Anna Karenina

ergey Ivanovitch Koznishev wanted a rest from mental work, and instead
of going abroad as he usually did, he came towards the end of May to
stay in the country with his brother. In his judgment the best sort of
life was a country life. He had come now to enjoy such a life at his
brother’s. Konstantin Levin was very glad to have him, especially as he
did not expect his brother Nikolay that summer. But in spite of his
affection and respect for Sergey Ivanovitch, Konstantin Levin was
uncomfortable with his brother in the country. It made him
uncomfortable, and it positively annoyed him to see his brother’s
attitude to the country. To Konstantin Levin the country was the
background of life, that is of pleasures, endeavors, labor. To Sergey
Ivanovitch the country meant on one hand rest from work, on the other a
valuable antidote to the corrupt influences of town, which he took with
satisfaction and a sense of its utility. To Konstantin Levin the
country was good first because it afforded a field for labor, of the
usefulness of which there could be no doubt. To Sergey Ivanovitch the
country was particularly good, because there it was possible and
fitting to do nothing. Moreover, Sergey Ivanovitch’s attitude to the
peasants rather piqued Konstantin. Sergey Ivanovitch used to say that
he knew and liked the peasantry, and he often talked to the peasants,
which he knew how to do without affectation or condescension, and from
every such conversation he would deduce general conclusions in favor of
the peasantry and in confirmation of his knowing them. Konstantin Levin
did not like such an attitude to the peasants. To Konstantin the
peasant was simply the chief partner in their common labor, and in
spite of all the respect and the love, almost like that of kinship, he
had for the peasant—sucked in probably, as he said himself, with the
milk of his peasant nurse—still as a fellow-worker with him, while
sometimes enthusiastic over the vigor, gentleness, and justice of these
men, he was very often, when their common labors called for other
qualities, exasperated with the peasant for his carelessness, lack of
method, drunkenness, and lying. If he had been asked whether he liked
or didn’t like the peasants, Konstantin Levin would have been
absolutely at a loss what to reply. He liked and did not like the
peasants, just as he liked and did not like men in general. Of course,
being a good-hearted man, he liked men rather than he disliked them,
and so too with the peasants. But like or dislike “the people” as
something apart he could not, not only because he lived with “the
people,” and all his interests were bound up with theirs, but also
because he regarded himself as a part of “the people,” did not see any
special qualities or failings distinguishing himself and “the people,”
and could not contrast himself with them. Moreover, although he had
lived so long in the closest relations with the peasants, as farmer and
arbitrator, and what was more, as adviser (the peasants trusted him,
and for thirty miles round they would come to ask his advice), he had
no definite views of “the people,” and would have been as much at a
loss to answer the question whether he knew “the people” as the
question whether he liked them. For him to say he knew the peasantry
would have been the same as to say he knew men. He was continually
watching and getting to know people of all sorts, and among them
peasants, whom he regarded as good and interesting people, and he was
continually observing new points in them, altering his former views of
them and forming new ones. With Sergey Ivanovitch it was quite the
contrary. Just as he liked and praised a country life in comparison
with the life he did not like, so too he liked the peasantry in
contradistinction to the class of men he did not like, and so too he
knew the peasantry as something distinct from and opposed to men
generally. In his methodical brain there were distinctly formulated
certain aspects of peasant life, deduced partly from that life itself,
but chiefly from contrast with other modes of life. He never changed
his opinion of the peasantry and his sympathetic attitude towards them.

In the discussions that arose between the brothers on their views of
the peasantry, Sergey Ivanovitch always got the better of his brother,
precisely because Sergey Ivanovitch had definite ideas about the
peasant—his character, his qualities, and his tastes. Konstantin Levin
had no definite and unalterable idea on the subject, and so in their
arguments Konstantin was readily convicted of contradicting himself.

In Sergey Ivanovitch’s eyes his younger brother was a capital fellow,
with his heart in the right place (as he expressed it in French), but
with a mind which, though fairly quick, was too much influenced by the
impressions of the moment, and consequently filled with contradictions.
With all the condescension of an elder brother he sometimes explained
to him the true import of things, but he derived little satisfaction
from arguing with him because he got the better of him too easily.

Konstantin Levin regarded his brother as a man of immense intellect and
culture, as generous in the highest sense of the word, and possessed of
a special faculty for working for the public good. But in the depths of
his heart, the older he became, and the more intimately he knew his
brother, the more and more frequently the thought struck him that this
faculty of working for the public good, of which he felt himself
utterly devoid, was possibly not so much a quality as a lack of
something—not a lack of good, honest, noble desires and tastes, but a
lack of vital force, of what is called heart, of that impulse which
drives a man to choose someone out of the innumerable paths of life,
and to care only for that one. The better he knew his brother, the more
he noticed that Sergey Ivanovitch, and many other people who worked for
the public welfare, were not led by an impulse of the heart to care for
the public good, but reasoned from intellectual considerations that it
was a right thing to take interest in public affairs, and consequently
took interest in them. Levin was confirmed in this generalization by
observing that his brother did not take questions affecting the public
welfare or the question of the immortality of the soul a bit more to
heart than he did chess problems, or the ingenious construction of a
new machine.

Besides this, Konstantin Levin was not at his ease with his brother,
because in summer in the country Levin was continually busy with work
on the land, and the long summer day was not long enough for him to get
through all he had to do, while Sergey Ivanovitch was taking a holiday.
But though he was taking a holiday now, that is to say, he was doing no
writing, he was so used to intellectual activity that he liked to put
into concise and eloquent shape the ideas that occurred to him, and
liked to have someone to listen to him. His most usual and natural
listener was his brother. And so in spite of the friendliness and
directness of their relations, Konstantin felt an awkwardness in
leaving him alone. Sergey Ivanovitch liked to stretch himself on the
grass in the sun, and to lie so, basking and chatting lazily.

“You wouldn’t believe,” he would say to his brother, “what a pleasure
this rural laziness is to me. Not an idea in one’s brain, as empty as a
drum!”

But Konstantin Levin found it dull sitting and listening to him,
especially when he knew that while he was away they would be carting
dung onto the fields not ploughed ready for it, and heaping it all up
anyhow; and would not screw the shares in the ploughs, but would let
them come off and then say that the new ploughs were a silly invention,
and there was nothing like the old Andreevna plough, and so on.

“Come, you’ve done enough trudging about in the heat,” Sergey
Ivanovitch would say to him.

“No, I must just run round to the counting-house for a minute,” Levin
would answer, and he would run off to the fields.