Anna Karenina

“es, there is something in me hateful, repulsive,” thought Levin, as
he came away from the Shtcherbatskys’, and walked in the direction of
his brother’s lodgings. “And I don’t get on with other people. Pride,
they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have
put myself in such a position.” And he pictured to himself Vronsky,
happy, good-natured, clever, and self-possessed, certainly never placed
in the awful position in which he had been that evening. “Yes, she was
bound to choose him. So it had to be, and I cannot complain of anyone
or anything. I am myself to blame. What right had I to imagine she
would care to join her life to mine? Who am I and what am I? A nobody,
not wanted by anyone, nor of use to anybody.” And he recalled his
brother Nikolay, and dwelt with pleasure on the thought of him. “Isn’t
he right that everything in the world is base and loathsome? And are we
fair in our judgment of brother Nikolay? Of course, from the point of
view of Prokofy, seeing him in a torn cloak and tipsy, he’s a
despicable person. But I know him differently. I know his soul, and
know that we are like him. And I, instead of going to seek him out,
went out to dinner, and came here.” Levin walked up to a lamppost, read
his brother’s address, which was in his pocketbook, and called a
sledge. All the long way to his brother’s, Levin vividly recalled all
the facts familiar to him of his brother Nikolay’s life. He remembered
how his brother, while at the university, and for a year afterwards,
had, in spite of the jeers of his companions, lived like a monk,
strictly observing all religious rites, services, and fasts, and
avoiding every sort of pleasure, especially women. And afterwards, how
he had all at once broken out: he had associated with the most horrible
people, and rushed into the most senseless debauchery. He remembered
later the scandal over a boy, whom he had taken from the country to
bring up, and, in a fit of rage, had so violently beaten that
proceedings were brought against him for unlawfully wounding. Then he
recalled the scandal with a sharper, to whom he had lost money, and
given a promissory note, and against whom he had himself lodged a
complaint, asserting that he had cheated him. (This was the money
Sergey Ivanovitch had paid.) Then he remembered how he had spent a
night in the lockup for disorderly conduct in the street. He remembered
the shameful proceedings he had tried to get up against his brother
Sergey Ivanovitch, accusing him of not having paid him his share of his
mother’s fortune, and the last scandal, when he had gone to a western
province in an official capacity, and there had got into trouble for
assaulting a village elder.... It was all horribly disgusting, yet to
Levin it appeared not at all in the same disgusting light as it
inevitably would to those who did not know Nikolay, did not know all
his story, did not know his heart.

Levin remembered that when Nikolay had been in the devout stage, the
period of fasts and monks and church services, when he was seeking in
religion a support and a curb for his passionate temperament, everyone,
far from encouraging him, had jeered at him, and he, too, with the
others. They had teased him, called him Noah, and monk; and, when he
had broken out, no one had helped him, but everyone had turned away
from him with horror and disgust.

Levin felt that, in spite of all the ugliness of his life, his brother
Nikolay, in his soul, in the very depths of his soul, was no more in
the wrong than the people who despised him. He was not to blame for
having been born with his unbridled temperament and his somehow limited
intelligence. But he had always wanted to be good. “I will tell him
everything, without reserve, and I will make him speak without reserve,
too, and I’ll show him that I love him, and so understand him,” Levin
resolved to himself, as, towards eleven o’clock, he reached the hotel
of which he had the address.

“At the top, 12 and 13,” the porter answered Levin’s inquiry.

“At home?”

“Sure to be at home.”

The door of No. 12 was half open, and there came out into the streak of
light thick fumes of cheap, poor tobacco, and the sound of a voice,
unknown to Levin; but he knew at once that his brother was there; he
heard his cough.

As he went in the door, the unknown voice was saying:

“It all depends with how much judgment and knowledge the thing’s done.”

