THIRTY-SEVEN

Chapter 26
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SVIYAZHSKY was Marshal of the Nobility in his district. He was five years older than Levin and had long been married. His young sister-in-law, whom Levin thought very pleasant, lived with them. He knew that both Sviyazhsky and his wife wanted to see her married to him, Levin. He knew this as certainly as all so-called eligible young men know these things, though he could never have said so to anyone; and he also knew that although he wanted to marry, and although this girl, to all appearance very fascinating, ought to make a splendid wife, he could as soon fly as marry her, even had he not been in love with Kitty. And this knowledge spoilt the pleasure which he hoped his visit to Sviyazhsky would give him.
Levin had thought of this when he received Sviyazhsky’s invitation, but in spite of it he made up his mind that this idea of Sviyazhsky’s intentions was only an unfounded conjecture of his and that he would go. Besides, at the bottom of his heart he wanted to put himself to the test and again to estimate his feelings for the girl. Sviyazhsky’s home life was extremely pleasant, and Sviyazhsky himself was the best type of social worker that Levin had ever known, and Levin always found him very interesting.
Sviyazhsky was one of those people — they invariably amazed Levin — whose judgment was very logical though never original and was kept quite apart from their conduct, while their manner of life was very definite and stable, its tendency being quite independent of their judgment, and even clashing with it. Sviyazhsky was an extreme Liberal. He despised the gentry and considered the majority of noblemen to be secretly in favour of serfdom, and only prevented by cowardice from expressing their views. He considered Russia to be a doomed country like Turkey, and the Russian government so bad that he did not think it worth while seriously to criticize its actions; yet he had an official position, was a model Marshal of the Nobility, and when he travelled always wore a cockade and a red band to his cap. He imagined that to live as a human being was possible only in foreign countries, where he went to stay at every opportunity; yet he carried on very complicated and perfected agricultural pursuits in Russia and carefully followed and knew what was being done there. He considered the Russian peasant to be one degree higher than the ape in development, yet at district elections no one shook hands with the peasants and listened to their opinions more willingly than he. He believed in neither God nor Devil, yet he was much concerned by the question of improving the condition of the clergy and limiting parishes, and was at the same time particularly active in seeing that the church should be retained in his village.
On the Woman’s Question he sided with the extreme advocates of woman’s freedom and especially the right to work; yet he lived with his wife in such a way that it gave everybody pleasure to see the friendly relationship in which they passed their childless life, and had so arranged that his wife did nothing and could do nothing except share her husband’s efforts to spend their time as pleasantly and merrily as possible.
Had Levin not possessed the faculty of giving the best interpretation to people’s characters, Sviyazhsky’s character would have presented no difficulty or problem to him; he would only have called him a fool or a good-for-nothing, and everything would have been clear. But he could not call him a fool, because Sviyazhsky was not only very intelligent but also a very well-educated man, who carried his education with extreme modesty. There was no subject with which he was not acquainted, but he only exhibited his knowledge when forced to do so. Still less could Levin call him a good-for-nothing, because Sviyazhsky was certainly an honest, kind-hearted, and clever man, always joyfully and actively engaged on work highly prized by all around, and certainly a man who could never consciously do anything bad.
Levin tried but could not understand him, and regarded him and his life as animated riddles.
The Sviyazhskys were friendly with Levin, and therefore he allowed himself to sound Sviyazhsky and try to get to the very foundation of his philosophy of life; but it was all in vain. Each time that Levin tried to penetrate deeper than the reception rooms of the other’s mind, which were always open to anybody, he noticed Sviyazhsky seemed a little confused. A just perceptible look of fear appeared on his face, as if he were afraid that he would be understood by Levin, whom he met with good-natured, jocose resistance.
Now, after his disillusion with the work on his estate, Levin was especially pleased to stay a while with Sviyazhsky. Not to mention the fact that the sight of the happy doves in their well-ordered nest, so content with themselves and everybody else, had a cheering effect on him, he now wanted, dissatisfied with life as he was, to get at the secret which gave Sviyazhsky such clearness, definiteness, and cheerfulness.
Levin also knew that he would meet neighbouring landowners at the Sviyazhskys’; and it would be very interesting to talk and hear about farming, the harvest, the hire of labour, and all those questions which, though considered very low, seemed to him most important.
