Leo Tolstoy

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

  ‘They must have struck up a conversation without me,’ thought Kitty. ‘But all the same it’s vexing that Kostya’s not here. He must have gone to the apiary again. Though it’s sad that he goes there so often, I’m glad all the same. It diverts him. Now he’s begun to be more cheerful and better than in the spring. Then he was so gloomy and tormented, I began to be frightened for him. What a funny man!’ she whispered, smiling.

  She knew what tormented her husband. It was his unbelief. Although, if she had been asked whether she supposed that in the future life he would perish for his unbelief, she would have had to agree that he would, his unbelief did not make her unhappy; and while she acknowledged that there was no salvation for an unbeliever, and she loved her husband’s soul more than anything in the world, she smiled as she thought about his unbelief and said to herself that he was funny.

  ‘Why has he been reading all sorts of philosophies for a whole year?’ she thought. ‘If it’s all written in those books, then he can understand them. If it’s not true, why read them? He says himself that he’d like to believe. Then why doesn’t he believe? Probably because he thinks so much. And he thinks so much because of his solitude. Alone, always alone. With us he can’t talk about everything. I think he’ll like having these guests, especially Katavasov. He likes discussing things with him,’ she thought, and at once turned her mind to where it would be best to put Katavasov – in a separate room, or together with Sergei Ivanovich. And here a thought suddenly came to her that made her start with agitation and even disturb Mitya, who gave her a stern look for it. ‘I don’t think the laundress has brought the washing yet, and the bed linen for guests has all been used. If I don’t see to it, Agafya Mikhailovna will give Sergei Ivanovich unwashed linen’ – and the very thought of it brought the blood rushing to Kitty’s face.

  ‘Yes, I’ll see to it,’ she decided and, going back to her previous thoughts, remembered that she had not finished thinking about something important, intimate, and she began to remember what it was. ‘Yes, Kostya’s an unbeliever,’ she remembered again with a smile.

  ‘So, he’s an unbeliever! Better let him stay that way than be like Mme Stahl, or like I wanted to be that time abroad. No, he’s not one to pretend.’

  And a recent instance of his kindness appeared vividly to her. Two weeks ago Dolly had received a repentant letter from Stepan Arkadyich. He implored her to save his honour, to sell her estate in order to pay his debts. Dolly was in despair, hated her husband, despised him, pitied him, resolved to divorce him, to refuse him, but ended by agreeing to sell part of her estate. Then Kitty, with an involuntary smile of tenderness, remembered her husband’s embarrassment, his several awkward approaches to the matter in question, and how, having thought up the one and only way of helping Dolly without insulting her, he had suggested that Kitty give up her part of the estate, something she had not thought of before.

  ‘What kind of unbeliever is he? With his heart, with that fear of upsetting anyone, even a child! Everything for others, nothing for himself. Sergei Ivanovich simply thinks it’s Kostya’s duty to be his steward. His sister, too. Now Dolly and her children are in his care. And there are all these muzhiks who come to him every day as if it were his business to serve them.’

  ‘Yes, be just like your father, be just like him,’ she said, handing Mitya to the nanny and touching his cheek with her lips.

  VIII

  From that moment when, at the sight of his beloved brother dying, Levin had looked at the questions of life and death for the first time through those new convictions, as he called them, which imperceptibly, during the period from twenty to thirty–four years of age, had come to replace his childhood and adolescent beliefs, he had been horrified, not so much at death as at life without the slightest knowledge of whence it came, wherefore, why, and what it was. The organism, its decay, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, development, were the words that had replaced his former faith. These words and the concepts connected with them were very well suited to intellectual purposes, but they gave nothing for life, and Levin suddenly felt himself in the position of a person who has traded his warm fur coat for muslin clothing and, caught in the cold for the first time, is convinced beyond question, not by reasoning but with his whole being, that he is as good as naked and must inevitably die a painful death.

  From that moment on, though not accounting for it to himself and continuing to live as before, Levin never ceased to feel that fear at his ignorance.

  Moreover, he felt vaguely that what he called his convictions were not only ignorance but were a way of thinking that made the knowledge he needed impossible.

  At first his marriage, the new joys and responsibilities he came to know, completely stifled these thoughts; but lately, after his wife gave birth, while he was living idly in Moscow, Levin began to be faced more and more often, more and more urgently, by this question that demanded an answer.

  The question for him consisted in the following: ‘If I do not accept the answers that Christianity gives to the questions of my life, then which answers do I accept?’ And nowhere in the whole arsenal of his convictions was he able to find, not only any answers, but anything resembling an answer.

