Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Eight/Chapter 11

by Leo Tolstoy

CHAPTER XI

The day on which Sergyeï Ivanovitch reached Pokrovskoye had been unusually full of torment for Levin.

It was at that hurried, busy season of the year when all the peasantry are engaged in putting forth an extraordinary effort, and showing an endurance, which are quite unknown in the ordinary conditions of their lives, and which would be prized very highly if it were not repeated every year, and did not produce such very simple results. Mowing and sowing rye and oats, reaping, harvesting, threshing,—these are labors which seem simple and commonplace; but to accomplish them in the short time accorded by nature, every one, old and young, must set to work. For three or four weeks they must be content with the simplest fare,—black bread, garlic, and kvas; must sleep only a few hours, and must not pause night or day. And every year this happens throughout all Russia.

Having lived the larger part of his life in the country, and in the closest relations with the peasantry, Levin always at harvest-time felt that this universal activity among the people embraced his own life.

In the early morning he had gone to the field of early rye, to the field where they were carrying off the oats in ricks. Then he came back to breakfast with his wife and sister-in-law, and had afterward gone off on foot to the farm, where he was trying a new threshing-machine.

This whole day. Levin, as he talked with the overseer and the muzhiks in the field, as he talked at the house with his wife and Dolly and the children and his father-in-law, thought of only one thing; and constantly the same questions pursued him: "What am I? and where am I? and why am I here?"

As he stood in the cool shadow of his newly thatched barn, where the hazelwood timbers, still smelling of the fragrant leaves, held down the straw to the freshly peeled aspen timbers that made the roof, Levin gazed, now through the open doors, where whirled and played the dry and choking dust thrown off by the threshing-machine; now at the hot sunlight lying on the grass of the threshing-floor, and at the fresh straw just brought out of the barn; now at the white-breasted swallows with their spotted heads, as they flew about twittering, and settled under the eaves, or, shaking their wings, darted through the open doors; and then again at the peasantry, bustling about in the dark and dusty barn, and strange ideas came into his mind:—

"Why is all this done?" he asked himself. "Why am I standing here? Why am I compelling them to work, and why are they working so hard? Why are they doing their best in my presence? Why is my old friend Matriona putting in so with all her might? I cured her when a beam fell on her at the fire," he said to himself, as he looked at a hideous old baba, who was walking with bare, sunburned feet across the hard, uneven soil, and was plying the rake vigorously. "She got well then. But if not to-day or to-morrow, then in ten years, she must be borne to her grave, and there will be nothing left of her, nor of that pretty girl in red, who is husking corn with such graceful, swift motions. They will bury her. And that dappled gelding will soon die," he thought, as he looked at the horse, breathing painfully with distended nostrils and heavily sagging belly, as it struggled up the ever descending treadmill. "They will carry him off. And Feodor, the machine-tender, with his curling beard, full of chaff, and his white shoulder showing through a tear in his shirt—they will carry him off too. But now he gathers up the sheaves, and gives his commands, and shouts to the women, and, with quick motions, arranges the belt on the machine. And it will be the same with me. They will carry me away, and nothing of me will be left. Why?"

And, in the midst of his meditations, he mechanically took out his watch to calculate how much they threshed in an hour. It was his duty to do this, so that he could pay the men fairly for their day's work.

"So far, only three ricks," he said to himself; and he went to the machine-tender, and, trying to make his voice heard above the racket, told him to work faster.

"You put in too much at once, Feodor; you see it stops it, so it wastes time. Do it more regularly."

Feodor, his face black with dust and sweat, shouted back some unintelligible reply, but entirely failed to carry out Levin's directions.

He mounted the drum, took Feodor's place, and began to do the feeding.

He worked thus till it was the muzhiks' dinner-hour, not a very long time; and then, in company with Feodor, he left the barn, and talked with him, leaning against a beautifully stacked pile of yellow rye saved for planting.

Feodor was from a distant village, the very one where Levin had formerly let the association have some land. Now it was rented to a dvornik.

Levin talked with Feodor about this land, and asked him if it were not possible that Platon, a rich and trustworthy muzhik of his village, would take it for the next year.

"Price too high; won't catch Platon, Konstantin Dmitritch," replied the muzhik, wiping the chaff from his sweaty chest.

"Yes; but how does Kirillof make money out of it?"

"Mitiukh!"—by this contemptuous diminutive Feodor called the dvornik,—"what does n't he make money out of! He puts on the screws and gets the last drop! He has no pity on the peasants. But Uncle Fokanuitch,"—so he called the old man Platon,—"does he try to fleece a man? And he gives credit, when any one owes him. He does not try to squeeze it out of them. He's that kind of a man!"

"Yes; but why does he give credit?"

"Well, of course men differ. One lives for his belly, like Mitiukh; but Fokanuitch,—he 's an honest man,—he lives for his soul. He remembers God."

"How does he remember God and live for his soul?" exclaimed Levin, eagerly.

"Why, that 's plain enough. It's to live according to God, .... according to truth. People differ. Take you, Konstantin Dmitritch, for example; you could n't wrong a man." ....

"Yes, yes; prashchaï—good-by," exclaimed Levin, deeply moved; and, taking his cane, he turned toward the house.

As he recalled the muzhik's words, how "Fokanuitch lived for his soul, according to God .... according to truth," confused but weighty thoughts arose within him from some hidden source, and filled his soul with their brilliant light.