Part VII   
Chapter XXX   
     
‘HERE it is again! Again I understand it all!’ Anna said to herself, as soon as the carriage had started, and swaying lightly, rumbled over the tiny cobbles of the paved road, and again one impression followed rapidly upon another.      1   
  ‘Yes; what was the last thing I thought of so clearly?’ she tried to recall it. ‘ “Tiutkin, coiffeur?”—no, not that. Yes, of what Yashvin says, the struggle for existence and hatred is the one thing that holds men together. No, it’s a useless journey you’re making,’ she said, mentally addressing a party in a coach and four, evidently going for an excursion into the country. ‘And the dog you’re taking with you will be no help to you. You can’t get away from yourselves.’ Turning her eyes in the direction Pyotr had turned to look, she saw a factory-hand almost dead-drunk, with hanging head, being led away by a policeman. ‘Come, he’s found a quicker way,’ she thought. ‘Count Vronsky and I did not find that happiness either, though we expected so much from it.’ And now for the first time Anna turned that glaring light in which she was seeing everything on to her relations with him, which she had hitherto avoided thinking about. ‘What was it he sought in me? Not love so much as the satisfaction of vanity.’ She remembered his words, the expression of his face that recalled an abject setter-dog, in the early days of their connection. And everything now confirmed this. ‘Yes, there was the triumph of success in him. Of course there was love too, but the chief element was the pride of success. He boasted of me. Now that’s over. There’s nothing to be proud of. Not to be proud of, but to be ashamed of. He has taken from me all he could, and now I am no use to him. He is weary of me and is trying not to be dishonourable in his behaviour to me. He let that out yesterday—he wants divorce and marriage so as to burn his ships. He loves me, but how? The zest is gone, as the English say. That fellow wants every one to admire him and is very much pleased with himself,’ she thought, looking at a red-faced clerk, riding on a riding-school horse. ‘Yes, there’s not the same flavour about me for him now. If I go away from him, at the bottom of his heart he will be glad.’      2   
  This was not mere supposition, she saw it distinctly in the piercing light, which revealed to her now the meaning of life and human relations.      3   
  ‘My love keeps growing more passionate and egoistic, while his is waning and waning, and that’s why we’re drifting apart.’ She went on musing. ‘And there’s no help for it. He is everything for me, and I want him more and more to give himself up to me entirely. And he wants more and more to get away from me. We walked to meet each other up to the time of our love, and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions. And there’s no altering that. He tells me I’m insanely jealous, and I have told myself that I am insanely jealous; but it’s not true. I’m not jealous, but I’m unsatisfied. But …’ she opened her lips, and shifted her place in the carriage in the excitement, aroused by the thought that suddenly struck her. ‘If I could be anything but a mistress, passionately caring for nothing but his caresses; but I can’t and I don’t care to be anything else. And by that desire I rouse aversion in him, and he rouses fury in me, and it cannot be different. Don’t I know that he wouldn’t deceive me, that he has no schemes about Princess Sorokin, that he’s not in love with Kitty, that he won’t desert me! I know all that, but it makes it no better for me. If without loving me, from duty he’ll be good and kind to me, without what I want, that’s a thousand times worse than unkindness! That’s—hell! And that’s just how it is. For a long while now he hasn’t loved me. And where love ends, hate begins. I don’t know these streets at all. Hills it seems, and still houses, and houses … And in the houses always people and people … How many of them, no end, and all hating each other! Come, let me try and think what I want, to make me happy. Well? Suppose I am divorced, and Alexey Alexandrovitch lets me have Seryozha, and I marry Vronsky.’ Thinking of Alexey Alexandrovitch, she at once pictured him with extraordinary vividness as though he were alive before her, with his mild, lifeless, dull eyes, the blue veins in his white hands, his intonations and the cracking of his fingers, and remembering the feeling which had existed between them, and which was also called love, she shuddered with loathing. ‘Well, I’m divorced, and become Vronsky’s wife. Well, will Kitty cease looking at me as she looked at me to-day? No. And will Seryozha leave off asking and wondering about my two husbands? And is there any new feeling I can awaken between Vronsky and me? Is there possible, if not happiness, some sort of ease from misery? No, no!’ she answered now without the slightest hesitation. ‘Impossible! We are drawn apart by life, and I make his unhappiness, and he mine, and there’s no altering him or me. Every attempt has been made, the screw has come unscrewed. Oh, a beggar-woman with a baby. She thinks I’m sorry for her. Aren’t we all flung into the world only to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and each other? Schoolboys coming—laughing—Seryozha?’ she thought. ‘I thought, too, that I loved him, and used to be touched by my own tenderness. But I have lived without him, I gave him up for another love, and did not regret the exchange till that love was satisfied.’ And with loathing she thought of what she meant by that love. And the clearness with which she saw life now, her own and all men’s, was a pleasure to her. ‘It’s so with me and Pyotr, and the coachman, Fyodor, and that merchant, and all the people living along the Volga, where those placards invite one to go, and everywhere and always,’ she thought when she had driven under the low-pitched roof of the Nizhigorod station, and the porters ran to meet her.      4   
  ‘A ticket to Obiralovka?’ said Pyotr.      5   
  She had utterly forgotten where and why she was going, and only by a great effort she understood the question.      6   
  ‘Yes,’ she said, handing him her purse, and taking a little red bag in her hand, she got out of the carriage.      7   
  Making her way through the crowd to the first-class waiting-room, she gradually recollected all the details of her position, and the plans between which she was hesitating. And again at the old sore places, hope and then despair poisoned the wounds of her tortured, fearfully throbbing heart. As she sat on the star-shaped sofa waiting for the train, she gazed with aversion at the people coming and going (they were all hateful to her), and thought how she would arrive at the station, would write him a note, and what she would write to him, and how he was at this moment complaining to his mother of his position, not understanding her sufferings, and how she would go into the room, and what she would say to him. Then she thought that life might still be happy, and how miserably she loved and hated him, and how fearfully her heart was beating.

