The Eighth Part Unwritten: Levin's Second Dawn

Levin stood on the terrace as the last light drained from the sky, and the stars, one by one, pricked through the darkness like the points of needles through black cloth. He had spoken to no one of what had passed through his mind that afternoon — that revelation which had come not from books, not from argument, but from the simple words of Fyodor the peasant.

And yet, even now, as the certainty of it settled within him like water finding its level, there stirred beneath it a counter-current of doubt — not doubt of the truth itself, but doubt of his own capacity to hold it. He knew himself too well. He knew that by morning the feeling might have thinned, like frost under sunlight, leaving only the damp trace of something that had once been crystalline and whole.

From within the house came the sound of Kitty's voice, speaking to Agafya Mikhailovna about the preserves. There was a question of whether the gooseberries had been put up with enough sugar, and Kitty's tone — reasonable, attentive, concerned with exactly the right proportion — struck Levin with a force that he could not have explained to anyone. Here was life. Here was the thing itself. Not in syllogisms, not in the disputations of philosophers, but in the particular question of whether gooseberries required more sugar.

He went inside.

"Kostya, you've been standing out there for half an hour," Kitty said, turning to him with that expression he knew so well — the expression that combined tenderness with a slight, practical impatience. "Mitya has been asking for you."

"Mitya cannot ask for anything. He is not yet a year old," Levin replied, but he was already moving toward the nursery, and Kitty smiled, because she knew — as she always knew — that his objection was merely the outward form of his eagerness.

In the nursery, the child lay in his cot, not sleeping but gazing upward with that look of absolute, purposeless attention that infants possess and philosophers spend their lives trying to recover. Levin bent over him. The child's hand found his finger and gripped it, and Levin felt again what he had felt on the terrace — the sense that something real had taken hold of him, something that could not be argued away or dissolved by the acids of reason.

"You see," he whispered to the child, who of course saw nothing and understood nothing, "you see, it is very simple."

But it was not simple. Nothing, Levin reflected, was ever simple for long.

***

The following morning brought Sergei Ivanovich.

He arrived unannounced, as was his custom when he wished to appear casual, though Levin knew that every visit from his half-brother was the product of careful deliberation. Sergei Ivanovich did nothing without deliberation. He deliberated about the weather before remarking upon it. He deliberated about his tea before drinking it. And now, sitting across from Levin at the breakfast table, he deliberated visibly before introducing the subject that had brought him from Moscow.

"I have been reading Khomyakov again," Sergei Ivanovich said, spreading butter on his bread with the precision of a man laying bricks.

"Ah," said Levin.

"And it occurred to me that you, in your present state of mind — that is, in your interest in these questions of faith and reason — might find his later essays particularly illuminating."

Levin felt the old irritation rising. It was always like this with Sergei Ivanovich. Everything was always a matter of reading and thinking and the construction of fine arguments. Everything was at one remove from life itself.

"I am not in any particular state of mind," Levin said, which was a lie, and they both knew it.

Sergei Ivanovich regarded him with that calm, slightly sorrowful expression that suggested he saw through Levin entirely and forgave him for it, which was the thing Levin found most intolerable.

"You know," Sergei Ivanovich continued, as though Levin had not spoken, "Khomyakov makes a distinction between two kinds of knowledge — the knowledge that comes through rational inquiry and the knowledge that comes through living communion. He calls the second —"

"I know what he calls it," Levin interrupted. "And I don't need Khomyakov to tell me what I already know from Fyodor."

"Fyodor?"

"A peasant. He works on the estate. He said something yesterday that contained more truth than all of Khomyakov's essays combined."

Sergei Ivanovich set down his knife and looked at his brother with genuine interest, which irritated Levin even more, because he did not want to be looked at with genuine interest; he wanted to be left alone with his discovery before it was examined and categorized and filed away among all the other discoveries that Sergei Ivanovich kept in the vast, airless library of his mind.

"And what did this Fyodor say?" Sergei Ivanovich asked.

Levin opened his mouth and closed it again. He found that he could not repeat Fyodor's words. Not because he had forgotten them — they were as clear to him as they had been the moment they were spoken — but because, removed from the field, from the smell of cut hay, from the particular slant of afternoon light, from the physical fact of Fyodor leaning on his pitchfork, the words would become mere words. They would become a proposition to be debated, and Sergei Ivanovich would debate them, and the truth in them would be crushed under the weight of the debate like a living thing under a stone.

