Anna Karenina - Part 3

Sviazhsky was the marshal of his district. He was five years

older than Levin, and had long been married. His sister-in-law,

a young girl Levin liked very much, lived in his house; and Levin

knew that Sviazhsky and his wife would have greatly liked to

marry the girl to him. He knew this with certainty, as so-called

eligible young men always know it, though he could never have

brought himself to speak of it to anyone; and he knew too that,

although he wanted to get married, and although by every token

this very attractive girl would make an excellent wife, he could

no more have married her, even if he had not been in love with

Kitty Shtcherbatskaya, than he could have flown up to the sky.

And this knowledge poisoned the pleasure he had hoped to find in

the visit to Sviazhsky.

On getting Sviazhsky's letter with the invitation for shooting,

Levin had immediately thought of this; but in spite of it he had

made up his mind that Sviazhsky's having such views for him was

simply his own groundless supposition, and so he would go, all

the same. Besides, at the bottom of his heart he had a desire to

try himself, put himself to the test in regard to this girl. The

Sviazhskys' home-life was exceedingly pleasant, and Sviazhsky

himself, the best type of man taking part in local affairs that

Levin knew, was very interesting to him.

Sviazhsky was one of those people, always a source of wonder to

Levin, whose convictions, very logical though never original, go

one way by themselves, while their life, exceedingly definite and

firm in its direction, goes its way quite apart and almost always

in direct contradiction to their convictions. Sviazhsky was an

extremely advanced man. He despised the nobility, and believed

the mass of the nobility to be secretly in favor of serfdom, and

only concealing their views from cowardice. He regarded Russia

as a ruined country, rather after the style of Turkey, and the

government of Russia as so bad that he never permitted himself to

criticize its doings seriously, and yet he was a functionary of

that government and a model marshal of nobility, and when he

drove about he always wore the cockade of office and the cap with

the red band. He considered human life only tolerable abroad,

and went abroad to stay at every opportunity, and at the same

time he carried on a complex and improved system of agriculture

in Russia, and with extreme interest followed everything and knew

everything that was being done in Russia. He considered the

Russian peasant as occupying a stage of development intermediate

between the ape and the man, and at the same time in the local

assemblies no one was readier to shake hands with the peasants

and listen to their opinion. He believed neither in God nor the

devil, but was much concerned about the question of the

improvement of the clergy and the maintenance of their revenues,

and took special trouble to keep up the church in his village.