When Levin thought what he was and what he was living for, he
could find no answer to the questions and was reduced to despair,
but he left off questioning himself about it. It seemed as
though he knew both what he was and for what he was living, for
he acted and lived resolutely and without hesitation. Indeed, in
these latter days he was far more decided and unhesitating in
life than he had ever been.
When he went back to the country at the beginning of June, he
went back also to his usual pursuits. The management of the
estate, his relations with the peasants and the neighbors, the
care of his household, the management of his sister's and
brother's property, of which he had the direction, his relations
with his wife and kindred, the care of his child, and the new
bee-keeping hobby he had taken up that spring, filled all his
time.
These things occupied him now, not because he justified them to
himself by any sort of general principles, as he had done in
former days; on the contrary, disappointed by the failure of his
former efforts for the general welfare, and too much occupied
with his own thought and the mass of business with which he was
burdened from all sides, he had completely given up thinking of
the general good, and he busied himself with all this work simply
because it seemed to him that he must do what he was doing--that
he could not do otherwise. In former days--almost from
childhood, and increasingly up to full manhood--when he had tried
to do anything that would be good for all, for humanity, for
Russia, for the whole village, he had noticed that the idea of it
had been pleasant, but the work itself had always been
incoherent, that then he had never had a full conviction of its
absolute necessity, and that the work that had begun by seeming
so great, had grown less and less, till it vanished into nothing.
But now, since his marriage, when he had begun to confine himself
more and more to living for himself, though he experienced no
delight at all at the thought of the work he was doing, he felt a
complete conviction of its necessity, saw that it succeeded far
better than in old days, and that it kept on growing more and
more.
Now, involuntarily it seemed, he cut more and more deeply into
the soil like a plough, so that he could not be drawn out without
turning aside the furrow.
To live the same family life as his father and forefathers--that
is, in the same condition of culture--and to bring up his
children in the same, was incontestably necessary. It was as
necessary as dining when one was hungry. And to do this, just as
it was necessary to cook dinner, it was necessary to keep the
mechanism of agriculture at Pokrovskoe going so as to yield an
income. Just as incontestably as it was necessary to repay a
debt was it necessary to keep the property in such a condition
that his son, when he received it as a heritage, would say "thank
you" to his father as Levin had said "thank you" to his
grandfather for all he built and planted. And to do this it was
necessary to look after the land himself, not to let it, and to
breed cattle, manure the fields, and plant timber.