Chapter I
Sergey Ivanovitch Koznishev wanted a rest
from mental work, and instead of going abroad as he usually did, he
came towards the end of May to stay in the country with his
brother. In his judgment the best sort of life was a country life.
He had come now to enjoy such a life at his brother’s. Konstantin
Levin was very glad to have him, especially as he did not expect
his brother Nikolay that summer. But in spite of his affection and
respect for Sergey Ivanovitch, Konstantin Levin was uncomfortable
with his brother in the country. It made him uncomfortable, and it
positively annoyed him to see his brother’s attitude to the
country. To Konstantin Levin the country was the background of
life, that is of pleasures, endeavors, labor. To Sergey Ivanovitch
the country meant on one hand rest from work, on the other a
valuable antidote to the corrupt influences of town, which he took
with satisfaction and a sense of its utility. To Konstantin Levin
the country was good first because it afforded a field for labor,
of the usefulness of which there could be no doubt. To Sergey
Ivanovitch the country was particularly good, because there it was
possible and fitting to do nothing. Moreover, Sergey Ivanovitch’s
attitude to the peasants rather piqued Konstantin. Sergey
Ivanovitch used to say that he knew and liked the peasantry, and he
often talked to the peasants, which he knew how to do without
affectation or condescension, and from every such conversation he
would deduce general conclusions in favor of the peasantry and in
confirmation of his knowing them. Konstantin Levin did not like
such an attitude to the peasants. To Konstantin the peasant was
simply the chief partner in their common labor, and in spite of all
the respect and the love, almost like that of kinship, he had for
the peasant—sucked in probably, as he said himself, with the milk
of his peasant nurse—still as a fellow-worker with him, while
sometimes enthusiastic over the vigor, gentleness, and justice of
these men, he was very often, when their common labors called for
other qualities, exasperated with the peasant for his carelessness,
lack of method, drunkenness, and lying. If he had been asked
whether he liked or didn’t like the peasants, Konstantin Levin
would have been absolutely at a loss what to reply. He liked and
did not like the peasants, just as he liked and did not like men in
general. Of course, being a good-hearted man, he liked men rather
than he disliked them, and so too with the peasants. But like or
dislike “the people” as something apart he could not, not only
because he lived with “the people,” and all his interests were
bound up with theirs, but also because he regarded himself as a
part of “the people,” did not see any special qualities or failings
distinguishing himself and “the people,” and could not contrast
himself with them. Moreover, although he had lived so long in the
closest relations with the peasants, as farmer and arbitrator, and
what was more, as adviser (the peasants trusted him, and for thirty
miles round they would come to ask his advice), he had no definite
views of “the people,” and would have been as much at a loss to
answer the question whether he knew “the people” as the question
whether he liked them. For him to say he knew the peasantry would
have been the same as to say he knew men. He was continually
watching and getting to know people of all sorts, and among them
peasants, whom he regarded as good and interesting people, and he
was continually observing new points in them, altering his former
views of them and forming new ones. With Sergey Ivanovitch it was
quite the contrary. Just as he liked and praised a country life in
comparison with the life he did not like, so too he liked the
peasantry in contradistinction to the class of men he did not like,
and so too he knew the peasantry as something distinct from and
opposed to men generally. In his methodical brain there were
distinctly formulated certain aspects of peasant life, deduced
partly from that life itself, but chiefly from contrast with other
modes of life. He never changed his opinion of the peasantry and
his sympathetic attitude towards them.
In the discussions that arose between the brothers
on their views of the peasantry, Sergey Ivanovitch always got the
better of his brother, precisely because Sergey Ivanovitch had
definite ideas about the peasant—his character, his qualities, and
his tastes. Konstantin Levin had no definite and unalterable idea
on the subject, and so in their arguments Konstantin was readily
convicted of contradicting himself.
In Sergey Ivanovitch’s eyes his younger brother was
a capital fellow, with his heart in the right place (as he
expressed it in French), but with a mind which, though fairly
quick, was too much influenced by the impressions of the moment,
and consequently filled with contradictions. With all the
condescension of an elder brother he sometimes explained to him the
true import of things, but he derived little satisfaction from
arguing with him because he got the better of him too easily.
Konstantin Levin regarded his brother as a man of
immense intellect and culture, as generous in the highest sense of
the word, and possessed of a special faculty for working for the
public good. But in the depths of his heart, the older he became,
and the more intimately he knew his brother, the more and more
frequently the thought struck him that this faculty of working for
the public good, of which he felt himself utterly devoid, was
possibly not so much a quality as a lack of something—not a lack of
good, honest, noble desires and tastes, but a lack of vital force,
of what is called heart, of that impulse which drives a man to
choose some one out of the innumerable paths of life, and to care
only for that one. The better he knew his brother, the more he
noticed that Sergey Ivanovitch and many other people who worked for
the public welfare were not led by an impulse of the heart to care
for the public good, but reasoned from intellectual considerations
that it was a right thing to take interest in public affairs, and
consequently took interest in them. Levin was confirmed in this
generalization by observing that his brother did not take questions
affecting the public welfare or the question of the immortality of
the soul a bit more to heart than he did chess problems, or the
ingenious construction of a new machine.
Besides this, Konstantin Levin was not at his ease
with his brother, because in summer in the country Levin was
continually busy with work on the land, and the long summer day was
not long enough for him to get through all he had to do, while
Sergey Ivanovitch was taking a holiday. But though he was taking a
holiday now, that is to say, he was doing no writing, he was so
used to intellectual activity that he liked to put into concise and
eloquent shape the ideas that occurred to him, and liked to have
some one to listen to him. His most usual and natural listener was
his brother. And so in spite of the friendliness and directness of
their relations, Konstantin felt an awkwardness in leaving him
alone. Sergey Ivanovitch liked to stretch himself on the grass in
the sun, and to lie so, basking and chatting lazily.
“You wouldn’t believe,” he would say to his
brother, “what a pleasure this rural laziness is to me. Not an idea
in one’s brain, as empty as a drum!”
But Konstantin Levin found it dull sitting and
listening to him, especially when he knew that while he was away
they would be carting dung onto the fields not ploughed ready for
it, and heaping it all up anyhow; and would not screw the shares in
the ploughs, but would let them come off and then say that the new
ploughs were a silly invention, and there was nothing like the old
Andreevna plough, and so on.
“Come, you’ve done enough trudging about in the
heat,” Sergey Ivanovitch would say to him.
“No, I must just run round to the counting-house
for a minute,” Levin would answer, and he would run off to the
fields.