Resurrection, Leo Tolstoy [top 5 books to read .txt] 📗

was a perfectly chaste maiden, in the same way Rántzeva was perfectly chaste as her own husband’s wife. When only a schoolgirl of sixteen she fell in love with Rántzeff, a student of the Petersburg University, and married him before he left the university, when she was only nineteen years old. During his fourth year at the university her husband had become involved in the students’ rows, was exiled from Petersburg, and turned revolutionist. She left the medical courses she was attending, followed him, and also turned revolutionist. If she had not considered her husband the cleverest and best of men she would not have fallen in love with him; and if she had not fallen in love would not have married; but having fallen in love and married him whom she thought the best and cleverest of men, she naturally looked upon life and its aims in the way the best and cleverest of men looked at them. At first he thought the aim of life was to learn, and she looked upon study as the aim of life. He became a revolutionist, and so did she. She could demonstrate very clearly that the existing state of things could not go on, and that it was everybody’s duty to fight this state of things and to try to bring about conditions in which the individual could develop freely, etc. And she imagined that she really thought and felt all this, but in reality she only regarded everything her husband thought as absolute truth, and only sought for perfect agreement, perfect identification of her own soul with his which alone could give her full moral satisfaction. The parting with her husband and their child, whom her mother had taken, was very hard to bear; but she bore it firmly and quietly, since it was for her husband’s sake and for that cause which she had not the slightest doubt was true, since he served it. She was always with her husband in thoughts, and did not love and could not love any other any more than she had done before. But Nabátoff’s devoted and pure love touched and excited her. This moral, firm man, her husband’s friend, tried to treat her as a sister, but something more appeared in his behaviour to her, and this something frightened them both, and yet gave colour to their life of hardship.

So that in all this circle only Mary Pávlovna and Kondrátieff were quite free from love affairs.

XIV

Expecting to have a private talk with Katúsha, as usual, after tea, Nekhlúdoff sat by the side of Kryltzóff, conversing with him. Among other things he told him the story of Makár’s crime and about his request to him. Kryltzóff listened attentively, gazing at Nekhlúdoff with glistening eyes.

“Yes,” said Kryltzóff suddenly, “I often think that here we are going side by side with them, and who are they? The same for whose sake we are going, and yet we not only do not know them, but do not even wish to know them. And they, even worse than that, they hate us and look upon us as enemies. This is terrible.”

“There is nothing terrible about it,” broke in Novódvoroff. “The masses always worship power only. The government is in power, and they worship it and hate us. Tomorrow we shall have the power, and they will worship us,” he said with his grating voice. At that moment a volley of abuse and the rattle of chains sounded from behind the wall, something was heard thumping against it and screaming and shrieking, someone was being beaten, and someone was calling out, “Murder! help!”

“Hear them, the beasts! What intercourse can there be between us and such as them?” quietly remarked Novódvoroff.

“You call them beasts, and Nekhlúdoff was just telling me about such an action!” irritably retorted Kryltzóff, and went on to say how Makár was risking his life to save a fellow-villager. “That is not the action of a beast, it is heroism.”

“Sentimentality!” Novódvoroff ejaculated ironically; “it is difficult for us to understand the emotions of these people and the motives on which they act. You see generosity in the act, and it may be simply jealousy of that other criminal.”

“How is it that you never wish to see anything good in another?” Mary Pávlovna said suddenly, flaring up.

“How can one see what does not exist!”

“How does it not exist, when a man risks dying a terrible death?”

“I think,” said Novódvoroff, “that if we mean to do our work, the first condition is that” (here Kondrátieff put down the book he was reading by the lamplight and began to listen attentively to his master’s words) “we should not give way to fancy, but look at things as they are. We should do all in our power for the masses, and expect nothing in return. The masses can only be the object of our activity, but cannot be our fellow-workers as long as they remain in that state of inertia they are in at present,” he went on, as if delivering a lecture. “Therefore, to expect help from them before the process of development⁠—that process which we are preparing them for⁠—has taken place is an illusion.”

“What process of development?” Kryltzóff began, flushing all over. “We say that we are against arbitrary rule and despotism, and is this not the most awful despotism?”

“No despotism whatever,” quietly rejoined Novódvoroff. “I am only saying that I know the path that the people must travel, and can show them that path.”

“But how can you be sure that the path you show is the true path? Is this not the same kind of despotism that lay at the bottom of the Inquisition, all persecutions, and the great revolution? They, too, knew the one true way, by means of their science.”

“Their having erred is no proof of my going to err; besides, there is a great difference between the ravings of idealogues and the facts based on sound, economic science.” Novódvoroff’s