Anna Karenina - Part 6 - Page 99/121

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.