Anna Karenina

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Levin remembered that when Nikolay had been in the devout stage,
the period of fasts and monks and church services, when he was
seeking in religion a support and a curb for his passionate
temperament, everyone, far from encouraging him, had jeered at
him, and he, too, with the others. They had teased him, called
him Noah and Monk; and, when he had broken out, no one had helped
him, but everyone had turned away from him with horror and
disgust.

Levin felt that, in spite of all the ugliness of his life, his
brother Nikolay, in his soul, in the very depths of his soul, was
no more in the wrong than the people who despised him. He was
not to blame for having been born with his unbridled temperament
and his somehow limited intelligence. But he had always wanted
to be good. "I will tell him everything, without reserve, and I
will make him speak without reserve, too, and I'll show him that
I love him, and so understand him," Levin resolved to himself,
as, towards eleven o'clock, he reached the hotel of which he had
the address.

"At the top, 12 and 13," the porter answered Levin's inquiry.

"At home?"

"Sure to be at home."

The door of No. 12 was half open, and there came out into the
streak of light thick fumes of cheap, poor tobacco, and the sound
of a voice, unknown to Levin; but he knew at once that his
brother was there; he heard his cough.

As he went in the door, the unknown voice was saying:

"It all depends with how much judgment and knowledge the thing's
done."

Konstantin Levin looked in at the door, and saw that the speaker
was a young man with an immense shock of hair, wearing a Russian
jerkin, and that a pockmarked woman in a woolen gown, without
collar or cuffs, was sitting on the sofa. His brother was not to
be seen. Konstantin felt a sharp pang at his heart at the
thought of the strange company in which his brother spent his
life. No one had heard him, and Konstantin, taking off his
galoshes, listened to what the gentleman in the jerkin was
saying. He was speaking of some enterprise.

"Well, the devil flay them, the privileged classes," his
brother's voice responded, with a cough. "Masha! get us some
supper and some wine if there's any left; or else go and get
some."

The woman rose, came out from behind the screen, and saw
Konstantin.

"There's some gentleman, Nikolay Dmitrievitch," she said.

"Whom do you want?" said the voice of Nikolay Levin, angrily.

"It's I," answered Konstantin Levin, coming forward into the
light.

"Who's _I_?" Nikolay's voice said again, still more angrily. He
could be heard getting up hurriedly, stumbling against something,
and Levin saw, facing him in the doorway, the big, scared eyes,
and the huge, thin, stooping figure of his brother, so familiar,
and yet astonishing in its weirdness and sickliness.

He was even thinner than three years before, when Konstantin
Levin had seen him last. He was wearing a short coat, and his
hands and big bones seemed huger than ever. His hair had grown
thinner, the same straight mustaches hid his lips, the same eyes
gazed strangely and naively at his visitor.

"Ah, Kostya!" he exclaimed suddenly, recognizing his brother, and
his eyes lit up with joy. But the same second he looked round at
the young man, and gave the nervous jerk of his head and neck
that Konstantin knew so well, as if his neckband hurt him; and a
quite different expression, wild, suffering, and cruel, rested
on his emaciated face.

"I wrote to you and Sergey Ivanovitch both that I don't know you
and don't want to know you. What is it you want?"

He was not at all the same as Konstantin had been fancying him.
The worst and most tiresome part of his character, what made all
relations with him so difficult, had been forgotten by Konstantin
Levin when he thought of him, and now, when he saw his face, and
especially that nervous twitching of his head, he remembered it
all.

"I didn't want to see you for anything," he answered timidly.
"I've simply come to see you."

His brother's timidity obviously softened Nikolay. His lips
twitched.

"Oh, so that's it?" he said. "Well, come in; sit down. Like
some supper? Masha, bring supper for three. No, stop a minute.
Do you know who this is?" he said, addressing his brother, and
indicating the gentleman in the jerkin: "This is Mr. Kritsky, my
friend from Kiev, a very remarkable man. He's persecuted by the
police, of course, because he's not a scoundrel."

And he looked round in the way he always did at everyone in the
room. Seeing that the woman standing in the doorway was moving
to go, he shouted to her, "Wait a minute, I said." And with the
inability to express himself, the incoherence that Konstantin
knew so well, he began, with another look round at everyone, to
tell his brother Kritsky's story: how he had been expelled from
the university for starting a benefit society for the poor
students and Sunday schools; and how he had afterwards been a
teacher in a peasant school, and how he had been driven out of
that too, and had afterwards been condemned for something.

