Resurrection
him,” she continued.
“Of course not,” suddenly agreed Korableva, evidently thinking about
something else as she sat examining her bag. “Well, shall we have a
drop?”
“You have some,” replied Maslova. “I won’t.”
END OF BOOK I.
BOOK II.
CHAPTER I.
PROPERTY IN LAND.
It was possible for Maslova’s case to come before the Senate in a
fortnight, at which time Nekhludoff meant to go to Petersburg, and, if
need be, to appeal to the Emperor (as the advocate who had drawn up the
petition advised) should the appeal be disregarded (and, according to
the advocate, it was best to be prepared for that, since the causes for
appeal were so slight). The party of convicts, among whom was Maslova,
would very likely leave in the beginning of June. In order to be able to
follow her to Siberia, as Nekhludoff was firmly resolved to do, he was
now obliged to visit his estates, and settle matters there. Nekhludoff
first went to the nearest, Kousminski, a large estate that lay in the
black earth district, and from which he derived the greatest part of his
income.
He had lived on that estate in his childhood and youth, and had been
there twice since, and once, at his mother’s request, he had taken a
German steward there, and had with him verified the accounts. The state
of things there and the peasants’ relations to the management, i.e.,
the landlord, had therefore been long known to him. The relations of the
peasants to the administration were those of utter dependence on that
management. Nekhludoff knew all this when still a university student,
he had confessed and preached Henry Georgeism, and, on the basis of that
teaching, had given the land inherited from his father to the peasants.
It is true that after entering the army, when he got into the habit of
spending 20,000 roubles a year, those former occupations ceased to be
regarded as a duty, and were forgotten, and he not only left off asking
himself where the money his mother allowed him came from, but even
avoided thinking about it. But his mother’s death, the coming into the
property, and the necessity of managing it, again raised the question
as to what his position in reference to private property in land was. A
month before Nekhludoff would have answered that he had not the strength
to alter the existing order of things; that it was not he who was
administering the estate; and would one way or another have eased his
conscience, continuing to live far from his estates, and having the
money sent him. But now he decided that he could not leave things to go
on as they were, but would have to alter them in a way unprofitable
to himself, even though he had all these complicated and difficult
relations with the prison world which made money necessary, as well as a
probable journey to Siberia before him. Therefore he decided not to farm
the land, but to let it to the peasants at a low rent, to enable them
to cultivate it without depending on a landlord. More than once, when
comparing the position of a landowner with that of an owner of serfs,
Nekhludoff had compared the renting of land to the peasants instead
of cultivating it with hired labour, to the old system by which serf
proprietors used to exact a money payment from their serfs in place of
labour. It was not a solution of the problem, and yet a step towards the
solution; it was a movement towards a less rude form of slavery. And it
was in this way he meant to act.
Nekhludoff reached Kousminski about noon. Trying to simplify his life
in every way, he did not telegraph, but hired a cart and pair at the
station. The driver was a young fellow in a nankeen coat, with a belt
below his long waist. He was glad to talk to the gentleman, especially
because while they were talking his broken-winded white horse and the
emaciated spavined one could go at a foot-pace, which they always liked
to do.
The driver spoke about the steward at Kousminski without knowing that he
was driving “the master.” Nekhludoff had purposely not told him who he
was.
“That ostentatious German,” said the driver (who had been to town and
read novels) as he sat sideways on the box, passing his hand from
the top to the bottom of his long whip, and trying to show off his
accomplishments--“that ostentatious German has procured three light
bays, and when he drives out with his lady---oh, my! At Christmas he had
a Christmas-tree in the big house. I drove some of the visitors there.
It had ‘lectric lights; you could not see the like of it in the whole
of the government. What’s it to him, he has cribbed a heap of money. I
heard say he has bought an estate.”
Nekhludoff had imagined that he was quite indifferent to the way the
steward managed his estate, and what advantages the steward derived from
it. The words of the long-waisted driver, however, were not pleasant to
hear.
A dark cloud now and then covered the sun; the larks were soaring above
the fields of winter corn; the forests were already covered with fresh
young green; the meadows speckled with grazing cattle and horses. The
fields were being ploughed, and Nekhludoff enjoyed the lovely day. But
every now and then he had an unpleasant feeling, and, when he asked
himself what it was caused by, he remembered what the driver had told
him about the way the German was managing Kousminski. When he got to his
estate and set to work this unpleasant feeling vanished.
Looking over the books in the office, and a talk with the foreman, who
naively pointed out the advantages to be derived from the facts that the
peasants had very little land of their own and that it lay in the midst
of the landlord’s fields, made Nekhludoff more than ever determined to
leave off farming and to let his land to the peasants.
