But Levin had changed a good deal since his marriage; he was
patient, and if he could not see why it was all arranged like
this, he told himself that he could not judge without knowing all
about it, and that most likely it must be so, and he tried not to
fret.
In attending the elections, too, and taking part in them, he
tried now not to judge, not to fall foul of them, but to
comprehend as fully as he could the question which was so
earnestly and ardently absorbing honest and excellent men whom he
respected. Since his marriage there had been revealed to Levin
so many new and serious aspects of life that had previously,
through his frivolous attitude to them, seemed of no importance,
that in the question of the elections too he assumed and tried to
find some serious significance.
Sergey Ivanovitch explained to him the meaning and object of the
proposed revolution at the elections. The marshal of the
province in whose hands the law had placed the control of so many
important public functions--the guardianship of wards (the very
department which was giving Levin so much trouble just now), the
disposal of large sums subscribed by the nobility of the
province, the high schools, female, male, and military, and
popular instruction on the new model, and finally, the district
council--the marshal of the province, Snetkov, was a nobleman of
the old school,--dissipating an immense fortune, a good-hearted
man, honest after his own fashion, but utterly without any
comprehension of the needs of modern days. He always took, in
every question, the side of the nobility; he was positively
antagonistic to the spread of popular education, and he succeeded
in giving a purely party character to the district council which
ought by rights to be of such an immense importance. What was
needed was to put in his place a fresh, capable, perfectly modern
man, of contemporary ideas, and to frame their policy so as from
the rights conferred upon the nobles, not as the nobility, but as
an element of the district council, to extract all the powers of
self-government that could possibly be derived from them. In the
wealthy Kashinsky province, which always took the lead of other
provinces in everything, there was now such a preponderance of
forces that this policy, once carried through properly there,
might serve as a model for other provinces for all Russia. And
hence the whole question was of the greatest importance. It was
proposed to elect as marshal in place of Snetkov either
Sviazhsky, or, better still, Nevyedovsky, a former university
professor, a man of remarkable intelligence and a great friend of
Sergey Ivanovitch.