here. Any hunting is good in that you have to do with nature. This steely water is so lovely!’ he said. ‘Those meadows along the bank,’ he went on, ‘always remind me of a riddle – do you know it? The grass says to the water: we’ll sway and sway.’
‘I don’t know that riddle,’ Levin replied glumly.
III
‘You know, I’ve been thinking about you,’ said Sergei Ivanovich. ‘What’s happening in your district is unheard–of, from what this doctor tells me – he’s quite an intelligent fellow. I’ve said to you before and I’ll say it again: it’s not good that you don’t go to the meetings and have generally withdrawn from zemstvo affairs. Of course, if decent people start withdrawing, God knows how things will go. We pay money, it goes to pay salaries, and there are no schools, no medical aid, no midwives, no dispensaries, nothing.’
‘But I tried,’ Levin answered softly and reluctantly, ‘I just can’t! There’s no help for it!’
‘Why can’t you? I confess, I don’t understand. Indifference, inability, I don’t accept; can it be simple laziness?’
‘Neither the one, nor the other, nor the third. I tried and I see that I can’t do anything,’ said Levin.
He hardly entered into what his brother was saying. Peering across the river at the ploughed field, he made out something black, but could not tell whether it was a horse or the mounted steward.
‘Why can’t you do anything? You made an attempt, it didn’t succeed as you wanted, and you gave up. Where’s your self–esteem?’
‘Self–esteem,’ said Levin, cut to the quick by his brother’s words, ‘is something I do not understand. If I had been told at the university that others understood integral calculus and I did not – there you have self–esteem. But here one should first be convinced that one needs to have a certain ability in these matters and, chiefly, that they are all very important.’
‘And what, then? Aren’t they important?’ said Sergei Ivanovich, also cut to the quick that his brother should find what interested him unimportant, and especially that he was obviously hardly listening to him.
‘It doesn’t seem important to me, I’m not taken with it, what do you want?…’ answered Levin, having made out that what he saw was the steward, and that the steward had probably allowed the muzhiks to quit ploughing. They were turning their ploughs over. ‘Can it be they’re already done ploughing?’ he thought.
‘But listen,’ the elder brother said, his handsome, intelligent face scowling, ‘there are limits to everything. It’s all very well to be an eccentric and to be sincere and to dislike falseness –I know all that; but what you’re saying either has no meaning or has a very bad meaning. When you find it unimportant that the peasantry, whom you love, as you assure me . ..’
‘I never assured him,’ thought Konstantin Levin.
‘… dies without help? Crude midwives kill off babies, and the peasantry rot in ignorance and remain in the power of every scrivener, and you are given the means to help them, but you don’t help them, because in your opinion it’s not important.’
And Sergei Ivanovich confronted him with a dilemma:
‘Either you’re so undeveloped that you cannot see all that you could do, or you cannot give up your peace, your vanity, whatever, in order to do it.’
Konstantin Levin felt that it only remained for him to submit or to confess to a lack of love for the common cause. And this offended and upset him.
‘Both the one and the other,’ he said resolutely. ‘I don’t see how it’s possible…’ ‘What? Impossible to give medical help, if money is placed in the right way?’
‘Impossible, it seems to me … In our district, with its three thousand square miles, with our slush, blizzards, seasonal field work, I see no possibility of providing medical help everywhere. Besides, I generally don’t believe in medicine.’
‘Well, excuse me, but that’s not fair … I can give you a thousand examples … Well, and schools?’
‘Why schools?’
‘What are you saying? Can there be any doubt of the usefulness of education? If it’s good for you, it’s good for everyone.’
Konstantin Levin felt himself morally driven into a corner and therefore got excited and involuntarily let out the main reason for his indifference to the common cause.
‘Maybe all that is good, but why should I worry about setting up medical centres that I’ll never use and schools that I won’t send my children to, that the peasants don’t want to send their children to either, and that I have no firm belief that they ought to send them to?’ he said.
Sergei Ivanovich was momentarily surprised by this unexpected view of things, but he at once devised a new plan of attack.
He paused, raised one rod, dropped the line in again, and tur
ned to his brother with a smile.
‘Well, excuse me … First, there’s a need for medical centres. Here we just summoned the district doctor for Agafya Mikhailovna.’
‘Well, I think her arm will stay crooked.’
‘That’s still a question … And then, a literate muzhik or worker is more needful and valuable to you.’
‘No, ask anybody you like,’ Konstantin Levin replied resolutely, ‘a literate peasant is much worse as a worker. And the roads can’t be repaired, and bridges are no sooner put up than they steal them.’
‘However,’ said the frowning Sergei Ivanovich, who did not like contradictions, especially the sort that kept jumping from one thing to another and introduced new arguments without any connection, so that it was impossible to know which to answer, ‘however, that’s not the point. Excuse me. Do you acknowledge that education is good for the peasantry?’
‘I do,’ Levin said inadvertently, and immediately thought that he had not said what he thought. He sensed that, once he acknowledged that, it would be proved to him that he was speaking rubbish that did not make any sense. How it would be proved to him he did not know, but he knew that it would doubtless be proved to him logically, and he waited for this proof.
The argument turned out to be much simpler than he expected.
