Leo Tolstoy

by Anna Karenina (tr Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky) (Penguin Classics) (epub)

  Whether he was acting well or badly he did not know, and not only would not start proving it now but even avoided talking or thinking about it.

  Reasoning led him into doubt and kept him from seeing what he should and should not do. Yet when he did not think, but lived, he constantly felt in his soul the presence of an infallible judge who decided which of two possible actions was better and which was worse; and whenever he did not act as he should, he felt it at once.

  So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any possibility of knowing what he was and why he was living in the world, tormented by this ignorance to such a degree that he feared suicide, and at the same time firmly laying down his own particular, definite path in life.

  XI

  The day Sergei Ivanovich arrived at Pokrovskoe was one of Levin’s most tormenting days.

  It was the most pressing work time, when all the peasants show such an extraordinary effort of self–sacrifice in their labour as is not shown in any other conditions of life, and which would be highly valued if the people who show this quality valued it themselves, if it were not repeated every year, and if the results of this effort were not so simple.

  To mow and reap rye and oats and cart them, to mow out the meadows, to cross–plough the fallow land, to thresh the seed and sow the winter crops – it all seems simple and ordinary; but to manage to get it all done, it was necessary that all the village people, from oldest to youngest, work ceaselessly during those three or four weeks, three times more than usual, living on kvass, onions and black bread, threshing and transporting the sheaves by night and giving no more than two or three hours a day to sleep. And every year this was done all over Russia.

  Having lived the major part of his life in the country and in close relations with the peasantry, Levin always felt during the work period that this general peasant excitement communicated itself to him as well.

  In the morning he went to the first sowing of the rye, then to the oats, which he helped to cart and stack. Returning by the time his wife and sister–in–law got up, he had coffee with them and left on foot for the farmstead, where they had to start the newly set–up threshing machine for preparing the seed.

  That whole day, talking with the steward and the muzhiks, and at home talking with his wife, with Dolly, with her children, with his father–in–law, Levin thought about the one and only thing that occupied him during this time, apart from farm cares, and sought in everything a link to his questions: ‘What am I? And where am I? And why am I here?’

  Standing in the cool of the newly covered threshing barn, with fragrant leaves still clinging to the hazel rods pressed to the freshly peeled aspen rafters of the thatched roof, Levin gazed now through the open doorway in which the dry and bitter dust of the threshing hovered and sparkled, at the grass of the threshing floor lit by the hot sun and the fresh straw just taken from the barn, now at the white–breasted swallows with multi–coloured heads that flew peeping under the roof and, fluttering their wings, paused in the opening of the door, now at the people pottering about in the dark and dusty threshing barn, and thought strange thoughts.

  ‘Why is all this being done?’ he thought. ‘What am I standing here and making them work for? Why are they all bustling about and trying to show me their zeal? Why is this old woman toiling so? (I know her, she’s Matryona, I treated her when a beam fell on her during a fire),’ he thought, looking at a thin woman who, as she moved the grain with a rake, stepped tensely with her black–tanned bare feet over the hard, uneven threshing floor. ‘That time she recovered; but today or tomorrow or in ten years they’ll bury her and nothing will be left of her, nor of that saucy one in the red skirt who is beating the grain from the chaff with such a deft and tender movement. She’ll be buried, too, and so will this piebald gelding – very soon,’ he thought, looking at the heavy–bellied horse, breathing rapidly through flared nostrils, that was treading the slanted wheel as it kept escaping from under him. ‘He’ll be buried, and Fyodor, the feeder, with his curly beard full of chaff and the shirt torn on his white shoulder, will also be buried. And now he’s ripping the sheaves open, and giving orders, and yelling at the women, and straightening the belt on the flywheel with a quick movement. And above all, not only they, but I, too, will be buried and nothing will be left. What for?’

  He thought that and at the same time looked at his watch to calculate how much had been threshed in an hour. He had to know that in order to set the day’s quota by it.

  ‘It will soon be an hour, and they’ve only just started on the third stack,’ Levin thought, went over to the feeder and, shouting above the noise of the machine, told him to feed more slowly.

  ‘You stuff in too much, Fyodor! See – it gets choked, that’s why it’s slow. Even it out!’

  Blackened by the dust sticking to his sweaty face, Fyodor shouted something in reply, but went on doing it not as Levin wanted.

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

  Working till the muzhiks’ dinner–time, which was not far off, he left the threshing barn together with the feeder and got into conversation with him, stopping by a neat yellow brick of harvested rye stacked on the seed–threshing floor.

  The feeder came from a distant village, the one where Levin used to lease land on collective principles. Now it was leased to an innkeeper.

