Levin talked to Fyodor about this land and asked whether Platon, a well-to-do peasant of good character belonging
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to the same village, would not take the land for the coming
year.
‘It’s a high rent; it wouldn’t pay Platon, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,’ answered the peasant, picking the ears off his
sweat-drenched shirt.
‘But how does Kirillov make it pay?’
‘Mituh!’ (so the peasant called the house porter, in a tone
of contempt), ‘you may be sure he’ll make it pay, Konstantin
Dmitrievitch! He’ll get his share, however he has to squeeze
to get it! He’s no mercy on a Christian. But Uncle Fokanitch’
(so he called the old peasant Platon), ‘do you suppose he’d
flay the skin off a man? Where there’s debt, he’ll let anyone
off. And he’ll not wring the last penny out. He’s a man too.’
‘But why will he let anyone off?’
‘Oh, well, of course, folks are different. One man lives for
his own wants and nothing else, like Mituh, he only thinks of
filling his belly, but Fokanitch is a righteous man. He lives for
his soul. He does not forget God.’
‘How thinks of God? How does he live for his soul?’ Levin
almost shouted.
‘Why, to be sure, in truth, in God’s way. Folks are different. Take you now, you wouldn’t wrong a man….’
‘Yes, yes, good-bye!’ said Levin, breathless with excitement,
and turning round he took his stick and walked quickly away
towards home. At the peasant’s words that Fokanitch lived
for his soul, in truth, in God’s way, undefined but significant
ideas seemed to burst out as though they had been locked
up, and all striving towards one goal, they thronged whirling
through his head, blinding him with their light.
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Chapter 12
Levin strode along the highroad, absorbed not so much
in his thoughts (he could not yet disentangle them) as in his
spiritual condition, unlike anything he had experienced before.
The words uttered by the peasant had acted on his soul
like an electric shock, suddenly transforming and combining
into a single whole the whole swarm of disjointed, impotent,
separate thoughts that incessantly occupied his mind. These
thoughts had unconsciously been in his mind even when he
was talking about the land.
He was aware of something new in his soul, and joyfully
tested this new thing, not yet knowing what it was.
‘Not living for his own wants, but for God? For what God?
And could one say anything more senseless than what he
said? He said that one must not live for one’s own wants, that
is, that one must not live for what we understand, what we are
attracted by, what we desire, but must live for something incomprehensible, for God, whom no one can understand nor
even define. What of it? Didn’t I understand those senseless
words of Fyodor’s? And understanding them, did I doubt of
their truth? Did I think them stupid, obscure, inexact? No, I
understood him, and exactly as he understands the words. I
understood them more fully and clearly than I understand
anything in life, and never in my life have I doubted nor can I
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doubt about it. And not only I, but everyone, the whole world
understands nothing fully but this, and about this only they
have no doubt and are always agreed.
‘And I looked out for miracles, complained that I did not
see a miracle which would convince me. A material miracle
would have persuaded me. And here is a miracle, the sole
miracle possible, continually existing, surrounding me on all
sides, and I never noticed it!
‘Fyodor says that Kirillov lives for his belly. That’s comprehensible and rational. All of us as rational beings can’t do
anything else but live for our belly. And all of a sudden the
same Fyodor says that one mustn’t live for one’s belly, but must
live for truth, for God, and at a hint I understand him! And I
and millions of men, men who lived ages ago and men living
now— peasants, the poor in spirit and the learned, who have
thought and written about it, in their obscure words saying
the same thing—we are all agreed about this one thing: what
we must live for and what is good. I and all men have only
one firm, incontestable, clear knowledge, and that knowledge
cannot be explained by the reason—it is outside it, and has no
causes and can have no effects.
‘If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects,
a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the
chain of cause and effect.
‘And yet I know it, and we all know it.
‘What could be a greater miracle than that?
