Leo Tolstoy

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

  ‘Go on, leave the children alone to provide for themselves, to make the dishes, do the milking and so on. Would they start playing pranks? They’d starve to death. Go on, leave us to ourselves, with our passions and thoughts, with no notion of one God and Creator! Or with no notion of what the good is, with no explanation of moral evil.

  ‘Go on, try building something without those notions!

  ‘We destroy only because we’re spiritually sated. Exactly like children!

  ‘Where do I get the joyful knowledge I have in common with the muzhik, which alone gives me peace of mind? Where did I take it from?

  ‘Having been brought up with the notion of God, as a Christian, having filled my whole life with the spiritual blessings that Christianity gave me, filled with those blessings myself and living by them, but, like the children, not understanding them, I destroy– that is, want to destroy – what I live by. And as soon as an important moment comes in my life, like children who are cold and hungry, I go to Him, and even less than children scolded by their mother for their childish pranks do I feel that my childish refusal to let well enough alone is not to my credit.

  ‘Yes, what I know, I do not know by reason, it is given to me, it is revealed to me, and I know it by my heart, by faith in that main thing that the Church confesses.

  ‘The Church? The Church!’ Levin repeated, turned over on his other side and, leaning on his elbow, began looking into the distance, at the herd coming down to the river on the other bank.

  ‘But can I believe in everything the Church confesses?’ he thought, testing himself and thinking up everything that might destroy his present peace. He began purposely to recall all the teachings of the Church that had always seemed to him the most strange and full of temptation. ‘Creation? And how do I account for existence? By existence? By nothing? The devil and sin? And how am I to explain evil? … The Redeemer?…

  ‘But I know nothing, nothing, and can know nothing but what I’ve been told along with everybody else.’

  And it now seemed to him that there was not a single belief of the Church that violated the main thing – faith in God, in the good, as the sole purpose of man.

  In place of each of the Church’s beliefs there could be put the belief in serving the good instead of one’s needs. And each of them not only did not violate it but was indispensable for the accomplishment of that chief miracle, constantly manifested on earth, which consists in it being possible for each person, along with millions of the most diverse people, sages and holy fools, children and old men – along with everyone, with some peasant, with Lvov, with Kitty, with beggars and kings – to understand one and the same thing with certainty and to compose that life of the soul which alone makes life worth living and alone is what we value.

  Lying on his back, he was now looking at the high, cloudless sky. ‘Don’t I know that it is infinite space and not a round vault? But no matter how I squint and strain my sight, I cannot help seeing it as round and limited, and despite my knowledge of infinite space, I am undoubtedly right when I see a firm blue vault, more right than when I strain to see beyond it.’

  Levin had stopped thinking and was as if only listening to the mysterious voices that spoke joyfully and anxiously about something among themselves.

  ‘Can this be faith?’ he wondered, afraid to believe his happiness. ‘My God, thank you!’ he said, choking back the rising sobs and with both hands wiping away the tears that filled his eyes.

  XIV

  Levin looked before him and saw the herd, then he saw his own little gig with Raven harnessed to it, and the coachman, who drove up to the herd and said something to the herdsman; then, already close to him, he heard the sound of wheels and the snorting of the sleek horse; but he was so absorbed in his thoughts that he did not even think why the coachman was coming to him.

  He remembered it only when the coachman, having driven up quite close to him, called out.

  ‘The mistress sent me. Your brother has come and some other gentleman with him.’

  Levin got into the gig and took the reins.

  As if roused from sleep, Levin took a long time coming to his senses. He looked at the sleek horse, lathered between the thighs and on the neck where a strap rubbed it, looked at the coachman, Ivan, who was sitting beside him, and remembered that he had been expecting his brother, that his wife was probably worried by his long absence, and tried to guess who the visitor was who had come with his brother. He now pictured his brother, and his wife, and the unknown visitor differently than before. It seemed to him that his relations with all people would now be different.

  ‘With my brother now there won’t be that estrangement there has always been between us, there won’t be any arguments; with Kitty there will be no more quarrels; with the visitor, whoever he is, I’ll be gentle and kind; and with the servants, with Ivan, everything will be different.’

  Keeping a tight rein on the good horse, who was snorting with impatience and begging to run free, Levin kept looking at Ivan, who sat beside him not knowing what to do with his idle hands and constantly smoothing down his shirt, and sought a pretext for starting a conversation with him. He wanted to say that Ivan should not have tightened the girth so much, but that seemed like a reproach and he wanted to have a loving conversation. Yet nothing else came to his mind.

  ‘Please bear to the right, sir, there’s a stump,’ said the coachman, guiding Levin by the reins.

