Anna Karenina — Part 3, Chapter 6

By Leo Tolstoy (1877)

Entry 2196

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Untitled Anarchism Anna Karenina Part 3, Chapter 6

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(1828 - 1910)

Father of Christian Anarchism

: In 1861, during the second of his European tours, Tolstoy met with Proudhon, with whom he exchanged ideas. Inspired by the encounter, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana to found thirteen schools that were the first attempt to implement a practical model of libertarian education. (From: Anarchy Archives.)
• "Only by recognizing the land as just such an article of common possession as the sun and air will you be able, without bias and justly, to establish the ownership of land among all men, according to any of the existing projects or according to some new project composed or chosen by you in common." (From: "To the Working People," by Leo Tolstoy, Yasnaya P....)
• "The Government and all those of the upper classes near the Government who live by other people's work, need some means of dominating the workers, and find this means in the control of the army. Defense against foreign enemies is only an excuse. The German Government frightens its subjects about the Russians and the French; the French Government, frightens its people about the Germans; the Russian Government frightens its people about the French and the Germans; and that is the way with all Governments. But neither Germans nor Russians nor Frenchmen desire to fight their neighbors or other people; but, living in peace, they dread war more than anything else in the world." (From: "Letter to a Non-Commissioned Officer," by Leo Tol....)
• "People who take part in Government, or work under its direction, may deceive themselves or their sympathizers by making a show of struggling; but those against whom they struggle (the Government) know quite well, by the strength of the resistance experienced, that these people are not really pulling, but are only pretending to." (From: "A Letter to Russian Liberals," by Leo Tolstoy, Au....)


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Part 3, Chapter 6

Mashkin Upland was mown, the last row finished, the peasants had put on their coats and were gaily trudging home. Levin got on his horse and, parting regretfully from the peasants, rode homeward. On the hillside he looked back; he could not see them in the mist that had risen from the valley; he could only hear rough, good-humored voices, laughter, and the sound of clanking scythes.

Sergey Ivanovitch had long ago finished dinner, and was drinking iced lemon and water in his own room, looking through the reviews and papers which he had only just received by post, when Levin rushed into the room, talking merrily, with his wet and matted hair sticking to his forehead, and his back and chest grimed and moist.

"We mowed the whole meadow! Oh, it is nice, delicious! And how have you been getting on?" said Levin, completely forgetting the disagreeable conversation of the previous day.

"Mercy! what do you look like!" said Sergey Ivanovitch, for the first moment looking round with some dissatisfaction. "And the door, do shut the door!" he cried. "You must have let in a dozen at least."

Sergey Ivanovitch could not endure flies, and in his own room he never opened the window except at night, and carefully kept the door shut.

"Not one, on my honor. But if I have, I’ll catch them. You wouldn’t believe what a pleasure it is! How have you spent the day?"

"Very well. But have you really been mowing the whole day? I expect you’re as hungry as a wolf. Kouzma has got everything ready for you."

"No, I don’t feel hungry even. I had something to eat there. But I’ll go and wash."

"Yes, go along, go along, and I’ll come to you directly," said Sergey Ivanovitch, shaking his head as he looked at his brother. "Go along, make haste," he added smiling, and gathering up his books, he prepared to go too. He, too, felt suddenly good-humored and disinclined to leave his brother’s side. "But what did you do while it was raining?"

"Rain? Why, there was scarcely a drop. I’ll come directly. So you had a nice day too? That’s first-rate." And Levin went off to change his clothes.

Five minutes later the brothers met in the dining room. Although it seemed to Levin that he was not hungry, and he sat down to dinner simply so as not to hurt Kouzma’s feelings, yet when he began to eat the dinner struck him as extraordinarily good. Sergey Ivanovitch watched him with a smile.

"Oh, by the way, there’s a letter for you," said he. "Kouzma, bring it down, please. And mind you shut the doors."

The letter was from Oblonsky. Levin read it aloud. Oblonsky wrote to him from Petersburg: "I have had a letter from Dolly; she’s at Ergushovo, and everything seems going wrong there. Do ride over and see her, please; help her with advice; you know all about it. She will be so glad to see you. She’s quite alone, poor thing. My mother-in-law and all of them are still abroad."

"That’s capital! I will certainly ride over to her," said Levin. "Or we’ll go together. She’s such a splendid woman, isn’t she?"

"They’re not far from here, then?"

"Twenty-five miles. Or perhaps it is thirty. But a capital road. Capital, we’ll drive over."

"I shall be delighted," said Sergey Ivanovitch, still smiling. The sight of his younger brother’s appearance had immediately put him in a good humor.

"Well, you have an appetite!" he said, looking at his dark-red, sunburnt face and neck bent over the plate.

"Splendid! You can’t imagine what an effectual remedy it is for every sort of foolishness. I want to enrich medicine with a new word: Arbeitskur."

"Well, but you don’t need it, I should fancy."

"No, but for all sorts of nervous invalids."