Part VII   
Chapter XXXI   
     
A BELL rang, some young men, ugly and impudent, and at the same time careful of the impression they were making, hurried by. Pyotr, too, crossed the room in his livery and top-boots, with his dull, animal face, and came up to her to take her to the train. Some noisy men were quiet as she passed them on the platform, and one whispered something about her to another—something vile, no doubt. She stepped up on the high step, and sat down in a carriage by herself on a dirty seat that had been white. Her bag lay beside her, shaken up and down by the springiness of the seat. With a foolish smile Pyotr raised his hat, with its coloured band, at the window, in token of farewell, an impudent conductor slammed the door and the latch. A grotesque-looking lady wearing a bustle (Anna mentally undressed the woman, and was appalled at her hideousness), and a little girl laughing affectedly ran down the platform.      1   
  ‘Katerina Andreevna, she’s got them all, ma tante!’ cried the girl.      2   
  ‘Even the child’s hideous and affected,’ thought Anna. To avoid seeing any one, she got up quickly and seated herself at the opposite window of the empty carriage. A misshapen-looking peasant covered with dirt, in a cap from which his tangled hair stuck out all round, passed by that window, stooping down to the carriage wheels. ‘There’s something familiar about that hideous peasant,’ thought Anna. And remembering her dream, she moved away to the opposite door, shaking with terror. The conductor opened the door and let in a man and his wife.      3   
  ‘Do you wish to get out?’      4   
  Anna made no answer. The conductor and her two fellow-passengers did not notice under her veil her panic-stricken face. She went back to her corner and sat down. The couple seated themselves on the opposite side, and intently but surreptitiously scrutinised her clothes. Both husband and wife seemed repulsive to Anna. The husband asked, would she allow him to smoke, obviously not with a view to smoking but to getting into conversation with her. Receiving her assent, he said to his wife in French something about caring less to smoke than to talk. They made inane and affected remarks to one another, entirely for her benefit. Anna saw clearly that they were sick of each other, and hated each other. And no one could have helped hating such miserable monstrosities.      5   
  A second bell sounded, and was followed by moving of luggage, noise, shouting and laughter. It was so clear to Anna that there was nothing for any one to be glad of, that this laughter irritated her agonisingly, and she would have liked to stop up her ears not to hear it. At last the third bell rang, there was a whistle and a hiss of steam, and a clank of chains, and the man in her carriage crossed himself. ‘It would be interesting to ask him what meaning he attaches to that,’ thought Anna, looking angrily at him. She looked past the lady out of window at the people who seemed whirling by as they ran beside the train or stood on the platform. The train, jerking at regular intervals at the junctions of the rails, rolled by the platform, past a stone wall, a signal-box, past other trains; the wheels, moving more smoothly and evenly, resounded with a slight clang on the rails. The window was lighted up by the bright evening sun, and a slight breeze fluttered the curtain. Anna forgot her fellow-passengers, and to the light swaying of the train she fell to thinking again, as she breathed the fresh air.      6   
  ‘Yes, what did I stop at? That I couldn’t conceive a position in which life would not be a misery, that we are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?’      7   
  ‘That’s what reason is given man for, to escape from what worries him,’ said the lady in French, lisping affectedly, and obviously pleased with her phrase.      8   
  The words seemed an answer to Anna’s thoughts.      9   
  ‘To escape from what worries him,’ repeated Anna. And glancing at the red-cheeked husband and the thin wife, she saw that the sickly wife considered herself misunderstood, and the husband deceived her and encouraged her in that idea of herself. Anna seemed to see all their history and all the crannies of their souls, as it were turning a light upon them. But there was nothing interesting in them, and she pursued her thought.     10   
  ‘Yes, I’m very much worried, and that’s what reason was given me for, to escape; so then one must escape: why not put out the light when there’s nothing more to look at, when it’s sickening to look at it all? But how? Why did the conductor run along the footboard, why are they shrieking, those young men in that train? why are they talking, why are they laughing? It’s all falsehood, all lying, all humbug, all cruelty!…’     11   
  When the train came into the station, Anna got out into the crowd of passengers, and moving apart from them as if they were lepers, she stood on the platform, trying to think what she had come here for, and what she meant to do. Everything that had seemed to her possible before was now so difficult to consider, especially in this noisy crowd of hideous people who would not leave her alone. At one moment porters ran up to her proffering their services, then young men clacking their heels on the planks of the platform and talking loudly, stared at her, then people meeting her dodged past on the wrong side. Remembering that she had meant to go on further if there were no answer, she stopped a porter and asked if her coachman were not here with a note from Count Vronsky.     12   
  ‘Count Vronsky? They sent up here from Vronsky’s just this minute, to meet Princess Sorokin and her daughter. And what is the coachman like?’     13   
  Just as she was talking to the porter, the coachman Mihail, red and cheerful in his smart blue coat and chain, evidently proud of having so successfully performed his commission, came up to her and gave her a letter. She broke it open, and her heart ached before she had read it.     14   
  ‘I am very sorry your note did not reach me. I will be home at ten,’ Vronsky had written carelessly.…     15   
  ‘Yes, that’s what I expected!’ she said to herself with an evil smile.     16   
  ‘Very good, you can go home then,’ she said softly, addressing Mihail. She spoke softly because the rapidity of her heart’s beating hindered her breathing. ‘No, I won’t let you make me miserable,’ she thought menacingly, addressing not him, not herself, but the power that made her suffer, and she walked along the platform.     17   
  Two maid-servants walking along the platform turned their heads, staring at her and making some remarks about her dress. ‘Real,’ they said of the lace she was wearing. The young men would not leave her in peace. Again they passed by, peering into her face, and with a laugh shouting something in an unnatural voice. The stationmaster coming up asked her whether she was going by train. A boy selling kvas, never took his eyes off her. ‘My God! where am I to go?’ she thought, going farther and farther along the platform. At the end she stopped. Some ladies and children, who had come to meet a gentleman in spectacles, paused in their loud laughter and talking, and stared at her as she reached them. She quickened her pace and walked away from them to the edge of the platform. A luggage train was coming in. The platform began to sway, and she fancied she was in the train again.     18   
  And all at once she thought of the man crushed by the train the day she had first met Vronsky, and she knew what she had to do. With a rapid, light step she went down the steps that led from the tank to the rails and stopped quite near the approaching train.     19   
  She looked at the lower part of the carriages, at the screws and chains, and the tall cast-iron wheel of the first carriage slowly moving up, and trying to measure the middle between the front and back wheels, and the very minute when that middle point would be opposite her.     20   
  ‘There,’ she said to herself, looking into the shadow of the carriage, at the sand and coal-dust which covered the sleepers—‘there, in the very middle, and I will punish him and escape from every one and from myself.’     21   
  She tried to fling herself below the wheels of the first carriage as it reached her; but the red bag which she tried to drop out of her hand delayed her, and she was too late; she missed the moment. She had to wait for the next carriage. A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed herself. That familiar gesture brought back into her soul a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness that had covered everything for her was torn apart, and life rose up before her for an instant with all its bright past joys. But she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the second carriage. And exactly at the moment when the space between the wheels came opposite her, she dropped the red bag, and drawing her head back into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage, and lightly, as though she would rise again at once, dropped on to her knees. And at the same instant she was terror-stricken at what she was doing. ‘Where am I? What am I doing? What for?’ She tried to get up, to drop backwards; but something huge and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back. ‘Lord, forgive me all!’ she said, feeling it impossible to struggle. A peasant muttering something was working at the iron above her. And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched for ever.

