Chapter 5

 

 

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IN the slanting shadow of a pile of sacks heaped up on the platform, Vronsky, in a long overcoat, his hat pulled down low and his hands in his pockets, was walking up and down like an animal in a cage, turning sharply every twenty paces. To Koznyshev as he approached it seemed that Vronsky saw but pretended not to see him. But Koznyshev did not care. He was above any personal considerations with Vronsky.

 

In his eyes Vronsky at that moment seemed an important worker in a great cause, and Koznyshev considered it his duty to encourage and cheer him. He went up to him.

 

Vronsky paused, looked at Koznyshev, recognized him, and advancing a few steps to meet him, pressed his hand very very hard.

 

‘Perhaps you did not wish to see me,’ said Koznyshev, ‘but can I not be of some use to you?’

 

‘There is no one whom it would be less unpleasant for me to meet than yourself,’ returned Vronsky. ‘Excuse me. There is nothing that is pleasant in life for me.’

 

‘I understand, and I wanted to offer you my services,’ said Koznyshev, gazing into Vronsky’s face, which bore evident signs of suffering. ‘Do you not want a letter to [Serbian Prime Minister] Ristich or to [Serbian Prince] Milan?’

 

‘Oh no!’ replied Vronsky, as if it cost him an effort to understand. ‘If you don’t mind, let us walk up and down. It is so stuffy in the carriage. A letter? No, thank you. No introductions are needed to enable one to die! Unless indeed to the Turks! . . .’ he added, smiling with his lips only. His eyes retained their expression of angry suffering.

 

‘Yes, but it may be easier for you to establish connections (which will be necessary anyway) with some one who has been prepared. However, as you please. I was very glad to hear of your decision. The Volunteers are being very much attacked and a man like yourself will raise them in public opinion.’

 

‘As a man I have this quality, that I do not value my life at all and that I have physical energy enough to hack my way into a square and slay or fall — that I am sure of. I am glad that there is something for which I can lay down the life which I not only do not want, but of which I am sick! It will be of use to somebody,’ and he moved his jaw impatiently because of the incessant gnawing pain in his tooth, which even prevented him from speaking with the expression he desired.

 

‘You will recover, I prophesy it,’ said Koznyshev, feeling touched. ‘To free one’s brothers from oppression is an aim worth both dying and living for. God grant you outward success and inward peace,’ he added, holding out his hand.

 

Vronsky grasped the hand warmly.

 

‘Yes, as a tool I may be of some use. But as a man I — am a ruin!’ said he, pausing between the words.

 

The acute pain in the strong tooth, filling his mouth with saliva, hindered his speaking. He remained silent, gazing at the wheels of the approaching tender, which was slowly and smoothly gliding over the rails.

 

Suddenly a quite different feeling, not of pain but of tormenting inward discomfort, made him for a moment forget his toothache. At the sight of the tender and the rails, and under the influence of conversation with some one he had not met since the catastrophe, he suddenly remembered her; that is, remembered what was left of her when, like a madman, he ran into the railway shed where on a table, stretched out shamelessly before the eyes of strangers, lay the mangled body still warm with recent life. The head, left intact, with its heavy plaits and the curls round the temples, was thrown back; and on the lovely face with its half-open red lips was frozen an expression — pitiful on the lips and horrible in the fixed open eyes — an expression which repeated, as if in words, the terrible phrase about his repenting it — which she had uttered during their quarrel.

 

He tried to remember her as she was when he had met her the first time — also at a railway station — mysterious, charming, loving, seeking and giving joy, and not cruelly vindictive as he remembered her at the last. He tried to recall his best moments with her, but they were for ever poisoned. He could think of her only as triumphant, having carried out the threat of inflicting on him totally useless but irrevocable remorse. He ceased to feel the pain in his tooth, and sobs distorted his face.

 

Having twice walked past the sacks and mastered himself, he turned calmly to Koznyshev:

 

‘You have not seen any telegram later than yesterday’s? Yes, they have been beaten a third time, but a decisive battle is expected to-morrow.’

