Part Three - Chapter 1

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_ Sergey 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 some one 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 some one to listen to him. His most usual and natural
1istener 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, _

Read next: Part Three: Chapter 2

Read previous: Part Two: Chapter 35

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