Part VIII   
Chapter I   
     
ALMOST two months had passed. The hot summer was half over, but Sergey Ivanovitch was only just preparing to leave Moscow.      1   
  Sergey Ivanovitch’s life had not been uneventful during this time. A year ago he had finished his book, the fruit of six years’ labour, ‘Sketch of a Survey of the Principles and Forms of Government in Europe and Russia.’ Several sections of this book and its introduction had appeared in periodical publications, and other parts had been read by Sergey Ivanovitch to persons of his circle, so that the leading ideas of the work could not be completely novel to the public. But still Sergey Ivanovitch had expected that on its appearance his book would be sure to make a serious impression on society, and if it did not cause a revolution in social science it would, at any rate, make a great stir in the scientific world.      2   
  After the most conscientious revision the book had last year been published, and had been distributed among the book-sellers.      3   
  Though he asked no one about it, reluctantly and with feigned indifference answered his friends’ inquiries as to how the book was going, and did not even inquire of the book-sellers how the book was selling, Sergey Ivanovitch was all on the alert, with strained attention, watching for the first impression his book would make in the world and in literature.      4   
  But a week passed, a second, a third, and in society no impression whatever could be detected. His friends who were specialists and savants, occasionally—unmistakably from politeness—alluded to it. The rest of his acquaintances, not interested in a book on a learned subject, did not talk of it at all. And society generally—just now especially absorbed in other things—was absolutely indifferent. In the press, too, for a whole month there was not a word about his book.      5   
  Sergey Ivanovitch had calculated to a nicety the time necessary for writing a review, but a month passed, and a second, and still there was silence.      6   
  Only in the Northern Beetle, in a comic article on the singer Drabanti, who had lost his voice, there was a contemptuous allusion to Koznishev’s book, suggesting that the book had been long ago seen through by every one, and was a subject of general ridicule.      7   
  At last in the third month a critical article appeared in a serious review. Sergey Ivanovitch knew the author of the article. He had met him once at Golubtsov’s.      8   
  The author of the article was a young man, an invalid, very bold as a writer, but extremely deficient in breeding and shy in personal relations.      9   
  In spite of his absolute contempt for the author, it was with complete respect that Sergey Ivanovitch set about reading the article. The article was awful.     10   
  The critic had undoubtedly put an interpretation upon the book which could not possibly be put on it. But he had selected quotations so adroitly that for people who had not read the book (and obviously scarcely any one had read it) it seemed absolutely clear that the whole book was nothing but a medley of high-flown phrases, not even—as suggested by marks of interrogation—used appropriately, and that the author of the book was a person absolutely without knowledge of the subject. And all this was so wittily done that Sergey Ivanovitch would not have disowned such wit himself. But that was just what was so awful.     11   
  In spite of the scrupulous conscientiousness with which Sergey Ivanovitch verified the correctness of the critic’s arguments, he did not for a minute stop to ponder over the faults and mistakes which were ridiculed; but unconsciously he began immediately trying to recall every detail of his meeting and conversation with the author of the article.     12   
  ‘Didn’t I offend him in some way?’ Sergey Ivanovitch wondered. And remembering that when they met he had corrected the young man about something he had said that betrayed ignorance, Sergey Ivanovitch found the clue to explain the article.     13   
  This article was followed by a deadly silence about the book both in the press and in conversation, and Sergey Ivanovitch saw that his six years’ task, toiled at with such love and labour, had gone, leaving no trace.     14   
  Sergey Ivanovitch’s position was still more difficult from the fact that, since he had finished his book, he had had no more literary work to do, such as had hitherto occupied the greater part of his time.     15   
  Sergey Ivanovitch was clever, cultivated, healthy, and energetic, and he did not know what use to make of his energy. Conversations in drawing-rooms, in meetings, assemblies, and committees—everywhere where talk was possible—took up part of his time. But being used for years to town life, he did not waste all his energies in talk, as his less experienced younger brother did, when he was in Moscow. He had a great deal of leisure and intellectual energy still to dispose of.     16   
  Fortunately for him, at this period so difficult for him from the failure of his book, the various public questions of the dissenting sects, of the American alliance, of the Samara famine, of exhibitions, and of spiritualism, were definitely replaced in public interest by the Slavonic question, which had hitherto rather languidly interested society, and Sergey Ivanovitch, who had been one of the first to raise this subject, threw himself into it heart and soul.     17   
  In the circle to which Sergey Ivanovitch belonged, nothing was talked of or written about just now but the Servian War. Everything that the idle crowd usually does to kill time was done now for the benefit of the Slavonic States. Balls, concerts, dinners, matchboxes, ladies’ dresses, beer, restaurants—everything testified to sympathy with the Slavonic peoples.     18   
  From much of what was spoken and written on the subject, Sergey Ivanovitch differed on various points. He saw that the Slavonic question had become one of those fashionable distractions which succeed one another in providing society with an object and an occupation. He saw, too, that a great many people were taking up the subject from motives of self-interest and self-advertisement. He recognised that the newspapers published a great deal that was superfluous and exaggerated, with the sole aim of attracting attention and outbidding one another. He saw that in this general movement those who thrust themselves most forward and shouted the loudest were men who had failed and were smarting under a sense of injury—generals without armies, ministers not in the ministry, journalists not on any paper, party leaders without followers. He saw that there was a great deal in it that was frivolous and absurd. But he saw and recognised an unmistakable growing enthusiasm, uniting all classes, with which it was impossible not to sympathise. The massacre of men who were fellow-Christians, and of the same Slavonic race, excited sympathy for the sufferers and indignation against the oppressors. And the heroism of the Servians and Montenegrins struggling for a great cause begot in the whole people a longing to help their brothers not in word but in deed.     19   
  But in this there was another aspect that rejoiced Sergey Ivanovitch. That was the manifestation of public opinion. The public had definitely expressed its desire. The soul of the people had, as Sergey Ivanovitch said, found expression. And the more he worked in this cause, the more incontestable it seemed to him that it was a cause destined to assume vast dimensions, to create an epoch.     20   
  He threw himself heart and soul into the service of this great cause, and forgot to think about his book. His whole time now was engrossed by it, so that he could scarcely manage to answer all the letters and appeals addressed to him. He worked the whole spring and part of the summer, and it was only in July that he prepared to go away to his brother’s in the country.     21   
  He was going both to rest for a fortnight, and in the very heart of the people, in the farthest wilds of the country, to enjoy the sight of that uplifting of the spirit of the people, of which, like all residents in the capital and big towns, he was fully persuaded. Katavasov had long been meaning to carry out his promise to stay with Levin, and so he was going with him.