 

And having spoken about the proposed proclamation of Milan as King and of the immense results this might have, they returned to their respective carriages after the second bell had already sounded.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 6

 

 

 

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AS he had not known when he would be able to leave Moscow, Koznyshev had not sent a telegram to his brother asking to be met at the station, and Levin was not at home when, toward noon, Katavasov and Koznyshev, dark as Arabs with the dust in the little tarantas they had hired at the station, drew up at the porch of the Pokrovsk house. Kitty, who was sitting on the balcony with her father and sister, recognized her brother-in-law and ran down to meet him.

 

‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for not letting us know?’ she said, holding out her hand to him and offering her forehead for a kiss.

 

‘We got here first-rate without troubling you,’ replied Koznyshev. ‘I am so dusty that I dare not touch you. I was so busy that I did not know when I could tear myself away. And you, as usual,’ said he, smiling, ‘are enjoying tranquil happiness outside the currents in your peaceful shallows. And here is our friend, Theodore Vasilyevich, who has come at last.’

 

‘But I am not a Negro! When I have had a wash I shall look like a human being!’ Katavasov said in his usual jesting way, holding out his hand and smiling, his teeth looking particularly bright in contrast with his black face.

 

‘Kostya will be so pleased! He has gone to the farm. It is time he was back.’

 

‘Always busy with his husbandry! “In the shallows” hits it exactly,’ remarked Katavasov. ‘And we in town can see nothing but the Serbian war! Well, and what does my friend think of it? Surely not the same as other people?’

 

‘Oh, nothing in particular — the same as everybody,’ Kitty answered, rather embarrassed and glancing round at Koznyshev. ‘Well, I’ll send for him. Papa is staying with us. He has not long returned from abroad.’

 

And having arranged that Levin should be sent for and that the dusty visitors should be shown where to wash — one of them in Levin’s study and the other in Dolly’s former room — and about lunch for them, Kitty, exercising the right of moving quickly of which she had been deprived during pregnancy, ran up the balcony stairs.

 

‘It’s Sergius Ivanich and Katavasov, the Professor,’ said she.

 

‘Oh, how trying in this heat!’ said the Prince.

 

‘No, Papa, he is very nice, and Kostya is very fond of him,’ Kitty replied with a smile as of entreaty, having noticed a sarcastic expression on her father’s face.

 

‘I don’t mind.’

 

‘You go and entertain them, dear,’ Kitty said to her sister. ‘They met Stiva at the station, he is quite well. And I will run to Mitya. As ill-luck will have it I have not fed him since breakfast. He will be awake now and is certainly screaming.’ And feeling the flow of milk, she went with rapid steps to the nursery.

 

It was not a mere guess — the bond between herself and the baby had not yet been severed — and she knew surely by the flow of milk within herself that he was wanting food.

 

She knew he was screaming before she reached the nursery. And so he was. She heard his voice and increased her speed. But the faster she went the louder he screamed. It was a fine healthy voice, only hungry and impatient.

 

‘Has he been screaming long, Nurse? Long?’ she asked hurriedly, sitting down and preparing to nurse the baby. ‘Be quick and give him to me! Oh, Nurse! How tiresome you are; come, you can tie up his cap afterwards!’

 

The baby was convulsed with hungry yells.

 

‘But one must, you know, ma’am,’ said Agatha Mikhaylovna, who was almost always in the nursery. ‘He must be properly tidied up! Goo! Goo!’ she cooed to him, paying no attention to the mother.

 

The nurse brought the baby to his mother, and Agatha Mikhaylovna followed behind, her face softened with tenderness.

 

‘He knows me, he does! It’s God’s truth, Catherine Alexandrovna, dear, he knows me!’ cried Agatha Mikhaylovna, raising her voice above the baby’s.

 

But Kitty did not listen. Her impatience was increasing with the baby’s.

 

As a result of their impatience matters were long in getting settled. The baby got hold in the wrong place and was angry.