  He was in the position of a man looking for food in a toymaker’s or a gunsmith’s shop.

  Involuntarily, unconsciously, he now sought in every book, in every conversation, in every person, a connection with these questions and their resolution.

  What amazed and upset him most of all was that the majority of people of his age and circle, who had replaced their former beliefs, as he had, with the same new beliefs as he had, did not see anything wrong with it and were perfectly calm and content. So that, besides the main question, Levin was tormented by other questions: Are these people sincere? Are they not pretending? Or do they not understand somehow differently, more clearly, than he the answers science gives to the questions that concerned him? And he diligently studied both the opinions of these people and the books that expressed these answers.

  One thing he had discovered since he began to concern himself with these questions was that he had been mistaken in supposing, from memories of his youthful university circle, that religion had outlived its day and no longer existed. All the good people close to him were believers. The old prince, and Lvov, whom he had come to love so much, and Sergei Ivanovich, and all the women were believers, and his wife believed as he had believed in early childhood, and ninety–nine hundredths of all the Russian people, that people whose life inspired the greatest respect in him, were believers.

  Another thing was that, after reading many books, he became convinced that those who shared the same views with him saw nothing else implied in them and, without explaining anything, simply dismissed the questions which he felt he could not live without answering, and tried to resolve completely different questions, which could not be of interest to him – for instance, about the development of the organism, about the mechanical explanation of the soul, and so on.

  Besides that, while his wife was giving birth an extraordinary thing had happened to him. He, the unbeliever, had begun to pray, and in the moment of praying he had believed. But that moment had passed, and he was unable to give any place in his life to the state of mind he had been in then.

  He could not admit that he had known the truth then and was now mistaken, because as soon as he began to think calmly about it, the whole thing fell to pieces; nor could he admit that he had been mistaken then, because he cherished his state of soul of that time, and by admitting that it had been due to weakness he would have profaned those moments. He was in painful discord with himself and strained all the forces of his soul to get out of it.

  IX

  These thoughts wearied and tormented him now less, now more strongly, but they never left him. He read and pondered, and the more he read and pondered, the further he felt himself from the goal he was pursuing.

  Recently in Moscow and in the country, convin
ced that he would not find an answer in the materialists, he reread, or read for the first time, Plato, and Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer – the philosophers who gave a non–materialistic explanation of life.[6]

  Their thoughts seemed fruitful to him when he was either reading or devising refutations of other teachings, especially that of the materialists; but as soon as he read or himself devised answers to the questions, one and the same thing always repeated itself. Following the given definitions of vague words such as spirit, will, freedom, substance, deliberately falling into 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 the artificial train of thought and refer back from life itself to what had satisfied him while he thought along a given line – and suddenly the whole artificial edifice would collapse like a house of cards, and it would be clear that the edifice had been made of the same words rearranged, independent of something more important in life than reason.

  Once, reading Schopenhauer, he substituted love for his will,[7] and this new philosophy comforted him for a couple of days, until he stepped back from it; but it collapsed in the same way when he later looked at it from life, and turned out to be warmthless muslin clothing.

  His brother Sergei Ivanovich advised him to read the theological works of Khomiakov.[8] Levin read the second volume of Khomiakov’s writings and, despite the elegant and witty polemical tone, which put him off at first, was struck by their teaching about the Church. He was struck first by the thought that it is not given to man to comprehend divine truths, but it is given to an aggregate of men united by love – the Church. He rejoiced at the thought of how much easier it was to believe in the presently existing, living Church, which constitutes the entire faith of men, which has God at its head and is therefore holy and infallible, and from it to receive one’s beliefs about God, creation, the fall, redemption, than to begin with God, the distant, mysterious God, creation, and so on. But later, having read a history of the Church by a Catholic writer and a history of the Church by an Orthodox writer, and seeing that the two Churches, infallible in their essence, rejected each other, he became disappointed in Khomiakov’s teaching about the Church as well, and this edifice fell to dust just as the philosophical edifices had done.

  All that spring he was not himself and lived through terrible moments.

  ‘Without knowing what I am and why I’m here, it is impossible for me to live. And I cannot know that, therefore I cannot live,’ Levin would say to himself.

  ‘In infinite time, in the infinity of matter, in infinite space, a bubble–organism separates itself, and that bubble holds out for a while and then bursts, and that bubble is – me.’ This was a tormenting untruth, but it was the sole, the latest result of age–long labours of human thought in that direction.

  This was the latest belief on which all researches of the human mind in almost all fields were built. This was the reigning conviction, and out of all other explanations it was precisely this one that Levin, himself not knowing when or how, had involuntarily adopted as being at any rate the most clear.