   
Part VIII   
Chapter II   
     
SERGEY IVANOVITCH and Katavasov had only just reached the station of the Kursk line, which was particularly busy and full of people that day, when, looking round for the groom who was following with their things, they saw a party of volunteers driving up in four cabs. Ladies met them with bouquets of flowers, and followed by the rushing crowd they went into the station.      1   
  One of the ladies, who had met the volunteers, came out of the hall and addressed Sergey Ivanovitch.      2   
  ‘You too come to see them off?’ she asked in French.      3   
  ‘No, I’m going away myself, princess. To my brother’s for a holiday. Do you always see them off?’ said Sergey Ivanovitch with a hardly perceptible smile.      4   
  ‘Oh, that would be impossible!’ answered the princess. ‘Is it true that eight hundred have been sent from us already? Malvinsky wouldn’t believe me.’      5   
  ‘More than eight hundred. If you reckon those who have been sent not directly from Moscow, over a thousand,’ answered Sergey Ivanovitch.      6   
  ‘There! That’s just what I said!’ exclaimed the lady. ‘And it’s true too, I suppose, that more than a million has been subscribed?’      7   
  ‘Yes, princess.’      8   
  ‘What do you say to to-day’s telegram? Beaten the Turks again.’      9   
  ‘Yes, so I saw,’ answered Sergey Ivanovitch. They were speaking of the last telegram stating that the Turks had been for three days in succession beaten at all points and put to flight, and that to-morrow a decisive engagement was expected.     10   
  ‘Ah, by the way, a splendid young fellow has asked leave to go, and they’ve made some difficulty, I don’t know why. I meant to ask you; I know him, please write a note about his case. He’s being sent by Countess Lidia Ivanovna.     11   
  Sergey Ivanovitch asked for all the details the princess knew about the young man, and going into the first-class waiting-room, wrote a note to the person on whom the granting of leave of absence depended, and handed it to the princess.     12   
  ‘You know Count Vronsky, the notorious one … is going by this train?’ said the princess with a smile full of triumph and meaning, when he found her again and gave her the letter.     13   
  ‘I had heard he was going, but I did not know when. By this train?’     14   
  ‘I’ve seen him. He’s here: there’s only his mother seeing him off. It’s the best thing, any way, that he could do.’     15   
  ‘Oh yes, of course.’     16   
  While they were talking the crowd streamed by them into the dining-room. They went forward too, and heard a gentleman with a glass in his hand delivering a loud discourse to the volunteers. ‘In the service of religion, humanity, and our brothers,’ the gentleman said, his voice growing louder and louder; ‘to this great cause mother Moscow dedicates you with her blessing. Jivio!’ he concluded, loudly and tearfully.     17   
  Every one shouted Jivio! and a fresh crowd dashed into the hall, almost carrying the princess off her legs.     18   
  ‘Ah, princess! that was something like!’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch, suddenly appearing in the middle of the crowd and beaming upon them with a delighted smile. ‘Capitally, warmly said, wasn’t it? Bravo! And Sergey Ivanovitch! Why, you ought to have said something—just a few words, you know, to encourage them; you do that so well,’ he added with a soft, respectful, and discreet smile, moving Sergey Ivanovitch forward a little by the arm.     19   
  ‘No, I’m just off.’     20   
  ‘Where to?’     21   
  ‘To the country, to my brother’s,’ answered Sergey Ivanovitch.     22   
  ‘Then you’ll see my wife. I’ve written to her, but you’ll see her first. Please tell her that they’ve seen me and that it’s “all right,” as the English say. She’ll understand. Oh, and be so good as to tell her I’m appointed secretary of the committee … But she’ll understand! You know, les petites misères de la vie humaine,’ he said, as it were apologising to the princess. ‘And Princess Myaky—not Liza, but Bibish—is sending a thousand guns and twelve nurses. Did I tell you?’     23   
  ‘Yes, I heard so,’ answered Koznishev indifferently.     24   
  ‘It’s a pity you’re going away,’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch. ‘To-morrow we’re giving a dinner to two who’re setting off—Dimer-Bartnyansky from Petersburg and our Veslovsky, Grisha. They’re both going. Veslovsky’s only lately married. There’s fine fellow for you! Eh, princess?’ he turned to the lady.     25   
  The princess looked at Koznishev without replying. But the fact that Sergey Ivanovitch and the princess seemed anxious to get rid of him did not in the least disconcert Stepan Arkadyevitch. Smiling, he stared at the feather in the princess’s hat, and then about him as though he were going to pick something up. Seeing a lady approaching with a collecting-box, he beckoned her up and put in a five-rouble note.     26   
  ‘I can never see these collecting-boxes unmoved while I’ve money in my pocket,’ he said. ‘And how about to-day’s telegram? Fine chaps those Montenegrins!’     27   
  ‘You don’t say so!’ he cried, when the princess told him that Vronsky was going by this train. For an instant Stepan Arkadyevitch’s face looked sad, but a minute later, when stroking his moustaches and swinging as he walked, he went into the hall where Vronsky was, he had completely forgotten his own despairing sobs over his sister’s corpse, and he saw in Vronsky only a hero and an old friend.     28   
  ‘With all his faults one can’t refuse to do him justice,’ said the princess to Sergey Ivanovitch as soon as Stepan Arkadyevitch had left them. ‘What a typically Russian, Slav nature! Only, I’m afraid it won’t be pleasant for Vronsky to see him. Say what you will, I’m touched by that man’s fate. Do talk to him a little on the way,’ said the princess.     29   
  ‘Yes, perhaps, if it happens so.’     30   
  ‘I never liked him. But this atones for a great deal. He’s not merely going himself, he’s taking a squadron at his own expense.’     31   
  ‘Yes, so I heard.’     32   
  A bell sounded. Every one crowded to the doors. ‘Here he is!’ said the princess, indicating Vronsky, who with his mother on his arm walked by, wearing a long overcoat and wide-brimmed black hat. Oblonsky was walking beside him, talking eagerly of something.     33   
  Vronsky was frowning and looking straight before him, as though he did not hear what Stepan Arkadyevitch was saying.     34   
  Probably on Oblonsky’s pointing them out, he looked round in the direction where the princess and Sergey Ivanovitch were standing, and without speaking lifted his hat. His face, aged and worn by suffering, looked stony.     35   
  Going on to the platform, Vronsky left his mother and disappeared into a compartment.     36   
  On the platform there rang out ‘God save the Tsar,’ then shouts of ‘hurrah!’ and jivio!’ One of the volunteers, a tall, very young man with a hollow chest, was particularly conspicuous, bowing and waving his felt hat and a nosegay over his head. Then two officers emerged, bowing too, and a stout man with a big beard, wearing a greasy forage-cap.