Konstantin Levin looked in at the door, and saw that the speaker was a
young man with an immense shock of hair, wearing a Russian jerkin, and
that a pockmarked woman in a woolen gown, without collar or cuffs, was
sitting on the sofa. His brother was not to be seen. Konstantin felt a
sharp pang at his heart at the thought of the strange company in which
his brother spent his life. No one had heard him, and Konstantin,
taking off his galoshes, listened to what the gentleman in the jerkin
was saying. He was speaking of some enterprise.

“Well, the devil flay them, the privileged classes,” his brother’s
voice responded, with a cough. “Masha! get us some supper and some wine
if there’s any left; or else go and get some.”

The woman rose, came out from behind the screen, and saw Konstantin.

“There’s some gentleman, Nikolay Dmitrievitch,” she said.

“Whom do you want?” said the voice of Nikolay Levin, angrily.

“It’s I,” answered Konstantin Levin, coming forward into the light.

“Who’s I?” Nikolay’s voice said again, still more angrily. He could
be heard getting up hurriedly, stumbling against something, and Levin
saw, facing him in the doorway, the big, scared eyes, and the huge,
thin, stooping figure of his brother, so familiar, and yet astonishing
in its weirdness and sickliness.

He was even thinner than three years before, when Konstantin Levin had
seen him last. He was wearing a short coat, and his hands and big bones
seemed huger than ever. His hair had grown thinner, the same straight
mustaches hid his lips, the same eyes gazed strangely and naïvely at
his visitor.

“Ah, Kostya!” he exclaimed suddenly, recognizing his brother, and his
eyes lit up with joy. But the same second he looked round at the young
man, and gave the nervous jerk of his head and neck that Konstantin
knew so well, as if his neckband hurt him; and a quite different
expression, wild, suffering, and cruel, rested on his emaciated face.

“I wrote to you and Sergey Ivanovitch both that I don’t know you and
don’t want to know you. What is it you want?”

He was not at all the same as Konstantin had been fancying him. The
worst and most tiresome part of his character, what made all relations
with him so difficult, had been forgotten by Konstantin Levin when he
thought of him, and now, when he saw his face, and especially that
nervous twitching of his head, he remembered it all.

“I didn’t want to see you for anything,” he answered timidly. “I’ve
simply come to see you.”

His brother’s timidity obviously softened Nikolay. His lips twitched.

“Oh, so that’s it?” he said. “Well, come in; sit down. Like some
supper? Masha, bring supper for three. No, stop a minute. Do you know
who this is?” he said, addressing his brother, and indicating the
gentleman in the jerkin: “This is Mr. Kritsky, my friend from Kiev, a
very remarkable man. He’s persecuted by the police, of course, because
he’s not a scoundrel.”

And he looked round in the way he always did at everyone in the room.
Seeing that the woman standing in the doorway was moving to go, he
shouted to her, “Wait a minute, I said.” And with the inability to
express himself, the incoherence that Konstantin knew so well, he
began, with another look round at everyone, to tell his brother
Kritsky’s story: how he had been expelled from the university for
starting a benefit society for the poor students and Sunday schools;
and how he had afterwards been a teacher in a peasant school, and how
he had been driven out of that too, and had afterwards been condemned
for something.

“You’re of the Kiev university?” said Konstantin Levin to Kritsky, to
break the awkward silence that followed.

“Yes, I was of Kiev,” Kritsky replied angrily, his face darkening.

“And this woman,” Nikolay Levin interrupted him, pointing to her, “is
the partner of my life, Marya Nikolaevna. I took her out of a bad
house,” and he jerked his neck saying this; “but I love her and respect
her, and anyone who wants to know me,” he added, raising his voice and
knitting his brows, “I beg to love her and respect her. She’s just the
same as my wife, just the same. So now you know whom you’ve to do with.
And if you think you’re lowering yourself, well, here’s the floor,
there’s the door.”

And again his eyes traveled inquiringly over all of them.

“Why I should be lowering myself, I don’t understand.”

“Then, Masha, tell them to bring supper; three portions, spirits and
wine.... No, wait a minute.... No, it doesn’t matter.... Go along.”