"Yes, it ought to be tried. I had meant to come to the mowing to look at you, but it was so unbearably hot that I got no further than the forest. I sat there a little, and went on by the forest to the village, met your old nurse, and sounded her as to the peasants’ view of you. As far as I can make out, they don’t approve of this. She said: ‘It’s not a gentleman’s work.’ Altogether, I fancy that in the people’s ideas there are very clear and definite notions of certain, as they call it, ‘gentlemanly’ lines of action. And they don’t sanction the gentry’s moving outside bounds clearly laid down in their ideas."

"Maybe so; but anyway it’s a pleasure such as I have never known in my life. And there’s no harm in it, you know. Is there?" answered Levin. "I can’t help it if they don’t like it. Though I do believe it’s all right. Eh?"

"Altogether," pursued Sergey Ivanovitch, "you’re satisfied with your day?"

"Quite satisfied. We cut the whole meadow. And such a splendid old man I made friends with there! You can’t fancy how delightful he was!"

"Well, so you’re content with your day. And so am I. First, I solved two chess problems, and one a very pretty one—a pawn opening. I’ll show it you. And then—I thought over our conversation yesterday."

"Eh! our conversation yesterday?" said Levin, blissfully dropping his eyelids and drawing deep breaths after finishing his dinner, and absolutely incapable of recalling what their conversation yesterday was about.

"I think you are partly right. Our difference of opinion amounts to this, that you make the mainspring self-interest, while I suppose that interest in the common weal is bound to exist in every man of a certain degree of advancement. Possibly you are right too, that action founded on material interest would be more desirable. You are altogether, as the French say, too primesautière a nature; you must have intense, energetic action, or nothing."

Levin listened to his brother and did not understand a single word, and did not want to understand. He was only afraid his brother might ask him some question which would make it evident he had not heard.

"So that’s what I think it is, my dear boy," said Sergey Ivanovitch, touching him on the shoulder.

"Yes, of course. But, do you know? I won’t stand up for my view," answered Levin, with a guilty, childlike smile. "Whatever was it I was disputing about?" he wondered. "Of course, I’m right, and he’s right, and it’s all first-rate. Only I must go round to the counting house and see to things." He got up, stretching and smiling. Sergey Ivanovitch smiled too.

"If you want to go out, let’s go together," he said, disinclined to be parted from his brother, who seemed positively breathing out freshness and energy. "Come, we’ll go to the counting house, if you have to go there."

"Oh, heavens!" shouted Levin, so loudly that Sergey Ivanovitch was quite frightened.

"What, what is the matter?"

"How’s Agafea Mihalovna’s hand?" said Levin, slapping himself on the head. "I’d positively forgotten her even."

"It’s much better."

"Well, anyway I’ll run down to her. Before you’ve time to get your hat on, I’ll be back."

And he ran downstairs, clattering with his heels like a spring-rattle.

From : Gutenberg.org

(1828 - 1910)

Father of Christian Anarchism

: In 1861, during the second of his European tours, Tolstoy met with Proudhon, with whom he exchanged ideas. Inspired by the encounter, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana to found thirteen schools that were the first attempt to implement a practical model of libertarian education. (From: Anarchy Archives.)
• "There are people (we ourselves are such) who realize that our Government is very bad, and who struggle against it." (From: "A Letter to Russian Liberals," by Leo Tolstoy, Au....)
• "...for no social system can be durable or stable, under which the majority does not enjoy equal rights but is kept in a servile position, and is bound by exceptional laws. Only when the laboring majority have the same rights as other citizens, and are freed from shameful disabilities, is a firm order of society possible." (From: "To the Czar and His Assistants," by Leo Tolstoy, ....)
• "It usually happens that when an idea which has been useful and even necessary in the past becomes superfluous, that idea, after a more or less prolonged struggle, yields its place to a new idea which was till then an ideal, but which thus becomes a present idea." (From: "Patriotism and Government," by Leo Tolstoy, May 1....)

(1861 - 1946)

Constance Clara Garnett (née Black; 19 December 1861 – 17 December 1946) was an English translator of nineteenth-century Russian literature. She was the first English translator to render numerous volumes of Anton Chekhov's work into English and the first to translate almost all of Fyodor Dostoevsky's fiction into English. She also rendered works by Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Goncharov, Alexander Ostrovsky, and Alexander Herzen into English. Altogether, she translated 71 volumes of Russian literature, many of which are still in print today. Garnett was born in Brighton, England, the sixth of the eight children of the solicitor David Black (1817–1892), afterwards town clerk and coroner, and his wife, Clara Maria Patten (1825–1875), daughter of painter George Patten. Her brother was the mathematician Arthur Black, and her sister was the labor organizer and novelist Clementina Black. Her father became paralyzed in 1873, and two ye... (From: Wikipedia.org.)

Chronology

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1877
Part 3, Chapter 6 — Publication.

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February 14, 2017; 7:05:16 PM (UTC)
Added to http://revoltlib.com.

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January 13, 2022; 4:50:56 PM (UTC)
Updated on http://revoltlib.com.

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