‘These matters might not have been so important in the time of serfdom and may be unimportant in England. In these cases the conditions were or are settled; but with us everything has only just been changed, and is only beginning to settle down. The question of how things will settle down is the only important question in the whole of Russia,’ thought Levin.
The shooting did not prove as good as he had expected. The marsh had dried up and there were hardly any snipe. He went about all day and only brought back three, but on the other hand he brought back, as he always did after a day’s shooting, a splendid appetite, good spirits, and the stimulated mental condition which in his case always accompanied physical exertion. And when out shooting, while he did not seem to be thinking at all, he again and again thought about the old peasant and his family, and felt as if the impression made on him called not only for his attention, but for the solution of some problem related thereto.
In the evening at tea a very interesting conversation sprang up, just as Levin had expected, in the company of two landlords who had come about some guardianship business.
Levin sat beside the hostess at the tea-table, and was obliged to converse with her and her sister, who was sitting opposite him. The hostess was a short, fair, round-faced woman, beaming with smiles and dimples. Levin tried to find out through her the answer to the riddle, so important to him, presented by her husband; but he had not full freedom of thought because he felt painfully uncomfortable. This painful discomfort was due to the fact that her sister sat opposite to him in a dress that seemed to him to have been put on especially for his benefit, with a particularly low, square-cut decolletage showing her white bosom. Though her bosom was so white, or perhaps because it was so white, this square-cut deprived Levin of his freedom of thought. He imagined, probably quite mistakenly, that the bodice was cut like that on his account; he felt that he had no right to look at it and tried not to do so, but felt guilty because it was cut so. Levin felt as if he were deceiving some one, as if he ought to offer some explanation which was impossible, and therefore he kept blushing and was restless and uncomfortable. His discomfort communicated itself to the pretty sister, but the hostess did not seem to notice anything and purposely drew her sister into the conversation.
‘You say,’ the hostess continued, ‘that my husband cannot feel an interest in anything Russian? On the contrary, though he is happy abroad, he is never so happy there as here. He feels in his own sphere. He is so busy, and he has a gift for taking an interest in everything. Oh! you have not been to see our school!’
‘I saw it. . . . It is a little ivy-covered house?’
‘Yes, that is Nastya’s business,’ she said, pointing to her sister.
‘You yourself teach?’ asked Levin, trying to look beyond the bodice, but conscious that if he looked in her direction he must see it.
‘Yes, I have been and am still teaching, but we have a splendid master. And we have introduced gymnastics.’
‘No thanks! No more tea,’ said Levin, and unable to continue the conversation, though he knew he was behaving rudely, he got up blushing. ‘I hear a very interesting conversation there,’ he added, and went to the other end of the table where his host and the two landlords were sitting. Sviyazhsky sat sideways, leaning his elbow on the table and turning his cup round with one hand, while with the other he gathered his beard together, lifted it to his nose as if smelling it, and let it go again. He looked with his glittering black eyes straight at an excited landowner, with a grey moustache, whose words evidently amused him. The landowner was complaining about the peasants. Levin saw clearly that Sviyazhsky could have answered the landowner’s complaint so that the meaning of the latter’s words would have been destroyed at once, but owing to his position he could not give that answer, and listened not without pleasure to the landowner’s funny speech.
This landowner with the grey moustache was evidently an inveterate believer in serfdom, and a passionate farmer who had lived long in the country.
Levin saw signs of this in the way the man was dressed — he wore an old-fashioned shiny coat which he was evidently not used to — and in his intelligent, dismal eyes, his well-turned Russian, his authoritative tone, evidently acquired by long practice, and in the firm movement of his fine large sunburnt hands, the right one having an old wedding-ring on the third finger.
Chapter 27
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‘IF it were not a pity to give up what has been set going . . . after spending so much toil . . . I would throw it all up, sell out and, like Nicholas Ivanich, go away . . . to hear La belle Hélène,’ said the landowner, a pleasant smile lighting up his wise old face.
‘But we see you don’t give it up,’ said Nicholas Ivanich Sviyazhsky, ‘so it seems it has its advantages.’
