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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 house-
hold, 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 bus-
ied 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 hu-
manity, 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 grow-
ing 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 condi-
tion 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