Anna Karenina - Part 8

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.