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little fact—that death will come, and all ends; that nothing was even
worth beginning, and that there was no helping it anyway. Yes, it was
awful, but it was so.
“But I am alive still. Now what’s to be done? what’s to be done?” he
said in despair. He lighted a candle, got up cautiously and went to the
looking-glass, and began looking at his face and hair. Yes, there were
gray hairs about his temples. He opened his mouth. His back teeth
were beginning to decay. He bared his muscular arms. Yes, there was
strength in them. But Nikolay, who lay there breathing with what was
left of lungs, had had a strong, healthy body too. And suddenly he
recalled how they used to go to bed together as children, and how they
only waited till Fyodor Bogdanitch was out of the room to fling pillows
at each other and laugh, laugh irrepressibly, so that even their awe of
Fyodor Bogdanitch could not check the effervescing, overbrimming
sense of life and happiness. “And now that bent, hollow chest...and I,
not knowing what will become of me, or wherefore...”
“K...ha! K...ha! Damnation! Why do you keep fidgeting, why
don’t you go to sleep?” his brother’s voice called to him.
“Oh, I don’t know, I’m not sleepy.”
“I have had a good sleep, I’m not in a sweat now. Just see, feel my
shirt; it’s all wet, isn’t it?”
Levin felt, withdrew behind the screen, and put out the candle, but
for a long while he could not sleep. The question how to live had
hardly begun to grow a little clearer to him, when a new, insoluble
question presented itself—death.
“Why, he’s dying—yes, he’ll die in the spring, and how help him?
What can I say to him? What do I know about it? I’d even forgotten
that it was at all.”
Chapter 32.
Levin had long before made the observation that when one is
uncomfortable with people from their being excessively amenable and
meek, One is apt very soon after to find things intolerable from their
touchiness and irritability. He felt that this was how it would be with
his brother. And his brother Nikolay’s gentleness did in fact not last
out for long. The very next morning he began to be irritable, and
seemed doing his best to find fault with his brother, attacking him on
his tenderest points.
Levin felt himself to blame, and could not set things right. He felt
that if they had both not kept up appearances, but had spoken, as it is
called, from the heart—that is to say, had said only just what they were
thinking and feeling—they would simply have looked into each other’s
faces, and Konstantin could only have said, “You’re dying, you’re dy-
ing,” and Nikolay could only have answered, “I know I’m dying, but I’m
afraid, I’m afraid, I’m afraid!” And they could have said nothing more,
if they had said only what was in their hearts. But life like that was
impossible, and so Konstantin tried to do what he had been trying to
do all his life, and never could learn to do, though, as far as he could
observe, many people knew so well how to do it, and without it there
was no living at all. He tried to say what he was not thinking, but he
felt continually that it had a ring of falsehood, that his brother detected