Anna Karenina

Levin went up to the drum, motioned Fyodor aside, and began feeding himself.

Working till the muzhiks’ dinner-time, which was not far off, he left the threshing barn together with the feeder and got into conversation with him, stopping by a neat yellow rick of harvested rye stacked on the seed-threshing floor.

The feeder came from a distant village, the one where Levin used to lease land on collective principles. Now it was leased to an innkeeper.

Levin got into conversation about that land with Fyodor and asked whether Platon, a wealthy and good muzhik from the same village, might rent it next year.

‘The price is too dear, Platon wouldn’t make enough, Konstantin Dmitrich,’ said the muzhik, picking ears of rye from under his sweaty shirt.

‘Then how does Kirillov make it pay?’

‘Mityukha’ (so the muzhik scornfully called the innkeeper) ‘makes it pay right enough, Konstantin Dmitrich! He pushes till he gets his own. He takes no pity on a peasant. But Uncle Fokanych’ (so he called old Platon), ‘he won’t skin a man. He lends to you, he lets you off. So he comes out short. He’s a man, too.’

‘But why should he let anyone off?’

‘Well, that’s how it is - people are different. One man just lives for his own needs, take Mityukha even, just stuffs his belly, but Fokanych - he’s an upright old man. He lives for the soul. He remembers God.’

‘How’s that? Remembers God? Lives for the soul?’ Levin almost shouted.

‘Everybody knows how - by the truth, by God’s way. People are different. Now, take you even, you wouldn’t offend anybody either ...’

‘Yes, yes, goodbye!’ said Levin, breathless with excitement, and, turning, he took his stick and quickly walked off towards home.

A new, joyful feeling came over him. At the muzhik’s words about Fokanych living for the soul, by the truth, by God’s way, it was as if a host of vague but important thoughts burst from some locked-up place and, all rushing towards the same goal, whirled through his head, blinding him with their light.

XII

Levin went in big strides along the main road, listening not so much to his thoughts (he still could not sort them out) as to the state of his soul, which he had never experienced before.

The words spoken by the muzhik had the effect of an electric spark in his soul, suddenly transforming and uniting into one the whole swarm of disjointed, impotent, separate thoughts which had never ceased to occupy him. These thoughts, imperceptibly to himself, had occupied him all the while he had been talking about leasing the land.

He felt something new in his soul and delightedly probed this new thing, not yet knowing what it was.

‘To live not for one’s own needs but for God. For what God? For God. And could anything more meaningless be said than what he said? He said one should not live for one’s needs - that is, one should not live for what we understand, for what we’re drawn to, for what we want - but for something incomprehensible, for God, whom no one can either comprehend or define. And what then? Didn’t I understand those meaningless words of Fyodor’s? And having understood, did I doubt their rightness? Did I find them stupid, vague, imprecise?

‘No, I understood him, and in absolutely the same way that he understands, I understood fully and more clearly than I understand anything else in life, and never in my life have I doubted or could I doubt it. And not I alone, but everybody, the whole world, fully understands this one thing, and this one thing they do not doubt and always agree upon.

‘Fyodor says that Kirillov the innkeeper lives for his belly. That is clear and reasonable. None of us, as reasonable beings, can live otherwise than for our belly. And suddenly the same Fyodor says it’s bad to live for the belly and that one should live for the truth, for God, and I understand him from a hint! And I and millions of people who lived ages ago and are living now, muzhiks, the poor in spirit, and the wise men who have thought and written about it, saying the same thing in their vague language - we’re all agreed on this one thing: what we should live for and what is good. I and all people have only one firm, unquestionable and clear knowledge, and this knowledge cannot be explained by reason - it is outside it, and has no causes, and can have no consequences.

‘If the good has a cause, it is no longer the good; if it has a consequence - a reward - it is also not the good. Therefore the good is outside the chain of cause and effect.

‘And I know it, and we all know it.

‘But I looked for miracles, I was sorry that I’d never seen a miracle that would convince me. And here it is, the only possible miracle, ever existing, surrounding me on all sides, and I never noticed it!

‘What miracle can be greater than that?