"You're of the Kiev university?" said Konstantin Levin to
Kritsky, to break the awkward silence that followed.

"Yes, I was of Kiev," Kritsky replied angrily, his face
darkening.

"And this woman," Nikolay Levin interrupted him, pointing to her,
"is the partner of my life, Marya Nikolaevna. I took her out of
a bad house," and he jerked his neck saying this; "but I love her
and respect her, and any one who wants to know me," he added,
raising his voice and knitting his brows, "I beg to love her and
respect her. She's just the same as my wife, just the same. So
now you know whom you've to do with. And if you think you're
lowering yourself, well, here's the floor, there's the door."

And again his eyes traveled inquiringly over all of them.

"Why I should be lowering myself, I don't understand."

"Then, Masha, tell them to bring supper; three portions, spirits
and wine.... No, wait a minute.... No, it doesn't matter....
Go along."



Chapter 25


"So you see," pursued Nikolay Levin, painfully wrinkling his
forehead and twitching.

It was obviously difficult for him to think of what to say and
do.

"Here, do you see?"... He pointed to some sort of iron bars,
fastened together with strings, lying in a corner of the room.
"Do you see that? That's the beginning of a new thing we're
going into. It's a productive association..."

Konstantin scarcely heard him. He looked into his sickly,
consumptive face, and he was more and more sorry for him, and he
could not force himself to listen to what his brother was telling
him about the association. He saw that this association was a
mere anchor to save him from self-contempt. Nikolay Levin went
on talking:

"You know that capital oppresses the laborer. The laborers with
us, the peasants, bear all the burden of labor, and are so placed
that however much they work they can't escape from their position
of beasts of burden. All the profits of labor, on which they
might improve their position, and gain leisure for themselves,
and after that education, all the surplus values are taken from
them by the capitalists. And society's so constituted that the
harder they work, the greater the profit of the merchants and
landowners, while they stay beasts of burden to the end. And
that state of things must be changed," he finished up, and he
looked questioningly at his brother.

"Yes, of course," said Konstantin, looking at the patch of red
that had come out on his brother's projecting cheek bones.

"And so we're founding a locksmiths' association, where all the
production and profit and the chief instruments of production
will be in common."

"Where is the association to be?" asked Konstantin Levin.

"In the village of Vozdrem, Kazan government."

"But why in a village? In the villages, I think, there is plenty
of work as it is. Why a locksmiths' association in a village?"

"Why? Because the peasants are just as much slaves as they ever
were, and that's why you and Sergey Ivanovitch don't like people
to try and get them out of their slavery," said Nikolay Levin,
exasperated by the objection.

Konstantin Levin sighed, looking meanwhile about the cheerless
and dirty room. This sigh seemed to exasperate Nikolay still
more.

"I know your and Sergey Ivanovitch's aristocratic views. I know
that he applies all the power of his intellect to justify
existing evils."

"No; and what do you talk of Sergey Ivanovitch for?" said Levin,
smiling.

"Sergey Ivanovitch? I'll tell you what for!" Nikolay Levin
shrieked suddenly at the name of Sergey Ivanovitch. "I'll tell
you what for.... But what's the use of talking? There's only one
thing.... What did you come to me for? You look down on this,
and you're welcome to,--and go away, in God's name go away!" he
shrieked, getting up from his chair. "And go away, and go away!"

"I don't look down on it at all," said Konstantin Levin timidly.
"I don't even dispute it."

At that instant Marya Nikolaevna came back. Nikolay Levin
looked round angrily at her. She went quickly to him, and
whispered something.

"I'm not well; I've grown irritable," said Nikolay Levin, getting
calmer and breathing painfully; "and then you talk to me of
Sergey Ivanovitch and his article. It's such rubbish, such
lying, such self-deception. What can a man write of justice who
knows nothing of it? Have you read his article?" he asked
Kritsky, sitting down again at the table, and moving back off
half of it the scattered cigarettes, so as to clear a space.

"I've not read it," Kritsky responded gloomily, obviously not
desiring to enter into the conversation.

"Why not?" said Nikolay Levin, now turning with exasperation upon
Kritsky.

"Because I didn't see the use of wasting my time over it."

"Oh, but excuse me, how did you know it would be wasting your
time? That article's too deep for many people--that's to say
it's over their heads. But with me, it's another thing; I see
through his ideas, and I know where its weakness lies."

Everyone was mute. Kritsky got up deliberately and reached his
cap.

