XXVIII
Levin was insufferably bored with the ladies that evening: he was troubled as never before by the thought that the dissatisfaction he now felt with farming was not his exceptional situation but the general condition of things in Russia, that to establish relations with workers so that they would work like the muzhik he had met half-way there was not a dream but a problem that had to be solved. And it seemed to him that this problem could be solved and that he must try to do it.
Having taken leave of the ladies and promised to stay the whole of the next day so that they could go together on horseback to look at an interesting landslide in the state forest, Levin stopped at his host's study before going to bed to take some books on the workers question that Sviyazhsky had offered him. Sviyazhsky's study was a huge room lined with bookcases and had two tables in it - one a massive desk that stood in the middle of the room, and the other a round one on which the latest issues of newspapers and magazines in different languages were laid out in a star-like pattern around a lamp. By the desk was a stand with boxes of all sorts of files marked with gilt labels.
Sviyazhsky got the books out and sat down in a rocking chair.
'What are you looking at?' he said to Levin, who stood by the round table looking through a magazine.
'Ah, yes, there's a very interesting article in it,' Sviyazhsky said of the magazine Levin was holding. 'It turns out,' he added with cheerful animation, 'that the chief culprit in the partition of Poland was not Frederick at all.[28] It turns out...'
And, with his particular clarity, he briefly recounted these new, very important and interesting discoveries. Despite the fact that Levin was now most occupied with the thought of farming, he kept asking himself as he listened to his host: 'What's got into him? And why, why is he interested in the partition of Poland?' When Sviyazhsky finished, Levin involuntarily asked: 'Well, what then?' But there was nothing. The only interesting thing was that 'it had turned out'. But Sviyazhsky did not explain or find it necessary to explain why he found it interesting.
'Yes, but I was very interested in the angry landowner,' Levin said with a sigh. 'He's intelligent and said many right things.'
'Ah, go on! An inveterate secret serf-owner, as they all are!' said Sviyazhsky.
'Of whom you are the marshal...'
'Yes, only I'm marshalling them in the other direction,' Sviyazhsky said, laughing.
'What interests me so much is this,' said Levin. 'He's right that our cause, that is, rational farming, doesn't work, that only usurious farming works, as with that silent one, or else the simplest kind. Who is to blame for that?'
'We are, of course. And besides, it's not true that it doesn't work. At Vassilchikov's it works.'
'A mill...'
'But all the same I don't know what you're surprised at. The peasantry stand at such a low level of both material and moral development that they apparently must oppose everything foreign to them. In Europe rational farming works because the peasantry are educated; which means that with us the peasantry have to be educated - that's all.'
'But how are we to educate the peasantry?'
'To educate the peasantry, three things are needed: schools, schools and schools.'
'But you said yourself that the peasantry stand at a low level of material development. How will schools help?'
'You know, you remind me of the anecdote about giving advice to a sick man: "Why don't you try a laxative?" "I did: got worse." "Try leeches." "Tried them: got worse." "Well, then, just pray to God." "Tried that: got worse." It's the same with you and me. I say political economy, and you say: worse. I say socialism - worse. Education - worse.'
'But how will schools help?'
'They'll give them different needs.'
'That's something I've never understood,' Levin objected hotly. 'How will schools help the peasantry to improve their material well-being? You say that schools, education, will give them new needs. So much the worse, because they won't be able to satisfy them. And how the knowledge of addition, subtraction and the catechism will help them to improve their material condition, I never could understand. The evening before last I met a woman with an infant at her breast and asked her where she had been. She said: "To the wise woman, because a shriek-hag has got into the child, so I took him to be treated." I asked how the wise woman treats the shriek-hag. "She puts the baby on a roost with the chickens and mumbles something."'
'Well, there you've said it yourself! We need schools so that she won't treat the shriek-hag by putting the baby on a roost...' Sviyazhsky said, smiling gaily.
'Ah, no!' Levin said in vexation. 'For me that treatment is like treating the peasantry with schools. The peasants are poor and uneducated, we see that as surely as the woman sees the shriek-hag because the baby shrieks. But why schools will help in this trouble - poverty and uneducation - is as incomprehensible as why chickens on a roost help against the shriek-hag. What must be helped is the cause of the poverty.'
'Well, in that at least you agree with Spencer,[29] whom you dislike so. He, too, says that education may result from a greater well-being and comfort in life - from frequent ablutions, as he says - but not from the ability to read and write ...'
'Well, I'm very glad, or, on the contrary, very not-glad, that I agree with Spencer - only I've known it for a long time. Schools won't help, what will help is an economic system in which the peasantry will be wealthier, there will be more leisure - and then there will also be schools.'
'Nevertheless, all over Europe schools are now compulsory.'
'And how about you? Do you agree with Spencer?' asked Levin.
But a look of fear flashed in Sviyazhsky's eyes, and he said, smiling:
'Ah, but that shriek-hag is excellent! You actually heard it yourself?'
