Chapter 10

 

 

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WHEN Levin thought about what he was and why he lived, he could find no answer and was driven to despair; but when he left off asking himself those questions, he seemed to know what he was and why he lived, for he acted and lived unfalteringly and definitely — recently even more unfalteringly than before.

 

When he returned to the country in June, he went back to his ordinary occupations — husbandry, intercourse with the peasants and with his neighbours, management of his house and of his sister’s and brother’s affairs, which were entrusted to him, relations with his wife and relatives, cares about his baby, and a new hobby — beekeeping, which he took up with enthusiasm that spring — occupied all his time.

 

These matters interested him, not because he justified them to himself by any general theories as he had done previously; on the contrary, being now on the one hand disenchanted by the ill-success of his former occupations for the general welfare, and on the other hand too much occupied with his own thoughts and by the mass of affairs that overwhelmed him from all sides, he quite abandoned all calculation of public utility, and these matters interested him only because it seemed to him that he had to do what he was doing, and could not act otherwise.

 

Formerly (it had been so almost from childhood and increasingly so till his complete maturity) when he tried to do anything for the good of everybody, for humanity, for Russia, for the whole village, he had noticed that the thoughts of it were agreeable, but the activity itself was always unsatisfactory; there was no full assurance that the work was really necessary, and the activity itself which at first seemed so great, ever lessened and lessened till it vanished. But now since his marriage, when he began to confine himself more and more to living for himself, though he no longer felt any joy at the thought of his activity, he felt confident that his work was necessary, saw that it progressed far better than formerly, and that it was always growing more and more.

 

Now, as if involuntarily, he cut ever deeper and deeper into the earth, so that he, like a ploughshare, could not get out without turning the sod. For the family to live as their grandfathers and fathers had been accustomed to live, that is at the same educational level, and so to bring up their children, was undoubtedly necessary. It was just as necessary as to dine when hungry; and therefore just as it was necessary to prepare dinner, so it was necessary to arrange the husbandry at Pokrovsk in such a way as to derive an income from it. As surely as one must pay one’s debts, so surely was it necessary to keep the patrimony in such a state that when his son inherited it, he would thank his father, as Levin thanked his grandfather, for all that he had built and planted. To do this he must not lease the land, but must farm it himself, keep cattle, manure the fields, and plant woods.

 

It was as impossible not to look after his brother’s and sister’s affairs, and those of all the peasants who came for advice and were accustomed to do so, as it is impossible to abandon a baby you are already holding in your arms.

 

It was necessary to look after the comforts of his sister-in-law and her children, who had been invited, and of his wife and child, and it was impossible not to pass at least a small portion of each day with them.

 

All this, with game-shooting, and his new hobby of beekeeping, filled up the whole of that life of his which seemed to him, when he thought about it, to have no meaning.

 

But besides knowing definitely what he had to do, Levin also knew how to do it all, and which affair was the more important of any two.

 

He knew that he must hire labourers as cheaply as possible; but that he must not take them in bondage for less than they were worth by advancing them money, though this would be very profitable. He might sell straw to the peasants in a time of shortage, though he felt sorry for them; but an inn or a public-house, although it brought in a revenue, must be done away with. Felling trees must be punished as severely as possible, but if peasants let their cattle stray he must not exact fines from them; and though it grieved the watchmen and weakened discipline, the strayed cattle must not be detained.

 

He must lend money to Peter to liberate him from the usurers to whom he was paying ten per cent a month; but he must neither reduce nor postpone the payments of rent by the peasants who were in default. The steward must not be excused when the small meadow was not mown and the grass was wasted; but grass must not be mown on the eighty desyatinas which had been planted with young trees. He must not pardon a labourer who went home at a busy time because his father had died — sorry as he might be for the man: part of his pay had to be deducted for the precious months during which he had been absent; but he could not neglect giving a monthly allowance to old domestic serfs who were of no use at all to him.

