DARYA ALEXANDROVNA was there in a dressing-jacket, with her large frightened eyes, made more prominent by the emaciation of her face, and her knot of thin plaits of once luxurious and beautiful hair. The room was covered with scattered articles, and she was standing among them before an open wardrobe, where she was engaged in selecting something. Hearing her husband’s step she stopped and looked at the door, vainly trying to assume a severe and contemptuous expression. She felt that she was afraid of him and afraid of the impending interview. She was trying to do what she had attempted ten times already during those three days, to sort out her own and her children’s clothes to take to her mother’s; but she could not bring herself to do it, and said again, as she had done after each previous attempt, that things could not remain as they were — that she must do something to punish and humiliate him, and to revenge herself if only for a small part of the pain he had caused her. She still kept saying that she would leave him, but felt that this was impossible. It was impossible because she could not get out of the habit of regarding him as her husband and of loving him. Besides, she felt that if here, in her own home, it was all she could do to look after her five children properly, it would be still worse where she meant to take them. As it was, during these three days the youngest had fallen ill because they had given him sour broth, and the others had had hardly any dinner yesterday. She felt that it was impossible for her to leave; but still deceiving herself, she went on sorting the things and pretending that she really would go.
On seeing her husband she thrust her arms into a drawer of the wardrobe as if looking for something, and only when he had come close to her did she turn her face toward him. But her face, which she wanted to seem stern and determined, expressed only perplexity and suffering.
‘Dolly!’ he said in a soft, timid voice. He drew his head down, wishing to look pathetic and submissive, but all the same he shone with freshness and health. With a rapid glance she took in his fresh and healthy figure from head to foot. ‘Yes, he is happy and contented,’ she thought, ‘but what about me? … And that horrid good-nature of his which people love and praise so, how I hate it!’ She pressed her lips together and a cheek-muscle twitched on the right side of her pale and nervous face.
‘What do you want?’ she said quickly in a voice unlike her usual deep tones.
‘Dolly,’ he repeated unsteadily, ‘Anna is coming to-day.’
‘What’s that to do with me? I can’t receive her!’ she exclaimed.
‘But after all, Dolly, you really must,’ said he.
‘Go away, go away, go away!’ she cried, as if in physical pain, without looking at him.
Oblonsky could think calmly of his wife, could hope that ‘things would shape themselves’ as Matthew had said, and could calmly read his paper and drink his coffee, but when he saw her worn, suffering face, and heard her tone, resigned and despairing, he felt a choking sensation. A lump rose to his throat and tears glistened in his eyes.
‘Oh, my God! What have I done? Dolly — for heaven’s sake! … You know …’ He could not continue. His throat was choked with sobs.
She slammed the doors of the wardrobe and looked up at him.
‘Dolly, what can I say? … Only forgive me! Think, nine years… . Can’t they atone for a momentary — a momentary …’
Her eyes drooped and she waited to hear what he would say, as if entreating him to persuade her somehow that she had made a mistake.
‘A momentary infatuation, …’ he said, and was going on; but at those words her lips tightened again as if with pain, and again the muscle in her right cheek began to twitch.
‘Go away — go away from here!’ she cried in a still shriller voice, ‘and don’t talk to me of your infatuations and all those horrors!’
She wished to go away, but staggered and held on to the back of a chair to support herself. His face broadened, his lips swelled, and his eyes filled with tears.
‘Dolly!’ he said, now actually sobbing, ‘for heaven’s sake think of the children — they have done nothing! Punish me — make me suffer for my sin! Tell me what to do — I am ready for anything. I am the guilty one. I have no words to express my guilt… . But Dolly, forgive me!’
She sat down and he could hear her loud, heavy breathing. He felt unutterably sorry for her. She tried again and again to speak and could not. He waited.
‘You think of our children when you want to play with them, but I am always thinking of them, and know they are ruined now,’ she said, evidently repeating one of the phrases she had used to herself again and again during those three days.
But she had spoken of ‘our children’, and looking gratefully at her he moved to take her hand; but she stepped aside with a look of repugnance.
‘I do think of the children, and would do anything in the world to save them; but I do not know how to save them — whether by taking them away from their father, or by leaving them with a dissolute — yes, a dissolute father… . Tell me, do you think it possible for us to live together after what has happened? Is it possible? Say, is it possible?’ she repeated, raising her voice. ‘When my husband, the father of my children, has love affairs with his children’s governess?’
‘But what’s to be done? — what’s to be done?’ said he, in a piteous voice, hardly knowing what he was saying, and sinking his head lower and lower.
‘You are horrid and disgusting to me!’ she shouted, getting more and more excited. ‘Your tears are — water! You never loved me; you have no heart, no honour! To me you are detestable, disgusting — a stranger, yes, a perfect stranger!’ She uttered that word stranger, so terrible to herself, with anguish and hatred.
