THIRTY-EIGHT

Chapter 28
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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 give. It was interesting that ‘it turns out’, and he did not consider it necessary to explain why it interested him.
‘Yes, and I was greatly interested by that cross old landowner,’ said Levin with a sigh. ‘He is intelligent and said much that is true.’
‘Oh, pooh! He is secretly a rooted partisan of serfdom, like all of them!’ said Sviyazhsky.
‘Whose Marshal you are . . .’
‘Yes, but I marshal them in the opposite direction,’ said Sviyazhsky, laughing.
‘What interests me very much is this,’ said Levin: ‘he is right when he says that our rational farming is not a success and that only money-lending methods, like that quiet fellow’s, or very elementary methods, pay, . . . Whose fault is it?’
‘Our own, of course! but it is not true that it does not pay. Vasilchikov makes it pay.’
‘A factory. . . .’
‘I still cannot understand what you are surprised at. The people are on so low a level both of material and moral development that they are certain to oppose what is good for them. In Europe rational farming answers because the people are educated; therefore we must educate our people — that’s all.’
‘But how is one to educate them?’
‘To educate the people three things are necessary: schools, schools, schools!’
‘But you yourself just said that the people are on a low level of material development: how will schools help that?’
‘Do you know, you remind me of the story of the advice given to a sick man: “You should try an aperient.” — “I have, and it made me worse.” “Try leeches.” — “I have, and they made me worse.” “Well, then you had better pray to God.” — “I have, and that made me worse!” It is just the same with us. I mention political economy; you say it makes things worse. I mention Socialism; you say, “still worse”. Education? “Worse and worse.” ’
‘But how will schools help?’
‘By giving people other wants.’
‘Now that I never could understand,’ replied Levin, hotly. ‘How will schools help the peasants to improve their material conditions? You say that schools and education will give them new wants. So much the worse, for they won’t be able to satisfy them. And in what way knowing how to add and subtract and to say the catechism will help them to improve their material condition, I never could understand! The other evening I met a woman with an infant in her arms and asked her where she was going. She replied that she had been to see the “wise woman” because her boy was fractious, and she took him to be cured. I asked her what cure the wise woman had for fractiousness. “She puts the baby on the perch among the fowls and says something.” ’
‘Well, there is your answer! Education will stop them from carrying their children to the roosts to cure them of fractiousness,’ said Sviyazhsky with a merry smile.
‘Oh, not at all!’ said Levin, crossly. ‘That treatment seems to me just a parallel to treating the peasants by means of schools. The people are poor and ignorant, this we know as surely as the woman knows that the child is fractious because it cries. But why schools should cure the ills of poverty and ignorance is just as incomprehensible as why hens on their perches should cure fractiousness. What needs to be cured is their poverty.’
‘Well, in this at least you agree with Spencer, whom you dislike so much; he too says that education may result from increased well-being and comfort — from frequent ablutions, as he expresses it — but not from the ability to read and reckon . . .’
‘Well, I am very glad, or rather very sorry, that I coincide with Spencer; but it is a thing I have long known. Schools are no remedy, but the remedy would be an economic organization under which the people would be better off and have more leisure. Then schools would come.’
‘Yet all over Europe education is now compulsory.’
‘And how do you agree with Spencer yourself in this matter?’
A frightened look flashed up in Sviyazhsky’s eyes and he said with a smile:
‘Yes, that cure for fractiousness is splendid! Did you really hear it yourself?’
Levin saw that he would not succeed in finding a connection between this man’s life and his thoughts. It was evidently all the same to him what conclusions his reasoning led to: he only needed the process itself, and he did not like it when the process of reasoning led him up a blind alley. That he disliked and evaded by turning the conversation to something pleasantly jocular.
All the impressions of that day, beginning with the impression of the peasant at the halfway-house which seemed to serve as a foundation for all the other impressions and ideas, agitated Levin greatly. There was this amiable Sviyazhsky, who kept his opinions only for social use, and evidently had some other bases of life which Levin could not discern, while with that crowd, whose name is legion, he directed public opinion by means of thoughts foreign to himself; and that embittered landowner with perfectly sound views he had wrung painfully from life, but wrong in his bitterness toward a whole class, and that the best class in Russia; and Levin’s own discontent with his own activity, and his vague hope of finding a remedy for all these things — all this merged into a feeling of restlessness and expectation of a speedy solution.
