Leo Tolstoy
Page 117
After the rain it was too wet to go for a walk; besides, the storm clouds never left the horizon and, now here, now there, passed thundering and black across the edges of the sky. The whole company spent the rest of the day at home.
No more arguments started, and, on the contrary, after dinner everyone was in the best of spirits.
Katavasov first made the ladies laugh with his original jokes, which people always liked so much on first making his acquaintance, but then, prompted by Sergei Ivanovich, he told them his very interesting observations on the differences of character and even of physiognomy between female and male house flies and on their life. Sergei Ivanovich was also merry and over tea, prompted by his brother, expounded his view of the future of the Eastern question,[14] so simply and well that everyone listened with delight.
Only Kitty could not listen to the end. She was called to bathe Mitya.
A few minutes after Kitty had left, Levin, too, was called to her in the nursery.
Leaving his tea, and also regretting the interruption of the interesting conversation, and at the same time worrying about why he had been called, since that happened only on important occasions, Levin went to the nursery.
In spite of his great interest in Sergei Ivanovich’s plan – something completely new to him and which he had not heard to the end – for how the liberated forty millions of the Slavic world, together with Russia, were to start a new epoch in history, and in spite of his curiosity and alarm about why he had been called, as soon as he left the drawing room and was alone he at once remembered his morning thoughts. And all those considerations about the meaning of the Slavic element in world history seemed so insignificant to him compared with what was happening in his soul that he instantly forgot it all and was transported into the same mood he had been in that morning.
He did not recall his whole train of thought now, as he had done before (he did not need to). He was immediately transported into the feeling that guided him, which was connected with those thoughts, and he found that feeling still stronger and more definite in his soul than before. What had happened to him before, when he had invented some reassurance and had had to restore the whole train of thought in order to recover the feeling, did not happen now. On the contrary, now the feeling of joy and reassurance was all the more alive, and his thought could not keep up with it.
He walked across the terrace and looked at two stars appearing in the already darkening sky, and suddenly remembered: ‘Yes, when I was looking at the sky and thinking that the vault I see is not an untruth, there was something I didn’t think through, something I hid from myself,’ he thought. ‘But whatever it was, there can be no objection. I only have to think and everything will be explained!’
As he was going into the nursery, he remembered what he had hidden from himself. It was that if the main proof of the Deity is His revelation of what is good, then why was this revelation limited to the Christian Church alone? What relation did the beliefs of the Buddhists, the Mohammedans, who also confess and do good, have to that revelation?
It seemed to him that he had the answer to that question, but before he had time to formulate it for himself, he was already in the nursery.
Kitty was standing with her sleeves rolled up beside the tub with the baby splashing in it and, hearing her husband’s steps, turned her face to him and called him with her smile. With one hand she supported the head of the plump baby, who was floating on his back, his little legs squirming, and with the other, smoothly tensing her muscles, she squeezed out a sponge over him.
‘Look, look here!’ she said, when her husband came up to her. ‘Agafya Mikhailovna’s right. He recognizes us.’
The thing was that Mitya, that day, obviously, unquestionably, had begun to recognize all his own people.
As soon as Levin came up to the bath, an experiment was performed for him, and it succeeded perfectly. The scullery maid, invited for the purpose, took Kitty’s place and bent over the baby. He frowned and wagged his head negatively. Kitty bent over him and he lit up with a smile, put his hands to the sponge and bubbled with his lips, producing such a pleased and strange sound that not only Kitty and the nanny but Levin, too, went into unexpected raptures.
The baby was taken out of the tub with one hand, doused with water, wrapped in a sheet, dried off and, after a piercing shout, handed to his mother.
‘Well, I’m glad you’re beginning to love him,’ Kitty said to her husband, after settling calmly in her usual place with the baby at her breast. ‘I’m very glad. Because it was beginning to upset me. You said you felt nothing for him.’
‘No, did I say I felt nothing? I only said I was disappointed.’
‘What, disappointed in him?’
‘Not in him but in my own feeling. I expected more. I expected that a new, pleasant feeling would blossom in me like a surprise. And suddenly, instead of that, there was squeamishness, pity …’
She listened to him attentively over the baby, replacing on her slender fingers the rings she had taken off in order to wash Mitya.
‘And, above all, there’s much more fear and pity than pleasure. Today, after that fear during the thunderstorm, I realized how much I love him.’ Kitty smiled radiantly.
‘Were you very frightened?’ she said. ‘I was, too, but I’m more afraid now that it’s past. I’ll go and look at the oak. And how nice Katavasov is! And generally the whole day was so pleasant. And you’re so good with Sergei Ivanovich when you want to be … Well, go to them. It’s always so hot and steamy here after the bath …’
XIX
Leaving the nursery and finding himself alone, Levin at once remembered that thought in which there was something unclear.