"He said that one must live for the soul," Levin finally answered, knowing even as he said it that this was both everything and nothing.

"Hmm," said Sergei Ivanovich, and Levin could see him placing this remark on the shelf next to Khomyakov, next to Hegel, next to all the others, and he wanted to shout: No, you don't understand, it isn't like that, it isn't a remark at all, it is the thing itself — but he said nothing, because he knew that shouting would only prove Sergei Ivanovich right in thinking him excitable and imprecise.

Kitty entered the room and immediately perceived the tension between the brothers, as she always did, with that faculty which Levin sometimes thought of as a sixth sense and sometimes thought of as simply the natural consequence of paying attention to other human beings, which was something he himself did badly.

"Sergei Ivanovich, how wonderful," Kitty said, and her warmth was genuine but also tactical, and she placed herself between them as deftly as a diplomat positioning a buffer state between warring nations. "Have you had enough to eat? The eggs are from our own hens — Levin has been very particular about the hens this year."

"I have not been particular about the hens," Levin said.

"He has counted them every morning for three weeks," Kitty told Sergei Ivanovich, with a look of affectionate conspiracy.

Sergei Ivanovich smiled. Levin felt himself softening. This was another thing that Kitty did — she dissolved his anger not by opposing it but by surrounding it with warmth until it could no longer sustain itself, like an ice floe in a warm current.

***

After breakfast, Levin walked out to the fields alone. The morning was clear and still, the kind of September morning when the air itself seems to be listening. The harvest was nearly complete. The last sheaves stood in the far field like a congregation of golden-robed figures, and the stubble between them was pale and sharp under the early sun.

He walked for a long time without thinking — or rather, without thinking in words. There was something moving in him, some rearrangement of his inner landscape, and he knew from experience that it was better not to interfere with it, better to let it work itself out in its own way, as the body works out a fever.

He came to the edge of the wood where, in spring, he had seen the snipe. The trees were beginning to turn. Here and there a branch had gone yellow or rust-colored, and these isolated bursts of color against the prevailing green struck him as unutterably beautiful and also, in some way he could not articulate, as evidence. Evidence of what? Of the rightness of things. Of the fact that change and constancy were not opposed but were aspects of a single process, and that this process was — he groped for the word — good.

He sat down on a fallen birch and looked out across the field.

The trouble, he thought, was that he could not hold both things at once: the certainty that had come to him through Fyodor's words, and the life he actually lived — the arguments with Sergei Ivanovich, the irritation over trivial matters, the daily compromises and pettiness. The truth was there, he was sure of it. But the truth and life did not seem to fit together. They were like two halves of a broken plate that ought to match but whose edges, when pressed together, revealed a gap.

And yet — and this was the thing he had begun, however dimly, to understand — perhaps the gap was the point. Perhaps living rightly did not mean closing the gap but learning to live within it. Perhaps faith was not a state of certainty but a practice of returning — of falling away and returning, falling away and returning, as the breath falls away and returns, as the seasons fall away and return.

He stood up and walked back toward the house. The sun was higher now, and the sheaves in the field cast short, sharp shadows. From the direction of the house he could hear Mitya crying — that particular, outraged cry that meant he had been denied something — and Kitty's voice, steady and calm, and the deeper murmur of Sergei Ivanovich, probably offering some philosophical observation about the nature of infantile desire.

Levin quickened his pace. He was not, he knew, a better man than he had been yesterday. He would still lose his temper. He would still argue with his brother. He would still lie awake at night, tormented by questions he could not answer. But something had shifted, nonetheless. Some foundation had been laid beneath his feet, invisible but solid, and he walked upon it now with a tread that was, if not confident, then at least willing.

The house appeared through the trees, its white walls glowing in the morning light, and for a moment Levin stopped and looked at it as though seeing it for the first time — this house in which his mother had died, in which his child had been born, in which his wife moved now from room to room, attending to the thousand small necessities that constituted, he now understood, not the distraction from life's meaning but its very substance.

He went in. Kitty looked up at him from the samovar and said, "You've got mud on your boots again."

"Yes," Levin said. And he felt, in that single syllable, the weight and the lightness of everything he had come to know.