   
Part VIII   
Chapter III   
     
SAYING good-bye to the princess, Sergey Ivanovitch was joined by Katavasov; together they got into a carriage full to overflowing, and the train started.      1   
  At Tsaritsino station the train was met by a chorus of young men singing ‘Hail to Thee!’ Again the volunteers bowed and poked their heads out, but Sergey Ivanovitch paid no attention to them. He had had so much to do with the volunteers that the type was familiar to him and did not interest him.      2   
  Katavasov, whose scientific work had prevented his having a chance of observing them hitherto, was very much interested in them and questioned Sergey Ivanovitch.      3   
  Sergey Ivanovitch advised him to go into the second-class and talk to them himself. At the next station Katavasov acted on the suggestion.      4   
  At the first stop he moved into the second-class and made the acquaintance of the volunteers. They were sitting in a corner of the carriage, talking loudly and obviously aware that the attention of the passengers and Katavasov as he got in was concentrated upon them. More loudly than all talked the tall, hollow-chested young man. He was unmistakably tipsy, and was relating some story that had occurred at his school. Facing him sat a middle-aged officer in the Austrian military jacket of the Guards uniform. He was listening with a smile to the hollow-chested youth, and occasionally pulling him up. The third, in an artillery uniform, was sitting on a box beside them. A fourth was asleep.      5   
  Entering into conversation with the youth, Katavasov learned that he was a wealthy Moscow merchant who had run through a large fortune before he was two-and-twenty. Katavasov did not like him, because he was unmanly and effeminate and sickly. He was obviously convinced, especially now after drinking, that he was performing a heroic action, and he bragged of it in the most unpleasant way.      6   
  The second, the retired officer, made an unpleasant impression too upon Katavasov. He was, it seemed, a man who had tried everything. He had been on a railway, had been a land-steward, and had started factories, and he talked, quite without necessity, of all he had done, and used learned expressions quite inappropriately.      7   
  The third, the artilleryman, on the contrary, struck Katavasov very favourably. He was a quiet, modest fellow, unmistakably impressed by the knowledge of the officer and the heroic self-sacrifice of the merchant and saying nothing about himself. When Katavasov asked him what had impelled him to go to Servia, he answered modestly—      8   
  ‘Oh, well, every one’s going. The Servians want help, too. I’m sorry for them.’      9   
  ‘Yes, you artillerymen especially are scarce there,’ said Katavasov.     10   
  ‘Oh, I wasn’t long in the artillery; maybe they’ll put me into the infantry or the cavalry.’     11   
  ‘Into the infantry when they need artillery more than anything?’ said Katavasov, fancying from the artilleryman’s apparent age that he must have reached a fairly high grade.     12   
  ‘I wasn’t long in the artillery, I’m a cadet retired,’ he said, and he began to explain how he had failed in his examination.     13   
  All of this together made a disagreeable impression on Katavasov, and when the volunteers got out at a station for a drink, Katavasov would have liked to compare his unfavourable impression in conversation with some one. There was an old man in the carriage, wearing a military overcoat, who had been listening all the while to Katavasov’s conversation with the volunteers. When they were left alone, Katavasov addressed him.     14   
  ‘What different positions they come from, all those fellows who are going off there,’ Katavasov said vaguely, not wishing to express his own opinion, and at the same time anxious to find out the old man’s views.     15   
  The old man was an officer who had served on two campaigns. He knew what makes a soldier, and judging by the appearance and the talk of those persons, by the swagger with which they had recourse to the bottle on the journey, he considered them poor soldiers. Moreover, he lived in a district town, and he was longing to tell how one soldier had volunteered from his town, a drunkard and a thief whom no one would employ as a labourer. But knowing by experience that in the present condition of the public temper it was dangerous to express an opinion opposed to the general one, and especially to criticise the volunteers unfavourably, he too watched Katavasov without committing himself.     16   
  ‘Well, men are wanted there,’ he said, laughing with his eyes. And they fell to talking of the last war news, and each concealed from the other his perplexity as to the engagement expected next day, since the Turks had been beaten, according to the latest news, at all points. And so they parted, neither giving expression to his opinion.     17   
  Katavasov went back to his own carriage, and with reluctant hypocrisy reported to Sergey Ivanovitch his observations of the volunteers, from which it would appear that they were capital fellows.     18   
  At a big station at a town the volunteers were again greeted with shouts and singing, again men and women with collecting-boxes appeared, and provincial ladies brought bouquets to the volunteers and followed them into the refreshment-room; but all this was on a much smaller and feebler scale than in Moscow.

