Page 521 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

he lived with ‘the people,’ and all his interests were bound
up with theirs, but also because he regarded himself as a
part of ‘the people,’ did not see any special qualities or
failings distinguishing himself and ‘the people,’ and could

not contrast himself with them. Moreover, although he
had lived so long in the closest relations with the peasants,
as farmer and arbitrator, and what was more, as adviser
(the peasants trusted him, and for thirty miles round they
would come to ask his advice), he had no definite views of
‘the people,’ and would have been as much at a loss to
answer the question whether he knew ‘the people’ as the
question whether he liked them. For him to say he knew
the peasantry would have been the same as to say he knew
men. He was continually watching and getting to know
people of all sorts, and among them peasants, whom he
regarded as good and interesting people, and he was
continually observing new points in them, altering his
former views of them and forming new ones. With Sergey
Ivanovitch it was quite the contrary. Just as he liked and
praised a country life in comparison with the life he did
not like, so too he liked the peasantry in contradistinction
to the class of men he did not like, and so too he knew the
peasantry as something distinct from and opposed to men
generally. In his methodical brain there were distinctly

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