 

Levin knew, too, that on returning home the first thing he must do was to go to his wife, who was unwell, and that the peasants who had been waiting for three hours to see him could wait a little longer; and he knew that in spite of all the pleasure of hiving a swarm, he must forgo that pleasure, let the old beekeeper hive the swarm without him, and go to talk to the peasants who had found him at the apiary.

 

Whether he was acting well or ill he did not know, and far from laying down the law about it, he now avoided talking or thinking about it.

 

Thinking about it led him into doubts and prevented him from seeing what he should and should not do. But when he did not think, but just lived, he unceasingly felt in his soul the presence of an infallible judge deciding which of two possible actions was the better and which the worse; and as soon as he did what he should not have done, he immediately felt this.

 

In this way he lived, not knowing or seeing any possibility of knowing what he was or why he lived in the world, and he suffered so much from that ignorance that he was afraid he might commit suicide, while at the same time he was firmly cutting his own particular definite path through life.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 11

 

 

 

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THE day when Koznyshev arrived at Pokrovsk was one of Levin’s most distressing days.

 

It was the most pressingly busy season of the year, when an extraordinary tension of self-sacrificing labour manifests itself among all the peasants, such as is never shown in any other condition of life, and such as would be highly esteemed if the people who exhibit this quality esteemed it themselves, if it were not repeated every year, and if the results of that tension were not so simple.

 

To mow or reap the rye and oats, and cart them, to finish mowing the meadows, to re-plough the fallow land, to thresh the seed corn and sow the winter rye — all this seems simple and ordinary; yet to get it all done, it is necessary that all the peasants, from the oldest to the youngest, should work unceasingly those three or four weeks, three times as hard as usual, living on kvas, onions, and black bread, threshing and carting the sheaves by night and sleeping not more than two or three hours out of the twenty-four. And this is done every year, all over Russia.

 

Having lived most of his life in the country and in close contact with the peasants, Levin always felt, at this busy time, that this general stimulation of the peasants communicated itself to him.

 

Early in the morning he rode to where the first rye was being sown, then to see the oats carted and stacked, and returning home when his wife and sister-in-law were getting up he drank coffee with them, and then walked to the farm where the new threshing machine was to be started to thresh the seed corn.

 

All that day, when talking to the steward and the peasants and at home with his wife, Dolly, her children, and his father-in-law, Levin’s thoughts were busy with the one and only subject, outside his farming, that interested him at this time, and in everything he sought its relation to his questions: ‘What am I? Where am I? And why am I here?’

 

Standing in the cool shade of the newly-thatched barn, with its wattle walls of hazel, which had not yet shed its scented leaves, pressed against the freshly-stripped aspens of the roof-tree under the thatch, he looked now through the open doorway into which the dry and bitter chaff-dust rushed and whirled, at the grass round the threshing-floor lit up by the hot sunshine and at the fresh straw that had just been brought out of the barn, now at the bright-headed and white-breasted swallows that flew in chirping beneath the roof and, flapping their wings, paused in the light of the doorway, and now at the people who bustled about in the dark and dusty barn; and he thought strange thoughts:

 

‘Why is all this being done?’ he wondered. ‘Why am I standing here, obliging them to work? Why do they all make such efforts and try to show me their zeal? Why is my old friend Matrena toiling so (I doctored her after the fire, when she was struck by a girder)?’ he thought, looking at a thin peasant woman who pushed the grain along with a rake, her dark sunburnt bare feet stepping with effort on the hard uneven barn floor. ‘She recovered then, but to-day or to-morrow, or in ten years’ time, they will bury her and nothing will be left of her, nor of that smart girl with the red skirt, who with such dexterous and delicate movements is beating the chaff from the ears. She too will be buried, and that piebald gelding too — and that one very soon,’ he reflected, looking at a horse breathing quickly with falling and rising belly and inflated nostrils, as it trod on the slanting wheel that moved under it. ‘They will bury her, and so they will Theodore, who is feeding the machine, his curly beard full of chaff and his shirt torn on his white shoulder. Yet he loosens the sheaves and gives directions, shouts at the women, and quickly puts right the strap on the fly-wheel. And, moreover, not they only but I too shall be buried and nothing will be left. What is it all for?’