"Won't you have supper? All right, good-bye! Come round
tomorrow with the locksmith."

Kritsky had hardly gone out when Nikolay Levin smiled and winked.

"He's no good either," he said. "I see, of course..."

But at that instant Kritsky, at the door, called him...

"What do you want now?" he said, and went out to him in the
passage. Left alone with Marya Nikolaevna, Levin turned to her.

"Have you been long with my brother?" he said to her.

"Yes, more than a year. Nikolay Dmitrievitch's health has become
very poor. Nikolay Dmitrievitch drinks a great deal," she said.

"That is...how does he drink?"

"Drinks vodka, and it's bad for him."

"And a great deal?" whispered Levin.

"Yes," she said, looking timidly towards the doorway, where
Nikolay Levin had reappeared.

"What were you talking about?" he said, knitting his brows, and
turning his scared eyes from one to the other. "What was it?"

"Oh, nothing," Konstantin answered in confusion.

"Oh, if you don't want to say, don't. Only it's no good your
talking to her. She's a wench, and you're a gentleman," he said
with a jerk of the neck. "You understand everything, I see, and
have taken stock of everything, and look with commiseration on my
shortcomings," he began again, raising his voice.

"Nikolay Dmitrievitch, Nikolay Dmitrievitch," whispered Marya
Nikolaevna, again going up to him.

"Oh, very well, very well!... But where's the supper? Ah, here
it is," he said, seeing a waiter with a tray. "Here, set it
here," he added angrily, and promptly seizing the vodka, he
poured out a glassful and drank it greedily. "Like a drink?" he
turned to his brother, and at once became better humored.

"Well, enough of Sergey Ivanovitch. I'm glad to see you, anyway.
After all's said and done, we're not strangers. Come, have a
drink. Tell me what you're doing," he went on, greedily munching
a piece of bread, and pouring out another glassful. "How are you
living?"

"I live alone in the country, as I used to. I'm busy looking
after the land," answered Konstantin, watching with horror the
greediness with which his brother ate and drank, and trying to
conceal that he noticed it.

"Why don't you get married?"

"It hasn't happened so," Konstantin answered, reddening a little.

"Why not? For me now...everything's at an end! I've made a mess
of my life. But this I've said, and I say still, that if my
share had been given me when I needed it, my whole life would
have been different."

Konstantin made haste to change the conversation.

"Do you know your little Vanya's with me, a clerk in the
countinghouse at Pokrovskoe."

Nikolay jerked his neck, and sank into thought.

"Yes, tell me what's going on at Pokrovskoe. Is the house
standing still, and the birch trees, and our schoolroom? And
Philip the gardener, is he living? How I remember the arbor and
the seat! Now mind and don't alter anything in the house, but
make haste and get married, and make everything as it used to be
again. Then I'll come and see you, if your wife is nice."

"But come to me now," said Levin. "How nicely we would arrange
it!"

"I'd come and see you if I were sure I should not find Sergey
Ivanovitch."

"You wouldn't find him there. I live quite independently of
him."

"Yes, but say what you like, you will have to choose between me
and him," he said, looking timidly into his brother's face.

This timidity touched Konstantin.

"If you want to hear my confession of faith on the subject, I
tell you that in your quarrel with Sergey Ivanovitch I take
neither side. You're both wrong. You're more wrong externally,
and he inwardly."

"Ah, ah! You see that, you see that!" Nikolay shouted joyfully.

"But I personally value friendly relations with you more
because..."

"Why, why?"

Konstantin could not say that he valued it more because Nikolay
was unhappy, and needed affection. But Nikolay knew that this
was just what he meant to say, and scowling he took up the vodka
again.

"Enough, Nikolay Dmitrievitch!" said Marya Nikolaevna, stretching
out her plump, bare arm towards the decanter.

"Let it be! Don't insist! I'll beat you!" he shouted.

Marya Nikolaevna smiled a sweet and good-humored smile, which was
at once reflected on Nikolay's face, and she took the bottle.

"And do you suppose she understands nothing?" said Nikolay. "She
understands it all better than any of us. Isn't it true there's
something good and sweet in her?"

"Were you never before in Moscow?" Konstantin said to her, for
the sake of saying something.

"Only you mustn't be polite and stiff with her. It frightens
her. No one ever spoke to her so but the justices of the peace
who tried her for trying to get out of a house of ill-fame.
Mercy on us, the senselessness in the world!" he cried suddenly.
"These new institutions, these justices of the peace, rural
councils, what hideousness it all is!"