He looked at her and the hatred he saw in her face frightened and surprised him. He did not understand that his pity exasperated her. She saw in him pity for herself but not love. ‘No, she hates me; she will not forgive me,’ he thought. ‘It is awful, awful!’ he muttered.
At that moment a child began to cry in another room, probably having tumbled down. Darya Alexandrovna listened, and her face softened suddenly.
She seemed to be trying to recollect herself, as if she did not know where she was or what she had to do. Then she rose quickly and moved toward the door.
‘After all, she loves my child,’ he thought, noticing the change in her face when the baby cried; ‘my child — then how can she hate me?’
‘Dolly, just a word!’ he said, following her.
‘If you follow me, I shall call the servants and the children! I’ll let everybody know you are a scoundrel! I am going away to-day, and you may live here with your mistress!’
She went out, slamming the door.
Oblonsky sighed, wiped his face, and with soft steps left the room. ‘Matthew says “things will shape themselves,” — but how? I don’t even see a possibility… . Oh dear, the horror of it! And her shouting — it was so vulgar,’ he thought, recalling her screams and the words scoundrel and mistress. ‘And the maids may have heard it! It is dreadfully banal, dreadfully!’ For a few seconds Oblonsky stood alone; then he wiped his eyes, sighed, and expanding his chest went out of the room.
It was a Friday, the day on which a German clockmaker always came to wind up the clocks. Seeing him in the dining-room, Oblonsky recollected a joke he had once made at the expense of this accurate baldheaded clockmaker, and he smiled. ‘The German,’ he had said, ‘has been wound up for life to wind up clocks.’ Oblonsky was fond of a joke. ‘Well, perhaps things will shape themselves — “shape themselves”! That’s a good phrase,’ he thought. ‘I must use that.’
‘Matthew!’ he called. ‘Will you and Mary arrange everything for Anna Arkadyevna in the little sitting-room?’ he added when Matthew appeared.
‘Yes, sir.’
Oblonsky put on his fur coat, and went out into the porch.
‘Will you be home to dinner, sir?’ said Matthew, as he showed him out.
‘I’ll see… . Oh, and here’s some money,’ said he, taking a ten-rouble note out of his pocket-book. ‘Will it be enough?’
‘Enough or not, we shall have to manage, that’s clear,’ said Matthew, closing the carriage door and stepping back into the porch.
Meanwhile Darya Alexandrovna after soothing the child, knowing from the sound of the carriage wheels that her husband had gone, returned to her bedroom. It was her only place of refuge from household cares. Even now, during the few minutes she had spent in the nursery, the English governess and Matrena Filimonovna had found time to ask some questions that could not be put off and which she alone could answer. ‘What should the children wear when they went out? Ought they to have milk? Should not a new cook be sent for?’
‘Oh, do leave me alone!’ she cried; and returning to her bedroom she sat down where she had sat when talking with her husband. Locking together her thin fingers, on which her rings hung loosely, she went over in her mind the whole of their conversation.
‘Gone! But how did he finish with her?’ she thought. ‘Is it possible that he still sees her? Why didn’t I ask him? No, no! It’s impossible to be reunited… . Even if we go on living in the same house, we are strangers — strangers for ever!’ she repeated, specially emphasizing the word that was so dreadful to her. ‘And how I loved him! Oh God, how I loved him! … How I loved — and don’t I love him now? Don’t I love him more than ever? The most terrible thing …’ She did not finish the thought, because Matrena Filimonovna thrust her head in at the door.
‘Hadn’t I better send for my brother?’ she said. ‘After all, he can cook a dinner; — or else the children will go without food till six o’clock, as they did yesterday.’
‘All right! I’ll come and see about it in a moment… . Has the milk been sent for?’ and Darya Alexandrovna plunged into her daily cares, and for a time drowned her grief in them.
THERE was no railway or stage-coach to the Surovsky district, and Levin went in his own tarantas [a four-wheeled Russian carriage without springs on a long flexible wooden chassis, suitable for bad roads].
Halfway he stopped to feed his horses at a well-to-do peasant’s house. The baldheaded, fresh-faced old man, with a red beard which was growing grey round the cheeks, opened the gates and pressed close to the post to let the three-horsed vehicle enter. After showing the coachman to a place in a lean-to, in a large, clean, tidy, newly-constructed yard where stood some charred wooden ploughs, the old man invited Levin to enter the house. A cleanly-dressed young woman with goloshes on her stockingless feet was washing the floor in the passage. The dog that followed Levin frightened her, but when she was told that it would not hurt her she at once began to laugh at her own alarm. After pointing to the door with her bare arm she again stooped, hiding her handsome face, and went on scrubbing.
‘Want a samovar?’ she asked.
‘Yes, please.’
