Anna Karenina (Literature Classics Series). Leo Tolstoy

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СКАЧАТЬ I am not the only one,’ continued Levin. ‘I can refer you to many farmers who carry on rational farming, and with rare exceptions they all make a loss on it. You just tell us, is your farming profitable?’ said Levin, and at once noticed a momentary expression of fright which he had observed before on Sviyazhsky’s face, when he tried to penetrate beyond the reception rooms of his mind. Besides, this question was not quite honest. His hostess had told him at tea that they had engaged that summer a German from Moscow, an expert bookkeeper, and paid him five hundred roubles to audit their accounts; and he found that they lost three thousand roubles-odd a year on their farming. She did not remember the exact figure, though the German had calculated it down to a quarter of a kopeck.

      The landowner smiled when the profits of Sviyazhsky’s farming were mentioned, evidently aware of the sort of profits that his neighbour the Marshal of the Nobility was able to make.

      ‘It may be unprofitable,’ answered Sviyazhsky, ‘but that only shows that I am either a bad farmer or that I spend capital to raise the rent.’

      ‘Oh dear! The rent!’ exclaimed Levin, quite horrified. ‘There may be such a thing as rent in Europe, where the land has been improved by the labour put into it, but with us the land gets poorer by the labour put into it, that is, by being ploughed up. Therefore there can be no such thing as rent.’

      ‘No rent? Rent is a natural law.’

      ‘Then we are outside that law: rent does not explain anything in our case, but on the contrary only causes confusion. But you had better tell us how the theory of rent can be …’

      ‘Would you like some curds and whey? Mary, send us some curds and whey or some raspberries here,’ said Sviyazhsky to his wife. ‘This year the raspberries are lasting an extraordinarily long time,’ and Sviyazhsky got up cheerfully and moved away, evidently regarding the conversation as finished at the very point where to Levin it seemed to be just beginning.

      Having lost his interlocutor Levin continued the conversation with the landowner, trying to prove to him that all our difficulties arise from the fact that we do not wish to understand the characteristics and habits of our labourers; but the landowner, like everybody who thinks individually and in solitude, was obtuse to other thoughts and tenacious of his own.

      He insisted that the Russian peasant was a pig and loved piggishness, and that, to lead him out of the pigsty, power was needed, but there was no such power. A stick was necessary, but we had exchanged the thousand-year-old stick for some kind of lawyers and prisons, in which the good-for-nothing stinking peasants were fed with good soup and provided with a given number of cubic feet of air.

      ‘Why do you think,’ asked Levin, trying to bring him back to the question, ‘that we could not establish some relation with labour which would make it remunerative?’

      ‘It will never be done with Russians! We have no power!’ answered the landowner.

      ‘What new conditions could be discovered?’ said Sviyazhsky who, having eaten his curds and whey and lit a cigarette, now returned to the disputants. ‘Every possible relation to the power of labour has been defined and investigated,’ he said. ‘The remnant of barbarism, the primitive commune with its reciprocal bonds, falls to pieces of itself when serfdom is abolished, and there is nothing left but free labour; its forms are defined and ready and we must accept them. The labourer, the hired man, the farmer, you cannot get away from them.’

      ‘But the rest of Europe is not satisfied with that system.’

      ‘No, it is dissatisfied and it is seeking new methods. It will probably find them.’

      ‘All I wish to say is,’ said Levin, ‘why should we not seek them for ourselves?’

      ‘Because it would be just the same as inventing new methods of building a railway. They are invented and ready.’

      ‘But if they don’t suit us? If they are stupid?’ said Levin.

      And again he noticed a look of fear in the eyes of Sviyazhsky.

      ‘Oh yes, it is all child’s play for us: we have discovered what Europe is looking for! I know all that, but excuse me, do you know what has been accomplished in Europe with regard to the labour question?’

      ‘Not much.’

      ‘The question is at present occupying the best brains in Europe. There is the Schulze-Delitzsch trend… . Then there is a whole gigantic literature on the labour question, with the most Liberal Lassalle tendency… . The Mulhausen system — that is already a fact. I expect you know about it.’

      ‘I have some idea about it, but very vague.’

      ‘Oh, you only say so, I am sure you know about it just as well as I do! I am, of course, not a professor of Sociology, but it interests me, and really if it interests you, you had better study the matter.’

      ‘But what have they arrived at?’

      ‘Excuse me …’

      The landowners had risen, and Sviyazhsky, having again checked Levin in his disagreeable habit of prying beyond the reception rooms of his mind, went to see his visitors off.

      Chapter 28

       Table of Contents

      LEVIN felt intolerably bored by the ladies that evening. He was more than ever excited by the thought that the dissatisfaction with work on the land which he now experienced was not an exceptional state of mind, but the result of the condition of agriculture in Russia generally, and that some arrangement that would make the labourers work as they did for the peasant at the halfway-house was not an idle dream but a problem it was necessary to solve. And he felt that it could be solved, and that he must try to do it.

      Having said good-night to the ladies and promised to stay a whole day longer in order to ride with them and see an interesting landslide in the State forest, Levin before going to bed went to his host’s study to borrow the books on the labour question which Sviyazhsky had offered him. Sviyazhsky’s study was an enormous room lined with book cupboards. There were two tables in it, one a massive writing-table, the other a round one on which lay a number of newspapers and journals in different languages, arranged as if they were mats round the lamp in the centre. Beside the writing-table was a stand with gold-labelled drawers containing various business papers.

      Sviyazhsky got down the books and settled himself in a rocking-chair.

      ‘What is it you are looking at?’ he asked Levin, who, having stopped at the round table, was looking at one of the journals.

      ‘Oh, there is a very interesting article there,’ he added, referring to the journal Levin held in his hand. ‘It turns out that the chief agent in the Partition of Poland was not Frederick at all,’ he added with gleeful animation. ‘It turns out …’

      And with characteristic clearness he briefly recounted these new and very important and interesting discoveries. Though at present Levin was more interested in agriculture than in anything else, he asked himself while listening to his host, ‘What is there inside him? And why, why does the Partition of Poland interest him?’ And when Sviyazhsky had finished he could not help asking him, ‘Well, and what of it?’ But Sviyazhsky had no answer to СКАЧАТЬ