So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he
was and what he was living for, and harassed at this lack of knowledge to
such a point that he was afraid of suicide, and yet firmly laying down his
own individual definite path in life.
Chapter 11
The day on which Sergey Ivanovitch came to Pokrovskoe was one of
Levin’s most painful days. It was the very busiest working time, when all
the peasantry show an extraordinary intensity of self-sacrifice in labor, such
as is never shown in any other conditions of life, and would be highly
esteemed if the men who showed these qualities themselves thought highly
of them, and if it were not repeated every year, and if the results of this
intense labor were not so simple.
To reap and bind the rye and oats and to carry it, to mow the meadows,
turn over the fallows, thrash the seed and sow the winter corn—all this
seems so simple and ordinary; but to succeed in getting through it all
everyone in the village, from the old man to the young child, must toil
incessantly for three or four weeks, three times as hard as usual, living on
rye-beer, onions, and black bread, thrashing and carrying the sheaves at
night, and not giving more than two or three hours in the twenty-four to
sleep. And every year this is done all over Russia.
Having lived the greater part of his life in the country and in the closest
relations with the peasants, Levin always felt in this busy time that he was
infected by this general quickening of energy in the people.
In the early morning he rode over to the first sowing of the rye, and to the
oats, which were being carried to the stacks, and returning home at the time
his wife and sister-in-law were getting up, he drank coffee with them and
walked to the farm, where a new thrashing machine was to be set working
to get ready the seed-corn.
He was standing in the cool granary, still fragrant with the leaves of the
hazel branches interlaced on the freshly peeled aspen beams of the new
thatch roof. He gazed through the open door in which the dry bitter dust of
the thrashing whirled and played, at the grass of the thrashing floor in the
sunlight and the fresh straw that had been brought in from the barn, then at
the speckly-headed, white-breasted swallows that flew chirping in under the
roof and, fluttering their wings, settled in the crevices of the doorway, then
at the peasants bustling in the dark, dusty barn, and he thought strange
thoughts.
“Why is it all being done?” he thought. “Why am I standing here, making
them work? What are they all so busy for, trying to show their zeal before
me? What is that old Matrona, my old friend, toiling for? (I doctored her,
when the beam fell on her in the fire)” he thought, looking at a thin old
woman who was raking up the grain, moving painfully with her bare, sun-
blackened feet over the uneven, rough floor. “Then she recovered, but today
or tomorrow or in ten years she won’t; they’ll bury her, and nothing will be
left either of her or of that smart girl in the red jacket, who with that skillful,
soft action shakes the ears out of their husks. They’ll bury her and this
piebald horse, and very soon too,” he thought, gazing at the heavily
moving, panting horse that kept walking up the wheel that turned under
him. “And they will bury her and Fyodor the thrasher with his curly beard
full of chaff and his shirt torn on his white shoulders—they will bury him.
He’s untying the sheaves, and giving orders, and shouting to the women,
and quickly setting straight the strap on the moving wheel. And what’s
more, it’s not them alone—me they’ll bury too, and nothing will be left.
What for?”
He thought this, and at the same time looked at his watch to reckon how
much they thrashed in an hour. He wanted to know this so as to judge by it
the task to set for the day.
“It’ll soon be one, and they’re only beginning the third sheaf,” thought
Levin. He went up to the man that was feeding the machine, and shouting
over the roar of the machine he told him to put it in more slowly. “You put
in too much at a time, Fyodor. Do you see—it gets choked, that’s why it
isn’t getting on. Do it evenly.”
Fyodor, black with the dust that clung to his moist face, shouted
something in response, but still went on doing it as Levin did not want him
to.
Levin, going up to the machine, moved Fyodor aside, and began feeding
the corn in himself. Working on till the peasants’ dinner hour, which was
not long in coming, he went out of the barn with Fyodor and fell into talk
with him, stopping beside a neat yellow sheaf of rye laid on the thrashing
floor for seed.
Fyodor came from a village at some distance from the one in which
Levin had once allotted land to his cooperative association. Now it had been
let to a former house porter.
Levin talked to Fyodor about this land and asked whether Platon, a well-
to-do peasant of good character belonging to the same village, would not
take the land for the coming year.
“It’s a high rent; it wouldn’t pay Platon, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,”
answered the peasant, picking the ears off his sweat-drenched shirt.
“But how does Kirillov make it pay?”
“Mituh!” (so the peasant called the house porter, in a tone of contempt),
“you may be sure he’ll make it pay, Konstantin Dmitrievitch! He’ll get his
share, however he has to squeeze to get it! He’s no mercy on a Christian.
But Uncle Fokanitch” (so he called the old peasant Platon), “do you
suppose he’d flay the skin off a man? Where there’s debt, he’ll let anyone
off. And he’ll not wring the last penny out. He’s a man too.”
“But why will he let anyone off?”
“Oh, well, of course, folks are different. One man lives for his own wants
and nothing else, like Mituh, he only thinks of filling his belly, but
Fokanitch is a righteous man. He lives for his soul. He does not forget
God.”
“How thinks of God? How does he live for his soul?” Levin almost
shouted.
“Why, to be sure, in truth, in God’s way. Folks are different. Take you
now, you wouldn’t wrong a man….”
“Yes, yes, good-bye!” said Levin, breathless with excitement, and turning
round he took his stick and walked quickly away towards home. At the
peasant’s words that Fokanitch lived for his soul, in truth, in God’s way,
undefined but significant ideas seemed to burst out as though they had been
locked up, and all striving towards one goal, they thronged whirling through
his head, blinding him with their light.