  ‘Kindly do not touch me and do not instruct me!’ said Levin, vexed by this interference from the coachman. This interference vexed him just as it always had, and at once he sadly felt how mistaken he had been in supposing that his inner state could instantly change him in his contacts with reality.

  About a quarter of a mile from home, Levin saw Grisha and Tanya running to meet him.

  ‘Uncle Kostya! Mama’s coming, and grandpapa, and Sergei Ivanych, and somebody else,’ they said, climbing into the gig.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘He’s terribly scary! And he goes like this with his arms,’ said Tanya, standing up in the gig and imitating Katavasov.

  ‘But is he old or young?’ Levin asked, laughing, reminded of someone by Tanya’s imitation. ‘Ah,’ he thought, ‘I only hope it’s not somebody unpleasant!’

  Only when he turned round the bend of the road and saw them coming to meet him did Levin recognize Katavasov in his straw hat, walking along waving his arms just as Tanya had imitated him.

  Katavasov was very fond of talking about philosophy, taking his notion of it from natural scientists who never studied philosophy, and in Moscow recently Levin had had many arguments with him.

  One of those conversations, in which Katavasov had thought he had gained the upper hand, was the first thing that Levin remembered when he recognized him.

  ‘No, I’m not going to argue and speak my thoughts light–mindedly, not for anything,’ he thought.

  Getting down from the gig and greeting his brother and Katavasov, Levin asked about his wife.

  ‘She’s taken Mitya to Kolok’ (that was a wood near the house). ‘She wanted to settle him there, it’s hot in the house,’ said Dolly.

  Levin had always advised his wife against taking the baby to the wood, which he considered dangerous, and the news displeased him.

  ‘She rushes from place to place with him,’ the prince said, smiling. ‘I advised her to try taking him to the ice–cellar.’

  ‘She wanted to go to the apiary. She thought you were there. That’s where we’re going,’ said Dolly.

  ‘Well, what are you up to?’ said Sergei Ivanovich, lagging behind the others and walking side by side with his brother.

  ‘Nothing special. Busy with farming, as usual,’ Levin answered. ‘And you, can you stay long? "We’ve been expecting you all this while.’

  ‘A couple of weeks. There’s so much to do in Moscow.’

  At these words the brothers’ eyes met, and Levin, despite his usual and now especially strong desire to be on friendly and, a
bove all, simple terms with his brother, felt it awkward to look at him. He lowered his eyes and did not know what to say.

  Going over subjects of conversation that would be agreeable for Sergei Ivanovich and would distract him from talking about the Serbian war and the Slavic question, which he had hinted at in mentioning how busy he was in Moscow, Levin spoke of Sergei Ivanovich’s book.

  ‘Well, have there been reviews of your book?’ he asked.

  Sergei Ivanovich smiled at the deliberateness of the question.

  ‘Nobody’s interested in it, and I least of all,’ he said. ‘Look, Darya Alexandrovna, it’s going to rain,’ he added, pointing with his umbrella at some white clouds that appeared over the aspen tops.

  And these words were enough to re–establish between the brothers the not hostile but cool relations that Levin was trying to avoid.

  Levin went over to Katavasov.

  ‘How nice that you decided to come,’ he said to him.

  ‘I’ve long been meaning to. Now we’ll talk and see. Have you read Spencer?’

  ‘No, I didn’t finish,’ Levin said. ‘However, I don’t need him now.’

  ‘How so? That’s interesting. Why?’

  ‘I mean I’ve finally become convinced that I won’t find in him and those like him the solution to the questions that interest me. Now …’

  But he was suddenly struck by the calm and cheerful expression on Katavasov’s face, and was so sorry to have disturbed his own mood with this conversation, as he obviously had, that, recalling his intention, he stopped.

  ‘However, we’ll talk later,’ he added. ‘If we’re going to the apiary, it’s here, down this path,’ he said, addressing everyone.

  Having come by a narrow path to an unmowed clearing, covered on one side with bright cow–wheat thickly interspersed with tall, dark–green clumps of hellebore, Levin placed his guests in the dense, fresh shade of the young aspens, on a bench and on stumps especially prepared for visitors to the apiary who were afraid of bees, and went to the enclosure to fetch bread, cucumbers, and fresh honey for the children and grown–ups.