Left alone in the room assigned to him, and lying on a spring mattress which bounced unexpectedly whenever he moved a leg or an arm, it was long before Levin could sleep. Not one of the talks he had had with Sviyazhsky, though much that was clever had been said by the latter, interested him; but the landowner’s arguments required consideration. Levin involuntarily remembered all that the man had said, and corrected in imagination the answers he himself had given.
‘I ought to have said to him: “You say that our farming is not a success because the peasants hate all improvements and that these should be introduced by force; and if farming did not pay at all without these improvements, you would be right. But it succeeds where and only where (as in the case of the man at the halfway-house) the labourers act in conformity with their habits. Your and our common dissatisfaction with farming shows that we, and not the peasants, are at fault. We have long pushed on in our own way — the European way — without considering the nature of the labour force available. Let us consider the labourer not as an abstract labour force but as a Russian peasant with his own instincts, and let us arrange our farming accordingly. Imagine,” I ought to have said to him, “that your farming is conducted like that old man’s: that you have found means to interest the labourers in the results of their work, and have found improvements which they must recognize as such — then, without impoverishing the soil, you will get double and treble the crops you get now. Divide equally and give half the produce to labour, and the share left for you will be larger, and the labour force will receive more. And to do this we must lower the level of cultivation and give the peasants an interest in its success. How this can be done is a question of details, but it is certainly possible.” ’
This thought strongly excited Levin. He lay awake half the night considering the details necessary for carrying his thought into effect. He had not meant to leave next day, but now decided to go away early in the morning. Moreover there was the sister-in-law with the square-cut bodice, who occasioned in him a feeling akin to shame and repentance caused by the commission of a bad action. Above all he had to get away immediately to propose his new plan to the peasants before the winter corn was sown, so that the work might be done on the new conditions. He decided completely to reverse his former methods of farming.
Chapter 29
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THE carrying out of Levin’s plans presented many difficulties, but he struggled with all his might to attain, if not all he desired, at any rate a possibility of believing without self-deception that the thing was worth doing. One of the chief difficulties was that the farming was actually going on and it was impossible to stop it all and start afresh; so that the machine had to be altered while it was working.
When, on the evening of his return, he informed the steward of his intentions, the steward with evident pleasure agreed with that part of the plan which showed that all that had been done up to then was foolish and unprofitable. He remarked that he had always said so but had not been listened to. But to Levin’s proposal that he, like the peasants, should participate as a shareholder would in the farming, the steward only put on a look of great depression and expressed no definite opinion, but at once began to speak of the necessity of carting the last sheaves of rye next day and of starting the second ploughing; so that Levin felt that it was not the time for his plans to be considered.
When speaking of the matter to the peasants and offering them land on the new conditions, Levin again met with the same difficulty; they too were so fully occupied with the labour of the day that they had no time to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the venture.
The naïve peasant, the cowman Ivan, quite understood Levin’s offer of letting him and his family have a share in the profits of the dairy farm, and quite sympathized with this undertaking: but when Levin impressed upon him the benefit that would accrue to him in the future, a look of anxiety and regret that he could not stop to listen to it all appeared on Ivan’s face, and he hurriedly remembered some task that could not be put off, seized a hay-fork to remove the hay from the enclosure, fetched water, or cleared away the manure.
Another stumbling-block was the peasant’s invincible mistrust of the possibility of a landlord having any other aim than that of robbing them as much as possible. They were firmly convinced that his real aim (whatever he might say) would always be hidden in what he did not tell them. And they themselves, when they talked, said much, but never said what they really wanted. Besides all this (Levin felt that the splenetic landowner was right), the peasants put as the first and unalterable condition in any agreement, that they should not be obliged to use any new methods or new kinds of tools for their work. They agreed that an English plough ploughed better, that a scarifier worked quicker, but they found a thousand reasons why they could not use either the one or the other; and, though he was convinced that it would be necessary to lower his standards of farming, he disliked having to give up improvements the benefit of which was so clear. Yet in spite of all these difficulties he got his way, and by autumn the scheme began to work, or at any rate it seemed so to him.
At first Levin thought of letting the whole of his farm as it stood to the peasants, to the labourers, and to his steward, on the new co-partnership lines, but he very soon saw that this was impossible and decided to divide up the different parts. The cattle-yard, the fruit and vegetable gardens, the meadows and the corn-fields, divided into several parts, should come under different sections. The naïve Ivan, who, it seemed to Levin, best understood the plan, formed an artel [workman’s profit-sharing association with mutual responsibility] consisting chiefly of his own family, and became partner in the dairy section. The far field that had lain fallow for eight years was, with the aid of the intelligent carpenter Theodore Rezunov, taken up by six peasants’ families on the new cooperative lines, and the peasant Shuraev rented the vegetable gardens on similar terms. The rest remained as before; but these three sections were the beginning of a new order and fully occupied Levin.
