Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 1
theirs, but also because he regarded himself as a part of “the people,” did not see any
special qualities or failings distinguishing himself and “the people,” and could not
contrast himself with them. Moreover, although he had lived so long in the closest
relations with the peasants, as farmer and arbitrator, and what was more, as adviser
(the peasants trusted him, and for thirty miles round they would come to ask his
advice), he had no definite views of “the people,” and would have been as much at
a loss to answer the question whether he knew “the people” as the question whether
he liked them. For him to say he knew the peasantry would have been the same as
to say he knew men. He was continually watching and getting to know people of all
sorts, and among them peasants, whom he regarded as good and interesting people,
and he was continually observing new points in them, altering his former views of
them and forming new ones. With Sergey Ivanovitch it was quite the contrary. Just
as he liked and praised a country life in comparison with the life he did not like, so
too he liked the peasantry in contradistinction to the class of men he did not like,
and so too he knew the peasantry as something distinct from and opposed to men
generally. In his methodical brain there were distinctly formulated certain aspects of
peasant life, deduced partly from that life itself, but chiefly from contrast with other
modes of life. He never changed his opinion of the peasantry and his sympathetic
attitude towards them.
In the discussions that arose between the brothers on their views of the peasantry,
Sergey Ivanovitch always got the better of his brother, precisely because Sergey
Ivanovitch had definite ideas about the peasant–his character, his qualities, and his
tastes. Konstantin Levin had no definite and unalterable idea on the subject, and so
in their arguments Konstantin was readily convicted of contradicting himself.
In Sergey Ivanovitch’s eyes his younger brother was a capital fellow, with his heart
in the right place (as he expressed it in French), but with a mind which, though fairly
quick, was too much influenced by the impressions of the moment, and consequently
filled with contradictions. With all the condescension of an elder brother he sometimes
explained to him the true import of things, but he derived little satisfaction
from arguing with him because he got the better of him too easily.
Konstantin Levin regarded his brother as a man of immense intellect and culture,
as generous in the highest sense of the word, and possessed of a special faculty for
working for the public good. But in the depths of his heart, the older he became, and
the more intimately he knew his brother, the more and more frequently the thought
struck him that this faculty of working for the public good, of which he felt himself
utterly devoid, was possibly not so much a quality as a lack of something –not a lack
of good, honest, noble desires and tastes, but a lack of vital force, of what is called
heart, of that impulse which drives a man to choose someone out of the innumerable
paths of life, and to care only for that one. The better he knew his brother, the more he
noticed that Sergey Ivanovitch, and many other people who worked for the public
welfare, were not led by an impulse of the heart to care for the public good, but
reasoned from intellectual considerations that it was a right thing to take interest
in public affairs, and consequently took interest in them. Levin was confirmed in
this generalization by observing that his brother did not take questions affecting the
public welfare or the question of the immortality of the soul a bit more to heart than
he did chess problems, or the ingenious construction of a new machine.
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