Part VIII   
Chapter IV   
     
WHILE the train was stopping at the provincial town, Sergey Ivanovitch did not go to the refreshment-room, but walked up and down the platform.      1   
  The first time he passed Vronsky’s compartment he noticed that the curtain was drawn over the window; but as he passed it the second time he saw the old countess at the window. She beckoned to Koznishev.      2   
  ‘I’m going, you see, taking him as far as Kursk,’ she said.      3   
  ‘Yes, so I heard,’ said Sergey Ivanovitch, standing at her window and peeping in. ‘What a noble act on his part!’ he added, noticing that Vronsky was not in the compartment.      4   
  ‘Yes, after his misfortune, what was there for him to do?’      5   
  ‘What a terrible thing it was!’ said Sergey Ivanovitch.      6   
  ‘Ah, what I have been through! But do get in … Ah, what I have been through!’ she repeated, when Sergey Ivanovitch had got in and sat down beside her. ‘You can’t conceive it! For six weeks he did not speak to any one, and would not touch food except when I implored him. And not for one minute could we leave him alone. We took away everything he could have used against himself. We lived on the ground-floor, but there was no reckoning on anything. You know, of course, that he had shot himself once already on her account,’ she said, and the old lady’s eyelashes twitched at the recollection. ‘Yes, hers was the fitting end for such a woman. Even the death she chose was low and vulgar.’      7   
  ‘It’s not for us to judge, countess,’ said Sergey Ivanovitch; ‘but I can understand that it has been very hard for you.’      8   
  ‘Ah, don’t speak of it! I was staying on my estate, and he was with me. A note was brought him. He wrote an answer and sent it off. We hadn’t an idea that she was close by at the station. In the evening I had only just gone to my room, when my Mary told me a lady had thrown herself under the train. Something seemed to strike me at once. I knew it was she. The first thing I said was, he was not to be told. But they’d told him already. His coachman was there and saw it all. When I ran into his room, he was beside himself—it was fearful to see him. He didn’t say a word, but galloped off there. I don’t know to this day what happened there, but he was brought back at death’s-door. I shouldn’t have known him. Prostration complete, the doctor said. And that was followed almost by madness. Oh, why talk of it!’ said the countess with a wave of her hand. ‘It was an awful time! No, say what you will, she was a bad woman. Why, what is the meaning of such desperate passions? It was all to show herself something out of the way. Well, and that she did do. She brought herself to ruin and two good men—her husband and my unhappy son.’      9   
  ‘And what did her husband do?’ asked Sergey Ivanovitch.     10   
  ‘He has taken her daughter. Alexey was ready to agree to anything at first. Now it worries him terribly that he should have given his own child away to another man. But he can’t take back his word. Karenin came to the funeral. But we tried to prevent his meeting Alexey. For him, for her husband, it was easier, any way. She had set him free. But my poor son was utterly given up to her. He had thrown up everything, his career, me, and even then she had no mercy on him, but of set purpose she made his ruin complete. No, say what you will, her very death was the death of a vile woman, of no religious feeling. God forgive me, but I can’t help hating the memory of her, when I look at my son’s misery!’     11   
  ‘But how is he now?’     12   
  ‘It was a blessing from Providence for us—this Servian war. I’m old, and I don’t understand the rights and wrongs of it, but it’s come as a providential blessing to him. Of course for me, as his mother, it’s terrible; and what’s worse, they say, ce n’est pas tres bien vu à Pétersbourg. But it can’t be helped! It was the one thing that could rouse him. Yashvin—a friend of his—he had lost all he had at cards and he was going to Servia. He came to see him and persuaded him to go. Now it’s an interest for him. Do please talk to him a little. I want to distract his mind. He’s so low-spirited. And as bad luck would have it, he has toothache too. But he’ll be delighted to see you. Please do talk to him; he’s walking up and down on that side.’     13   
  Sergey Ivanovitch said he would be very glad to, and crossed over to the other side of the station.

Part VIII   
Chapter V   
     
IN the slanting evening shadows cast by the baggage piled up on the platform, Vronsky in his long overcoat and slouch hat, with his hands in his pockets, strode up and down, like a wild beast in a cage, turning sharply after twenty paces. Sergey Ivanovitch fancied, as he approached him, that Vronsky saw him but was pretending not to see. This did not affect Sergey Ivanovitch in the slightest. He was above all personal considerations with Vronsky.      1   
  At that moment Sergey Ivanovitch looked upon Vronsky as a man taking an important part in a great cause, and Koznishev thought it his duty to encourage him and express his approval. He went up to him.      2   
  Vronsky stood still, looked intently at him, recognised him, and going a few steps forward to meet him, shook hands with him very warmly.      3   
  ‘Possibly you didn’t wish to see me,’ said Sergey Ivanovitch, ‘but couldn’t I be of use to you?’      4   
  ‘There’s no one I should less dislike seeing than you,’ said Vronsky. ‘Excuse me; and there’s nothing in life for me to like.’      5   
  ‘I quite understand, and I merely meant to offer you my services,’ said Sergey Ivanovitch, scanning Vronsky’s face, full of unmistakable suffering. ‘Wouldn’t it be of use to you to have a letter to Ristitch—to Milan?’      6   
  ‘Oh no!’ Vronsky said, seeming to understand him with difficulty. ‘If you don’t mind, let’s walk on. It’s so stuffy among the carriages. A letter? No, thank you; to meet death one needs no letters of introduction. Nor for the Turks …’ he said, with a smile that was merely of the lips. His eyes still kept their look of angry suffering.      7   
  ‘Yes; but you might find it easier to get into relations, which are after all essential, with any one prepared to see you. But that’s as you like. I was very glad to hear of your intention. There have been so many attacks made on the volunteers, and a man like you raises them in public estimation.’      8   
  ‘My use as a man,’ said Vronsky, ‘is that life’s worth nothing to me. And that I’ve enough bodily energy to cut my way into their ranks, and to trample on them or fall—I know that. I’m glad there’s something to give my life for, for it’s not simply useless but loathsome to me. Any one’s welcome to it.’ And his jaw twitched impatiently from the incessant gnawing toothache, that prevented him from even speaking with a natural expression.      9   
  ‘You will become another man, I predict,’ said Sergey Ivanovitch, feeling touched. ‘To deliver one’s brother-men from bondage is an aim worth death and life. God grant you success outwardly—and inwardly peace,’ he added, and he held out his hand. Vronsky warmly pressed his out-stretched hand.     10   
  ‘Yes, as a weapon I may be of some use. But as a man, I’m a wreck,’ he jerked out.     11   
  He could hardly speak for the throbbing ache in his strong teeth, that were like rows of ivory in his mouth. He was silent, and his eyes rested on the wheels of the tender, slowly and smoothly rolling along the rails.     12   
  And all at once a different pain, not an ache, but an inner trouble, that set his whole being in anguish, made him for an instant forget his toothache. As he glanced at the tender and the rails, under the influence of the conversation with a friend he had not met since his misfortune, he suddenly recalled her—that is, what was left of her when he had run like one distraught into the cloak-room of the railway station—on the table, shamelessly sprawling out among strangers, the blood-stained body so lately full of life; the head unhurt dropping back with its weight of hair, and the curling tresses about the temples, and the exquisite face, with red, half-opened mouth, the strange, fixed expression, piteous on the lips and awful in the still open eyes, that seemed to utter that fearful phrase—that he would be sorry for it—that she had said when they were quarrelling.     13   
  And he tried to think of her as she was when he met her the first time, at a railway-station too, mysterious, exquisite, loving, seeking and giving happiness, and not cruelly revengeful as he remembered her on that last moment. He tried to recall his best moments with her, but those moments were poisoned for ever. He could only think of her as triumphant, successful in her menace of a wholly useless remorse never to be effaced. He lost all consciousness of toothache, and his face worked with sobs.     14   
  Passing twice up and down beside the baggage in silence and regaining his self-possession, he addressed Sergey Ivanovitch calmly—     15   
  ‘You have had no telegrams since yesterday’s? Yes, driven back for a third time, but a decisive engagement expected for to-morrow.’     16   
  And after talking a little more of King Milan’s proclamation, and the immense effect it might have, they parted, going to their carriages on hearing the second bell.

