The day on which Sergey Ivanovitch came to Pokrovskoe was one of
Levin's most painful days. It was the very busiest working time,
when all the peasantry show an extraordinary intensity of
self-sacrifice in labor, such as is never shown in any other
conditions of life, and would be highly esteemed if the men who
showed these qualities themselves thought highly of them, and if
it were not repeated every year, and if the results of this
intense labor were not so simple.
To reap and bind the rye and oats and to carry it, to mow the
meadows, turn over the fallows, thrash the seed and sow the
winter corn--all this seems so simple and ordinary; but to
succeed in getting through it all everyone in the village, from
the old man to the young child, must toil incessantly for three
or four weeks, three times as hard as usual, living on rye-beer,
onions, and black bread, thrashing and carrying the sheaves at
night, and not giving more than two or three hours in the
twenty-four to sleep. And every year this is done all over
Russia.
Having lived the greater part of his life in the country and in
the closest relations with the peasants, Levin always felt in
this busy time that he was infected by this general quickening of
energy in the people.
In the early morning he rode over to the first sowing of the rye,
and to the oats, which were being carried to the stacks, and
returning home at the time his wife and sister-in-law were
getting up, he drank coffee with them and walked to the farm,
where a new thrashing machine was to be set working to get ready
the seed-corn.
He was standing in the cool granary, still fragrant with the
leaves of the hazel branches interlaced on the freshly peeled
aspen beams of the new thatch roof. He gazed through the open
door in which the dry bitter dust of the thrashing whirled and
played, at the grass of the thrashing floor in the sunlight and
the fresh straw that had been brought in from the barn, then at
the speckly-headed, white-breasted swallows that flew chirping in
under the roof and, fluttering their wings, settled in the
crevices of the doorway, then at the peasants bustling in the
dark, dusty barn, and he thought strange thoughts.
"Why is it all being done?" he thought. "Why am I standing here,
making them work? What are they all so busy for, trying to show
their zeal before me? What is that old Matrona, my old friend,
toiling for? (I doctored 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 smart girl in the
red jacket, who with that skillful, soft action shakes the ears
out of their husks. They'll bury her and this piebald horse, and
very soon too," he thought, gazing at the heavily moving, panting
horse that kept walking up the wheel that turned under him. "And
they will bury her and Fyodor the thrasher 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--me
they'll bury too, and nothing will be left. What for?"