第144章

Moreover, this question on Levin's part was not quite in good faith. Madame Sviiazhsky had just told him at tea that they had that summer invited a German expert accountant 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 kopeck.

The landowner smiled at the mention of the profits of Sviiazhsky's farming, obviously aware how much gain his neighbor and marshal was likely to be making.

`Possibly it does not pay,' answered Sviiazhsky. `That merely proves that either 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 curded milk? Masha, pass us some curded milk or raspberries.' He turned to his wife. `The raspberries are lasting extraordinarily late this year.'

And in the happiest frame of mind Sviiazhsky 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 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 thought, 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, with 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 people; we've no authority,'

answered the landowner.

`How can new conditions be found?' said Sviiazhsky. Having eaten some curded milk 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 a 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, farmers - 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 meant,' 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 suit us, if they're stupid?' said Levin.

And again he detected the expression of alarm in the eyes of Sviiazhsky.

`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 no 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 Sviiazhsky, 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.

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TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 3, Chapter 28[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] 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 evolving of some relation of the laborers to the soil which they would work, as with the peasant he had met halfway to the Sviiazhskys', 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 to 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 gap in the crown forest, Levin went, before going to bed, into his host's study to get the books on the labor question that Sviiazhsky had offered him. Sviiazhsky's study was a huge room, 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 a lamp. On the writing table was a stand of drawers marked with gold labels, and full of papers of various sorts.