Anna Karenina

‘A couple of weeks. There’s so much to do in Moscow.’

At these words the brothers’ eyes met, and Levin, despite his usual and now especially strong desire to be on friendly and, above all, simple terms with his brother, felt it awkward to look at him. He lowered his eyes and did not know what to say.

Going over subjects of conversation that would be agreeable for Sergei Ivanovich and would distract him from talking about the Serbian war and the Slavic question, which he had hinted at in mentioning how busy he was in Moscow, Levin spoke of Sergei Ivanovich’s book.

‘Well, have there been reviews of your book?’ he asked.

Sergei Ivanovich smiled at the deliberateness of the question.

‘Nobody’s interested in it, and I least of all,’ he said. ‘Look, Darya Alexandrovna, it’s going to rain,’ he added, pointing with his umbrella at some white clouds that appeared over the aspen tops.

And these words were enough to re-establish between the brothers the not hostile but cool relations that Levin was trying to avoid.

Levin went over to Katavasov.

‘How nice that you decided to come,’ he said to him.

‘I’ve long been meaning to. Now we’ll talk and see. Have you read Spencer?’

‘No, I didn’t finish,’ Levin said. ‘However, I don’t need him now.’

‘How so? That’s interesting. Why?’

‘I mean I’ve finally become convinced that I won’t find in him and those like him the solution to the questions that interest me. Now ...’

But he was suddenly struck by the calm and cheerful expression on Katavasov’s face, and was so sorry to have disturbed his own mood with this conversation, as he obviously had, that, recalling his intention, he stopped.

‘However, we’ll talk later,’ he added. ‘If we’re going to the apiary, it’s here, down this path,’ he said, addressing everyone.

Having come by a narrow path to an unmowed clearing, covered on one side with bright cow-wheat thickly interspersed with tall, dark-green clumps of hellebore, Levin placed his guests in the dense, fresh shade of the young aspens, on a bench and on stumps especially prepared for visitors to the apiary who were afraid of bees, and went to the enclosure to fetch bread, cucumbers, and fresh honey for the children and grown-ups.

Trying to make as few quick movements as possible and listening to the bees flying past him more and more frequently, he went down the path as far as the cottage. Just at the front door a bee whined, tangled in his beard, but he carefully freed it. Going into the shady front hall, he took down his net that hung from a peg in the wall, put it on, and, hands in pockets, went out to the fenced apiary where, in the middle of a mowed space, in even rows, tied to stakes with strips of bast, the old hives stood - all of them familiar to him, each with its own story - and, along the wattle fence, the young ones started that year. Bees and drones played, dizzying the eye, before the flightholes, circling and swarming in one spot, and among them the worker bees flew, all in the same direction, out to the blossoming lindens in the forest and back to the hives with their booty.

His ears were ceaselessly filled with various sounds, now of a busy worker bee flying quickly by, now of a trumpeting, idle drone, now of alarmed, sting-ready sentry bees guarding their property against the enemy. On the other side of the fence, the old man was shaving a hoop and did not see Levin. Levin stopped in the middle of the apiary without calling to him.

He was glad of the chance to be alone, in order to recover from reality, which had already brought his mood down so much.

He remembered that he had already managed to get angry with Ivan, to show coldness to his brother, and to talk light-mindedly with Katavasov.

‘Can it have been only a momentary mood that will pass without leaving a trace?’ he thought.

But in that same moment, returning to his mood, he felt with joy that something new and important had taken place in him. Reality had only veiled for a time the inner peace he had found, but it was intact within him.

Just as the bees now circling around him, threatening and distracting him, deprived him of full physical ease, made him shrink to avoid them, so the cares that had surrounded him from the moment he got into the gig had deprived him of inner freedom; but that lasted only as long as he was among them. As his bodily strength was wholly intact in him, despite the bees, so, too, was his newly realized spiritual strength intact.

XV

‘And do you know, Kostya, whom Sergei Ivanovich travelled with on the way here?’ Dolly asked, after distributing the cucumbers and honey among the children. ‘Vronsky! He’s going to Serbia.’

‘And not alone - he’s taking a squadron at his own expense!’ said Katavasov.

‘That suits him well,’ said Levin. ‘And are the volunteers still going?’ he added, glancing at Sergei Ivanovich.

Sergei Ivanovich, without replying, was carefully probing with a blunt knife in the bowl, where a square of white honeycomb lay, for a still-living bee stuck in the liquid honey.