It is true that the dairy farm did not as yet go on any better than before, and Ivan strongly opposed heating the cowsheds and making butter from fresh cream, maintaining that cows required less food when kept in the cold and that butter made from sour cream went further; and that he expected his wages to be paid as before, not being at all interested to know that they were not wages but an advance on account of profits.
It was true that Theodore Rezunov’s group did not plough the corn land twice with the English plough as they had agreed to do, pleading lack of time. It was true that the peasants of that group, though they had agreed to farm the land on the new conditions, did not speak of it as co-operatively held land, but as land held for payment in kind; and that the members of that group and Rezunov himself said to Levin: ‘If you would only accept money for the land it would be less trouble for you, and we should feel freer.’ Moreover, these peasants, on all sorts of pretexts, kept putting off the building of the cattle-sheds and granary they had agreed to put up on this land, and dragged the matter on till winter.
It was true that Shuraev had taken steps to sublet the kitchen garden in small lots to the other peasants; he evidently quite misunderstood, and apparently intentionally misunderstood, the conditions on which the land was let to him.
It was true that often when talking to the peasants, and explaining to them the advantages of the plan, Levin felt that they were only listening to the sound of his voice and were quite determined, whatever he might say, not to let themselves be taken in. He felt this especially when talking to the most intelligent of them, Rezunov, and noticing the play in his eyes, which clearly indicated his derision of Levin and a firm resolve that if anyone was taken in it should not be Rezunov.
But in spite of this, Levin thought matters were getting on, and that by keeping strict accounts and insisting on having his way he would eventually be able to prove to the peasants the advantage of these new arrangements, and that things would then go on of themselves.
These affairs, added to the rest of the farming which remained on his hands, and the indoor work on his book, so filled Levin’s whole summer that he hardly ever made time to go out shooting. At the end of August he heard from a servant who brought back the side-saddle that the Oblonskys had gone back to Moscow. He felt that by not having answered Dolly Oblonskaya’s letter (a rudeness he could not remember without blushing) he had burned his boats and could never visit there again. He had treated the Sviyazhskys just as badly, having left their house without saying goodbye. But neither would he ever visit them again. That made no difference to him now. The rearrangement of his farming interested him more than anything had ever done in his life. He read through the books lent him by Sviyazhsky, and having ordered various others that he required, he read books on political economy and socialistic books on the same subject, but, as he had expected, he found nothing in them related to his undertaking. In the works on political economy — in Mill for instance, which he studied first and with great ardour, hoping every moment to find a solution of the questions that occupied him — he found various laws deduced as governing the state of agriculture in Europe, but he could not see why these laws, inapplicable to Russia, should be considered universal! It was the same with the socialistic books: they were either beautiful but inapplicable fancies which had carried him away when he was still at the university, or they were improvements and patchings-up of the order existing in Europe, with which agricultural affairs in Russia have nothing in common. Political economy maintained that the laws by which the wealth of Europe had developed and is developing are universal and unquestionable laws. The socialistic teaching declared that development on those lines leads to ruin. But neither the one set of books nor the other so much as hinted at explaining what Levin, and all the Russian peasants and landowners with their millions of hands and acres, should do to make them as productive as possible for the general welfare.
Having taken up this question he conscientiously read everything relating to it; and he purposed going abroad in the autumn to study the question further there, so that what had often happened to him with other questions should not be repeated. Often, just as he was beginning to understand the idea in his interlocutor’s mind and to explain his own, he would suddenly be asked: ‘And what about Kauffmann and Jones, and Dubois and Michelli? Have you not read them? You should do so: they have elucidated the question!’
He now clearly saw that Kauffmann and Michelli had nothing to tell him. He knew what he wanted. He saw that Russia had splendid soil and splendid labourers, and that in some cases (such as that of the peasant at the halfway-house) the labourers and land produced much: but that in the majority of cases, when capital was expended in the European way, they produced little, and that this happened simply because the labourers are only willing to work and work well, in the way natural to them, and that their opposition was not accidental but permanent, being rooted in the spirit of the people. He thought that the Russian people whose mission it is to occupy and cultivate enormous unoccupied tracts of land, deliberately, as long as any land remains unoccupied, kept to the methods necessary for that purpose and that those methods are not at all as bad as is generally thought. This he wanted to prove theoretically in his book and practically by his farming.