  Levin got into conversation about that land with Fyodor and asked whether Platon, a wealthy and good muzhik from the same village, might rent it next year.

  ‘The price is too dear, Platon wouldn’t make enough, Konstantin Dmitrich,’ said the muzhik, picking ears of rye from under his sweaty shirt.

  ‘Then how does Kirillov make it pay?’

  ‘Mityukha’ (so the muzhik scornfully called the innkeeper) ‘makes it pay right enough, Konstantin Dmitrich! He pushes till he gets his own. He takes no pity on a peasant. But Uncle Fokanych’ (so he called old Platon), ‘he won’t skin a man. He lends to you, he lets you off. So he comes out short. He’s a man, too.’

  ‘But why should he let anyone off ?’

  ‘Well, that’s how it is – people are different. One man just lives for his own needs, take Mityukha even, just stuffs his belly, but Fokanych – he’s an upright old man. He lives for the soul. He remembers God.’

  ‘How’s that? Remembers God? Lives for the soul?’ Levin almost shouted.

  ‘Everybody knows how – by the truth, by God’s way. People are different. Now, take you even, you wouldn’t offend anybody either …’

  ‘Yes, yes, goodbye!’ said Levin, breathless with excitement, and, turning, he took his stick and quickly walked off towards home.

  A new, joyful feeling came over him. At the muzhik’s words about Fokanych living for the soul, by the truth, by God’s way, it was as if a host of vague but important thoughts burst from some locked–up place and, all rushing towards the same goal, whirled through his head, blinding him with their light.

  XII

  Levin went in big strides along the main road, listening not so much to his thoughts (he still could not sort them out) as to the state of his soul, which he had never experienced before.

  The words spoken by the muzhik had the effect of an electric spark in his soul, suddenly transforming and uniting into one the whole swarm of disjointed, impotent, separate thoughts which had never ceased to occupy him. These thoughts, imperceptibly to himself, had occupied him all the while he had been talking about leasing the land.

  He felt something new in his soul and delightedly probed this new thing, not yet knowing what it was.

  ‘To live not for one’s own needs but for God. For what God? For God. And could anything more meaningless be said than what he said? He said one should not live for one’s needs – that is, one should not live for what we understand, for what we’re drawn to, for what we want –but for something incomprehensible, for God, whom no one can either comprehend or define. And what then? Didn’t I understand those meaningless words of Fyodor’
s? And having understood, did I doubt their Tightness? Did I find them stupid, vague, imprecise?

  ‘No, I understood him, and in absolutely the same way that he understands, I understood fully and more clearly than I understand anything else in life, and never in my life have I doubted or could I doubt it. And not I alone, but everybody, the whole world, fully understands this one thing, and this one thing they do not doubt and always agree upon.

  ‘Fyodor says that Kirillov the innkeeper lives for his belly. That is clear and reasonable. None of us, as reasonable beings, can live otherwise than for our belly. And suddenly the same Fyodor says it’s bad to live for the belly and that one should live for the truth, for God, and I understand him from a hint! And I and millions of people who lived ages ago and are living now, muzhiks, the poor in spirit, and the wise men who have thought and written about it, saying the same thing in their vague language – we’re all agreed on this one thing: what we should live for and what is good. I and all people have only one firm, unquestionable and clear knowledge, and this knowledge cannot be explained by reason – it is outside it, and has no causes, and can have no consequences.

  ‘If the good has a cause, it is no longer the good; if it has a consequence – a reward – it is also not the good. Therefore the good is outside the chain of cause and effect.

  ‘And I know it, and we all know it.

  ‘But I looked for miracles, I was sorry that I’d never seen a miracle that would convince me. And here it is, the only possible miracle, ever existing, surrounding me on all sides, and I never noticed it!

  ‘What miracle can be greater than that?

  ‘Is it possible that I’ve found the solution to everything, is it possible that my sufferings are now over?’ thought Levin, striding along the dusty road, noticing neither heat nor fatigue, and experiencing a feeling of relief after long suffering. This feeling was so joyful that it seemed incredible to him. He was breathless with excitement and, unable to walk any further, went off the road into the woods and sat down on the unmowed grass in the shade of the aspens. He took the hat from his sweaty head and lay down, propping himself on his elbow in the succulent, broad–bladed forest grass.

  ‘Yes, I must collect myself and think it over,’ he thought, looking intently at the untrampled grass before him and following the movements of a little green bug that was climbing a stalk of couch–grass and was blocked in its ascent by a leaf of angelica. ‘From the very beginning,’ he said to himself, holding back the leaf of angelica so that it no longer hindered the bug and bending down some other plant so that the bug could get over on to it. ‘What makes me so glad? What have I discovered?