The room Levin entered was a large one with a tiled stove and a partition. Under the shelf with the icons stood a table decorated with a painted pattern, a bench, and two chairs. By the door stood a little cupboard with crockery. The shutters were closed and there were not many flies in the room, which was so clean that Levin took care to keep Laska (who had been bathing in the puddles on the way) from trampling on the floor, telling her to lie down in a corner by the door. Having looked round the room, he went out into the backyard. The good-looking woman in goloshes, with two empty pails swinging from a wooden yoke, ran down before him to fetch water from the well.
‘Look alive!’ the old man called merrily after, and approached Levin. ‘Is it to Nicholas Ivanich Sviyazhsky you are going, sir? He too stops at our place,’ he began garrulously, leaning on the banisters of the porch. In the midst of his conversation about his acquaintanceship with Sviyazhsky the gates creaked again, and the labourers returning from the fields came into the yard with their ploughs and harrows. The horses harnessed to the ploughs and harrows were big and well-fed. The labourers evidently belonged to the household. Two young fellows wore print shirts and peaked caps, two others were hired men and wore home-spun shirts; one of these was old and the other young.
The old master of the house left the porch and went to unharness the horses.
‘What have they been ploughing?’ asked Levin.
‘Between the potatoes. We too rent a little land. Don’t let the gelding out, Fedof, lead him to the trough. We’ll harness another.’
‘I say, father! have those ploughshares I ordered been brought?’ asked a tall, robust young fellow, evidently the old man’s son.
‘There in the passage,’ answered the old man, winding the reins into a ring and throwing them on the ground. ‘Fix them in before we finish dinner.’
The good-looking woman returned, her shoulders pressed down by the weight of the full pails, and went into the house. Other women, young and handsome, middle-aged, old and plain, some with children, others without, appeared from somewhere.
The chimney of the samovar began to hum. The labourers and the family, having attended to the horses, went in to dinner.
Levin took his provisions out of the tarantas and invited the old man to have tea with him.
‘Why, I don’t know! We have had tea once to-day,’ said he, evidently pleased to accept the invitation. ‘Well, just for company!’
Over their tea Levin heard the whole history of the old man’s farm. Ten years previously he had rented about four hundred acres from the landowner, and the year before he had bought them outright and rented another nine hundred from a neighbouring proprietor. A small part of the land — the worst — he let, and with the aid of his family and two hired men cultivated about a hundred and twenty acres. The old man complained that his affairs were in a bad way. But Levin knew that he only did so for propriety’s sake and that in reality his farm was flourishing. Had his affairs been in a bad way he would not have bought land at thirty-five roubles an acre, would not have married three of his sons and a nephew, and would not have twice rebuilt his homestead after fires, nor rebuilt it better each time. In spite of the old peasant’s grumbling one could see that he was justly proud of his property, of his sons, his nephew, his daughters-in-law, his horses, his cows, and especially of the fact that his whole household and farm held together. From their conversation Levin gathered that he was not against new methods either. He had planted many potatoes which had already flowered and were forming fruit, as Levin had noticed when passing the fields on the way, while Levin’s own potatoes were just beginning to flower. He ploughed the land for the potatoes with an English plough, which he had borrowed from a landowner. He also sowed wheat. Levin was struck especially by one little detail. The old peasant used the thinnings of the rye as fodder for the horses. Many a time when Levin had seen this valuable food wasted he had wanted to have it gathered up, but had found this impossible. On this peasant’s fields this was being done, and he could not find words enough to praise this fodder.
‘What is there for the young women to do? They carry the heaps out on to the road and a cart comes and fetches them.’
‘There now! We landlords don’t get on well because of the labourers,’ said Levin, handing him a tumbler of tea.
‘Thank you,’ said the old man as he took the tea, but he refused sugar, pointing to a bit he still had left. [Russian peasants seldom put sugar in their tea, but frugally nibble a lump between drinks.] ‘How can one rely on work with hired labourers?’ he said, ‘it is ruination! Take Sviyazhsky now. We know what sort of soil his is, black as poppy-seed, but he cannot boast of his harvests either. It’s want of attention.’
‘And yet you too use hired labour on your farm?’
‘Ours is peasant’s business; we look after everything ourselves. If a labourer is no good, let him go! We can manage for ourselves.’
‘Father, Finnigan wants some tar fetched,’ said the woman with the goloshes, coming in.
‘That’s how it is, sir,’ said the old man, rising; and after crossing himself several times he thanked Levin and went out. When Levin went into the back room to call his coachman he found the whole peasant family at dinner. The women served standing. The vigorous young son with his mouth full of buckwheat porridge was saying something funny, and everybody laughed heartily — the woman with the goloshes laughing more merrily than anyone as she refilled the bowl with cabbage soup.
The handsome face of this woman with the goloshes might very well have had something to do with the impression of welfare that this peasant household produced on Levin; that impression was anyhow so strong that he never lost it. And all the rest of the way to Sviyazhsky’s he every now and then recalled that household, as if the impression it had left on him demanded special attention.
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.
‘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.
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.