Sviazhsky was the marshal of his district. He was five years
older than Levin, and had long been married. His sister-in-law,
a young girl Levin liked very much, lived in his house; and Levin
knew that Sviazhsky and his wife would have greatly liked to
marry the girl to him. He knew this with certainty, as so-called
eligible young men always know it, though he could never have
brought himself to speak of it to anyone; and he knew too that,
although he wanted to get married, and although by every token
this very attractive girl would make an excellent wife, he could
no more have married her, even if he had not been in love with
Kitty Shtcherbatskaya, than he could have flown up to the sky.
And this knowledge poisoned the pleasure he had hoped to find in
the visit to Sviazhsky.
On getting Sviazhsky's letter with the invitation for shooting,
Levin had immediately thought of this; but in spite of it he had
made up his mind that Sviazhsky's having such views for him was
simply his own groundless supposition, and so he would go, all
the same. Besides, at the bottom of his heart he had a desire to
try himself, put himself to the test in regard to this girl. The
Sviazhskys' home-life was exceedingly pleasant, and Sviazhsky
himself, the best type of man taking part in local affairs that
Levin knew, was very interesting to him.
Sviazhsky was one of those people, always a source of wonder to
Levin, whose convictions, very logical though never original, go
one way by themselves, while their life, exceedingly definite and
firm in its direction, goes its way quite apart and almost always
in direct contradiction to their convictions. Sviazhsky was an
extremely advanced man. He despised the nobility, and believed
the mass of the nobility to be secretly in favor of serfdom, and
only concealing their views from cowardice. He regarded Russia
as a ruined country, rather after the style of Turkey, and the
government of Russia as so bad that he never permitted himself to
criticize its doings seriously, and yet he was a functionary of
that government and a model marshal of nobility, and when he
drove about he always wore the cockade of office and the cap with
the red band. He considered human life only tolerable abroad,
and went abroad to stay at every opportunity, and at the same
time he carried on a complex and improved system of agriculture
in Russia, and with extreme interest followed everything and knew
everything that was being done in Russia. He considered the
Russian peasant as occupying a stage of development intermediate
between the ape and the man, and at the same time in the local
assemblies no one was readier to shake hands with the peasants
and listen to their opinion. He believed neither in God nor the
devil, but was much concerned about the question of the
improvement of the clergy and the maintenance of their revenues,
and took special trouble to keep up the church in his village.