 

At last, after desperate screaming and choking, matters went smoothly, and both mother and child felt calmed and were silent.

 

‘But he too, poor mite, is all in a perspiration,’ whispered Kitty, feeling him with her hand. ‘Why do you think he knows you?’ she added, moving her eyes so as to see the baby’s. They looked roguishly at her, she thought, from beneath his cap, which had slipped forward, and she watched the rhythmical rise and fall of his cheeks and the little hand with the rosy palm making circular movements.

 

‘It’s impossible! If he knew anyone it would be me,’ Kitty replied to Agatha Mikhaylovna’s statement, and smiled.

 

She smiled because, though she said it was impossible for him to know, she was sure in her heart that he not only knew Agatha Mikhaylovna, but that he knew and understood everything, even many things that no one else knew, and which she, his mother, had learnt to know and understand through him. For Agatha Mikhaylovna, for the nurse, for his grandfather and even for his father, Mitya was a living being requiring only material care; but for his mother he had already long been a moral being, with whom she had already had a long series of spiritual relations.

 

‘Well, wait till he wakes up and you will see for yourself. When I do like that, he quite brightens up, the dear! He brightens up like a sunny morning,’ said Agatha Mikhaylovna.

 

‘Well, all right, all right! We shall see,’ Kitty whispered. ‘But now go away, he is falling asleep.’

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 7

 

 

 

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AGATHA MIKHAYLOVNA went out on tiptoe; the nurse pulled down the blind, drove away the flies from under the muslin curtain of the cot and also a bumble-bee that was buzzing against the window-pane, and sat down, waving a birch branch above the mother and child.

 

‘Oh, the heat! the heat! . . . If God would only send a little rain!’ she said.

 

‘Yes, yes! Hush . . .’ was all Kitty answered as she sat softly rocking herself and tenderly pressing the little plump arm, which looked as if a thread had been tied round the wrist, and was still feebly waving while Mitya kept shutting and opening his eyes. This hand disturbed Kitty; she wanted to kiss it, but was afraid to do so lest she should wake her baby. At last the arm ceased waving and the eyes closed. Only now and then the baby, continuing his business, lifted his long curved lashes and looked at his mother with moist eyes that seemed black in the dim light. The nurse stopped waving the branch and began to doze. From upstairs was heard the roll of the Prince’s voice and of Katavasov’s laughter.

 

‘I expect they’ve got into conversation in my absence,’ thought Kitty, ‘but all the same it’s provoking that Kostya is away. I expect he has gone to the apiary again. Though I am sorry that he goes there so often, yet I am also glad of it. It is a distraction for him. He is more cheerful now than he was in spring. Then he was so gloomy, and suffered so much, that I was becoming alarmed about him. And how funny he is!’ she whispered with a smile.

 

She knew what was tormenting her husband. It was his want of faith. Although had she been asked whether she thought that if he did not believe in the future life he would perish, she would have had to acknowledge that he would, yet his lack of faith did not make her unhappy; and she, who accepted the doctrine that salvation was impossible for an unbeliever, while loving her husband’s soul more than anything in the world, smiled when she thought of his disbelief and called him funny.

 

‘Why has he been reading those philosophies for a whole year?’ she thought. ‘If it’s all written in those books, he can understand it. If what they say is untrue, why read them? He says himself that he would like to believe. Then why does he not believe? It must be because he thinks too much. And he thinks too much because of his solitude. He is always alone, alone. He can’t talk to us about everything. I think he will be glad of these visitors, especially of Katavasov. He likes arguing with them,’ she reflected, and then turned her mind to the problem of where she had better arrange for Katavasov to sleep — in a separate room or with Koznyshev? And here a thought suddenly struck her which made her start with excitement and even disturb Mitya, who gave her a severe look in consequence. ‘I don’t think the laundress has brought the things back and the spare sheets are all in use. If I don’t see to it, Agatha Mikhaylovna will give Sergius Ivanich used bed-linen!’ and the very thought of this sent the blood into 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, something spiritual, that she had not yet thought out and tried to recollect what it was. ‘Oh yes! Kostya is an unbeliever,’ she thought again with a smile.

