• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1139 0

day on not to hope any more for the extraordinary happiness that marriage was to have given him, and as a consequence not to neglect the present so much. Second, he would never again allow himself to be carried away by a vile passion, the memory of which had so tormented him as he was about to propose. Then, remembering his brother Nikolai, he decided that he would never again allow himself to forget him, would watch over him and never let him out of his sight, so as to be ready to help when things went badly for him. And that would be soon, he felt. Then, too, his brother’s talk about communism, which he had taken so lightly at the time, now made him ponder. He regarded the reforming of economic conditions as nonsense, but he had always felt the injustice of his abundance as compared with the poverty of the people, and he now decided that, in order to feel himself fully in the right, though he had worked hard before and lived without luxury, he would now work still harder and allow himself still less luxury. And all this seemed so easy to do that he spent the whole way in the most pleasant dreams. With a cheerful feeling of hope for a new, better life, he drove up to his house between eight and nine in the evening.

Light fell on to the snow-covered yard in front of the house from the windows of the room of Agafya Mikhailovna, his old nurse, who filled the role of housekeeper for him. She was not yet asleep. Kuzma, whom she woke up, ran out sleepy and barefoot on to the porch. The pointer bitch Laska also ran out, almost knocking Kuzma off his feet, and rubbed herself against Levin’s knees, stood on her hind legs and wanted but did not dare to put her front paws on his chest.

‘You’ve come back so soon, dear,’ said Agafya Mikhailovna.

‘I missed it, Agafya Mikhailovna. There’s no place like home,’ he replied and went to his study.

The study was slowly lit up by the candle that was brought. Familiar details emerged: deer’s antlers, shelves of books, the back of the stove with a vent that had long been in need of repair, his father’s sofa, the big desk, an open book on the desk, a broken ashtray, a notebook with his handwriting. When he saw it all, he was overcome by a momentary doubt of the possibility of setting up that new life he had dreamed of on the way. All these traces of his life seemed to seize hold of him and say to him: ‘No, you won’t escape us and be different, you’ll be the same as you were: with doubts, an eternal dissatisfaction with yourself, vain attempts to improve, and failures, and an eternal expectation of the happiness that has eluded you and is not possible for you.’

But that was how his things talked, while another voice in his soul said that he must not submit to his past and that it was possible to do anything with oneself. And, listening to this voice, he went to the corner where he had two thirty-six-pound dumb-bells and began lifting them, trying to cheer himself up with exercise. There was a creak of steps outside the door. He hastily set down the dumb-bells.

The steward came in and told him that everything, thank God, was well, but informed him that the buckwheat had got slightly burnt in the new kiln. This news vexed Levin. The new kiln had been built and partly designed by him. The steward had always been against this kiln and now with concealed triumph announced that the buckwheat had got burnt. Levin, however, was firmly convinced that if it had got burnt, it was only because the measures he had ordered a hundred times had not been taken. He became annoyed and reprimanded the steward. But there had been one important and joyful event: Pava, his best and most valuable cow, bought at a cattle show, had calved.

‘Kuzma, give me my sheepskin coat. And you have them bring a lantern,’ he said to the steward. ‘I’ll go and take a look.’

The shed for the valuable cows was just behind the house. Crossing the yard past a snowdrift by the lilac bush, he approached the shed. There was a smell of warm, dungy steam as the frozen door opened, and the cows, surprised by the unaccustomed light of the