‘Just one advantage: I live in my own house, which is neither bought nor hired. And there is always the hope that the people will come to their senses. You would hardly believe what drunkenness and debauchery there is! The families have all separated; they have not a horse nor a cow left. They are starving, yet if you hire one of them as a labourer, he’ll spoil and break things, and will even lodge complaints with the magistrate.’
‘On the other hand you, too, complain to the magistrate.’
‘I complain? Never! Nothing could induce me to! It would cause such gossip that one would be sorry one tried it. At the works now they took money in advance, and went off. And what did the magistrate do? Why, acquitted them! Things are only kept going by the village tribunal and the village elder. He thrashes them in the old style. If it were not for that, one had better give up everything and flee to the ends of the earth.’ The landowner evidently meant to tease Sviyazhsky, but the latter did not take offence; on the contrary, he evidently enjoyed it.
‘Well, you see, we carry on our work without such measures, I and Levin and he,’ Sviyazhsky said smiling, and pointing to the other landowner.
‘Yes, Michael Petrovich gets on, but ask him how? Is his what you would call “rational” farming?’ said the landowner, ostentatiously using the word ‘rational’.
‘My farming is very simple, thank heaven!’ said Michael Petrovich. ‘My farming is to have money ready for the autumn taxes. The peasants come along, and say, “Be a father to us! Help us!” Well, of course they are all our own people, our neighbours: one pities them, and lends them what they want, enough to pay the one-third then due, but one says, “Remember, lads! I help you, and you must help me when necessary — at the oat-sowing or hay-making, at harvest time”; and one agrees for so much work from each family. But it is true there are some dishonest ones among them.’
Levin, who had long been acquainted with these patriarchal methods, exchanged a glance with Sviyazhsky, and, interrupting Michael Petrovich, addressed the landowner with the grey moustache.
‘How then, in your opinion, should one carry on at present?’
‘Why, carry on the way Michael Petrovich does: either pay the peasants in kind, or rent it to them! That is quite possible, but the wealth of the community as a whole is ruined by such methods. Where my land used to yield ninefold under serfdom with good management, it only now yields threefold when the labourers are paid in kind. Russia has been ruined by the emancipation of the peasants.’
Sviyazhsky looked at Levin with smiling eyes, and even made a just perceptible sarcastic sign to him ridiculing the old man, but Levin did not consider the landowner’s words ridiculous, he understood him better than he did Sviyazhsky. Much of what the landowner said subsequently, to prove that Russia was ruined by the Emancipation, even appeared to him to be very true, new, and undeniable. The landowner was evidently expressing his own thoughts — which people rarely do — thoughts to which he had been led not by a desire to find some occupation for an idle mind, but by the conditions of his life: thoughts which he had hatched in his rural solitude and considered from every side.
‘The fact of the matter is, you see, that progress can only be achieved by authority,’ he said, evidently wishing to show that education was not foreign to him. ‘Take, for instance, the reforms of Peter the Great, Catherine, and Alexander. Take European history. In the realm of agriculture it is still more so. To name only potatoes, they even had to be introduced by force into this country. Our primitive ploughs you know have not been always used. They must have been introduced at the time of the Rurik Princes, and doubtless by force. Now in our case we landlords under serfdom applied improved methods of agriculture: we introduced the winnowing machines and all sorts of tools, organized the carting of manure — all by our authority, and the peasants at first resisted and afterwards copied us. Now that serfdom has been abolished and the power taken out of our hands, our agriculture where it has been brought to a high level must descend to a savage and primitive condition. That is how I look at the matter.’
‘But why? If your farming is rational you can carry it on with hired labour,’ said Sviyazhsky.
‘I have no power. By means of whose labour am I to carry it on?’
‘Here we have it! The labour-power is the chief element of agriculture,’ thought Levin.
‘Hired labourers,’ replied Sviyazhsky.
‘Hired labourers don’t want to work well with good tools. Our labourers understand one thing only: to get drunk like swine, and when drunk to spoil everything you put into their hands. They’ll water the horses at the wrong time, tear good harness, change a wheel with an iron tyre for one without, or drop a bolt into the threshing machine in order to break it. They hate to see anything that is beyond them. That is why the level of agriculture has gone down. The land is neglected, overgrown with wormwood or given to the peasants, and where eight million bushels used to be produced they now only produce eight hundred 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, 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.