‘Yes, there’s something disgusting and repulsive in me,’ thought Levin, having left the Shcherbatskys and making his way on foot to his brother’s. ‘And I don’t fit in with other people. It’s pride, they say. No, there’s no pride in me either. If there were any pride in me, I wouldn’t have put myself in such a position.’ And he pictured Vronsky to himself, happy, kind, intelligent and calm, who certainly had never been in such a terrible position as he had been in that evening. ‘Yes, she was bound to choose him. It had to be so, and I have nothing and no one to complain about. I myself am to blame. What right did I have to think she would want to join her life with mine? Who am I? And what am I? A worthless man, of no use to anyone or for anything.’ And he remembered his brother Nikolai and paused joyfully at this remembrance. ‘Isn’t he right that everything in the world is bad and vile? And our judgement of brother Nikolai has hardly been fair. Of course, from Prokofy’s point of view, who saw him drunk and in a ragged fur coat, he’s a despicable man; but I know him otherwise. I know his soul, and I know that we resemble each other. And instead of going to look for him, I went to dinner and then came here.’ Levin went up to the street-lamp, read his brother’s address, which he had in his wallet, and hailed a cab. On the long way to his brother‘s, Levin vividly recalled all the events he knew from the life of his brother Nikolai. He remembered how his brother, while at the university and for a year after the university, despite the mockery of his friends, had lived like a monk, strictly observing all the rituals of religion, services, fasts, and avoiding all pleasures, especially women; and then it was as if something broke loose in him, he began keeping company with the most vile people and gave himself up to the most licentious debauchery. Then he remembered the episode with a boy his brother had brought from the country in order to educate him, and to whom he gave such a beating in a fit of anger that proceedings were started against him for the inflicting of bodily harm. Then he remembered the episode with a card-sharper to whom his brother had lost money, had given a promissory note, and whom he had then lodged a complaint against, claiming that the man had cheated him. (It was this money that Sergei Ivanych had paid.) He also remembered how he had spent a night in the police station for disorderly conduct. He remembered a shameful lawsuit he had started against his brother Sergei Ivanych, whom he accused of not having paid him his share of their mother’s fortune; and the last case, when he went to serve in the western territory and there stood trial for giving his superior a beating ... All this was terribly vile, but for Levin it seemed by no means as vile as it might have seemed to those who did not know Nikolai Levin, did not know his whole story, did not know his heart.
Levin recalled how, during Nikolai’s period of piety, fasts, monks, church services, when he had sought help from religion as a bridle for his passionate nature, not only had no one supported him, but everyone, including Levin himself, had laughed at him. They had teased him, calling him ‘Noah’ and ‘the monk’; and when he broke loose, no one helped him, but they all turned away with horror and loathing.
Levin felt that in his soul, in the very bottom of his soul, his brother Nikolai, despite the ugliness of his life, was not more in the wrong than those who despised him. He was not to blame for having been born with an irrepressible character and a mind somehow constrained. But he had always wanted to be good. ‘I’ll tell him everything, I’ll make him tell everything, and I’ll show him that I love him and therefore understand him,’ Levin decided to himself as he drove up, past ten o‘clock, to the hotel indicated as the address.
‘Upstairs, numbers twelve and thirteen,’ the doorman replied to Levin’s inquiry.
‘Is he at home?’
‘Must be.’
The door of No. 12 was half open, and through it, in a strip of light, came thick smoke from bad and weak tobacco and the sound of an unfamiliar voice. But Levin knew at once that his brother was there; he heard his little cough.
As he walked in, the unfamiliar voice was saying:
‘It all depends on how reasonably and conscientiously the affair is conducted.’
Konstantin Levin looked through the door and saw that the speaker was a young man with an enormous shock of hair, wearing a quilted jacket, and that a young, slightly pockmarked woman in a woollen dress without cuffs or collar35 was sitting on the sofa. His brother could not be seen. Konstantin’s heart was painfully wrung at the thought of his brother living among such alien people. No one heard him, and Konstantin, taking off his galoshes, was listening to what the gentleman in the quilted jacket was saying. He spoke about some sort of enterprise.
