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Chapter 27.
The house was big and old-fashioned, and Levin, though he lived
alone, had the whole house heated and used. He knew that this was
stupid, he knew that it was positively not right, and contrary to his
present new plans, but this house was a whole world to Levin. It was
the world in which his father and mother had lived and died. They had
lived just the life that to Levin seemed the ideal of perfection, and that
he had dreamed of beginning with his wife, his family.
Levin scarcely remembered his mother. His conception of her was
for him a sacred memory, and his future wife was bound to be in his
imagination a repetition of that exquisite, holy ideal of a woman that
his mother had been.
He was so far from conceiving of love for woman apart from mar-
riage that he positively pictured to himself first the family, and only
secondarily the woman who would give him a family. His ideas of
marriage were, consequently, quite unlike those of the great majority of
his acquaintances, for whom getting married was one of the numerous
facts of social life. For Levin it was the chief affair of life, on which its
whole happiness turned. And now he had to give up that.
When he had gone into the little drawing room, where he always
had tea, and had settled himself in his armchair with a book , and
Agafea Mihalovna had brought him tea, and with her usual, “Well, I’ll
stay a while, sir,” had taken a chair in the window, he felt that, however
strange it might be, he had not parted from his daydreams, and that he
could not live without them. Whether with her, or with another, still it
would be. He was reading a book, and thinking of what he was read-
ing, and stopping to listen to Agafea Mihalovna, who gossiped away
without flagging, and yet with all that, all sorts of pictures of family life
and work in the future rose disconnectedly before his imagination. He
felt that in the depth of his soul something had been put in its place,
settled down, and laid to rest.
He heard Agafea Mihalovna talking of how Prohor had forgotten
his duty to God, and with the money Levin had given him to buy a
horse, had been drinking without stopping, and had beaten his wife till
he’d half killed her. He listened, and read his book, and recalled the
whole train of ideas suggested by his reading. It was Tyndall’s Treatise
on Heat. He recalled his own criticisms of Tyndall of his complacent
satisfaction in the cleverness of his experiments, and for his lack of
philosophic insight. And suddenly there floated into his mind the
joyful thought: “In two years’ time I shall have two Dutch cows; Pava
herself will perhaps still be alive, a dozen young daughters of Berkoot
and the three others—how lovely!”
He took up his book again. “Very good, electricity and heat are the
same thing; but is it possible to substitute the one quantity for the
other in the equation for the solution of any problem? No. Well, then
what of it? The connection between all the forces of nature is felt
instinctively.... It’s particulary nice if Pava’s daughter should be a red-
spotted cow, and all the herd will take after her, and the other three, too!
Splendid! To go out with my wife and visitors to meet the herd.... My
wife says, Kostya and I looked after that calf like a child.’ ‘How can it
interest you so much?’ says a visitor. ‘Everything that interests him,