cares, his new enterprise in bee-culture, which he had taken up this year, occupied all his time. These interests occupied him, not because he carried them on with a view to their universal application, as he had done before, but, on the contrary, because being now on the one hand disillusionized by the lack of success in his former undertakings for the common good, on the other being too much engrossed by his own thoughts and the very multitude of affairs calling for his attention, he entirely relinquished all his attempts of cooperative advantage and he occupied himself with his affairs, simply because it seemed to him that he was irresistibly impelled to do what he did, and could not do otherwise.
Formerly — almost from childhood till he reached manhood — when he began to do anything that would be good for all, for humanity, for Russia, he saw that the thought of it gave him, in advance, a pleasing sense of joy; but the action in itself never realized his hopes, nor had he full conviction that the work was necessary, and the activity itself which seemed at first so important kept growing smaller and smaller, and came to naught.
But now that since his marriage he had become more and more restricted by life for its own sake, though he had no pleasure at the thought of his activity, he felt a conviction that his work was indispensable, and saw that the results gained were far more satisfactory than before.
Now, quite against his will, he cut deeper and deeper into the soil, like a plow that cannot choose its path, or turn from its furrow.
To live as his fathers and grandfathers had lived, to carry out their work so as to hand it on in turn to his children, seemed to him a plain duty. It was as necessary as the duty of eating when hungry; and he knew that, to reach this end, he was under obligation so to conduct the machinery of the estate[1] at Pokrovskoye that there might be profit in it. As indubitably as a debt required to be paid, so was it incumbent on him to
- ↑ Khozhyaïstvennaya mashina.
