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Chapter 19.
“Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast
revealed them unto babes.” So Levin thought about his wife as he
talked to her that evening.
Levin thought of the text, not because he considered himself “wise
and prudent.” He did not so consider himself, but he could not help
knowing that he had more intellect than his wife and Agafea Mihalovna,
and he could not help knowing that when he thought of death, he
thought with all the force of his intellect. He knew too that the brains
of many great men, whose thoughts he had read, had brooded over
death and yet knew not a hundredth part of what his wife and Agafea
Mihalovna knew about it. Different as those two women were, Agafea
Mihalovna and Katya, as his brother Nikolay had called her, and as
Levin particularly liked to call her now, they were quite alike in this.
Both knew, without a shade of doubt, what sort of thing life was and
what was death, and though neither of them could have answered, and
would even not have understood the questions that presented them-
selves to Levin, both had no doubt of the significance of this event, and
were precisely alike in their way of looking at it, which they shared with
millions of people. The proof that they knew for a certainty the nature
of death lay in the fact that they knew without a second of hesitation
how to deal with the dying, and were not frightened of them. Levin
and other men like him, though they could have said a great deal about
death, obviously did not know this since they were afraid of death, and
were absolutely at a loss what to do when people were dying. If Levin
had been alone now with his brother Nikolay, he would have looked at
him with terror, and with still greater terror waited, and would not have
known what else to do.
More than that, he did not know what to say, how to look, how to
move. To talk of outside things seemed to him shocking, impossible, to
talk of death and depressing subjects—also impossible. To be silent,
also impossible. “If I look at him he will think I am studying him, I am
afraid; if I don’t look at him, he’ll think I’m thinking of other things. If I
walk on tiptoe, he will be vexed; to tread firmly, I’m ashamed.” Kitty
evidently did not think of herself, and had no time to think about
herself: she was thinking about him because she knew something, and
all went well. She told him about herself even and about her wedding,
and smiled and sympathized with him and petted him, and talked of
cases of recovery and all went well; so then she must know. The proof
that her behavior and Agafea Mihalovna’s was not instinctive, animal,
irrational, was that apart from the physical treatment, the relief of suf-
fering, both Agafea Mihalovna and Kitty required for the dying man
something else more important than the physical treatment, and some-
thing which had nothing in common with physical conditions. Agafea
Mihalovna, speaking of the man just dead, had said: “Well, thank
God, he took the sacrament and received absolution; God grant each
one of us such a death.” Katya in just the same way, besides all her care
about linen, bedsores, drink, found time the very first day to persuade
the sick man of the necessity of taking the sacrament and receiving
absolution.
On getting back from the sick-room to their own two rooms for the