Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [452]
Pyotr, who was paying ten per cent a month to a moneylender, had to be given a loan to redeem him; but it was impossible to let go or postpone the payment of quit-rent for non-paying muzhiks. The steward could not be let off if a small meadow was left unmowed and the grass went to waste; yet he could not mow the two hundred acres where a young forest had been planted. He could not excuse a worker who went home during a work period because his father had died, no matter how sorry he felt for him, and he had to pay him less for the costly months he missed; but it was impossible not to give monthly payments to old, useless household serfs.
Levin also knew that, on returning home, he must first of all go to his wife, if she was unwell, and that the muzhiks who had been waiting for three hours could wait longer; and he knew that, despite all the pleasure he experienced when hiving a swarm, he would have to give up that pleasure and let the old man hive the swarm without him, and go to talk with the peasants who had come looking for him at the apiary.
Whether he was acting well or badly he did not know, and not only would not start proving it now but even avoided talking or thinking about it.
Reasoning led him into doubt and kept him from seeing what he should and should not do. Yet when he did not think, but lived, he constantly felt in his soul the presence of an infallible judge who decided which of two possible actions was better and which was worse; and whenever he did not act as he should, he felt it at once.
So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any possibility of knowing what he was and why he was living in the world, tormented by this ignorance to such a degree that he feared suicide, and at the same time firmly laying down his own particular, definite path in life.
XI
The day Sergei Ivanovich arrived at Pokrovskoe was one of Levin’s most tormenting days.
It was the most pressing work time, when all the peasants show such an extraordinary effort of self-sacrifice in their labour as is not shown in any other conditions of life, and which would be highly valued if the people who show this quality valued it themselves, if it were not repeated every year, and if the results of this effort were not so simple.
To mow and reap rye and oats and cart them, to mow out the meadows, to cross-plough the fallow land, to thresh the seed and sow the winter crops - it all seems simple and ordinary; but to manage to get it all done, it was necessary that all the village people, from oldest to youngest, work ceaselessly during those three or four weeks, three times more than usual, living on kvass, onions and black bread, threshing and transporting the sheaves by night and giving no more than two or three hours a day to sleep. And every year this was done all over Russia.
Having lived the major part of his life in the country and in close relations with the peasantry, Levin always felt during the work period that this general peasant excitement communicated itself to him as well.
In the morning he went to the first sowing of the rye, then to the oats, which he helped to cart and stack. Returning by the time his wife and sister-in-law got up, he had coffee with them and left on foot for the farmstead, where they had to start the newly set-up threshing machine for preparing the seed.
That whole day, talking with the steward and the muzhiks, and at home talking with his wife, with Dolly, with her children, with his father-in-law, Levin thought about the one and only thing that occupied him during this time, apart from farm cares, and sought in everything a link to his questions: ‘What am I? And where am I? And why am I here?’
Standing in the cool of the newly covered threshing barn, with fragrant leaves