Part VIII   
Chapter VI   
     
SERGEY IVANOVITCH had not telegraphed to his brother to send to meet him, as he did not know when he should be able to leave Moscow. Levin was not at home when Katavasov and Sergey Ivanovitch in a fly hired at the station drove up to the steps of the Pokrovskoe house, as black as niggers from the dust of the road. Kitty, sitting on the balcony with her father and sister, recognised her brother-in-law, and ran down to meet him.      1   
  ‘What a shame not to have let us know,’ she said, giving her hand to Sergey Ivanovitch, and putting her forehead up for him to kiss.      2   
  ‘We drove here capitally, and have not put you out,’ answered Sergey Ivanovitch. ‘I’m so dirty, I’m afraid to touch you. I’ve been so busy, I didn’t know when I should be able to tear myself away. And so you’re still as ever enjoying your peaceful, quiet happiness,’ he said, smiling, ‘out of the reach of the current in your peaceful backwater. Here’s our friend Fyodor Vassilievitch has succeeded in getting here at last.’      3   
  ‘But I’m not a negro, I shall look like a human being when I wash,’ said Katavasov in his jesting fashion, and he shook hands and smiled, his teeth flashing white in his black face.      4   
  ‘Kostya will be delighted. He has gone to his settlement. It’s time he should be home.’      5   
  ‘Busy as ever with his farming. It really is a peaceful backwater,’ said Katavasov; ‘while we in town think of nothing but the Servian war. Well, how does our friend look at it? He’s sure not to think like other people.’      6   
  ‘Oh, I don’t know, like everybody else,’ Kitty answered, a little embarrassed, looking round at Sergey Ivanovitch. ‘I’ll send to fetch him. Papa’s staying with us. He’s only just come home from abroad.’      7   
  And making arrangements to send for Levin and for the guests to wash, one in his room and the other in what had been Dolly’s, and giving orders for their luncheon, Kitty ran out on to the balcony, enjoying the freedom and rapidity of movement, of which she had been deprived during the months of her pregnancy.      8   
  ‘It’s Sergey Ivanovitch and Katavasov, a professor,’ she said.      9   
  ‘Oh, that’s a bore in this heat,’ said the prince.     10   
  ‘No, papa, he’s very nice, and Kostya’s very fond of him,’ Kitty said, with a deprecating smile, noticing the irony on her father’s face.     11   
  ‘Oh, I didn’t say anything.’     12   
  ‘You go to them, darling,’ said Kitty to her sister, ‘and entertain them. They saw Stiva at the station; he was quite well. And I must run to Mitya. As ill-luck would have it, I haven’t fed him since tea. He’s awake now, and sure to be screaming.’ And feeling a rush of milk, she hurried to the nursery.     13   
  This was not a mere guess; her connection with the child was still so close, that she could gauge by the flow of her milk his need of food, and knew for certain he was hungry.     14   
  She knew he was crying before she reached the nursery. And he was indeed crying. She heard him and hastened. But the faster she went, the louder he screamed. It was a fine healthy scream, hungry and impatient.     15   
  ‘Has he been screaming long, nurse, very long?’ said Kitty hurriedly, seating herself on a chair, and preparing to give the baby the breast. ‘But give me him quickly. Oh, nurse, how tiresome you are! There, tie the cap afterwards, do!’     16   
  The baby’s greedy scream was passing into sobs.     17   
  ‘But you can’t manage so, ma’am,’ said Agafea Mihalovna, who was almost always to be found in the nursery. ‘He must be put straight. A-oo! a-oo!’ she chanted over him, paying no attention to the mother.     18   
  The nurse brought the baby to his mother. Agafea Mihalovna followed him with a face dissolving with tenderness.     19   
  ‘He knows me, he knows me. In God’s faith, Katerina Alexandrovna, ma’am, he knew me!’ Agafea Mihalovna cried above the baby’s screams.     20   
  But Kitty did not heed her words. Her impatience kept growing, like the baby’s.     21   
  Their impatience hindered things for a while. The baby could not get hold of the breast right, and was furious.     22   
  At last, after despairing, breathless screaming, and vain sucking, things went right, and mother and child felt simultaneously soothed, and both subsided into calm.     23   
  ‘But poor darling, he’s all in perspiration!’ said Kitty in a whisper, touching the baby.     24   
  ‘What makes you think he knows you?’ she added, with a sidelong glance at the baby’s eyes, that peered roguishly, as she fancied, from under his cap, at his rhythmically puffing cheeks, and the little red-palmed hand he was waving.     25   
  ‘Impossible! If he knew any one, he would have known me,’ said Kitty, in response to Agafea Mihalovna’s statement, and she smiled.     26   
  She smiled because, though she said he could not know her, in her heart she was sure that he knew not merely Agafea Mihalovna, but that he knew and understood everything, and knew and understood a great deal too that no one else knew, and that she, his mother, had learned and come to understand only through him. To Agafea Mihalovna, to the nurse, to his grandfather, to his father even, Mitya was a living being, requiring only material care, but for his mother he had long been a moral being, with whom there had been a whole series of spiritual relations already.     27   
  ‘When he wakes up, please God, you shall see for yourself. Then when I do like this, he simply beams on me, the darling! Simply beams like a sunny day!’ said Agafea Mihalovna.     28   
  ‘Well, well; then we shall see,’ whispered Kitty. ‘But now go away, he’s going to sleep.’     29

