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heart. Before the early dawn all was hushed. Nothing was to be heard
but the night sounds of the frogs that never ceased in the marsh, and
the horses snorting in the mist that rose over the meadow before the
morning. Rousing himself, Levin got up from the haycock, and looking
at the stars, he saw that the night was over.
“Well, what am I going to do? How am I to set about it?” he said to
himself, trying to express to himself all the thoughts and feelings he
had passed through in that brief night. All the thoughts and feelings
he had passed through fell into three separate trains of thought. One
was the renunciation of his old life, of his utterly useless education.
This renunciation gave him satisfaction, and was easy and simple.
Another series of thoughts and mental images related to the life he
longed to live now. The simplicity, the purity, the sanity of this life he
felt clearly, and he was convinced he would find in it the content, the
peace, and the dignity, of the lack of which he was so miserably con-
scious. But a third series of ideas turned upon the question how to
effect this transition from the old life to the new. And there nothing
took clear shape for him. “Have a wife? Have work and the necessity
of work? Leave Pokrovskoe? Buy land? Become a member of a
peasant community? Marry a peasant girl? How am I to set about it?”
he asked himself again, and could not find an answer. “I haven’t slept
all night, though, and I can’t think it out clearly,” he said to himself. “I’ll
work it out later. One thing’s certain, this night has decided my fate.
All my old dreams of home life were absurd, not the real thing,” he told
himself. “It’s all ever so much simpler and better...”
“How beautiful!” he thought, looking at the strange, as it were,
mother-of-pearl shell of white fleecy cloudless resting right over his
head in the middle of the sky. “How exquisite it all is in this exquisite
night! And when was there time for that cloud-shell to form? Just now
I looked at the sky, and there was nothing in it—only two white streaks.
Yes, and so imperceptibly too my views of life changed!”
He went out of the meadow and walked along the highroad to-
wards the village. A slight wind arose, and the sky looked gray and
sullen. The gloomy moment had come that usually precedes the dawn,
the full triumph of light over darkness.
Shrinking from the cold, Levin walked rapidly, looking at the ground.
“What’s that? Someone coming,” he thought, catching the tinkle of
bells, and lifting his head. Forty paces from him a carriage with four
horses harnessed abreast was driving towards him along the grassy
road on which he was walking. The shaft-horses were tilted against
the shafts by the ruts, but the dexterous driver sitting on the box held
the shaft over the ruts, so that the wheels ran on the smooth part of the
road.
This was all Levin noticed, and without wondering who it could be,
he gazed absently at the coach.
In the coach was an old lady dozing in one corner, and at the
window, evidently only just awake, sat a young girl holding in both
hands the ribbons of a white cap. With a face full of light and thought,
full of a subtle, complex inner life, that was remote from Levin, she was
gazing beyond him at the glow of the sunrise.
At the very instant when this apparition was vanishing, the truth-
ful eyes glanced at him. She recognized him, and her face lighted up
with wondering delight.
He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in
the world. There was only one creature in the world that could concen-
trate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was
Kitty. He understood that she was driving to Ergushovo from the
railway station. And everything that had been stirring Levin during