 

He thought this, and at the same time looked at his watch to calculate how much they could thresh in an hour. He had to know this in order to set them their day’s task accordingly.

 

‘They’ve been nearly an hour, and have only just started on the third heap,’ thought he, approached the man who was feeding the machine, and shouting above its din, told him to put in less at a time.

 

‘You put in too much at a time, Theodore! Don’t you see, it gets jammed and that’s why it does not go well! Feed it in evenly!’

 

Theodore, black with the dust that stuck to his perspiring face, shouted something in reply, but still did not do as Levin wished.

 

Levin went up to the roller, motioned Theodore aside, and himself began feeding the machine.

 

Having worked till the peasants’ dinner-hour, which soon came, he left the barn together with Theodore and began chatting, standing beside the neat yellow freshly-reaped stack of seed-rye on the threshing-floor.

 

Theodore came from the farther village, the one where Levin had formerly let the land to be worked co-operatively. At present it was let to the innkeeper.

 

Levin got into conversation with Theodore about that land, and asked whether Plato, a well-to-do and worthy peasant of that village, would not rent that land next year.

 

‘The rent is too high, Constantine Dmitrich,’ answered Theodore, picking out the ears of rye from the front of his damp shirt.

 

‘But how does Kirilov make it pay?’

 

‘Why shouldn’t Mityuka’ (as he contemptuously called the innkeeper) ‘make it pay, Constantine Dmitrich? That fellow will press hard, but he’ll get his own! He will have no pity on a Christian! But as if Daddy Plato would ever skin a man! He’ll lend, and sometimes he’ll let a man off, and so run short himself. It all depends on the sort of man.’

 

‘But why should he let anyone off?’

 

‘Oh well, you see, people differ! One man lives only for his own needs: take Mityuka, who only stuffs his own belly, but Plato is an upright old man. He lives for his soul and remembers God.’

 

‘How does he remember God? How does he live for the soul?’ Levin almost cried out.

 

‘You know how: rightly, in a godly way. You know, people differ! Take you, for instance, you won’t injure anyone either . . .’

 

‘Yes, yes! Good-bye!’ uttered Levin, gasping with excitement, and turning away, he took his stick and walked quickly away toward home. At the peasant’s words about Plato living for his soul, rightly, in a godly way, dim but important thoughts crowded into his mind, as if breaking loose from some place where they had been locked up, and all rushing toward one goal, whirled in his head, dazzling him with their light.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 12

 

 

 

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LEVIN went along the high-road with long strides, attending not so much to his thoughts — he could not yet disentangle them — as to a condition of his soul he had never before experienced.

 

The words the peasant had spoken produced in his soul the effect of an electric spark, suddenly transforming and welding into one a whole group of disjointed impotent separate ideas which had always interested him. These ideas, though he had been unconscious of them, had been in his mind when he was talking about letting the land.

 

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

 

‘To live not for one’s needs but for God! For what God? What could be more senseless than what he said? He said we must not live for our needs — that is, we must not live for what we understand and what attracts us, what we wish for, but must live for something incomprehensible, for God whom nobody can understand or define. Well? And did I not understand those senseless words of Theodore’s? And having understood them, did I doubt their justice? Did I find them stupid, vague, or inexact?

 

‘No, I understand him just as he understands them: understood completely and more clearly than I understand anything in life; and I have never in my life doubted it, and cannot doubt it. And not I alone but every one — the whole world — only understands that completely. Nobody is free from doubt about other things, but nobody ever doubts this one thing, everybody always agrees with it.

 

‘And I sought for miracles, regretted not to see a miracle that might convince me! A physical miracle would have tempted me. But here is a miracle, the one possible, everlasting miracle, all around me, and I did not notice it!

 

‘Theodore says that Kirilov, the innkeeper, lives for his belly. That is intelligible and reasonable. We all, as reasoning creatures, cannot live otherwise. And then that same Theodore says that it is wrong to live for one’s belly, and that we must live for Truth, for God, and at the first hint I understand him! I and millions of men who lived centuries ago and those who are living now: peasants, the poor in spirit, and sages, who have thought and written about it, saying the same thing in their obscure words — we all agree on that one thing: what we should live for, and what is good. I, and all other men, know only one thing firmly, clearly, and certainly, and this knowledge cannot be explained by reason: it is outside reason, has no cause, and can have no consequences.

