Anna Karenina

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 still clinging to the hazel rods pressed to the freshly peeled aspen rafters of the thatched roof, Levin gazed now through the open doorway in which the dry and bitter dust of the threshing hovered and sparkled, at the grass of the threshing floor lit by the hot sun and the fresh straw just taken from the barn, now at the white-breasted swallows with multi-coloured heads that flew peeping under the roof and, fluttering their wings, paused in the opening of the door, now at the people pottering about in the dark and dusty threshing barn, and thought strange thoughts.

‘Why is all this being done?’ he thought. ‘What am I standing here and making them work for? Why are they all bustling about and trying to show me their zeal? Why is this old woman toiling so? (I know her, she’s Matryona, I treated her when a beam fell on her during a fire),’ he thought, looking at a thin woman who, as she moved the grain with a rake, stepped tensely with her black-tanned bare feet over the hard, uneven threshing floor. ‘That time she recovered; but today or tomorrow or in ten years they’ll bury her and nothing will be left of her, nor of that saucy one in the red skirt who is beating the grain from the chaff with such a deft and tender movement. She’ll be buried, too, and so will this piebald gelding - very soon,’ he thought, looking at the heavy-bellied horse, breathing rapidly through flared nostrils, that was treading the slanted wheel as it kept escaping from under him. ‘He’ll be buried, and Fyodor, the feeder, with his curly beard full of chaff and the shirt torn on his white shoulder, will also be buried. And now he’s ripping the sheaves open, and giving orders, and yelling at the women, and straightening the belt on the flywheel with a quick movement. And above all, not only they, but I, too, will be buried and nothing will be left. What for?’

He thought that and at the same time looked at his watch to calculate how much had been threshed in an hour. He had to know that in order to set the day’s quota by it.

‘It will soon be an hour, and they’ve only just started on the third stack,’ Levin thought, went over to the feeder and, shouting above the noise of the machine, told him to feed more slowly.

‘You stuff in too much, Fyodor! See - it gets choked, that’s why it’s slow. Even it out!’

Blackened by the dust sticking to his sweaty face, Fyodor shouted something in reply, but went on doing it not as Levin wanted.