Konstantin Levin regarded his brother as a man of great intelligence and education, noble in the highest sense of the word, and endowed with the ability to act for the common good. But, in the depths of his soul, the older he became and the more closely he got to know his brother, the more often it occurred to him that this ability to act for the common good, of which he felt himself completely deprived, was perhaps not a virtue but, on the contrary, a lack of something - not a lack of good, honest and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of life force, of what is known as heart, of that yearning which makes a man choose one out of all the countless paths in life presented to him and desire that one alone. The more he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergei Ivanovich and many other workers for the common good had not been brought to this love of the common good by the heart, but had reasoned in their minds that it was good to be concerned with it and were concerned with it only because of that. And Levin was confirmed in this surmise by observing that his brother took questions about the common good and the immortality of the soul no closer to heart than those about a game of chess or the clever construction of a new machine.
Besides that, Konstantin Levin also felt awkward in the country with his brother because in the country, especially during the summer, he was constantly busy with the farming, and the long summer day was not long enough for him to do everything he had to do, while Sergei Ivanovich rested. But though he rested now, that is, did not work on his book, he was so used to intellectual activity that he liked to utter in beautifully concise form the thoughts that occurred to him and liked it when there was someone there to listen to him. His most usual and natural listener was his brother. And therefore, despite the friendly simplicity of their relations, Konstantin felt awkward leaving him alone. Sergei Ivanovich liked to stretch out on the grass in the sun and lie there like that, baking and lazily chatting.
‘You wouldn’t believe,’ he said to his brother, ‘how I love this rustic idleness. There’s not a thought in my head, you could play ninepins in it.’
But Konstantin Levin was bored sitting and listening to him, especially since he knew that, without him, they were carting dung to the fields that were not yet crossploughed, and would heap it up any old way if he was not watching; and they would not screw the shares to the ploughs, but would take them off and then say that iron ploughs were a worthless invention, nothing like the good old wooden plough, and so on.
‘Enough walking about in the heat for you,’ Sergei Ivanovich would say to him.
‘No, I’ll just run over to the office for a minute,’ Levin would say, and dash off to the fields.
II
In the first days of June it so happened that the nurse and housekeeper Agafya Mikhailovna, while carrying a jar of freshly pickled mushrooms to the cellar, slipped, fell, and dislocated her wrist. The district doctor came, a talkative young man who had just finished his studies. He examined the wrist, said it was not dislocated, applied compresses and, having stayed for dinner, obviously enjoyed conversing with the famous Sergei Ivanovich Koznyshev, and to show his enlightened view of things, told him all the local gossip, complaining about the bad state of zemstvo affairs. Sergei Ivanovich listened attentively, asked questions and, excited to have a new listener, talked a lot and produced several apt and weighty observations, respectfully appreciated by the young doctor, and recovered the animated state of mind, so familiar to his brother, to which he was usually brought by a brilliant and lively conversation. After the doctor’s departure, Sergei Ivanovich expressed a wish to go to the river with a fishing rod. He liked fishing and seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation.
Konstantin Levin, who had to go to the ploughing and the meadows, volunteered to take his brother in the cabriolet.
It was that time of year, the turning point of summer, when the harvest of the current year is assured, when concerns about the sowing for the year to come begin and the mowing is at hand, when the rye has all come into ear and its grey-green, unswollen, still light ears sway in the wind, when green oats, with clumps of yellow grass scattered among them, thrust themselves unevenly amidst the late-sown crops, when the early buckwheat is already bushing out, covering the ground, when the fallow fields are half ploughed, leaving the cattle paths beaten down hard as stone, which the plough could not break up; when crusted-over heaps of dung give off their smell at dawn and sunset together with the honeyed grasses, and in the bottoms, awaiting the scythe, the intact meadows stand in an unbroken sea, with blackening piles of weeded sorrel stalks here and there.