  ‘I used to say that in my body, in the body of this plant and of this bug (it didn’t want to go over to that plant, it spread its wings and flew away), an exchange of matter takes place according to physical, chemical and physiological laws. And that in all of us, along with the aspens, and the clouds, and the nebulae, development goes on. Development out of what? Into what? An infinite development and struggle? … As if there can be any direction or struggle in infinity! And I was astonished that in spite of the greatest efforts of my thinking along that line, the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses and yearnings, was still not revealed to me. Yet the meaning of my impulses is so clear to me that I constantly live by it, and was amazed and glad when a muzhik voiced it for me: to live for God, for the soul.

  ‘I haven’t discovered anything. I’ve only found out what I know. I’ve understood that power which not only gave me life in the past but is giving me life now. I am freed from deception, I have found the master.’

  And he briefly repeated to himself the whole train of his thought during those last two years, the beginning of which was the clear, obvious thought of death at the sight of his beloved, hopelessly ill brother.

  Understanding clearly then for the first time that for every man and for himself nothing lay ahead but suffering, death and eternal oblivion, he decided that it was impossible to live that way, that he had either to explain his life so that it did not look like the wicked mockery of some devil, or shoot himself.

  But he had done neither the one nor the other, and had gone on living, thinking and feeling, and had even married at that same time and experienced much joy, and was happy whenever he did not think about the meaning of his life.

  What did it mean? It meant that his life was good, but his thinking was bad.

  He lived (without being aware of it) by those spiritual truths that he had drunk in with his mother’s milk, yet he thought not only without admitting those truths but carefully avoiding them.

  Now it was clear to him that he was able to live only thanks to the beliefs in which he had been brought up.

  ‘What would I be and how would I live my life, if I did not have those beliefs, did not know that one should live for God and not for one’s needs? I would rob, lie, kill. Nothing of what constitutes the main joys of my life would exist for me.’ And, making the greatest efforts of imagination, he was still unable to imagine the beastly being that he himself would be if he did not know what he lived for.

  ‘I sought an answer to my question. But the answer to my question could not come from thought, which is incommensurable with the question. The answer was given by life itself, in my knowledge of what is good and what is bad. And I did not acquire that knowledge through anything, it was given to me as it is to everyone, given because I could not take it from anywhere.

  ‘Where did I take it from? Was it through reason that I arrived at the necessity of loving my neighbour and not throttling him? I was told it as a child, and I joyfully believed it, because they told me what was in my soul. And who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence and the law which demands that everyone who hinders the satisfaction of my desires should be throttled. That is the conclusion of reason. Reason could not discover love for the other, because it’s unreasonable.

  ‘Yes, pride,’ he said to himself, rolling over on his stomach and beginning to tie stalks of grass into a knot, trying not to break them.

  ‘And not only the pride of reason, but the stupidity of reason. And, above all – the slyness, precisely the slyness, of reason. Precisely the swindling of reason,’ he repeated.

  XIII

  And Levin remembered a recent scene with Dolly and her children. The children, left alone, started roasting raspberries over the candles and squirting streams of milk into their mouths. Their mother, catching them at it, tried to impress upon them, in Levin’s presence, how much work the things they destroyed had cost the grown–ups, and that this work had been done for them, and that if they started breaking cups they would have nothing to drink tea out of, and if they started spilling milk they would have nothing to eat and would die of hunger.

  And Levin was struck by the quiet, glum mistrust with which the children listened to their mother. They were merely upset that their amusing game had been stopped and did not believe a word of what she said to them. And they could not believe it, because they could not imagine the full scope of what they enjoyed and therefore could not imagine that they were destroying the very thing they lived by.

  ‘That all goes without saying,’ they thought, ‘and there’s nothing interesting or important about it, because it has always been so and always will be. And it’s always the same thing over and over. There’s no point in us thinking about it, it’s all ready–made. We’d like to think up some new little thing of our own. So we thought up putting raspberries in a cup and roasting them over a candle, and squirting milk in streams straight into each other’s mouths. It’s fun and new and no worse than drinking from cups.’

  ‘Don’t we do the same thing, didn’t I, when I sought the significance of the forces of nature and the meaning of human life with reason?’ he went on thinking.

  ‘And don’t all philosophical theories do the same thing, leading man by a way of thought that is strange and unnatural to him to the knowledge of what he has long know
n and known so certainly that without it he would not even be able to live? Is it not seen clearly in the development of each philosopher’s theory that he knows beforehand, as unquestionably as the muzhik Fyodor and no whit more clearly than he, the chief meaning of life, and only wants to return by a dubious mental path to what everybody knows?