  Trying to make as few quick movements as possible and listening to the bees flying past him more and more frequently, he went down the path as far as the cottage. Just at the front door a bee whined, tangled in his beard, but he carefully freed it. Going into the shady front hall, he took down his net that hung from a peg in the wall, put it on, and, hands in pockets, went out to the fenced apiary where, in the middle of a mowed space, in even rows, tied to stakes with strips of bast, the old hives stood – all of them familiar to him, each with its own story – and, along the wattle fence, the young ones started that year. Bees and drones played, dizzying the eye, before the flight holes, circling and swarming in one spot, and among them the worker bees flew, all in the same direction, out to the blossoming lindens in the forest and back to the hives with their booty.

  His ears were ceaselessly filled with various sounds, now of a busy worker bee flying quickly by, now of a trumpeting, idle drone, now of alarmed, sting–ready sentry bees guarding their property against the enemy. On the other side of the fence, the old man was shaving a hoop and did not see Levin. Levin stopped in the middle of the apiary without calling to him.

  He was glad of the chance to be alone, in order to recover from reality, which had already brought his mood down so much.

  He remembered that he had already managed to get angry with Ivan, to show coldness to his brother, and to talk light–mindedly with Katavasov.

  ‘Can it have been only a momentary mood that will pass without leaving a trace?’ he thought.

  But in that same moment, returning to his mood, he felt with joy that something new and important had taken place in him. Reality had only veiled for a time the inner peace he had found, but it was intact within him.

  Just as the bees now circling around him, threatening and distracting him, deprived him of full physical ease, made him shrink to avoid them, so the cares that had surrounded him from the moment he got into the gig had deprived him of inner freedom; but that lasted only as long as he was among them. As his bodily strength was wholly intact in him, despite the bees, so, too, was his newly realized spiritual strength intact.

  XV

  ‘And do you know, Kostya, whom Sergei Ivanovich travelled with on the way here?’ Dolly asked, after distributing the cucumbers and honey among the children. ‘Vronsky! He’s going to Serbia.’

  ‘And not alone – he’s taking a squadron at his own expense!’ said Katavasov.

  ‘That suits him well,’ said Levin. ‘And are the volunteers still going?’ he added, glancing at Sergei Ivanovich.

  Sergei Ivanovich, without replying, was carefully probing with a blunt knife in the bowl, where a square of white honeycomb lay, for a still–living bee stuck in the liquid honey.

  ‘And how they are! You should have seen what went on at the station yesterday!’ said Katavasov, noisily crunching on a cucumber.

  ‘Well, how are we to understand that? For Christ’s sake, Sergei Ivanovich, explain to me where all these volunteers go, who are they fighting?’ asked the old prince, evidently continuing a conversation started without Levin.

  ‘The Turks,’ Sergei Ivanovich replied with a calm smile, having liberated the bee, dark with honey and helplessly waving its legs, and transferred it from the knife to a sturdy aspen leaf.

  ‘But who declared war on the Turks? Ivan Ivanych Ragozov and Countess Lydia Ivanovna, along with Mme Stahl?’

  ‘No one declared war, but people sympathize with the suffering of their neighbours and want to help them,’ said Sergei Ivanovich.

  ‘But the prince is not talking about help,’ said Levin, interceding for his father–in–law, ‘but about war. The prince is saying that private persons cannot take part in a war without the permission of the government.’

  ‘Kostya, look, it’s a bee! We’ll really get stung!’ said Dolly, waving away a wasp.

  ‘It’s not a bee, it’s a wasp,’ said Levin.

  ‘Well, sir, what’s your theory?’ Katavasov said to Levin with a smile, obviously challenging him to an argument. ‘Why do private persons not have the right?’

  ‘My theory is this. On the one hand, war is such a beastly, cruel and terrible thing that no man, to say nothing of a Christian, can personally take upon himself the responsibility for starting a war. That can only be done by a government, which is called to it and is inevitably drawn into war. On the other hand, according to both science and common sense, in state matters, especially the matter of war, citizens renounce their personal will.’

  Sergei Ivanovich and Katavasov began talking simultaneously with ready–made objections.

  ‘That’s the hitch, my dear, that there may be occasions when the government does not carry out the will of the citizens, and then society declares its will,’ said Katavasov.

  But Sergei Ivanovich obviously did not approve of this objection. He frowned at Katavasov’s words and said something different.

  ‘The question shouldn’t be put that way. There is no declaration of war here, but simply the expression of human, Christian feeling. They’re killing our brothers, of the same blood, of the same religion. Well, suppose they weren’t even our brothers, our co–religionists, but simply children, women, old men; indignation is aroused, and the Russian people run to help stop these horrors. Imagine yourself going down the street and seeing some drunk beating a woman or a child, I don’t think you’d start asking whether war had or had not been declared on the man, but would fall upon him and protect the victim.’