`Why is all this being done?' he thought. `Why am I standing here, ****** them work? What are they all so busy for, trying to show their zeal before me? For what reason is old Matriona, my old friend, toiling? (Idoctored her, when the beam fell on her in the fire),' he thought, looking at a thin old woman who was raking up the grain, moving painfully with her bare, sun-blackened feet over the uneven, rough floor. `Then she recovered, but today or tomorrow or in ten years she won't; they'll bury her, and nothing will be left either of her or of that dashing woman in the red skirt, who with that skillful, gentle action is shaking the ears out of their husks. They'll bury her, as well as this piebald gelding, and very soon too,' he thought, gazing at the heavily moving, panting horse that kept walking up the treadwheel that turned under him. `And they will bury her, and Fiodor the thresher with his curly beard full of chaff, and his shirt torn on his white shoulders - they will bury him. He's untying the sheaves, and giving orders, and shouting to the women, and quickly setting straight the strap on the moving wheel. And what's more, it's not them alone - they'll bury me too, and nothing will be left. What for? '
He thought this, and at the same time looked at his watch to reckon how much they threshed in an hour. He wanted to know this so as to judge by it the task to set for the day.
`It'll soon be one, and they're only beginning the third sheaf,'
thought Levin. He went up to the man who was feeding the machine, and shouting over the roar of the machine, he told him to feed it more slowly.
`You put in too much at a time, Fiodor. Do you see - it gets choked, that's why it isn't getting on. Do it evenly.'
Fiodor, black with the dust that clung to his moist face, shouted something in response, but still went on doing as Levin did not want him to.
Levin, going up to the machine, moved Fiodor aside, and began feeding the machine himself.
Working on till the peasants' dinner hour, which was not long in coming, he went out of the barn with Fiodor and fell into talk with him, stopping beside a neat yellow sheaf of rye laid on the threshing floor for seed.
Fiodor came from a village at some distance from the one in which Levin had once allotted land to his co-operative association. Now it had been let to the innkeeper.
Levin talked to Fiodor about this land and asked whether Platon, a well-to-do peasant of good character belonging to the same village, would not take the land for the coming year.
`It's a high rent; it wouldn't pay Platon, Konstantin Dmitrich,'
answered the peasant, picking the ears off his sweat-drenched shirt.
`But how does Kirillov make it pay?'
`Mitukha!' (So the peasant called the innkeeper in a tone of contempt.)`You may be sure he'll make it pay, Konstantin Dmitrich! He'll get his share, however he has to squeeze to get it! He's no mercy on a peasant.
But Uncle Fokanich' (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 suffer losses. He's human, 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 Mitukha, thinking only of filling his belly; but Fokanich is a righteous old man. He lives for his soul. He does not forget God.'
`How does he think 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-by!' said Levin, breathless with excitement, and turning round he took his stick and walked quickly away toward home.
At the peasant's words that Fokanich lived for his soul, in truth, in God's way, undefined but significant ideas seemed to burst forth, as though they had been locked up, and, all of them striving toward one goal, they thronged whirling through his head, blinding him with their light.
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TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 8, Chapter 12[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] 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 Fiodor's? And understanding them, did I doubt 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 doubt about them. 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.
`Fiodor says that Kirillov, the innkeeper, lives for his belly.