Levin saw that he was not going to find a connection between this man's life and his thoughts. Evidently it made absolutely no difference to him where his reasoning led him; he needed only the process of reasoning itself. And it was unpleasant for him when the process of reasoning led him to a dead end. That alone he disliked and avoided, turning the conversation to something pleasantly cheerful.
All the impressions of that day, starting with the muzhik half-way there, which seemed to serve as the fundamental basis for all that day's impressions and thoughts, stirred Levin deeply. This good Sviyazhsky, who kept his thoughts only for public use and evidently had some other bases of life, hidden from Levin, though at the same time he and that crowd whose name was legion guided public opinion with these thoughts that were alien to him; this embittered landowner, perfectly right in his reasoning which he had suffered through in his life, but not right in his bitterness against a whole class, and that the best class in Russia; his own dissatisfaction with his activity and the vague hope of finding a remedy for it - all this merged into a feeling of inner anxiety and the expectation of an imminent resolution.
Left alone in the room given him, lying on a spring mattress that unexpectedly tossed his arms and legs up with every movement, Levin did not fall asleep for a long time. Not one conversation with Sviyazhsky, though he had said many intelligent things, had interested Levin; but the landowner's arguments called for discussion. Levin involuntarily recalled all his words and in his imagination corrected his own replies.
'Yes, I should have said to him: "You say our farming doesn't work because the muzhiks hate all improvements and that they must be introduced by authority. Now, if farming didn't work at all without these improvements, you'd be right; but it does work, and it works only where the worker acts according to his habits, like that old man half-way here. Your and our common dissatisfaction with farming proves that either we or the workers are to blame. We've been pushing ahead for a long time in our own way, the European way, without asking ourselves about the properties of the workforce. Let's try to look at the work force not as an ideal workforce but as the Russian muzhik with his instincts, and organize our farming accordingly. Picture to yourself," I should have said to h
im, "that you do your farming like that old man, that you've found a way of getting the workers interested in the success of the work and found some midpoint in the improvements that they can recognize - and, without exhausting the soil, you'll bring in two or three times more than before. Divide it in two, give half to the workers; the difference you come out with will be greater and the workers will also come out with more. But to do that you have to lower the level of the farming and interest the workers in its success. How to do that is a matter of details, but there's no doubt that it's possible."'
This thought threw Levin into great agitation. He did not sleep half the night, thinking over the details for bringing the thought to realization. He had not intended to leave the next day, but now decided to go home early in the morning. Besides, this sister-in-law with her neckline produced in him a feeling akin to shame and repentance for having done something bad. Above all, it was necessary for him to leave without delay: he had to offer the new project to the muzhiks in time, before the winter sowing, so that the sowing could be done on a new basis. He decided to overturn all the old management.
XXIX
The carrying out of Levin's plan presented many difficulties; but he struggled with all his might and achieved, if not what he wished, at least something which, without deceiving himself, he could believe was worth the effort. One of the main difficulties was that the work was already in progress, that he could not stop everything and start over from the beginning, but had to retune the machine while it was running.
When, on returning home that same evening, he told the steward about his plans, the steward was obviously pleased to agree with the part of his speech which showed that everything done up to then was nonsense and unprofitable. The steward said that he had long been saying so, but no one had wanted to listen to him. As far as Levin's proposal was concerned - that he participate as a shareholder, along with the workers, in the whole farming enterprise - to this the steward responded only with great dejection and no definite opinion, and immediately began talking about the necessity of transporting the remaining sheaves of rye the next day and seeing to the crossploughing, so that Levin felt that now was not the time for it.
Talking with the peasants about the same thing and offering to lease them the land on new conditions, he also ran into the chief difficulty that they were so busy with the current day's work that they had no time to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the undertaking.
A naive muzhik, Ivan the cowman, seemed to have fully understood Levin's proposal - that he and his family share in the profits of the cattle-yard - and was sympathetic with the undertaking. But when Levin impressed upon him his future advantages, Ivan's face showed alarm and regret that he could not listen to it all to the end, and he hastened to find something to do that could not be put off: taking the fork to finish heaping up hay from the cattle-yard, or fetching water, or clearing away manure.
Another difficulty lay in the peasants' invincible mistrust of any other purpose on the landowner's part than the desire to fleece them as much as possible. They were firmly convinced that his true goal, whatever he might tell them, would always lie in what he did not tell them. And they themselves, when they spoke, said many things, but never said what their true goal was. Besides that (Levin felt that the bilious landowner was right), the peasants put down as the first and immutable condition of any agreement whatsoever that they not be forced to employ new methods of farming or to make use of new tools. They agreed that the iron plough worked better, that the scarifier produced good results, but they found a thousand reasons why it was impossible for them to use either, and though he was convinced that he had to lower the level of farming, he was sorry to renounce improvements whose advantages were so obvious to him. But, despite all these difficulties, he had his way and by autumn things got going, or at least it seemed so to him.