  But it was not only untrue, it was the cruel mockery of some evil power, evil and offensive, which it was impossible to submit to.

  It was necessary to be delivered from this power. And deliverance was within everyone’s reach. It was necessary to stop this dependence on evil. And there was one means – death.

  And, happy in his family life, a healthy man, Levin was several times so close to suicide that he hid a rope lest he hang himself with it, and was afraid to go about with a rifle lest he shoot himself.

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

  X

  When Levin thought about what he was and what he lived for, he found no answer and fell into despair; but when he stopped asking himself about it, he seemed to know what he was and what he lived for, because he acted and lived firmly and definitely; recently he had even lived much more firmly and definitely than before.

  Returning to the country in the middle of June, he also returned to his usual occupations. Farming, relations with the muzhiks and his neighbours, running the household, his sister’s and brother’s affairs, which were in his hands, relations with his wife and family, cares about the baby, the new interest in bees he had acquired that last spring, took up all his time.

  These things occupied him, not because he justified them to himself by some general views as he had done formerly; on the contrary, now, disappointed by the failure of his earlier undertakings for the general good, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, too occupied with his thoughts and the very quantity of things that piled upon him from all sides, he completely abandoned all considerations of the common good, and these things occupied him only because it seemed to him that he had to do what he was doing – that he could not do otherwise.

  Formerly (it had begun almost from childhood and kept growing till full maturity), whenever he had tried to do something that would be good for everyone, for mankind, for Russia, for the district, for the whole village, he had noticed that thinking about it was pleasant, but the doing itself was always awkward, there was no full assurance that the thing was absolutely necessary, and the doing itself, which at the start had seemed so big, kept diminishing and diminishing, dwindling to nothing; while now, after his marriage, when he began to limit himself more and more to living for himself, though he no longer experienced any joy at the thought of what he was doing, he felt certain that his work was necessary, saw that it turned out much better than before and that it was expanding more and more.

  Now, as if against his will, he cut deeper and deeper into the soil, like a plough, so that he could no longer get out without turning over the furrow.

  For the family to live as their fathers and grandfathers had been accustomed to live – that is, in the same cultural conditions and with the same upbringing of children – was undoubtedly necessary. It was as necessary as dinner when one was hungry; and just as for that it was necessary to prepare dinner, so it was necessary to run the farming mechanism of Pokrovskoe in such a way as to produce income. As undoubtedly as it was necessary to pay debts, it was also necessary to maintain the family land in such condition that when his son inherited it he would thank his father, as Levin had thanked his grandfather for everything he had built and planted. And for that it was necessary not to lease the land, but to do the farming personally, to keep cattle, to manure the fields, to plant trees.

  It was as impossible not to take care of Sergei Ivanovich’s affairs, the affairs of his sister and of all the muzhiks who came for advice and were accustomed to do so, as it was impossible to drop a baby one is already holding in one’s arms. It was necessary to see to the comfort of his invited sister–in–law and her children, and of his wife and baby, and it was impossible not to spend at least a small part of the day with them.

  All that, together with hunting and the new interest in bees, filled that entire life of Levin’s which had no meaning for him when he thought.

  But besides the fact that Levin firmly knew what he had to do, he knew just as well how he had to do it all and which matter was more important than another.

  He knew that he had to hire workers as cheaply as possible, but that he should not put them in bondage by paying them in advance at a cheaper rate than they were worth, though it was very profitable. He could sell the muzhiks straw when there was a shortage, though he felt sorry for them; but the inn and the pot–house, even though they brought income, had to be eliminated. For felling timber he had to punish them as severely as possible, but he could not fine them for cattle that strayed into his pastures, and though it upset the watchmen and eliminated fear, it was impossible not to return the stray cattle.

  Pyotr, who was paying ten per cent a month to a moneylender, had to be given a loan to redeem him; but it was impossible to let go or postpone the payment of quit–rent for non–paying muzhiks. The steward could not be let off
if a small meadow was left unmowed and the grass went to waste; yet he could not mow the two hundred acres where a young forest had been planted. He could not excuse a worker who went home during a work period because his father had died, no matter how sorry he felt for him, and he had to pay him less for the costly months he missed; but it was impossible not to give monthly payments to old, useless household serfs.

  Levin also knew that, on returning home, he must first of all go to his wife, if she was unwell, and that the muzhiks who had been waiting for three hours could wait longer; and he knew that, despite all the pleasure he experienced when hiving a swarm, he would have to give up that pleasure and let the old man hive the swarm without him, and go to talk with the peasants who had come looking for him at the apiary.