An excerpt from the original text.(complete · 1915 words)
arya Alexandrovna carried out her intention and went to see Anna. She
was sorry to annoy her sister and to do anything Levin disliked. She
quite understood how right the Levins were in not wishing to have
anything to do with Vronsky. But she felt she must go and see Anna, and
show her that her feelings could not be changed, in spite of the change
in her position. That she might be independent of the Levins in this
expedition, Darya Alexandrovna sent to the village to hire horses for
the drive; but Levin learning of it went to her to protest.
“What makes you suppose that I dislike your going? But, even if I did
dislike it, I should still more dislike your not taking my horses,” he
said. “You never told me that you were going for certain. Hiring horses
in the village is disagreeable to me, and, what’s of more importance,
they’ll undertake the job and never get you there. I have horses. And
if you don’t want to wound me, you’ll take mine.”
Darya Alexandrovna had to consent, and on the day fixed Levin had ready
for his sister-in-law a set of four horses and relays, getting them
together from the farm and saddle-horses—not at all a smart-looking
set, but capable of taking Darya Alexandrovna the whole distance in a
single day. At that moment, when horses were wanted for the princess,
who was going, and for the midwife, it was a difficult matter for Levin
to make up the number, but the duties of hospitality would not let him
allow Darya Alexandrovna to hire horses when staying in his house.
Moreover, he was well aware that the twenty roubles that would be asked
for the journey were a serious matter for her; Darya Alexandrovna’s
pecuniary affairs, which were in a very unsatisfactory state, were
taken to heart by the Levins as if they were their own.
Darya Alexandrovna, by Levin’s advice, started before daybreak. The
road was good, the carriage comfortable, the horses trotted along
merrily, and on the box, besides the coachman, sat the counting-house
clerk, whom Levin was sending instead of a groom for greater security.
Darya Alexandrovna dozed and waked up only on reaching the inn where
the horses were to be changed.
After drinking tea at the same well-to-do peasant’s with whom Levin had
stayed on the way to Sviazhsky’s, and chatting with the women about
their children, and with the old man about Count Vronsky, whom the
latter praised very highly, Darya Alexandrovna, at ten o’clock, went on
again. At home, looking after her children, she had no time to think.
So now, after this journey of four hours, all the thoughts she had
suppressed before rushed swarming into her brain, and she thought over
all her life as she never had before, and from the most different
points of view. Her thoughts seemed strange even to herself. At first
she thought about the children, about whom she was uneasy, although the
princess and Kitty (she reckoned more upon her) had promised to look
after them. “If only Masha does not begin her naughty tricks, if Grisha
isn’t kicked by a horse, and Lily’s stomach isn’t upset again!” she
thought. But these questions of the present were succeeded by questions
of the immediate future. She began thinking how she had to get a new
flat in Moscow for the coming winter, to renew the drawing-room
furniture, and to make her elder girl a cloak. Then questions of the
more remote future occurred to her: how she was to place her children
in the world. “The girls are all right,” she thought; “but the boys?”
“It’s very well that I’m teaching Grisha, but of course that’s only
because I am free myself now, I’m not with child. Stiva, of course,
there’s no counting on. And with the help of good-natured friends I can
bring them up; but if there’s another baby coming?...” And the thought
struck her how untruly it was said that the curse laid on woman was
that in sorrow she should bring forth children.
“The birth itself, that’s nothing; but the months of carrying the
child—that’s what’s so intolerable,” she thought, picturing to herself
her last pregnancy, and the death of the last baby. And she recalled
the conversation she had just had with the young woman at the inn. On
being asked whether she had any children, the handsome young woman had
answered cheerfully:
“I had a girl baby, but God set me free; I buried her last Lent.”
“Well, did you grieve very much for her?” asked Darya Alexandrovna.
“Why grieve? The old man has grandchildren enough as it is. It was only
a trouble. No working, nor nothing. Only a tie.”
This answer had struck Darya Alexandrovna as revolting in spite of the
good-natured and pleasing face of the young woman; but now she could
not help recalling these words. In those cynical words there was indeed
a grain of truth.
“Yes, altogether,” thought Darya Alexandrovna, looking back over her
whole existence during those fifteen years of her married life,
“pregnancy, sickness, mental incapacity, indifference to everything,
and most of all—hideousness. Kitty, young and pretty as she is, even
Kitty has lost her looks; and I when I’m with child become hideous, I
know it. The birth, the agony, the hideous agonies, that last moment
... then the nursing, the sleepless nights, the fearful pains....”
Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain from
sore breasts which she had suffered with almost every child. “Then the
children’s illnesses, that everlasting apprehension; then bringing them
up; evil propensities” (she thought of little Masha’s crime among the
raspberries), “education, Latin—it’s all so incomprehensible and
difficult. And on the top of it all, the death of these children.” And
there rose again before her imagination the cruel memory, that always
tore her mother’s heart, of the death of her last little baby, who had
died of croup; his funeral, the callous indifference of all at the
little pink coffin, and her own torn heart, and her lonely anguish at
the sight of the pale little brow with its projecting temples, and the
open, wondering little mouth seen in the coffin at the moment when it
was being covered with the little pink lid with a cross braided on it.
“And all this, what’s it for? What is to come of it all? That I’m
wasting my life, never having a moment’s peace, either with child, or
nursing a child, forever irritable, peevish, wretched myself and
worrying others, repulsive to my husband, while the children are
growing up unhappy, badly educated, and penniless. Even now, if it
weren’t for spending the summer at the Levins’, I don’t know how we
should be managing to live. Of course Kostya and Kitty have so much
tact that we don’t feel it; but it can’t go on. They’ll have children,
they won’t be able to keep us; it’s a drag on them as it is. How is
papa, who has hardly anything left for himself, to help us? So that I
can’t even bring the children up by myself, and may find it hard with
the help of other people, at the cost of humiliation. Why, even if we
suppose the greatest good luck, that the children don’t die, and I
bring them up somehow. At the very best they’ll simply be decent
people. That’s all I can hope for. And to gain simply that—what
agonies, what toil!... One’s whole life ruined!” Again she recalled
what the young peasant woman had said, and again she was revolted at
the thought; but she could not help admitting that there was a grain of
brutal truth in the words.
“Is it far now, Mihail?” Darya Alexandrovna asked the counting-house
clerk, to turn her mind from thoughts that were frightening her.
“From this village, they say, it’s five miles.” The carriage drove
along the village street and onto a bridge. On the bridge was a crowd
of peasant women with coils of ties for the sheaves on their shoulders,
gaily and noisily chattering. They stood still on the bridge, staring
inquisitively at the carriage. All the faces turned to Darya
Alexandrovna looked to her healthy and happy, making her envious of
their enjoyment of life. “They’re all living, they’re all enjoying
life,” Darya Alexandrovna still mused when she had passed the peasant
women and was driving uphill again at a trot, seated comfortably on the
soft springs of the old carriage, “while I, let out, as it were from
prison, from the world of worries that fret me to death, am only
looking about me now for an instant. They all live; those peasant women
and my sister Natalia and Varenka and Anna, whom I am going to see—all,
but not I.
“And they attack Anna. What for? am I any better? I have, anyway, a
husband I love—not as I should like to love him, still I do love him,
while Anna never loved hers. How is she to blame? She wants to live.
God has put that in our hearts. Very likely I should have done the
same. Even to this day I don’t feel sure I did right in listening to
her at that terrible time when she came to me in Moscow. I ought then
to have cast off my husband and have begun my life fresh. I might have
loved and have been loved in reality. And is it any better as it is? I
don’t respect him. He’s necessary to me,” she thought about her
husband, “and I put up with him. Is that any better? At that time I
could still have been admired, I had beauty left me still,” Darya
Alexandrovna pursued her thoughts, and she would have liked to look at
herself in the looking-glass. She had a traveling looking-glass in her
handbag, and she wanted to take it out; but looking at the backs of the
coachman and the swaying counting-house clerk, she felt that she would
be ashamed if either of them were to look round, and she did not take
out the glass.
But without looking in the glass, she thought that even now it was not
too late; and she thought of Sergey Ivanovitch, who was always
particularly attentive to her, of Stiva’s good-hearted friend,
Turovtsin, who had helped her nurse her children through the
scarlatina, and was in love with her. And there was someone else, a
quite young man, who—her husband had told her it as a joke—thought her
more beautiful than either of her sisters. And the most passionate and
impossible romances rose before Darya Alexandrovna’s imagination. “Anna
did quite right, and certainly I shall never reproach her for it. She
is happy, she makes another person happy, and she’s not broken down as
I am, but most likely just as she always was, bright, clever, open to
every impression,” thought Darya Alexandrovna,—and a sly smile curved
her lips, for, as she pondered on Anna’s love affair, Darya
Alexandrovna constructed on parallel lines an almost identical love
affair for herself, with an imaginary composite figure, the ideal man
who was in love with her. She, like Anna, confessed the whole affair to
her husband. And the amazement and perplexity of Stepan Arkadyevitch at
this avowal made her smile.
In such daydreams she reached the turning of the highroad that led to
Vozdvizhenskoe.
