Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART EIGHT CHAPTER 10
Chapter 10
WHEN Levin thought what he was and what he was living for, he could find no
answer to the questions and was reduced to despair, but he left off questioning
himself about it. It seemed as though he knew both what he was and for what he
was living, for he acted and lived resolutely and without hesitation. Indeed, in these
latter days he was far more decided and unhesitating in life than he had ever been.
When he went back to the country at the beginning of June, he went back also to
his usual pursuits. The management of the estate, his relations with the peasants
and the neighbors, the care of his household, the management of his sister’s and
brother’s property, of which he had the direction, his relations with his wife and
kindred, the care of his child, and the new bee-keeping hobby he had taken up that
spring, filled all his time.
These things occupied him now, not because he justified them to himself by any
sort of general principles, as he had done in former days; on the contrary, disappointed
by the failure of his former efforts for the general welfare, and too much
occupied with his own thought and the mass of business with which he was burdened
from all sides, he had completely given up thinking of the general good, and
he busied himself with all this work simply because it seemed to him that he must
do what he was doing–that he could not do otherwise. In former days–almost from
childhood, and increasingly up to full manhood–when he had tried to do anything
that would be good for all, for humanity, for Russia, for the whole village, he had
noticed that the idea of it had been pleasant, but the work itself had always been
incoherent, that then he had never had a full conviction of its absolute necessity, and
that the work that had begun by seeming so great, had grown less and less, till it
vanished into nothing. But now, since his marriage, when he had begun to confine
himself more and more to living for himself, though he experienced no delight at all
at the thought of the work he was doing, he felt a complete conviction of its necessity,
saw that it succeeded far better than in old days, and that it kept on growing more
and more.
Now, involuntarily it seemed, he cut more and more deeply into the soil like a
plough, so that he could not be drawn out without turning aside the furrow.
To live the same family life as his father and forefathers–that is, in the same condition
of culture–and to bring up his children in the same, was incontestably necessary.
It was as necessary as dining when one was hungry. And to do this, just as it was
necessary to cook dinner, it was necessary to keep the mechanism of agriculture at
Pokrovskoe going so as to yield an income. Just as incontestably as it was necessary
to repay a debt was it necessary to keep the property in such a condition that his son,
when he received it as a heritage, would say “thank you” to his father as Levin had
said “thank you” to his grandfather for all he built and planted. And to do this it
was necessary to look after the land himself, not to let it, and to breed cattle, manure
the fields, and plant timber.
It was impossible not to look after the affairs of Sergey Ivanovitch, of his sister, of
the peasants who came to him for advice and were accustomed to do so–as impossible
as to fling down a child one is carrying in one’s arms. It was necessary to look
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