‘If you acknowledge it as a good,’ said Sergei Ivanovich, ‘then, being an honest man, you can’t help liking and sympathizing with such a cause and therefore working for it.’
‘But I have not yet acknowledged it as a good,’ said Konstantin Levin, blushing.
‘How’s that? You just said …’
‘That is, I do not acknowledge it either as good or as possible.’
‘You can’t know that without having tried.’
‘Well, suppose,’ said Levin, though he did not suppose it at all, ‘suppose it’s so; but all the same I don’t see why I should worry about it.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘No, since we’re talking, explain it to me from a philosophical point of view,’ said Levin.
‘I don’t understand what philosophy has got to do with it,’ said Sergei Ivanovich, in such a tone, it seemed to Levin, as if he did not recognize his brother’s right to discuss philosophy. And that vexed Levin.
‘It’s got this to do with it!’ he began hotly. ‘I think that the motive force of all our actions is, after all, personal happiness. In our present–day zemstvo institutions I, as a nobleman, see nothing that contributes to my well–being. The roads are no better and cannot be better; my horses carry me over the bad ones as well. I have no need of doctors and centres, I have no need of any justice of the peace – I’ve never turned to one and never will. Schools I not only do not need but also find harmful, as I told you. For me the zemstvo institutions are simply an obligation to pay six kopecks an acre, go to town, sleep with bedbugs, and listen to all sorts of nonsense and vileness, and personal interest does not move me to do that.’
‘Excuse me,’ Sergei Ivanovich interrupted with a smile, ‘but personal interest did not move us to work for the emancipation of the serfs, and yet we did.’
‘No!’ Konstantin interrupted, growing more heated. ‘The emancipation of the serfs was a different matter. There was a personal interest. We wanted to throw off the yoke that oppressed us and all good people. But to be a council member,[2] arguing about how many privy cleaners are needed and how the sewer pipes should be installed in a town I don’t live in; to be a juror and judge a muzhik who has stolen a ham, and listen for six hours to defence lawyers and prosecutors pouring out all sorts of drivel, and hear the foreman of the jury ask my old Alyoshka–the–fool: "Mister defendant, do you acknowledge the fact of the stolen ham?""Wha?"‘
Konstantin Levin was already side–tracked, impersonating the foreman of the jury and Alyoshka–the–fool; it seemed to him that it was all to the point.
But Sergei Ivanovich shrugged his shoulders.
‘Well, what do you mean to say?’
‘I only mean to say that I will always defend with all my might those rights that I. .. that touch on my interests. When the gendarmes searched us as students and read our letters, I was ready to defend those rights with all my might, to defend my rights to education, to freedom. I understand military service, which touches the future of my children, my brothers and myself. I’m ready to discuss anything that concerns me. But to decide how to dispose of forty thousand in zemstvo funds, or to judge Alyoshka–the–fool – that I do not understand and cannot do.’
Konstantin Levin spoke as if his words had burst their dam. Sergei Ivanovich smiled.
‘And if you were brought to trial tomorrow, do you mean you’d rather be tried by the old criminal courts?’[3]
‘I won’t be brought to trial. I’m not going to kill anybody, and I have no need of all that. Really!’ he went on, again skipping to something completely inappropriate, ‘our zemstvo institutions and all that – it’s like the birches we stick up on the day of the Trinity,[4] so that it looks like the forest that grew up by itself in Europe, and I can’t put my heart into watering and believing in those birches!’
Sergei Ivanovich merely shrugged his shoulders, expressing by this gesture his surprise at the appearance out of nowhere of these birches in their discussion, though he immediately understood what his brother meant to say by it.
‘Excuse me, but one cannot argue that way,’ he observed.
But Konstantin Levin wanted to vindicate himself in this shortcoming which he knew he had, in his indifference to the common good, and he went on.
‘I think,’ said Konstantin, ‘that no activity can be solid unless it’s based on personal interest. That is a general truth, a philosophical one,’ he said, resolutely repeating the word ‘philosophical’, as if wishing to show that he, too, had the right, like anyone else, to speak of philosophy.
Sergei Ivanovich smiled once more. ‘And he, too, has some sort of philosophy of his own to serve his inclinations,’ he thought.
‘Well, you should leave philosophy alone,’ he said. ‘The chief task of philosophy in all ages has consisted precisely in finding the connection that necessarily exists between personal and common interests. But that is not the point, the point is that I must correct your comparison. The birches are not stuck in, they are planted or seeded, and they ought to be carefully tended. Only those nations have a future, only those nations can be called historical, that have a sense of what is important and significant in their institutions, and value them.’
And Sergei Ivanovich transferred the question to the philosophical–historical realm, inaccessible to Konstantin Levin, and showed him all the incorrectness of his view.
‘As regards your not liking it, forgive me, but that is our Russian laziness and grand manner, and I’m sure that with you it’s a temporary error and will pass.’
Konstantin was silent. He felt himself roundly beaten, but together with that he felt that his brother had not understood what he had wanted to say. Only he did not know why he had not understood: whether it was because he had not been able to say clearly what he meant, or because his brother had been unwilling or unable to understand him. But he did not go deeper into these thoughts and, without objecting to his brother, began thinking about a completely different matter, a personal one for him.
Sergei Ivanovich reeled in the last line, Konstantin untied the horse, and they drove off.
IV