In the beginning Levin thought of leasing the whole farm, as it was, to the peasants, workers and steward, on new conditions of partnership, but he soon became convinced that it was impossible, and he decided to subdivide the farming. The cattle-yard, orchards, kitchen gardens, meadows, fields, divided into several parts, were to constitute separate items. Naive Ivan the cowman, who understood the matter best of all, as it seemed to Levin, chose an association for himself mainly from his own family, and became a participant in the cattle-yard. A far field that had lain fallow and overgrown for eight years was taken with the help of the clever carpenter Fyodor Rezunov by six muzhik families on the new associative terms, and the muzhik Shuraev leased all the kitchen gardens on the same conditions. The rest remained as before, but these three items were the beginning of a new system and fully occupied Levin.
True, in the cattle-yard things went no better than before, and Ivan strongly resisted the heating of the cow barn and making butter from fresh cream, maintaining that cows that are kept cold need less food and that sour-cream butter does you best, and he demanded a salary as in the old days, not concerned in the least that the money he got was not a salary but an advance against his share of the profit.
True, Fyodor Rezunov's company did not crossplough their land before sowing, as had been agreed, justifying themselves by the shortness of time. True, the muzhiks of this company, though they had agreed to conduct business on the new basis, referred to the land not as common but as shared, and both the muzhiks of the association and Rezunov himself more than once said to Levin: 'If you'd take money for the land, it would put you at ease and unbind us.' Besides that, these muzhiks, under various pretexts, kept postponing the building of a cattle-yard and threshing barn on this land, as had been agreed, and dragged it on till winter.
True, Shuraev wanted to take the kitchen gardens leased to him and let them out in small parcels to the muzhiks. Evidently he had completely misunderstood and, it seemed, deliberately misunderstood, the conditions on which the land had been leased to him.
True, as he talked with the muzhiks, explaining all the advantages of the undertaking to them, Levin often felt that they were listening only to the music of his voice and knew firmly that, whatever he might say, they were not going to let him deceive them. He felt it especially when he talked with the smartest of the peasants, Rezunov, and noticed that play in his eyes which clearly showed both mockery of him and the firm conviction that, if anyone was going to be deceived, it was not he, Rezunov.
But, despite all that, Levin thought that things had got going and that, by strict accounting and having it his way, he would eventually prove to them the advantages of such a system, and then everything would go by itself.
These matters, along with the rest of the farming, which had been left in his hands, along with the study-work on his book, so occupied Levin's summer that he hardly ever went hunting. He learned at the end of August, from the man who brought back the side-saddle, that the Oblonskys had returned to Moscow. He felt that by not answering Darya Alexandrovna's letter, by his impoliteness, which he could not recall without a flush of shame, he had burned his boats and could never visit them again. He had done the same with the Sviyazhskys by leaving without saying goodbye. But he would never visit them again either. It made no difference to him now. The business of his new system of farming occupied him as nothing ever had before in his life. He read the books Sviyazhsky gave him, and, ordering what he did not have, also read books on political economy and socialism concerned with the same subject and, as he expected, found nothing that related to the business he had undertaken. In the politico-economic books - in Mill,[30] for instance, whom he studied at first with great fervour, hoping at any moment to find a solution to the questions that preoccupied him - he found laws deduced from the situation of European farming; but he simply could not see why those laws, not applicable in Russia, should be universal. He saw the same in the socialist books: these were either beautiful but inapplicable fantasies, such as he had been enthusiastic about while still a student, or corrections, mendings of the state of affairs in which Europe stood and with which R
ussian agriculture had nothing in common. Political economy said that the laws according to which European wealth had developed and was developing were universal and unquestionable. Socialist teaching said that development according to these laws led to ruin. And neither the one nor the other gave, not only an answer, but even the slightest hint of what he, Levin, and all Russian peasants and landowners were to do with their millions of hands and acres so that they would be most productive for the common good.
Once he got down to this matter, he conscientiously read through everything related to his subject and planned to go abroad in the autumn to study the matter on site, so that the same thing would not happen to him with this question as had happened so often with various other questions. Just as he was beginning to understand his interlocutor's thought and to explain his own, he would suddenly be told: 'And what about Kauffmann, and Jones, and Dubois, and Miccelli?[31] You haven't read them? You should - they've worked out this whole question.'
He now saw clearly that Kauffmann and Miccelli had nothing to tell him. He knew what he wanted. He saw that Russia had excellent land, excellent workers, and that in some cases, as with the muzhik half-way there, workers and land produced much, but in the majority of cases, when capital was employed European-style, they produced little, and that this came only from the fact that the workers wanted to work and to work well in the one way natural to them, and that their resistance was not accidental but constant and rooted in the spirit of the peasantry. He thought that the Russian peasantry, called upon to inhabit and cultivate vast unoccupied spaces, consciously kept to the methods necessary for it until all the lands were occupied, and that these methods were not at all as bad as was usually thought. And he wanted to prove it theoretically in his book and in practice on his estate.