ANNA KARENINA (Collector's Edition). Leo Tolstoy

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СКАЧАТЬ thousand. The wealth of the nation has decreased. If the same step had been taken with due consideration …’

      And he began to develop his plan of emancipation, which might have prevented this dislocation.

      But it did not interest Levin, and, as soon as the landlord had finished, Levin returned to the first proposition, and, trying to get Sviyazhsky to express his views seriously, said to him:

      ‘The fact that our agriculture is sinking, that it is impossible, our relation to the peasants being what it is, to carry on our rational farming profitably, is quite true.’

      ‘I don’t think so,’ said Sviyazhsky, now quite serious. ‘All I see is that we do not know how to farm, and that our farming in the days of serfdom was not at too high but on the contrary at too low a level. We have no machines, no good horses, no proper management, and we do not know how to keep accounts. Ask any farmer; he cannot tell you what is profitable for you and what is not.’

      ‘Italian bookkeeping!’ said the landowner scornfully. ‘Keep your accounts as you will — if they spoil everything you have got, you won’t have a profit!’

      ‘Why spoil everything? They will break your inferior Russian threshers, but they cannot break my steam threshing-machine. The poor Russian hack, what d’you call it? … of the breed that you have to drag along by the tail, can be spoiled; but if you keep Flemish drays or good Russo-Danish horses, they won’t spoil them. And it’s by such means that we must raise agriculture to a higher level.’

      ‘Yes, if one can afford it, Nicholas Ivanich! It is all very well for you, but I have a son at the university to keep, and to pay for the little ones’ education at the secondary school, so that I cannot buy Flemish drays.’

      ‘We have got banks for such cases.’

      ‘Yes, and finish by being sold up by auction! … No, thank you!’

      ‘I do not believe that it is either advisable or possible to raise the level of agriculture,’ said Levin. ‘I go in for it, and have means, but I never could do anything. I do not know to whom banks are useful. I at any rate never spent money on improvements without loss. Expensive cattle bring me a loss, and machinery too.’

      ‘Yes, that is quite true,’ said the landowner with the grey moustache, and he even laughed with pleasure.

      ‘And 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, СКАЧАТЬ