And he began to enlarge on his encounters with the new
institutions.

Konstantin Levin heard him, and the disbelief in the sense of
all public institutions, which he shared with him, and often
expressed, was distasteful to him now from his brother's lips.

"In another world we shall understand it all," he said lightly.

"In another world! Ah, I don't like that other world! I don't
like it," he said, letting his scared eyes rest on his brother's
eyes. "Here one would think that to get out of all the baseness
and the mess, one's own and other people's, would be a good
thing, and yet I'm afraid of death, awfully afraid of death." He
shuddered. "But do drink something. Would you like some
champagne? Or shall we go somewhere? Let's go to the Gypsies!
Do you know I have got so fond of the Gypsies and Russian songs."

His speech had begun to falter, and he passed abruptly from one
subject to another. Konstantin with the help of Masha persuaded
him not to go out anywhere, and got him to bed hopelessly drunk.

Masha promised to write to Konstantin in case of need, and to
persuade Nikolay Levin to go and stay with his brother.



Chapter 26


In the morning Konstantin Levin left Moscow, and towards evening
he reached home. On the journey in the train he talked to his
neighbors about politics and the new railways, and, just as in
Moscow, he was overcome by a sense of confusion of ideas,
dissatisfaction with himself, shame of something or other. But
when he got out at his own station, when he saw his one-eyed
coachman, Ignat, with the collar of his coat turned up; when, in
the dim light reflected by the station fires, he saw his own
sledge, his own horses with their tails tied up, in their harness
trimmed with rings and tassels; when the coachman Ignat, as he
put in his luggage, told him the village news, that the
contractor had arrived, and that Pava had calved,--he felt that
little by little the confusion was clearing up, and the shame and
self-dissatisfaction were passing away. He felt this at the mere
sight of Ignat and the horses; but when he had put on the
sheepskin brought for him, had sat down wrapped up in the sledge,
and had driven off pondering on the work that lay before him in
the village, and staring at the side-horse, that had been his
saddle-horse, past his prime now, but a spirited beast from the
Don, he began to see what had happened to him in quite a
different light. He felt himself, and did not want to be any one
else. All he wanted now was to be better than before. In the
first place he resolved that from that day he would give up
hoping for any extraordinary happiness, such as marriage must
have given him, and consequently he would not so disdain what he
really had. Secondly, he would never again let himself give way
to low passion, the memory of which had so tortured him when he
had been making up his mind to make an offer. Then remembering
his brother Nikolay, he resolved to himself that he would never
allow himself to forget him, that he would follow him up, and not
lose sight of him, so as to be ready to help when things should
go ill with him. And that would be soon, he felt. Then, too,
his brother's talk of communism, which he had treated so lightly
at the time, now made him think. He considered a revolution in
economic conditions nonsense. But he always felt the injustice
of his own abundance in comparison with the poverty of the
peasants, and now he determined that so as to feel quite in the
right, though he had worked hard and lived by no means
luxuriously before, he would now work still harder, and would
allow himself even less luxury. And all this seemed to him so
easy a conquest over himself that he spent the whole drive in the
pleasantest daydreams. With a resolute feeling of hope in a new,
better life, he reached home before nine o'clock at night.

The snow of the little quadrangle before the house was lit up by
a light in the bedroom windows of his old nurse, Agafea
Mihalovna, who performed the duties of housekeeper in his house.
She was not yet asleep. Kouzma, waked up by her, came sidling
sleepily out onto the steps. A setter bitch, Laska, ran out too,
almost upsetting Kouzma, and whining, turned round about Levin's
knees, jumping up and longing, but not daring, to put her
forepaws on his chest.

"You're soon back again, sir," said Agafea Mihalovna.

"I got tired of it, Agafea Mihalovna. With friends, one is well;
but at home, one is better," he answered, and went into his
study.

The study was slowly lit up as the candle was brought in. The
familiar details came out: the stag's horns, the bookshelves,
the looking-glass, the stove with its ventilator, which had long
wanted mending, his father's sofa, a large table, on the table an
open book, a broken ash tray, a manuscript book with his
handwriting. As he saw all this, there came over him for an
instant a doubt of the possibility of arranging the new life, of
which he had been dreaming on the road. All these traces of his
life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him: "No, you're not
going to get away from us, and you're not going to be different,
but you're going to be the same as you've always been; with
doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts
to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness
which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you."

