Читать книгу Anna Karenina - 2 Classic Unabridged Translations in one eBook (Garnett and Maude translations) - Leo Tolstoy - Страница 109

LEVIN had long ago noticed that after people have made one uncomfortable by their pliancy and submissiveness they soon become unbearably exacting and aggressive. He felt that this would happen with his brother. And really Nicholas’s meekness did not last long. The very next morning he grew irritable and cavilled at everything his brother said, touching his most sensitive spots.

Levin felt guilty but could do nothing. He felt that if they both spoke without dissimulation and straight from the heart, they would only look into one another’s eyes and Constantine would say nothing but, ‘You will die! You will die!’ and Nicholas would only say in reply: ‘I know I shall die and I am afraid, afraid, afraid!’ That was all they would say if only they spoke straight from the heart. But that would make life impossible; therefore Constantine tried to do what all his life he had tried and never known how to do (although he had often observed that many people were able to do it well), something without which life was impossible: he tried to say something different from what he thought; and he felt all the time that it sounded false and that his brother detected him and grew irritable.

On the third day of his stay Nicholas challenged his brother to explain his plans to him once more, and not only found fault with them but purposely confused them with communism.

‘You have only taken an idea from others, and distorted it, and you wish to apply it where it is inapplicable.’

‘But I tell you that the two things have nothing in common! Communists deny the justice of property, capital, or inheritance, while I do not deny that main stimulus’ (it was repulsive to Levin to find himself using such words, but since he had been engrossed in his work he had involuntarily begun using more and more foreign words), ‘but want only to regulate labour.’

‘That is it. You have taken other people’s idea, dropped all that gave it force, and wish to make one believe that it is something new,’ said Nicholas, angrily jerking his neck.

‘But my idea has nothing in common …’

‘That idea,’ said Nicholas Levin with a sarcastic smile and angrily glistening eyes, ‘that idea at any rate, if one may say so, has a geometric charm of definiteness and certainty. It may be utopian; but granting the possibility of making a tabula rasa of the past — and abolishing private property and families — then labour comes by its own. But you have nothing …’

‘Why do you muddle it? I never was a communist.’

‘But I have been, and now I think it is premature but reasonable, and that it has a future as Christianity had in the first centuries.’

‘I only think that the force of labour must be dealt with in a scientifically experimental manner. It must be studied and its characteristics …’

‘But that is quite unnecessary! That force finds its own form of activity in accord with its degree of development. There used to be slaves everywhere, then villeins; and we have labour paid in kind, and leaseholders, and hired labour: so what are you looking for?’

At these words Levin suddenly grew warm, for at the bottom of his heart he felt that it was true — true that he wished to balance between communism and the existing forms of life, and that this was hardly possible.

‘I am seeking for a way of making labour profitable for me and for the labourers,’ he answered hotly. ‘I want to establish …’

‘You do not want to establish anything. You simply want to be original, as you always have done, and to show that you are not just exploiting the peasants, but have ideas!’

‘You think so? Well, then, leave me alone!’ said Levin, and he felt that a muscle was uncontrollably quivering in his left cheek.

‘You have no convictions and never had any; you only want to flatter your self-esteem.’

‘Well, all right! But leave me alone.’

‘I will, and high time too! You can go to the devil! And I am sorry I came!’

However much Levin tried afterwards to pacify his brother, Nicholas would not listen to it, but said that it was much better for them to part. And Levin saw that life had become simply intolerable for his brother.

Nicholas had quite made up his mind to go. Constantine came to him again and in an unnatural manner asked his forgiveness if he had offended him in any way.

‘Ah, this is magnanimity!’ said Nicholas, and smiled. ‘If you wish to be in the right, I can let you have that pleasure. You are in the right: but all the same I shall go away.’

Only just before he left Nicholas kissed Constantine, and suddenly said with a strange and serious look at his brother, ‘Do not think too badly of me, Kostya!’ and his voice trembled.

These were the only sincere words that had passed between them. Levin understood that they were meant to say, ‘You see that I am in a bad way, and perhaps we shall not meet again.’ He understood this, and tears trembled in his eyes. He again kissed his brother, but he did not know what to answer.

Three days after his brother’s departure Levin left for abroad. He surprised young Shcherbatsky, Kitty’s cousin, whom he happened to meet at a railway station, by his moroseness.

‘What is the matter with you?’ asked Shcherbatsky.

‘Nothing much, but there is little to be happy about in this world.’

‘Little? You’d better come to Paris with me instead of going to some Mulhausen or other. You’ll see how jolly it will be!’

‘No, I have done with that; it is time for me to die.’

‘That is a fine thing!’ said Shcherbatsky, laughing. ‘I am only preparing to begin to live.’

‘Yes, I thought so too till lately; but now I know that I shall soon die.’

Levin was saying what of late he had really been thinking. He saw death and the approach of death in everything; but the work he had begun interested him all the more. After all, he had to live his life somehow, till death came. Everything for him was wrapped in darkness; but just because, of the darkness, feeling his work to be the only thread to guide him through that darkness, he seized upon it and clung to it with all his might.