Anna Karenina

he 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.