This the things said to him, but another voice in his heart was
telling him that he must not fall under the sway of the past, and
that one can do anything with oneself. And hearing that voice,
he went into the corner where stood his two heavy dumbbells, and
began brandishing them like a gymnast, trying to restore his
confident temper. There was a creak of steps at the door. He
hastily put down the dumbbells.

The bailiff came in, and said everything, thank God, was doing
well; but informed him that the buckwheat in the new drying
machine had been a little scorched. This piece of news irritated
Levin. The new drying machine had been constructed and partly
invented by Levin. The bailiff had always been against the
drying machine, and now it was with suppressed triumph that he
announced that the buckwheat had been scorched. Levin was firmly
convinced that if the buckwheat had been scorched, it was only
because the precautions had not been taken, for which he had
hundreds of times given orders. He was annoyed, and reprimanded
the bailiff. But there had been an important and joyful event:
Pava, his best cow, an expensive beast, bought at a show, had
calved.

"Kouzma, give me my sheepskin. And you tell them to take a
lantern. I'll come and look at her," he said to the bailiff.

The cowhouse for the more valuable cows was just behind the
house. Walking across the yard, passing a snowdrift by the lilac
tree, he went into the cowhouse. There was the warm, steamy
smell of dung when the frozen door was opened, and the cows,
astonished at the unfamiliar light of the lantern, stirred on the
fresh straw. He caught a glimpse of the broad, smooth, black and
piebald back of Hollandka. Berkoot, the bull, was lying down
with his ring in his lip, and seemed about to get up, but thought
better of it, and only gave two snorts as they passed by him.
Pava, a perfect beauty, huge as a hippopotamus, with her back
turned to them, prevented their seeing the calf, as she sniffed
her all over.

Levin went into the pen, looked Pava over, and lifted the red and
spotted calf onto her long, tottering legs. Pava, uneasy, began
lowing, but when Levin put the calf close to her she was soothed,
and, sighing heavily, began licking her with her rough tongue.
The calf, fumbling, poked her nose under her mother's udder, and
stiffened her tail out straight.

"Here, bring the light, Fyodor, this way," said Levin, examining
the calf. "Like the mother! though the color takes after the
father; but that's nothing. Very good. Long and broad in the
haunch. Vassily Fedorovitch, isn't she splendid?" he said to the
bailiff, quite forgiving him for the buckwheat under the
influence of his delight in the calf.

"How could she fail to be? Oh, Semyon the contractor came the
day after you left. You must settle with him, Konstantin
Dmitrievitch," said the bailiff. "I did inform you about the
machine."

This question was enough to take Levin back to all the details of
his work on the estate, which was on a large scale, and
complicated. He went straight from the cowhouse to the counting
house, and after a little conversation with the bailiff and
Semyon the contractor, he went back to the house and straight
upstairs to the drawing room.



Chapter 27


The house was big and old-fashioned, and Levin, though he lived
alone, had the whole house heated and used. He knew that this
was stupid, he knew that it was positively not right, and
contrary to his present new plans, but this house was a whole
world to Levin. It was the world in which his father and mother
had lived and died. They had lived just the life that to Levin
seemed the ideal of perfection, and that he had dreamed of
beginning with his wife, his family.

Levin scarcely remembered his mother. His conception of her was
for him a sacred memory, and his future wife was bound to be in
his imagination a repetition of that exquisite, holy ideal of a
woman that his mother had been.

He was so far from conceiving of love for woman apart from
marriage that he positively pictured to himself first the family,
and only secondarily the woman who would give him a family. His
ideas of marriage were, consequently, quite unlike those of the
great majority of his acquaintances, for whom getting married was
one of the numerous facts of social life. For Levin it was the
chief affair of life, on which its whole happiness turned. And
now he had to give up that.

When he had gone into the little drawing room, where he always
had tea, and had settled himself in his armchair with a book,
and Agafea Mihalovna had brought him tea, and with her usual,
"Well, I'll stay a while, sir," had taken a chair in the window,
he felt that, however strange it might be, he had not parted from
his daydreams, and that he could not live without them. Whether
with her, or with another, still it would be. He was reading a
book, and thinking of what he was reading, and stopping to listen
to Agafea Mihalovna, who gossiped away without flagging, and yet
with all that, all sorts of pictures of family life and work in
the future rose disconnectedly before his imagination. He felt
that in the depth of his soul something had been put in its
place, settled down, and laid to rest.