Page 186 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

not having paid him his share of his mother’s fortune, and
the last scandal, when he had gone to a western province
in an official capacity, and there had got into trouble for
assaulting a village elder.... It was all horribly disgusting,

yet to Levin it appeared not at all in the same disgusting
light as it inevitably would to those who did not know
Nikolay, did not know all his story, did not know his
heart.
Levin remembered that when Nikolay had been in the
devout stage, the period of fasts and monks and church
services, when he was seeking in religion a support and a
curb for his passionate temperament, everyone, far from
encouraging him, had jeered at him, and he, too, with the
others. They had teased him, called him Noah and Monk;
and, when he had broken out, no one had helped him,
but everyone had turned away from him with horror and
disgust.
Levin felt that, in spite of all the ugliness of his life, his
brother Nikolay, in his soul, in the very depths of his soul,
was no more in the wrong than the people who despised
him. He was not to blame for having been born with his
unbridled temperament and his somehow limited
intelligence. But he had always wanted to be good. ‘I will
tell him everything, without reserve, and I will make him

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