 

‘If goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness; if it has a consequence — a reward, it is also not goodness. Therefore goodness is beyond the chain of cause and effect.

 

‘It is exactly this that I know and that we all know.

 

‘What greater miracle could there be than that?

 

‘Can I possibly have found the solution of everything? Have my sufferings really come to an end?’ thought Levin as he strode along the dusty road, oblivious of the heat, of his fatigue, and filled with a sense of relief from long-continued suffering. That feeling was so joyous that it seemed questionable to him. He was breathless with excitement and, incapable of going further, he turned from the road into the wood and sat down on the uncut grass in the shade of the aspens. Taking the hat from his perspiring head, he lay down, leaning his elbow upon the juicy, broad-bladed forest grass.

 

‘Yes, I must clear it up and understand it,’ he thought, gazing intently at the untrodden grass before him, and following the movements of a green insect that was crawling up a stalk of couch grass and was hindered in its ascent by a leaf of goutwort. ‘What have I discovered?’ he asked himself, turning back the leaf that it should not hinder the insect and bending another blade for the creature to pass on to. ‘What gladdens me? What have I discovered?

 

‘I have discovered nothing. I have only perceived what it is that I know. I have understood the power that not only gave me life in the past but is giving me life now. I have freed myself from deception and learnt to know my Master.

 

‘I used to say that in my body, in this grass, in this insect . . . (There! It did not want to get on to that grass, but has spread its wings and flown away) there takes place, according to physical, chemical, and physiological laws, a change of matter. And in all of us, including the aspens and the clouds and nebulae, evolution is proceeding. Evolution from what, into what? Unending evolution and struggle. . . . As if there could be any direction and struggle in infinity! And I was surprised that, in spite of the greatest effort of thought on that path, the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses and my aspirations, was not revealed to me. But now I say that I know the meaning of my life: it is to live for God, for the soul. And that meaning, in spite of its clearness, is mystic and wonderful. And such is the meaning of all existence. Ah yes! Pride!’ he said to himself turning over face downwards and beginning to tie blades of grass into knots, trying not to break them.

 

‘And not only mental pride but mental stupidity. And chiefly roguery of mind, precisely roguery. Just mind-swindling,’ he repeated.

 

He briefly reviewed the whole course of his thoughts during the last two years, beginning with the clear and obvious thought of death at the sight of his beloved brother hopelessly ill.

 

Having then for the first time clearly understood that before every man, and before himself, there lay only suffering, death, and eternal oblivion, he had concluded that to live under such conditions was impossible; that one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself.

 

But he had done neither the one nor the other, yet he continued to live, think, and feel, had even at that very time got married, experienced many joys, and been happy whenever he was not thinking of the meaning of his life.

 

What did that show? It showed that he had lived well, but thought badly.

 

He had lived (without being conscious of it) by those spiritual truths which he had imbibed with his mother’s milk; but in thought he had not only not acknowledged those truths, but had studiously evaded them.

 

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

 

‘What should I have been and how should I have lived my life, if I had not had those beliefs, and had not known that one must live for God, and not for one’s own needs? I should have robbed, lied, and murdered. Nothing of that which constitutes the chief joys of my life would have existed for me.’ And although he made the greatest efforts of imagination, he could not picture to himself the bestial creature he would have been, had he not known what he was living for.

 

‘I looked for an answer to my question. But reason could not give me an answer — reason is incommensurable with the question. Life itself has given me the answer, in my knowledge of what is good and what is bad. And that knowledge I did not acquire in any way; it was given to me as to everybody, given because I could not take it from anywhere.

 

‘Where did I get it from? Was it by reason that I attained to the knowledge that I must love my neighbour and not throttle him? They told me so when I was a child, and I gladly believed it, because they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason! Reason has discovered the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.’