Instead of going to the drawing room, where voices could be heard, he stopped on the terrace and, leaning on the rail, began looking at the sky.
It was already quite dark, and in the south, where he was looking, there were no clouds. The clouds stood on the opposite side. From there came flashes of lightning and the roll of distant thunder. Levin listened to the drops monotonously dripping from the lindens in the garden and looked at the familiar triangle of stars and the branching Milky Way passing through it. At each flash of lightning not only the Milky Way but the bright stars also disappeared, but as soon as the lightning died out they reappeared in the same places, as if thrown by some unerring hand.
‘Well, what is it that disturbs me?’ Levin said to himself, feeling beforehand that the resolution of his doubts, though he did not know it yet, was already prepared in his soul.
‘Yes, the one obvious, unquestionable manifestation of the Deity is the laws of the good disclosed to the world by revelation, which I feel in myself, and by acknowledging which I do not so much unite myself as I am united, whether I will or no, with others in one community of believers which is called the Church. Well, but the Jews, the Mohammedans, the Confucians, the Buddhists –what are they?’ He asked himself the same question that had seemed dangerous to him. ‘Can these hundreds of millions of people be deprived of the highest good, without which life has no meaning?’ He pondered, but at once corrected himself. ‘What am I asking?’ he said to himself. ‘I’m asking about the relation to the Deity of all the various faiths of mankind. I’m asking about the general manifestation of God to the whole world with all these nebulae. What am I doing? To me personally, to my heart, unquestionable knowledge is revealed, inconceivable to reason, and I stubbornly want to express this knowledge by means of reason and words.
‘Don’t I know that the stars don’t move?’ he asked himself, looking at a bright planet that had already changed its position over the topmost branch of a birch. ‘Yet, looking at the movement of the stars, I cannot picture to myself the turning of the earth, and I’m right in saying that the stars move.
‘And would the astronomers be able to understand or calculate anything, if they took into account all the various complex movements of the earth? All their astonishing conclusions about the distances, weights, move
ments and disturbances of the heavenly bodies are based solely on the visible movement of the luminaries around the fixed earth, on that very movement which is now before me, which has been that way for millions of people throughout the ages, and has been and will always be the same and can always be verified. And just as the conclusions of astronomers that were not based on observations of the visible sky in relation to the same meridian and the same horizon would be idle and lame, so my conclusions would be idle and lame if they were not based on that understanding of the good which always has been and will be the same for everyone, and which is revealed to me by Christianity and can always be verified in my soul. And I don’t have the right or possibility of resolving the question of other beliefs and their attitude to the Deity.’
‘Ah, you haven’t gone?’ the voice of Kitty suddenly said. She was walking the same way towards the drawing room. ‘What, are you upset about something?’ she said, studying his face attentively by the light of the stars.
But she would still have been unable to see his face if lightning, again hiding the stars, had not lit it up. By its light she made out his face and, seeing that he was calm and joyful, she smiled at him.
‘She understands,’ he thought. ‘She knows what I’m thinking about. Shall I tell her or not? Yes, I’ll tell her.’ But just as he was about to begin speaking, she also started to speak.
‘Listen, Kostya, do me a favour,’ she said. ‘Go to the corner room and see how they’ve arranged everything for Sergei Ivanovich. I’m embarrassed to. Did they put in the new washstand?’
‘Very well, I’ll make sure,’ said Levin, getting up and kissing her.
‘No, I won’t tell her,’ he thought, as she walked on ahead of him. ‘It’s a secret that’s necessary and important for me alone and inexpressible in words.
‘This new feeling hasn’t changed me, hasn’t made me happy or suddenly enlightened, as I dreamed – just like the feeling for my son. Nor was there any surprise. And faith or not faith –I don’t know what it is – but this feeling has entered into me just as imperceptibly through suffering and has firmly lodged itself in my soul.
‘I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray – but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!’
The End
Notes
The following notes are indebted to the commentaries in the twenty–two–volume edition of Tolstoy’s works published by Khudozhestvennaya Literatura (Volumes VIII and IX, Moscow, 1981–2) and to Vladimir Nabokov’s notes to Part One of Anna Karenina, in Lectures on Russian Literature (London and New York, 1981). Biblical quotations, unless otherwise specified, are from the King James version.
Epigraph
Romans 12:19. St Paul refers to Deuteronomy 32:35: ‘To me belongeth vengeance, and recompence.’