 

‘Well, he is an unbeliever! Better let him be that, than be like Madame Stahl, or like what I wanted to be when I was abroad. No, he will never pretend.’

 

Then a recent proof of his kindness came vividly to her mind. Two weeks before, Dolly had received a penitent letter from her husband. He implored her to save his honour and to sell her estate to pay his debts. Dolly was in despair; she hated her husband, despised him, pitied him, made up her mind to divorce him and to refuse; but ended by consenting to sell part of her estate. With an involuntary smile of emotion, Kitty remembered her own husband’s shamefacedness after that, and his repeated awkward attempts to approach the subject he had on his mind, and how at length, having discovered the only way of helping Dolly without offending her, he suggested to Kitty that she should give her sister her own part of the estate, a device that had not occurred to her.

 

‘How can he be an unbeliever with such a heart? And his dread of hurting anybody’s feelings, even a child’s! Everything for others, nothing for himself! Sergius Ivanich quite regards it as Kostya’s duty to act as his steward, and so does his sister. And now Dolly and her children are his wards! And then there are all those peasants who come to him every day as if it were his business to help them.

 

‘Yes, only be like your father, only be like him!’ she whispered, giving Mitya to the nurse, and touching his cheek with her lips.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 8

 

 

 

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SINCE the moment when, at the sight of his beloved and dying brother, Levin for the first time looked at the questions of life and death in the light of the 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 less horrified by death than by life without the least knowledge of whence it came, what it is for, why, and what it is. Organisms, their destruction, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, development — the terms that had superseded these beliefs — were very useful for mental purposes; but they gave no guidance for life, and Levin suddenly felt like a person who has exchanged a thick fur coat for a muslin garment and who, being out in the frost for the first time, becomes clearly convinced, not by arguments, but with the whole of his being, that he is as good as naked and that he must inevitably perish miserably.

 

From that moment, without thinking about it and though he continued living as he had done heretofore, Levin never ceased to feel afraid of his ignorance.

 

Moreover, he was vaguely conscious that what he had called his convictions were really ignorance and, more than that, were a state of mind which rendered knowledge of what he needed impossible.

 

At the commencement of his married life the new joys and new duties he experienced completely stifled these thoughts; but lately, since his wife’s confinement, while living in Moscow without any occupation, the problem demanding solution had presented itself more and more insistently to him.

 

For him the problem was this: ‘If I don’t accept the replies offered by Christianity to the questions my life presents, what solutions do I accept?’ And he not only failed to find in the whole arsenal of his convictions any kind of answer, but he could not even find anything resembling an answer.

 

He was in the position of a man seeking for food in a toyshop or at a gunsmith’s.

 

Involuntarily and unconsciously, in every book, in every conversation, and in every person he met, he now sought for their relation to those questions and for a solution to them.

 

What astounded and upset him most in this connection, was that the majority of those in his set and of his age, having like himself replaced their former beliefs by new convictions like his own, did not see anything to be distressed about, and were quite contented and tranquil. So that, besides the principal question, Levin was tormented by other questions: Were these people sincere? Were they not pretending? Or did they understand, possibly in some different and clearer way than he, the answers science gives to the questions he was concerned with? And he studied painstakingly both the opinions of those people and the books which contained their answers.

 

One thing he had discovered since these questions had begun to occupy him, namely, that he had been mistaken in imagining from his recollections of his youthful university circle, that religion had outlived its day and no longer existed. All those near to him who lived good lives were people who believed: the old Prince, Lvov, of whom he had grown so fond, his brother, Koznyshev, and all the womenfolk. His wife believed as he had done in early childhood, and ninety-nine out of a hundred of the Russian people, the whole of the people whose lives he most respected, also believed. Another thing was that, having read a great many books, he became convinced that those who shared his outlook understood only what he had understood, explaining nothing and merely ignoring those problems — without a solution to which he felt he could not live, — but trying to solve quite other problems which could not interest him, such as, for instance, the development of organisms, a mechanical explanation of the soul, and so on.