   
Part VIII   
Chapter VII   
     
AGAFEA MIHALOVNA went out on tiptoe; the nurse let down the blind, chased a fly out from under the muslin canopy of the crib, and a humble-bee struggling on the window-frame, and sat down waving a faded branch of birch over the mother and the baby.      1   
  ‘How hot it is! if God would send a drop of rain,’ she said.      2   
  ‘Yes, yes, sh—sh—sh—’ was all Kitty answered, rocking a little, and tenderly squeezing the plump little arm, with rolls of fat at the wrist, which Mitya still waved feebly as he opened and shut his eyes. That hand worried Kitty; she longed to kiss the little hand, but was afraid to for fear of waking the baby. At last the little hand ceased waving, and the eyes closed. Only from time to time, as he went on sucking, the baby raised his long, curly eyelashes and peeped at his mother with wet eyes, that looked black in the twilight. The nurse had left off fanning, and was dozing. From above came the peals of the old prince’s voice, and the chuckle of Katavasov.      3   
  ‘They have got into talk without me,’ thought Kitty, ‘but still it’s vexing that Kostya’s out. He’s sure to have gone to the bee-house again. Though it’s a pity he’s there so often, still I’m glad. It distracts his mind. He’s become altogether happier and better now than in the spring. He used to be so gloomy and worried that I felt frightened for him. And how absurd he is!’ she whispered, smiling.      4   
  She knew what worried her husband. It was his unbelief. Although, if she had been asked whether she supposed that in the future life, if he did not believe, he would be damned, she would have had to admit that he would be damned, his unbelief did not cause her unhappiness. And she, confessing that for an unbeliever there can be no salvation, and loving her husband’s soul more than anything in the world, thought with a smile of his unbelief, and told herself that he was absurd.      5   
  ‘What does he keep reading philosophy of some sort for all this year?’ she wondered. ‘If it’s all written in those books, he can understand them. If it’s all wrong, why does he read them? He says himself that he would like to believe. Then why is it he doesn’t believe? Surely from his thinking so much? And he thinks so much from being solitary. He’s always alone, alone. He can’t talk about it all to us. I fancy he’ll be glad of these visitors, especially Katavasov. He likes discussions with them,’ she thought, and passed instantly to the consideration of where it would be more convenient to put Katavasov, to sleep alone or to share Sergey Ivanovitch’s room. And then an idea suddenly struck her, which made her shudder and even disturb Mitya, who glanced severely at her. ‘I do believe the laundress hasn’t sent the washing yet, and all the best sheets are in use. If I don’t see to it, Agafea Mihalovna will give Sergey Ivanovitch the wrong sheets,’ and at the very idea of this the blood rushed to Kitty’s face.      6   
  ‘Yes, I will arrange it,’ she decided, and going back to her former thoughts, she remembered that some spiritual question of importance had been interrupted, and she began to recall what. ‘Yes, Kostya, an unbeliever,’ she thought again with a smile.      7   
  ‘Well, and unbeliever then! Better let him always be one than like Madame Stahl, or what I tried to be in those days abroad. No, he won’t ever sham anything.’      8   
  And a recent instance of his goodness rose vividly to her mind. A fortnight ago a penitent letter had come from Stepan Arkadyevitch to Dolly. He besought her to save his honour, to sell her estate to pay his debts. Dolly was in despair, she detested her husband, despised him, pitied him, resolved on a separation, resolved to refuse, but ended by agreeing to sell part of her property. After that, with an irrepressible smile of tenderness, Kitty recalled her husband’s shamefaced embarrassment, his repeated, awkward efforts to approach the subject, and how at last, having thought of the one means of helping Dolly without wounding her pride, he had suggested to Kitty—what had not occurred to her before—that she should give up her share of the property.      9   
  ‘He an unbeliever indeed! With his heart, his dread of offending any one, even a child! Everything for others, nothing for himself. Sergey Ivanovitch simply considers it as Kostya’s duty to be his steward. And it’s the same with his sister. Now Dolly and her children are under his guardianship; all these peasants who come to him every day, as though he were bound to be at their service.’     10   
  ‘Yes, only be like your father, only like him,’ she said, handing Mitya over to the nurse, and putting her lips to his cheek.

   
Part VIII   
Chapter VIII   
     
EVER since, by his beloved brother’s deathbed, Levin had first glanced into the questions of life and death in the light of these new convictions, as he called them, which had during the period from his twentieth to his thirty-fourth year imperceptibly replaced his childish and youthful beliefs—he had been stricken with horror, not so much of death, as of life, without any knowledge of whence, and why, and how, and what it was. The physical organisation, its decay, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, evolution, were the words which usurped the place of his old belief. These words and the ideas associated with them were very well for intellectual purposes. But for life they yielded nothing, and Levin felt suddenly like a man who has changed his warm fur cloak for a muslin garment, and going for the first time into the frost is immediately convinced, not by reason, but by his whole nature, that he is as good as naked, and that he must infallibly perish miserably.      1   
  From that moment, though he did not distinctly face it, and still went on living as before, Levin had never lost this sense of terror at his lack of knowledge.      2   
  He vaguely felt, too, that what he called his new convictions were not merely lack of knowledge, but that they were part of a whole order of ideas, in which no knowledge of what he needed was possible.      3   
  At first, marriage, with the new joys and duties bound up with it, had completely crowded out these thoughts. But of late, while he was staying in Moscow after his wife’s confinement, with nothing to do, the question that clamoured for solution had more and more often, more and more insistently, haunted Levin’s mind.      4   
  The question was summed up for him thus: ‘If I do not accept the answers Christianity gives to the problems of my life, what answers do I accept?’ And in the whole arsenal of his convictions, so far from finding any satisfactory answers, he was utterly unable to find anything at all like an answer.      5   
  He was in the position of a man seeking food in toy-shops and tool-shops.      6   
  Instinctively, unconsciously, with every book, with every conversation, with every man he met, he was on the lookout for light on these questions and their solution.      7   
  What puzzled and distracted him above everything was that the majority of men of his age and circle had, like him, exchanged their old beliefs for the same new convictions, and yet saw nothing to lament in this, and were perfectly satisfied and serene. So that, apart from the principal question, Levin was tortured by other questions too. Were these people sincere? he asked himself, or were they playing a part? or was it that they understood the answers science gave to these problems in some different, clearer sense than he did? And he assiduously studied both these men’s opinions and the books which treated of these scientific explanations.      8   
  One fact he had found out since these questions had engrossed his mind, was that he had been quite wrong in supposing from the recollections of the circle of his young days at college, that religion had outlived its day, and that it was now practically non-existent. All the people nearest to him who were good in their lives were believers. The old prince, and Lvov, whom he liked so much, and Sergey Ivanovitch, and all the women believed, and his wife believed as simply as he had believed in his earliest childhood, and ninety-nine hundredths of the Russian people, all the working-people for whose life he felt the deepest respect, believed.      9   
  Another fact of which he became convinced, after reading many scientific books, was that the men who shared his views had no other construction to put on them, and that they gave no explanation of the questions which he felt he could not live without answering, but simply ignored their existence and attempted to explain other questions of no possible interest to him, such as the evolution of organisms, the materialistic theory of consciousness, etc.     10   
  Moreover, during his wife’s confinement, something had happened that seemed extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into praying, and at the moment he prayed, he believed. But that moment had passed, and he could not make his state of mind at that moment fit into the rest of his life.     11   
  He could not admit that at that moment he knew the truth, and that now he was wrong; for as soon as he began thinking calmly about it, it all fell to pieces. He could not admit that he was mistaken then, for his spiritual condition then was precious to him, and to admit that it was a proof of weakness would have been to desecrate those moments. He was miserably divided against himself, and strained all his spiritual forces to the utmost to escape from this condition.