Chapter 26
In September Levin moved to Moscow for Kitty’s confinement. He had
spent a whole month in Moscow with nothing to do, when Sergey
Ivanovitch, who had property in the Kashinsky province, and took great
interest in the question of the approaching elections, made ready to set off
to the elections. He invited his brother, who had a vote in the Seleznevsky
district, to come with him. Levin had, moreover, to transact in Kashin some
extremely important business relating to the wardship of land and to the
receiving of certain redemption money for his sister, who was abroad.
Levin still hesitated, but Kitty, who saw that he was bored in Moscow,
and urged him to go, on her own authority ordered him the proper
nobleman’s uniform, costing seven pounds. And that seven pounds paid for
the uniform was the chief cause that finally decided Levin to go. He went to
Kashin….
Levin had been six days in Kashin, visiting the assembly each day, and
busily engaged about his sister’s business, which still dragged on. The
district marshals of nobility were all occupied with the elections, and it was
impossible to get the simplest thing done that depended upon the court of
wardship. The other matter, the payment of the sums due, was met too by
difficulties. After long negotiations over the legal details, the money was at
last ready to be paid; but the notary, a most obliging person, could not hand
over the order, because it must have the signature of the president, and the
president, though he had not given over his duties to a deputy, was at the
elections. All these worrying negotiations, this endless going from place to
place, and talking with pleasant and excellent people, who quite saw the
unpleasantness of the petitioner’s position, but were powerless to assist him
—all these efforts that yielded no result, led to a feeling of misery in Levin
akin to the mortifying helplessness one experiences in dreams when one
tries to use physical force. He felt this frequently as he talked to his most
good-natured solicitor. This solicitor did, it seemed, everything possible,
and strained every nerve to get him out of his difficulties. “I tell you what
you might try,” he said more than once; “go to so-and-so and so-and-so,”
and the solicitor drew up a regular plan for getting round the fatal point that
hindered everything. But he would add immediately, “It’ll mean some
delay, anyway, but you might try it.” And Levin did try, and did go.
Everyone was kind and civil, but the point evaded seemed to crop up again
in the end, and again to bar the way. What was particularly trying, was that
Levin could not make out with whom he was struggling, to whose interest it
was that his business should not be done. That no one seemed to know; the
solicitor certainly did not know. If Levin could have understood why, just as
he saw why one can only approach the booking office of a railway station in
single file, it would not have been so vexatious and tiresome to him. But
with the hindrances that confronted him in his business, no one could
explain why they existed.
But Levin had changed a good deal since his marriage; he was patient,
and if he could not see why it was all arranged like this, he told himself that
he could not judge without knowing all about it, and that most likely it must
be so, and he tried not to fret.
In attending the elections, too, and taking part in them, he tried now not
to judge, not to fall foul of them, but to comprehend as fully as he could the
question which was so earnestly and ardently absorbing honest and
excellent men whom he respected. Since his marriage there had been
revealed to Levin so many new and serious aspects of life that had
previously, through his frivolous attitude to them, seemed of no importance,
that in the question of the elections too he assumed and tried to find some
serious significance.
Sergey Ivanovitch explained to him the meaning and object of the
proposed revolution at the elections. The marshal of the province in whose
hands the law had placed the control of so many important public functions
—the guardianship of wards (the very department which was giving Levin
so much trouble just now), the disposal of large sums subscribed by the
nobility of the province, the high schools, female, male, and military, and
popular instruction on the new model, and finally, the district council—the
marshal of the province, Snetkov, was a nobleman of the old school,—
dissipating an immense fortune, a good-hearted man, honest after his own
fashion, but utterly without any comprehension of the needs of modern
days. He always took, in every question, the side of the nobility; he was
positively antagonistic to the spread of popular education, and he succeeded
in giving a purely party character to the district council which ought by
rights to be of such an immense importance. What was needed was to put in
his place a fresh, capable, perfectly modern man, of contemporary ideas,
and to frame their policy so as from the rights conferred upon the nobles,
not as the nobility, but as an element of the district council, to extract all the
powers of self-government that could possibly be derived from them. In the
wealthy Kashinsky province, which always took the lead of other provinces
in everything, there was now such a preponderance of forces that this
policy, once carried through properly there, might serve as a model for other
provinces for all Russia. And hence the whole question was of the greatest
importance. It was proposed to elect as marshal in place of Snetkov either
Sviazhsky, or, better still, Nevyedovsky, a former university professor, a
man of remarkable intelligence and a great friend of Sergey Ivanovitch.
The meeting was opened by the governor, who made a speech to the
nobles, urging them to elect the public functionaries, not from regard for
persons, but for the service and welfare of their fatherland, and hoping that
the honorable nobility of the Kashinsky province would, as at all former
elections, hold their duty as sacred, and vindicate the exalted confidence of
the monarch.
When he had finished with his speech, the governor walked out of the
hall, and the noblemen noisily and eagerly—some even enthusiastically—
followed him and thronged round him while he put on his fur coat and
conversed amicably with the marshal of the province. Levin, anxious to see
into everything and not to miss anything, stood there too in the crowd, and
heard the governor say: “Please tell Marya Ivanovna my wife is very sorry
she couldn’t come to the Home.” And thereupon the nobles in high good-
humor sorted out their fur coats and all drove off to the cathedral.
In the cathedral Levin, lifting his hand like the rest and repeating the
words of the archdeacon, swore with most terrible oaths to do all the
governor had hoped they would do. Church services always affected Levin,
and as he uttered the words “I kiss the cross,” and glanced round at the
crowd of young and old men repeating the same, he felt touched.
On the second and third days there was business relating to the finances
of the nobility and the female high school, of no importance whatever, as
Sergey Ivanovitch explained, and Levin, busy seeing after his own affairs,
did not attend the meetings. On the fourth day the auditing of the marshal’s
accounts took place at the high table of the marshal of the province. And
then there occurred the first skirmish between the new party and the old.
The committee who had been deputed to verify the accounts reported to the