Part One
1 Il mio tesoro: Probably the aria ‘Il mio tesoro’ sung by Don Ottavio in Act II, scene ii of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
2 physiology: Reflexes of the Brain, by I. M. Sechenov (1829–1905), was published in 1863. There was widespread interest at the time in materialistic physiology, even among those who knew of it only by hearsay.
3. newspaper: Stepan Arkadyich probably reads The Voice, edited by A. Kraevsky, the preferred newspaper of liberal functionaries, known as ‘the barometer of public opinion’, or possibly, as Nabokov suggests, the mildly liberal Russian Gazette.
4 Rurik: Chief (d. 879) of the Scandinavian rovers known as Varangians, he founded the principality of Novgorod at the invitation of the local populace, thus becoming the ancestor of the oldest Russian nobility. The dynasty of Rurik ruled from 862 to 1598; it was succeeded by the Romanovs.
5 Bentham and Mill: Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), English philosopher and jurist, founded the English utilitarian school of philosophy. John Stuart Mill (1806–73), philosopher and economist of the experimental school, was the author of the influential Principles of Political Economy, published in 1848.
6 Count Ferdinand von Beust: (1809–86), prime minister of Saxony and later chancellor of the Austro–Hungarian empire, a political opponent of Bismarck, he was frequently mentioned in the press. Wiesbaden, capital of the German province of Hesse, was famous for its hot springs. Von Beust visited Wiesbaden in February 1872 (see Nabokov’s extensive note).
7 kalatch: A very fine white yeast bread shaped like a purse with a handle; pl. kalatchi.
8 zertsalo: A three–faced glass pyramid bearing an eagle and certain edicts of the emperor Peter the Great (1682–1725) which stood on the desk in every government office.
9 kammerjunker: The German title (‘gentleman of the bed–chamber’) was adopted by the Russian imperial court.
10 zemstvo: An elective provincial council for purposes of local administration, established in Russia in 1865 by the emperor Alexander II (1818–81).
11 his opinion: Levin expresses a widely shared opinion of the time, that zemstvo activists commonly abused their position in order to make money.
12 psychological and physiological phenomena: In 1872–3 there was a heated debate in the magazine The Messenger of Europe about the relations between psychological and physiological phenomena, one side saying there was no known connection (but possibly a ‘parallelism’) between the two, the other that all psychic acts are reflexes subject to physiological study. Tolstoy, like Levin, took his distance from both sides.
13 origin of man: In the early 1870s works by Charles Darwin (1809–82) were published in Russian and his theories of natural selection and the descent of man from the animals were discussed in all Russian magazines and newspapers.
14 Wurst, Knaust, Pripasov: Tolstoy invented these names for comic and parodic effect; they mean, respectively, ‘sausage’, ‘stingy’ and ‘provisions’.
15 leaning on chairs: Chairs on runners were provided for beginners and occasionally for ladies to hold on to or be pushed around in.
16 Tartars: One of the ‘racial minorities’ of the Russian empire, they are a people originally native to Central Asia east of the Caspian Sea. Tolstoy seems to have no special intention in having them work as waiters in the Hotel Anglia (an actual hotel of the time, located on Petrovka, which enjoyed a dubious reputation as a place for aristocratic assignations).
17 shchi: Cabbage soup, and kasha, a sort of thick gruel made from various grains, most typically buckwheat groats, are the two staple foods of Russian peasants.
18 Levins are wild: In a letter to his aunt Alexandra A. Tolstoy (1817–1904), his elder by only ten years, Tolstoy spoke of the ‘Tolstoyan wildness’ characteristic of ‘all the Tolstoys’, meaning originality of behaviour and freedom from conventional rules. She in turn used to call him ‘roaring Leo’.
19 ’Bold steeds …’: Oblonsky quotes (imprecisely) the poem ‘From Anacreon’(1835), by Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). Later he will quote it, again imprecisely, in a conversation with Vronsky.
20 ‘with disgust reading over my life …’: Levin now quotes Pushkin’s poem ‘Remembrance’ (1828), one of Tolstoy’s own favourites.
21 ’Himmlisch ist’s …’: ‘Heavenly it would be to conquer/My earthly lusts;/But though I’ve not succeeded,/I still have lots of pleasure’ – a stanza from the libretto of Die Fledermaus, an operetta with music by Johann Strauss (1825–99).
22 lovely fallen creatures: The words are a paraphrase from a speech by Walsingham in Pushkin’s ‘little tragedy’ The Feast During the Plague (1830).
23 words … misused They are referring to Luke 7:47: ‘Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven;
for she loved much’ – a passage often quoted out of context as a justification for loose behaviour.