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Let's Analyse the Pattern
Using frantic activity and physical exhaustion to avoid confronting emotional or spiritual problems that require different solutions.
Why This Matters
Connect literature to life
This chapter teaches how to identify when frantic activity is masking deeper problems that require different solutions.
Practice This Today
This week, notice when you feel compelled to stay busy—ask yourself what you might be avoiding through motion.
Now let's explore the literary elements.
Key Quotes & Analysis
"He worked as he had never worked before, and felt that the harder he worked, the better he felt."
Context: Describing Levin's desperate attempt to find relief through physical exhaustion
This reveals how Levin is using work as a drug - the temporary high of physical exhaustion masks his emotional pain. But the word 'felt' suggests this relief is more illusion than reality.
In Today's Words:
He threw himself into work like his life depended on it, thinking that staying busy would make the pain go away.
"The peasants wondered at his energy, but they did not understand the desperation that drove him."
Context: Showing the disconnect between Levin's outward behavior and his inner turmoil
This highlights how mental health struggles are often invisible to others. The workers see the symptom (frantic work) but not the cause (existential crisis), showing how class and social barriers prevent deeper understanding.
In Today's Words:
His coworkers could tell something was off, but they had no idea he was falling apart inside.
"But even as his hands blistered and his back ached, his mind would not be quiet."
Context: Revealing that Levin's strategy of working to exhaustion isn't actually working
This shows the futility of trying to outrun internal problems through external activity. Physical pain can't silence emotional pain - the mind continues its torment regardless of what the body endures.
In Today's Words:
No matter how hard he pushed his body, his brain wouldn't shut up.
Thematic Threads
Escapism
In This Chapter
Levin uses backbreaking farm labor as an escape from his existential crisis and suicidal thoughts
Development
Escalated from his earlier intellectual searching—now he's trying physical solutions to spiritual problems
In Your Life:
You might recognize this when you find yourself cleaning obsessively, working excessive hours, or exercising compulsively during emotional stress.
Class
In This Chapter
Levin works alongside peasants who don't understand his desperation, highlighting the isolation of his privileged position
Development
Continues his ongoing struggle with his position between the aristocracy and working class
In Your Life:
You might feel this disconnect when your problems seem invisible to coworkers who face different challenges.
Depression
In This Chapter
Levin's frantic work ethic masks his inability to find meaning or hope in life
Development
His spiritual crisis has deepened into what we'd now recognize as clinical depression
In Your Life:
You might see this in yourself or others when productivity becomes a desperate attempt to feel worthwhile or distracted.
Identity
In This Chapter
Levin seeks to lose himself in physical labor, temporarily abandoning his intellectual identity
Development
His identity crisis continues as he rejects his educated background for manual work
In Your Life:
You might experience this when major life changes make you question who you really are beneath your roles and responsibilities.
Isolation
In This Chapter
Even surrounded by workers, Levin remains fundamentally alone with his inner turmoil
Development
His emotional isolation has persisted despite his attempts to connect with different social classes
In Your Life:
You might feel this when your struggles seem incomprehensible to the people around you, even in crowded spaces.
You now have the context. Time to form your own thoughts.
Discussion Questions
- 1
What is Levin trying to accomplish by throwing himself into physical labor on his estate?
analysis • surface - 2
Why does Levin believe that exhausting his body will quiet his troubled mind, and what does this reveal about how he approaches problems?
analysis • medium - 3
Where do you see people today using busyness or physical activity to avoid dealing with emotional problems?
application • medium - 4
When you're facing a problem that can't be solved through action, how do you resist the urge to just 'stay busy' instead of sitting with the discomfort?
application • deep - 5
What does Levin's failed attempt to work away his problems teach us about the difference between motion and progress in our own lives?
reflection • deep
Critical Thinking Exercise
Map Your Motion Patterns
Think of a recent time when you stayed unusually busy or threw yourself into physical activity. Write down what you were doing and what you were trying not to think about. Then identify the pattern: What type of motion do you default to when avoiding difficult emotions or decisions?
Consider:
- •Notice the difference between productive activity and escape activity
- •Consider whether the motion actually moved you toward solving the underlying problem
- •Identify what you were hoping the busyness would accomplish that thinking couldn't
Journaling Prompt
Write about a time when you had to stop moving and sit with a difficult emotion or decision. What did you discover when you finally stayed still long enough to listen to what your mind was trying to tell you?
Coming Up Next...
Chapter 174
Despite his exhausting days in the fields, Levin's spiritual crisis deepens as he realizes that physical labor alone cannot silence the fundamental questions about life's purpose that continue to haunt him.