From the office books and his talk with the foreman, Nekhludoff found
that two-thirds of the best of the cultivated land was still being
tilled with improved machinery by labourers receiving fixed wages, while
the other third was tilled by the peasants at the rate of five roubles
per desiatin [about two and three-quarter acres]. So that the peasants
had to plough each desiatin three times, harrow it three times, sow
and mow the corn, make it into sheaves, and deliver it on the threshing
ground for five roubles, while the same amount of work done by wage
labour came to at least 10 roubles. Everything the peasants got from the
office they paid for in labour at a very high price. They paid in labour
for the use of the meadows, for wood, for potato-stalks, and were nearly
all of them in debt to the office. Thus, for the land that lay beyond
the cultivated fields, which the peasants hired, four times the price
that its value would bring in if invested at five per cent was taken
from the peasants.
Nekhludoff had known all this before, but he now saw it in a new light,
and wondered how he and others in his position could help seeing how
abnormal such conditions are. The steward’s arguments that if the land
were let to the peasants the agricultural implements would fetch next to
nothing, as it would be impossible to get even a quarter of their value
for them, and that the peasants would spoil the land, and how great a
loser Nekhludoff would be, only strengthened Nekhludoff in the opinion
that he was doing a good action in letting the land to the peasants
and thus depriving himself of a large part of his income. He decided to
settle this business now, at once, while he was there. The reaping and
selling of the corn he left for the steward to manage in due season, and
also the selling of the agricultural implements and useless buildings.
But he asked his steward to call the peasants of the three neighbouring
villages that lay in the midst of his estate (Kousminski) to a meeting,
at which he would tell them of his intentions and arrange about the
price at which they were to rent the land.
With the pleasant sense of the firmness he had shown in the face of the
steward’s arguments, and his readiness to make a sacrifice, Nekhludoff
left the office, thinking over the business before him, and strolled
round the house, through the neglected flower-garden--this year the
flowers were planted in front of the steward’s house--over the tennis
ground, now overgrown with dandelions, and along the lime-tree walk,
where he used to smoke his cigar, and where he had flirted with the
pretty Kirimova, his mother’s visitor. Having briefly prepared in his
mind the speech he was going to make to the peasants, he again went in
to the steward, and, after tea, having once more arranged his thoughts,
he went into the room prepared for him in the big house, which used to
be a spare bedroom.
In this clean little room, with pictures of Venice on the walls, and a
mirror between the two windows, there stood a clean bed with a spring
mattress, and by the side of it a small table, with a decanter of water,
matches, and an extinguisher. On a table by the looking-glass lay his
open portmanteau, with his dressing-case and some books in it; a Russian
book, The Investigation of the Laws of Criminality, and a German and
an English book on the same subject, which he meant to read while
travelling in the country. But it was too late to begin to-day, and he
began preparing to go to bed.
An old-fashioned inlaid mahogany arm-chair stood in the corner of
the room, and this chair, which Nekhludoff remembered standing in his
mother’s bedroom, suddenly raised a perfectly unexpected sensation in
his soul. He was suddenly filled with regret at the thought of the house
that would tumble to ruin, and the garden that would run wild, and the
forest that would be cut down, and all these farmyards, stables, sheds,
machines, horses, cows which he knew had cost so much effort, though not
to himself, to acquire and to keep. It had seemed easy to give up all
this, but now it was hard, not only to give this, but even to let the
land and lose half his income. And at once a consideration, which proved
that it was unreasonable to let the land to the peasants, and thus to
destroy his property, came to his service. “I must not hold property in
land. If I possess no property in land, I cannot keep up the house and
farm. And, besides, I am going to Siberia, and shall not need either
the house or the estate,” said one voice. “All this is so,” said another
voice, “but you are not going to spend all your life in Siberia. You may
marry, and have children, and must hand the estate on to them in as good
a condition as you received it. There is a duty to the land, too.
To give up, to destroy everything is very easy; to acquire it very
difficult. Above all, you must consider your future life, and what
you will do with yourself, and you must dispose of your property
accordingly. And are you really firm in your resolve? And then, are you
really acting according to your conscience, or are you acting in order
to be admired of men?” Nekhludoff asked himself all this, and had to
acknowledge that he was influenced by the thought of what people would
say about him. And the more he thought about it the more questions
arose, and the more unsolvable they seemed.
In hopes of ridding himself of these thoughts by falling asleep, and
solving them in the morning when his head would be fresh, he lay down on
his clean bed. But it was long before he could sleep. Together with the
fresh air and the moonlight, the croaking of the frogs entered the room,
mingling with the trills of a couple of nightingales in the park and
one close to the window in a bush of lilacs in bloom. Listening to
the nightingales and the frogs, Nekhludoff remembered the inspector’s
daughter, and her music, and the inspector; that reminded him of
Maslova, and how her lips trembled, like the croaking of the frogs, when
she said, “You must just leave it.” Then the German steward began going