simply considers it as Kostya’s duty to be his steward. And it’s the same
with his sister. Now Dolly and her children are under his guardianship; all
these peasants who come to him every day, as though he were bound to be
at their service.”
“Yes, only be like your father, only like him,” she said, handing Mitya
over to the nurse, and putting her lips to his cheek.
Chapter 8
Ever since, by his beloved brother’s deathbed, Levin had first glanced
into the questions of life and death in the light of these new convictions, as
he called them, which had during the period from his twentieth to his thirty-
fourth year imperceptibly replaced his childish and youthful beliefs—he
had been stricken with horror, not so much of death, as of life, without any
knowledge of whence, and why, and how, and what it was. The physical
organization, its decay, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the
conservation of energy, evolution, were the words which usurped the place
of his old belief. These words and the ideas associated with them were very
well for intellectual purposes. But for life they yielded nothing, and Levin
felt suddenly like a man who has changed his warm fur cloak for a muslin
garment, and going for the first time into the frost is immediately
convinced, not by reason, but by his whole nature that he is as good as
naked, and that he must infallibly perish miserably.
From that moment, though he did not distinctly face it, and still went on
living as before, Levin had never lost this sense of terror at his lack of
knowledge.
He vaguely felt, too, that what he called his new convictions were not
merely lack of knowledge, but that they were part of a whole order of ideas,
in which no knowledge of what he needed was possible.
At first, marriage, with the new joys and duties bound up with it, had
completely crowded out these thoughts. But of late, while he was staying in
Moscow after his wife’s confinement, with nothing to do, the question that
clamored for solution had more and more often, more and more insistently,
haunted Levin’s mind.
The question was summed up for him thus: “If I do not accept the
answers Christianity gives to the problems of my life, what answers do I
accept?” And in the whole arsenal of his convictions, so far from finding
any satisfactory answers, he was utterly unable to find anything at all like
an answer.
He was in the position of a man seeking food in toy shops and tool shops.
Instinctively, unconsciously, with every book, with every conversation,
with every man he met, he was on the lookout for light on these questions
and their solution.
What puzzled and distracted him above everything was that the majority
of men of his age and circle had, like him, exchanged their old beliefs for
the same new convictions, and yet saw nothing to lament in this, and were
perfectly satisfied and serene. So that, apart from the principal question,
Levin was tortured by other questions too. Were these people sincere? he
asked himself, or were they playing a part? or was it that they understood
the answers science gave to these problems in some different, clearer sense
than he did? And he assiduously studied both these men’s opinions and the
books which treated of these scientific explanations.
One fact he had found out since these questions had engrossed his mind,
was that he had been quite wrong in supposing from the recollections of the
circle of his young days at college, that religion had outlived its day, and
that it was now practically non-existent. All the people nearest to him who
were good in their lives were believers. The old prince, and Lvov, whom he
liked so much, and Sergey Ivanovitch, and all the women believed, and his
wife believed as simply as he had believed in his earliest childhood, and
ninety-nine hundredths of the Russian people, all the working people for
whose life he felt the deepest respect, believed.
Another fact of which he became convinced, after reading many
scientific books, was that the men who shared his views had no other
construction to put on them, and that they gave no explanation of the
questions which he felt he could not live without answering, but simply
ignored their existence and attempted to explain other questions of no
possible interest to him, such as the evolution of organisms, the
materialistic theory of consciousness, and so forth.
Moreover, during his wife’s confinement, something had happened that
seemed extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into praying, and
