Chapter 1 Sergei Ivanovich Koznishev wanted a rest from mental work, and instead of going abroad as he usually did, he came toward the end of May to stay in the country with his brother. In his judgment the best sort of life was a country life. He had come now to enjoy such a life at his brother's.
Konstantin Levin was very glad to have him, especially as he did not expect his brother Nikolai that summer. But in spite of his affection and respect for Sergei Ivanovich, Konstantin Levin was uncomfortable with his brother in the country. It made him uncomfortable, and it even annoyed him, to see his brother's attitude to the country. To Konstantin Levin the country was the background of life - that is of pleasures, endeavors, labor; to Sergei Ivanovich the country meant on one hand rest from work, on the other a valuable antidote to laxness - an antidote which he took with satisfaction and a sense of its salutariness. To Konstantin Levin the country was good because it afforded a field for labor, of the usefulness of which there could be no doubt; to Sergei Ivanovich the country was particularly good, because there it was possible and fitting to do nothing. Moreover, Sergei Ivanovich's attitude toward `the people' rather piqued Konstantin. Sergei Ivanovich used to say that he knew and liked `the people,' and he often talked to the peasants, which he knew how to do without affectation or condescension, and from every such conversation he would deduce general conclusions in favor of `the people' and in confirmation of his knowing them. Konstantin Levin did not like such an attitude toward `the people.'
To Konstantin `the people' was simply the chief partner in the common labor, and in spite of all the respect and the love, almost like that of kinship, he had for the peasant (sucked in probably, as he said himself, with the milk of his peasant nurse), Konstantin as a fellow worker with them, while sometimes enthusiastic over the vigor, gentleness, and justice of these men, was very often, when their common labors called for other qualities, exasperated with the peasant for his carelessness, slovenliness, drunkenness and lying. If he had been asked whether he liked or didn't like `the people,'
Konstantin Levin would have been absolutely at a loss what to reply. He liked and did not like `the people,' just as he liked and did not like men in general. Of course, being a goodhearted man, he liked men more than he disliked them, and so too with `the people.' But like or dislike `the people' as something peculiar he could not, not only because he lived with `the people,' and all his interests were bound up with theirs, but also because he regarded himself as a part of `the people,' did not see any peculiar qualities or failings distinguishing himself from `the people,'
and could not contrast himself with them. Moreover, although he had lived so long in the closest relations with the peasants, as farmer and arbitrator, and what was more, as adviser (the peasants trusted him, and for forty verstas round they would come to ask his advice), he had no definite views of `the people,' and would have been as much at a loss to answer the question whether he knew `the people' as the question whether he liked them. For him to say he knew `the people' would have been the same as to say he knew men. He was continually watching and getting to know people of all sorts, and among them peasants, whom he regarded as good and interesting people, and he was continually observing new points in them, altering his former views of them and forming new ones.
With Sergei Ivanovich it was quite the contrary. Just as he liked and praised a country life in comparison with the life he did not like, so too he liked `the people' in contradistinction to the class of men he did not like, and so too he knew `the people' as something distinct from, and opposed to, men in general. In his methodical brain there were distinctly formulated certain aspects of peasant life, deduced partly from that life itself, but chiefly from contrast with other modes of life. He never changed his opinion of `the people' and his sympathetic attitude toward them.
In the discussions that arose between the brothers on their views of `the people,' Sergei Ivanovich always got the better of his brother, precisely because Sergei Ivanovich had definite ideas about the peasant - his character, his qualities, and his tastes; Konstantin Levin had no definite and unalterable idea on the subject, and so in their arguments Konstantin was readily convicted of contradicting himself.
In Sergei Ivanovich's eyes his younger brother was a capital fellow, with his heart in the right place (as he expressed it in French), but with a mind which, though fairly quick, was too much influenced by the impressions of the moment, and consequently filled with contradictions. With all the condescension of an elder brother he sometimes explained to him the true import of things, but he derived little satisfaction from arguing with him because he got the better of him too easily.
Konstantin Levin regarded his brother as a man of immense intellect and culture, as generous in the highest sense of the word, and possessed of a special faculty for working for the public good. But in the depths of his heart, the older he became, and the more intimately he knew his brother, the more and more frequently the thought struck him that this faculty of working for the public good, of which he felt himself utterly devoid, was possibly not so much a quality as a lack of something - not a lack of good, honest, noble desires and tastes, but a lack of vital force, of what is called heart, of that impulse which drives a man to choose some one out of the innumerable paths of life, and to care only for that one.
