PART THREE
Chapter 1
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 someone 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 someone 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.
