Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Three/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
Sergyeï Ivanovitch Koznuishef wanted a rest after his intellectual labors; and, instead of going abroad as usual, he came, toward the end of May, to visit his brother in the country. In his opinion, country life was best of all, and he came now to his brother's to enjoy it. Konstantin Levin was very glad to welcome him, the more because this summer he did not expect his brother Nikolaï. But in spite of his love and respect for Sergyeï Ivanovitch, Konstantin was not at his ease with him in the country. He was not at his ease, he was even annoyed to see how his brother regarded the country. For Konstantin Levin the country was the place for life,—for pleasures, sorrows, labor. For Sergyeï Ivanovitch the country, on the one side, offered rest from labor, on the other, a profitable antidote against corruption, and he took it gladly, convinced of its utility. For Konstantin Levin the country was beautiful because it offered field for works of incontestable utility. For Sergyeï Ivanovitch the country was especially delightful because there was nothing he could do, or needed to do there, at all.
Moreover, Sergyeï Ivanovitch's behavior toward the people somewhat piqued Konstantin. Sergyeï Ivanovitch said that he loved and knew the people; and he often chatted with the muzhiks as he was fully able to do, without pretense and without affectation, and discovered, in his interviews with them, traits of character honorable to the people, so that he felt convinced that he knew them thoroughly. Such relations with the people displeased Konstantin Levin. For him the peasantry was only the chief factor in associated labor; and though he respected the muzhik, and, as he himself said, drew in with the milk of the woman who nursed him a genuine love for them, still he, as a factor associated with them in the general labors, while sometimes admiring their strength, their good nature, their sense of justice, very often when in the general work of the estate other qualities were needed, flew into a passion with the peasantry for their carelessness, slovenliness, drunkenness, untruthfulness. If he had been asked whether he liked the people, he would really have not known what reply to make. He liked and he did not like the people as the majority of men did. Of course as a good man he liked men more than he disliked them; and so it was with the peasantry. But to like or not to like the peasantry, as something out of the common, was an impossibility to him, because he not only lived with the peasantry, because not only were his interests bound up with those of the peasantry, but also he looked on himself as a part of the people, saw no qualities or faults in the people that he did not himself possess, and could not take his stand contrary to the people. Moreover, although he had long lived in the closest relationship with his muzhiks as their landlord, their mediator, and, what was more, their adviser,—for the muzhiks had faith in him, and came to him from forty versts around to ask his advice,—he passed no definite judgment on them; and to the question, did he know the people, he would have found it as hard to find an answer as to the question, did he like the people.
But to say that he knew the peasantry would have meant in his opinion the same as to say that he knew men. He was constantly admiring and studying all kinds of men, and among them, men from among the peasantry whom he considered to be fine and interesting specimens of humanity, and he was all the time discovering in them new characteristics, and changing and revising his preconceived theories regarding them.
Sergyeï Ivanovitch was the opposite. Just exactly as he liked and enjoyed the country life for its contrariety to that which he did not like, so he liked the peasantry for their contrariety to that class of men which he did not like, and in exactly the same way he knew the people as beings opposed to men in general. His methodical mind clearly differentiated the definite forms of life among the peasantry, deducing it partly from the life of the peasantry itself, but principally from its contrarieties. He never changed his opinions in regard to the people and his sympathetic relationship to them.
In the discussions which arose between the brothers in consequence of their divergence of views, Sergyeï Ivanovitch always won the victory because he had definite opinions concerning the people, their character, peculiarities, and tastes; while Konstantin Levin, ceaselessly modifying his, was easily convicted of contradicting himself.
Sergyeï Ivanovitch looked on his brother as a splendid fellow, whose heart was bien placé, as he expressed it in French, but whose mind, though quick and active, was open to the impressions of the moment, and, therefore, full of contradictions. With the condescension of an elder brother, he sometimes explained to him the real meaning of things; but he could not take genuine pleasure in discussing with him, because his opponent was so easy to vanquish.
Konstantin Levin looked on his brother as a man of vast intelligence and learning, endowed with extraordinary faculties, most advantageous to the community at large; but as he advanced in life, and learned to know him better, he sometimes asked himself, in the secret chambers of his heart, if this devotion to the general interests, which he felt that he himself entirely lacked, was really a good quality, or rather a lack of something—not a lack of good-natured, upright, benevolent wishes and tastes, but the lack of the motive power of life, which is called "heart," of that impulse which constrains a man to choose one out of all multitudes of paths which life offers to men, and to desire this alone. The better he knew his brother, the more he remarked that Sergyeï Ivanovitch and many other workers for the common good were mot drawn by their affections to this work, but that they used their reason to justify themselves in the interest they took in it.
Levin was still further confirmed in this hypothesis by the observation that his brother did not really take much more to heart the questions concerning the common good and the immortality of the soul than those connected with a game of chess or the ingenious construction of a new machine.
Again Levin felt, also, constraint with his brother from the fact that while he was in the country, and especially in the summer-time, he was all the time busy with his work on the estate. The days seemed to him too short for him to accomplish all that he wanted to do, while his brother was taking his ease. But, though Sergyeï Ivanovitch was enjoying his vacation, in other words, was not working at his writing, he was so used to intellectual activity, that he enjoyed expressing in beautiful, concise form the thoughts that occurred to him, and he liked to have some one listen to him. His most habitual and most natural auditor was his brother, and therefore, notwithstanding the friendly simplicity of their relations, Konstantin felt awkward to be alone with him. Sergyeï Ivanovitch liked to lie on the grass, in the sun, stretched out at full length, and to talk lazily.
"You would n't believe," he would say to his brother, "how I enjoy this tufted idleness. I have not an idea in my head; it is empty as a shell."
But Konstantin Levin quickly wearied of sitting down and hearing him talk—especially because he knew that in his absence they were spreading the manure on the unplowed field, and would be up to God knows what mischief, unless he should be on hand to superintend this work; he knew that they would not screw up the cutters in his plows, but would be taking them off and then say that plows were foolish devices, and that Andreyef's sokha [1] did the work, and the like.
"Don't you ever get weary going about so in this heat?" asked Sergyeï Ivanovitch.
"No. Only I must run over to the office for a minute," said Levin; and he hurried across the field.
- ↑ The picture by Repin represents Count Tolstoi plowing with the primitive sokha. Levin's peasantry call the plow (plug) vuidumka pustaya, "empty invention."