Part 3 - Chapter 12 - Page 2

separated. Those who lived near had
gone home, while those who came from far were gathered into a
group for supper, and to spend the night in the meadow. Levin,
unobserved by the peasants, still lay on the haycock, and still
looked on and listened and mused. The peasants who remained for
the night in the meadow scarcely slept all the short summer
night. At first there was the sound of merry talk and laughing
all together over the supper, then singing again and laughter.

All the long day of toil had left no trace in them but lightness
of heart. Before the early dawn all was hushed. Nothing was to
be heard but the night sounds of the frogs that never ceased in
the marsh, and the horses snorting in the mist that rose over the
meadow before the morning. Rousing himself, Levin got up from
the haycock, and looking at the stars, he saw that the night was
over.

"Well, what am I going to do? How am I to set about it?" he
said to himself, trying to express to himself all the thoughts
and feelings he had passed through in that brief night. All the
thoughts and feelings he had passed through fell into three
separate trains of thought. One was the renunciation of his old
life, of his utterly useless education. This renunciation gave
him satisfaction, and was easy and simple. Another series of
thoughts and mental images related to the life he longed to live
now. The simplicity, the purity, the sanity of this life he felt
clearly, and he was convinced he would find in it the content,
the peace, and the dignity, of the lack of which he was so
miserably conscious. But a third series of ideas turned upon the
question how to effect this transition from the old life to the
new. And there nothing took clear shape for him. "Have a wife?
Have work and the necessity of work? Leave Pokrovskoe? Buy
land? Become a member of a peasant community? Marry a peasant
girl? How am I to set about it?" he asked himself again, and
could not find an answer. "I haven't slept all night, though,
and I can't think it out clearly," he said to himself. "I'll
work it out later. One thing's certain, this night has decided
my fate. All my old dreams of home life were absurd, not the
real thing," he told himself. "It's all ever so much simpler and
better..."

"How beautiful!" he thought, looking at the strange, as it were,
mother-of-pearl shell of white fleecy cloudless resting right
over his head in the middle of the sky. "How exquisite it all is
in this exquisite night! And when was there time for that
cloud-shell to form? Just now I looked at the sky, and there was
nothing in it--only two white streaks. Yes, and so
imperceptibly too my views of life changed!"

He went out of the meadow and walked along the highroad