that he is as good as naked, and that he must infallibly perish miserably.
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.
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
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what he needed was possible.
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 clamored
for solution had more and more often, more and more insistently, haunted Levin’s mind.
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.
He was in the position of a man seeking food in toy shops
and tool shops.
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.
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.
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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.
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, and so forth.
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.
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
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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.
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Chapter 9
These doubts fretted and harassed him, growing weaker
or stronger from time to time, but never leaving him. He
read and thought, and the more he read and the more he
thought, the further he felt from the aim he was pursuing.
Of late in Moscow and in the country, since he had
become convinced that he would find no solution in the materialists, he had read and re-read thoroughly Plato, Spinoza,
Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, the philosophers
who gave a non-materialistic explanation of life.
Their ideas seemed to him fruitful when he was reading
or was himself seeking arguments to refute other theories,
especially those of the materialists; but as soon as he began to read or sought for himself a solution of problems,
the same thing always happened. As long as he followed the
fixed definition of obscure words such as spirit, will, freedom, essence, purposely letting himself go into the snare
of words the philosophers set for him, he seemed to comprehend something. But he had only to forget the artificial
train of reasoning, and to turn from life itself to what had
satisfied him while thinking in accordance with the fixed
definitions, and all this artificial edifice fell to pieces at once
like a house of cards, and it became clear that the edifice
had been built up out of those transposed words, apart from
anything in life more important than reason.
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At one time, reading Schopenhauer, he put in place of his
will the word love, and for a couple of days this new philosophy charmed him, till he removed a little away from it. But
then, when he turned from life itself to glance at it again,
it fell away too, and proved to be the same muslin garment
with no warmth in it.
His brother Sergey Ivanovitch advised him to read the
theological works of Homiakov. Levin read the second
volume of Homiakov’s works, and in spite of the elegant,
epigrammatic, argumentative style which at first repelled
him, he was impressed by the doctrine of the church he
found in them. He was struck at first by the idea that the
apprehension of divine truths had not been vouchsafed to
man, but to a corporation of men bound together by love—
to the church. What delighted him was the thought how
much easier it was to believe in a still existing living church,
embracing all the beliefs of men, and having God at its
head, and therefore holy and infallible, and from it to accept
the faith in God, in the creation, the fall, the redemption,
than to begin with God, a mysterious, far-away God, the
creation, etc. But afterwards, on reading a Catholic writer’s
history of the church, and then a Greek orthodox writer’s
history of the church, and seeing that the two churches, in
their very conception infallible, each deny the authority
of the other, Homiakov’s doctrine of the church lost all its
charm for him, and this edifice crumbled into dust like the
philosophers’ edifices.
All that spring he was not himself, and went through
fearful moments of horror.
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‘Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life’s
impossible; and that I can’t know, and so I can’t live,’ Levin
said to himself.
‘In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is
formed a bubble-organism, and that bubble lasts a while
and bursts, and that bubble is Me.’
It was an agonizing error, but it was the sole logical result
of ages of human thought in that direction.
This was the ultimate belief on which all the systems
elaborated by human thought in almost all their ramifications rested. It was the prevalent conviction, and of all other
explanations Levin had unconsciously, not knowing when
or how, chosen it, as anyway the clearest, and made it his
own.
But it was not merely a falsehood, it was the cruel jeer of
some wicked power, some evil, hateful power, to whom one
could not submit.
He must escape from this power. And the means of escape every man had in his own hands. He had but to cut
short this dependence on evil. And there was one means—
death.
And Levin, a happy father and husband, in perfect health,
was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord that he
might not be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go
out with his gun for fear of shooting himself.
But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living.
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Chapter 10
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
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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
