ANNA KARENINA (Collector's Edition). Leo Tolstoy

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      Chapter 24

      ‘YES, there is certainly something objectionable and repellent about me,’ thought Levin after leaving the Shcherbatskys, as he walked toward his brother’s lodgings. ‘I do not get on with other people. They say it is pride! No, I am not even proud. If I had any pride, I should not have put myself into such a position.’ And he pictured to himself, Vronsky, happy, kind, clever, calm, and certainly never placing himself in such a terrible position as he, Levin, had been in that evening. ‘Yes, she was bound to choose him. It had to be so, and I have no cause to complain of anyone or anything. It was my own fault. What right had I to imagine that she would wish to unite her life with mine? Who and what am I? A man of no account, wanted by no one and of no use to anyone.’ And he remembered his brother Nicholas, and kept his mind gladly on that memory. ‘Is he not right that everything on earth is evil and horrid? And have we judged brother Nicholas fairly? Of course, from Prokofy’s point of view, who saw him in a ragged coat and tipsy, he is a despicable fellow; but I know him from another side. I know his soul, and know that we resemble one another. And yet I, instead of looking him up, dined out and came here.’ Levin went up to a lamp-post and read his brother’s address which he had in his pocket-book, and then hired a sledge. On the long way to his brother’s he recalled all the events he knew of Nicholas’s life. He recalled how despite the ridicule of his fellow-students his brother had lived like a monk while at the University and for a year after, strictly observing all the religious rites, attending service, fasting, avoiding all pleasures and especially women; and then how he suddenly broke loose, became intimate with the vilest people and gave himself up to unbridled debauchery. He remembered how his brother had brought a boy from the country to educate, and in a fit of anger had so beaten the lad that proceedings were commenced against him for causing bodily harm. He remembered an affair with a sharper to whom his brother had lost money, and whom he had first given a promissory note and then prosecuted on a charge of fraud. (That was when his brother Sergius had paid the money for him.) Then he remembered the night which Nicholas had spent in the police cells for disorderly conduct, and the disgraceful proceedings he had instigated against his brother Sergius Ivanich, whom he accused of not having paid out to him his share of his mother’s fortune: and lastly, the time when his brother took an official appointment in one of the Western Provinces and was there arrested for assaulting an Elder… . It was all very disgusting, but to Levin it did not seem nearly so disgusting as it must have seemed to those who did not know Nicholas, nor his whole story, nor his heart.

      Levin remembered that when Nicholas was passing through his pious stage of fasting, visiting monks, and going to church; when he was seeking in religion for help to curb his passionate nature, not only did no one encourage him, but every one, and Levin among them, made fun of him. He was teased and called ‘Noah’ and ‘monk’, and then when he broke loose no one helped him, but all turned away from him with horror and disgust.

      Levin felt that his brother Nicholas, in his soul, in the innermost depths of his soul, despite the depravity of his life, was no worse than those who despised him. It was not his fault that he was born with his ungovernable temper, and with a cramped mind. He always wished to do right. ‘I will tell him everything, I will get him to tell me everything. I will show him that I love and therefore understand him,’ Levin decided in his mind, as toward eleven o’clock he drove up to the hotel of which he had the address.

      ‘Upstairs, Nos. 12 and 13,’ said the hall porter in reply to Levin’s question.

      ‘Is he in?’

      ‘I expect so.’

      The door of No. 12 was ajar, and from within, visible in the streak of light, issued dense fumes of inferior and weak tobacco. Levin heard a stranger’s voice, but knew at once that his brother was there, for he heard him coughing.

      As he entered the doorway the stranger’s voice was saying: ‘It all depends on how intelligently and rationally the affair is conducted.’

      Constantine Levin glanced into the room, which was beyond a partition, and saw that the speaker was a young man with an enormous head of hair, who wore a workman’s coat, and that a young, pockmarked woman in a woollen dress without collar or cuffs was sitting on the sofa. [At that time better-class women always wore something white round their necks and wrists.] He could not see his brother, and his heart sank painfully at the thought that Nicholas lived among such strange people. No one noticed him, and, as he took off his goloshes, he overheard what the man in the workman’s coat was saying. He was talking about some commercial enterprise.

      ‘Oh, let the privileged classes go to the devil,’ said his brother’s voice, with a cough.

      ‘Masha, get us some supper and bring the wine if any is left, or send for some.’

      The woman rose, came out from behind the partition, and saw Constantine.

      ‘Here is a gentleman, Nicholas Dmitrich,’ she said.

      ‘Whom do you want?’ said Nicholas Levin’s voice angrily.

      ‘It is I,’ answered Constantine Levin, coming forward into the lamplight.

      ‘Who’s I?’ said the voice of Nicholas Levin still more angrily.

      Constantine heard how he rose hurriedly and caught against something, and then in the doorway before him he saw the familiar yet ever strange figure of his brother, wild, sickly, gigantic, lean, and round-shouldered, with large, frightened eyes.

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