‘Can I have found the solution of it all? can my sufferings be over?’ thought Levin, striding along the dusty road,
not noticing the heat nor his weariness, and experiencing a
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sense of relief from prolonged suffering. This feeling was so
delicious that it seemed to him incredible. He was breathless
with emotion and incapable of going farther; he turned off
the road into the forest and lay down in the shade of an aspen
on the uncut grass. He took his hat off his hot head and lay
propped on his elbow in the lush, feathery, woodland grass.
‘Yes, I must make it clear to myself and understand,’ he
thought, looking intently at the untrampled grass before him,
and following the movements of a green beetle, advancing
along a blade of couch-grass and lifting up in its progress a
leaf of goat-weed. ‘What have I discovered?’ he asked himself,
bending aside the leaf of goat-weed out of the beetle’s way
and twisting another blade of grass above for the beetle to
cross over onto it. ‘What is it makes me glad? What have I
discovered?
‘I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I
knew. I understand the force that in the past gave me life, and
now too gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have
found the Master.
‘Of old I used to say that in my body, that in the body of
this grass and of this beetle (there, she didn’t care for the grass,
she’s opened her wings and flown away), there was going on a
transformation of matter in accordance with physical, chemical, and physiological laws. And in all of us, as well as in the
aspens and the clouds and the misty patches, there was a process of evolution. Evolution from what? into what?—Eternal
evolution and struggle…. As though there could be any sort
of tendency and struggle in the eternal! And I was astonished
that in spite of the utmost effort of thought along that road
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I could not discover the meaning of life, the meaning of my
impulses and yearnings. Now I say that I know the meaning
of my life: ‘To live for God, for my soul.’ And this meaning,
in spite of its clearness, is mysterious and marvelous. Such,
indeed, is the meaning of everything existing. Yes, pride,’ he
said to himself, turning over on his stomach and beginning
to tie a noose of blades of grass, trying not to break them.
‘And not merely pride of intellect, but dulness of intellect.
And most of all, the deceitfulness; yes, the deceitfulness of
intellect. The cheating knavishness of intellect, that’s it,’ he
said to himself.
And he briefly went through, mentally, the whole course
of his ideas during the last two years, the beginning of which
was the clear confronting of death at the sight of his dear
brother hopelessly ill.
Then, for the first time, grasping that for every man, and
himself too, there was nothing in store but suffering, death,
and forgetfulness, he had made up his mind that life was impossible like that, and that he must either interpret life so that
it would not present itself to him as the evil jest of some devil,
or shoot himself.
But he had not done either, but had gone on living, thinking, and feeling, and had even at that very time married, and
had had many joys and had been happy, when he was not
thinking of the meaning of his life.
What did this mean? It meant that he had been living
rightly, but thinking wrongly.
He had lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritual
truths that he had sucked in with his mother’s milk, but he
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had thought, not merely without recognition of these truths,
but studiously ignoring them.
Now it was clear to him that he could only live by virtue of
the beliefs in which he had been brought up.
‘What should I have been, and how should I have spent
my life, if I had not had these beliefs, if I had not known that
I must live for God and not for my own desires? I should have
robbed and lied and killed. Nothing of what makes the chief
happiness of my life would have existed for me.’ And with the
utmost stretch of imagination he could not conceive the brutal creature he would have been himself, if he had not known
what he was living for.
‘I looked for an answer to my question. And thought could
not give an answer to my question—it is incommensurable
with my question. The answer has been given me by life itself,
in my knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. And
that knowledge I did not arrive at in any way, it was given to
me as to all men, given, because I could not have got it from
anywhere.
‘Where could I have got it? By reason could I have arrived
at knowing that I must love my neighbor and not oppress
him? I was told that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was already in my soul. But who
discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for
existence, and the law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the deduction of
reason. But loving one’s neighbor reason could never discover, because it’s irrational.’
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Chapter 13
And Levin remembered a scene he had lately witnessed
between Dolly and her children. The children, left to themselves, had begun cooking raspberries over the candles
and squirting milk into each other’s mouths with a syringe. Their mother, catching
