Anna Karenina
machines, and carting manure and all the modern implements—all that we
brought into use by our authority, and the peasants opposed it at
first, and ended by imitating us. Now, by the abolition of serfdom we
have been deprived of our authority; and so our husbandry, where it had
been raised to a high level, is bound to sink to the most savage
primitive condition. That’s how I see it.”
“But why so? If it’s rational, you’ll be able to keep up the same
system with hired labor,” said Sviazhsky.
“We’ve no power over them. With whom am I going to work the system,
allow me to ask?”
“There it is—the labor force—the chief element in agriculture,” thought
Levin.
“With laborers.”
“The laborers won’t work well, and won’t work with good implements. Our
laborer can do nothing but get drunk like a pig, and when he’s drunk he
ruins everything you give him. He makes the horses ill with too much
water, cuts good harness, barters the tires of the wheels for drink,
drops bits of iron into the thrashing machine, so as to break it. He
loathes the sight of anything that’s not after his fashion. And that’s
how it is the whole level of husbandry has fallen. Lands gone out of
cultivation, overgrown with weeds, or divided among the peasants, and
where millions of bushels were raised you get a hundred thousand; the
wealth of the country has decreased. If the same thing had been done,
but with care that....”
And he proceeded to unfold his own scheme of emancipation by means of
which these drawbacks might have been avoided.
This did not interest Levin, but when he had finished, Levin went back
to his first position, and, addressing Sviazhsky, and trying to draw
him into expressing his serious opinion:—
“That the standard of culture is falling, and that with our present
relations to the peasants there is no possibility of farming on a
rational system to yield a profit—that’s perfectly true,” said he.
“I don’t believe it,” Sviazhsky replied quite seriously; “all I see is
that we don’t know how to cultivate the land, and that our system of
agriculture in the serf days was by no means too high, but too low. We
have no machines, no good stock, no efficient supervision; we don’t
even know how to keep accounts. Ask any landowner; he won’t be able to
tell you what crop’s profitable, and what’s not.”
“Italian bookkeeping,” said the gentleman of the gray whiskers
ironically. “You may keep your books as you like, but if they spoil
everything for you, there won’t be any profit.”
“Why do they spoil things? A poor thrashing machine, or your Russian
presser, they will break, but my steam press they don’t break. A
wretched Russian nag they’ll ruin, but keep good dray-horses—they won’t
ruin them. And so it is all round. We must raise our farming to a
higher level.”
“Oh, if one only had the means to do it, Nikolay Ivanovitch! It’s all
very well for you; but for me, with a son to keep at the university,
lads to be educated at the high school—how am I going to buy these
dray-horses?”
“Well, that’s what the land banks are for.”
“To get what’s left me sold by auction? No, thank you.”
“I don’t agree that it’s necessary or possible to raise the level of
agriculture still higher,” said Levin. “I devote myself to it, and I
have means, but I can do nothing. As to the banks, I don’t know to whom
they’re any good. For my part, anyway, whatever I’ve spent money on in
the way of husbandry, it has been a loss: stock—a loss, machinery—a
loss.”
“That’s true enough,” the gentleman with the gray whiskers chimed in,
positively laughing with satisfaction.
“And I’m not the only one,” pursued Levin. “I mix with all the
neighboring landowners, who are cultivating their land on a rational
system; they all, with rare exceptions, are doing so at a loss. Come,
tell us how does your land do—does it pay?” said Levin, and at once in
Sviazhsky’s eyes he detected that fleeting expression of alarm which he
had noticed whenever he had tried to penetrate beyond the outer
chambers of Sviazhsky’s mind.
Moreover, this question on Levin’s part was not quite in good faith.
Madame Sviazhskaya had just told him at tea that they had that summer
invited a German expert in bookkeeping from Moscow, who for a
consideration of five hundred roubles had investigated the management
of their property, and found that it was costing them a loss of three
thousand odd roubles. She did not remember the precise sum, but it
appeared that the German had worked it out to the fraction of a
farthing.
The gray-whiskered landowner smiled at the mention of the profits of
Sviazhsky’s farming, obviously aware how much gain his neighbor and
marshal was likely to be making.
“Possibly it does not pay,” answered Sviazhsky. “That merely proves
either that I’m a bad manager, or that I’ve sunk my capital for the
increase of my rents.”
“Oh, rent!” Levin cried with horror. “Rent there may be in Europe,
where land has been improved by the labor put into it, but with us all
the land is deteriorating from the labor put into it—in other words
they’re working it out; so there’s no question of rent.”
“How no rent? It’s a law.”
“Then we’re outside the law; rent explains nothing for us, but simply
muddles us. No, tell me how there can be a theory of rent?...”
“Will you have some junket? Masha, pass us some junket or raspberries.”
He turned to his wife. “Extraordinarily late the raspberries are
lasting this year.”
And in the happiest frame of mind Sviazhsky got up and walked off,
apparently supposing the conversation to have ended at the very point
when to Levin it seemed that it was only just beginning.