 

Besides, during the time of his wife’s confinement an extraordinary thing had happened to him. He, an unbeliever, began to pray, and while praying believed. But that moment had passed, and he could not allot any place in his life to the state of mind he had then experienced.

 

He could not admit that he had then known the truth and was now making a mistake; because, as soon as he reflected calmly about it, it all fell to pieces; nor could he acknowledge that he had then been mistaken, for he prized the state his soul had then been in, and by acknowledging it to be a result of weakness he would have defiled those moments. He was painfully out of harmony with himself and strained all his spiritual powers to escape from this condition.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 9

 

 

 

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THESE thoughts oppressed and tormented him, now more and now less strongly, but never left him. He read and thought, and the more he read and thought the further he felt from his goal.

 

Latterly in Moscow and in the country, having convinced himself that he could get no answer from the materialists, he read through and re-read Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, those philosophers who explained life otherwise than materialistically.

 

Their thoughts seemed to him fruitful when he read, or was himself devising refutations of other teachings, the materialistic in particular; but as soon as he began reading, or himself devised, solutions to life’s problems, the same thing occurred every time. Following long definitions of vague words such as spirit, will, freedom, substance, and deliberately entering the verbal trap set for him by the philosophers, or by himself, he seemed to begin to understand something. But he had only to forget that artificial line of thought, and to return direct from real life to what had appeared satisfactory so long as he kept to the given line of thought — and suddenly the whole artificial edifice tumbled down like a house of cards, and it was evident that the edifice had been constructed of those same words differently arranged, and without regard for something in life more important than reason.

 

At one time, while reading Schopenhauer, he replaced the word will by the word love, and this new philosophy comforted him for a day or two, as long as he did not stand aside from it; but it, too, collapsed when he viewed it in relation to real life, and it turned out to be a muslin garment without warmth.

 

His brother Koznyshev advised him to read Homyakov’s theological writings. Levin read the second volume of them, and, in spite of its polemical, polished, and witty style, which at first repelled him, he was struck by its teaching about the Church. He was struck by the thought that it is not given to isolated man to attain divine truth, but that it is given to a community united by love — the Church. He was pleased by the thought that it was easier to believe in an existing living Church which compounds all the beliefs of men, and has God at its head and is therefore holy and infallible, and from it to accept belief in God, a distant, mysterious God, the Creation, and so on. But afterwards on reading the history of the Church, first by a Roman Catholic and then by a Greek Orthodox writer, and finding that each essentially infallible Church repudiated the other, he became disenchanted with Homyakov’s teaching about the Church; and that edifice fell into dust just as the philosophical structures had done.

 

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

 

‘Without knowing what I am, and why I am here, it is impossible to live. Yet I cannot know that and therefore I can’t live,’ he said to himself.

 

‘In an infinity of time, and in infinity of matter, in infinite space, a bubble, a bubble organism, separates itself, and that bubble maintains itself a while and then bursts, and that bubble is — I!’

 

This was a distressing falsehood, but it was the sole and last result of centuries and the age-long labour of human thought in that direction.

 

It was the latest belief. It was the ruling conviction, and from among all other explanations Levin, without himself knowing when or how, had involuntarily chosen it as being at any rate the clearest of all.

 

But it was not only false, it was the cruel mockery of some evil power: a wicked and disgusting Power, and one to which it was impossible to submit.

 

It was necessary to free oneself from that Power. The means of escape were in the hands of every man. An end had to be put to that dependence on an evil power; and there was one means — death.

 

And though he was a happy and healthy family man, Levin was several times so near to suicide that he hid a cord he had lest he should hang himself, and he feared to carry a gun lest he should shoot himself.

 

But he did not hang or shoot himself and went on living.