Having lost his antagonist, Levin continued the conversation with the
gray-whiskered landowner, trying to prove to him that all the
difficulty arises from the fact that we don’t find out the
peculiarities and habits of our laborer; but the landowner, like all
men who think independently and in isolation, was slow in taking in any
other person’s idea, and particularly partial to his own. He stuck to
it that the Russian peasant is a swine and likes swinishness, and that
to get him out of his swinishness one must have authority, and there is
none; one must have the stick, and we have become so liberal that we
have all of a sudden replaced the stick that served us for a thousand
years by lawyers and model prisons, where the worthless, stinking
peasant is fed on good soup and has a fixed allowance of cubic feet of
air.
“What makes you think,” said Levin, trying to get back to the question,
“that it’s impossible to find some relation to the laborer in which the
labor would become productive?”
“That never could be so with the Russian peasantry; we’ve no power over
them,” answered the landowner.
“How can new conditions be found?” said Sviazhsky. Having eaten some
junket and lighted a cigarette, he came back to the discussion. “All
possible relations to the labor force have been defined and studied,”
he said. “The relic of barbarism, the primitive commune with each
guarantee for all, will disappear of itself; serfdom has been
abolished—there remains nothing but free labor, and its forms are fixed
and ready made, and must be adopted. Permanent hands, day-laborers,
rammers—you can’t get out of those forms.”
“But Europe is dissatisfied with these forms.”
“Dissatisfied, and seeking new ones. And will find them, in all
probability.”
“That’s just what I was meaning,” answered Levin. “Why shouldn’t we
seek them for ourselves?”
“Because it would be just like inventing afresh the means for
constructing railways. They are ready, invented.”
“But if they don’t do for us, if they’re stupid?” said Levin.
And again he detected the expression of alarm in the eyes of Sviazhsky.
“Oh, yes; we’ll bury the world under our caps! We’ve found the secret
Europe was seeking for! I’ve heard all that; but, excuse me, do you
know all that’s been done in Europe on the question of the organization
of labor?”
“No, very little.”
“That question is now absorbing the best minds in Europe. The
Schulze-Delitsch movement.... And then all this enormous literature of
the labor question, the most liberal Lassalle movement ... the
Mulhausen experiment? That’s a fact by now, as you’re probably aware.”
“I have some idea of it, but very vague.”
“No, you only say that; no doubt you know all about it as well as I do.
I’m not a professor of sociology, of course, but it interested me, and
really, if it interests you, you ought to study it.”
“But what conclusion have they come to?”
“Excuse me....”
The two neighbors had risen, and Sviazhsky, once more checking Levin in
his inconvenient habit of peeping into what was beyond the outer
chambers of his mind, went to see his guests out.
Chapter 28
Levin was insufferably bored that evening with the ladies; he was
stirred as he had never been before by the idea that the
dissatisfaction he was feeling with his system of managing his land was
not an exceptional case, but the general condition of things in Russia;
that the organization of some relation of the laborers to the soil in
which they would work, as with the peasant he had met half-way to the
Sviazhskys’, was not a dream, but a problem which must be solved. And
it seemed to him that the problem could be solved, and that he ought to
try and solve it.
After saying good-night to the ladies, and promising to stay the whole
of the next day, so as to make an expedition on horseback with them to
see an interesting ruin in the crown forest, Levin went, before going
to bed, into his host’s study to get the books on the labor question
that Sviazhsky had offered him. Sviazhsky’s study was a huge room,
surrounded by bookcases and with two tables in it—one a massive
writing-table, standing in the middle of the room, and the other a
round table, covered with recent numbers of reviews and journals in
different languages, ranged like the rays of a star round the lamp. On
the writing-table was a stand of drawers marked with gold lettering,
and full of papers of various sorts.
Sviazhsky took out the books, and sat down in a rocking-chair.
“What are you looking at there?” he said to Levin, who was standing at
the round table looking through the reviews.
“Oh, yes, there’s a very interesting article here,” said Sviazhsky of
the review Levin was holding in his hand. “It appears,” he went on,
with eager interest, “that Friedrich was not, after all, the person
chiefly responsible for the partition of Poland. It is proved....”
And with his characteristic clearness, he summed up those new, very
important, and interesting revelations. Although Levin was engrossed at
the moment by his ideas about the problem of the land, he wondered, as
he heard Sviazhsky: “What is there inside of him? And why, why is he
interested in the partition of Poland?” When Sviazhsky had finished,
Levin could not help asking: “Well, and what then?” But there was
nothing to follow. It was simply interesting that it had been proved to
be so and so. But Sviazhsky did not explain, and saw no need to explain
why it was interesting to him.
“Yes, but I was very much interested by your irritable neighbor,” said
Levin, sighing. “He’s a clever fellow, and said a lot that was true.”
“Oh, get along with you! An inveterate supporter of serfdom at heart,
like all of them!” said Sviazhsky.
“Whose marshal you are.”
“Yes, only I marshal them in the other direction,” said Sviazhsky,
laughing.
“I’ll tell you what interests me very much,” said Levin. “He’s right
that our system, that’s to say of rational farming, doesn’t answer,
that the only thing that answers is the money-lender system, like that
meek-looking gentleman’s, or else the very simplest.... Whose fault is
it?”