Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Three/Chapter 29
CHAPTER XXIX
When he reached home in the evening, he summoned his overseer, and explained to him his plans. The overseer received with undisguised satisfaction all the details of this scheme as far as they showed that all that had been done hitherto was absurd and unproductive. The overseer declared that he had long ago told him so, but that no one would listen to him. But when it came to Levin's proposition to share the profits of the estate with the laborers, on the basis of an association, the overseer put on an expression of the deepest melancholy, and immediately began to speak of the necessity of bringing in the last sheaves of wheat, and commencing the second plowing; and Levin felt that now was not a propitious time.
On conversing with the muzhiks about his project of dividing with them the products of the earth, he found that here his chief difficulty lay in the fact that they were too much occupied with their daily tasks to comprehend the advantages and disadvantages of his enterprise.
A simple-minded muzhik, Ivan the herdsman, seemed to comprehend and to approve Levin's proposal to share with him in the profits of the cattle; but whenever Levin went on to speak of the advantages that would result, Ivan's face grew troubled, and, without waiting to hear Levin out, he would hurry off to attend to some work that could not be postponed,—either to pitch the hay from the pens, or to draw water, or to clear away the manure.
Another obstacle consisted in the inveterate distrust of the peasants, who would not believe that a proprietor could have any other aim than to get all he could out of them. They were firmly convinced, in spite of all he could say, that his real purpose was hidden. They, on their side, in expressing their opinions had much to say; but they carefully guarded against telling what their actual object was.
Levin came to the conclusion that the irate proprietor was right in saying that the peasants demanded, as the first and indispensable condition for any arrangement, that they should never be bound to any of the new agricultural methods, or to use the improved tools. They agreed that the new-fashioned plow worked better, that the weed-extirpator was more successful; but they in vented a thousand reasons why they should not use them; and, although he had made up his mind that there must be a coming down from anything like ideal management, he felt deep regret to give up improvements the advantages of which were so evident. But in spite of all these difficulties, he persevered; and by autumn the new arrangement was in working order, or at least seemed to be.
At first Levin intended to give up his whole domain[1] just as it was to the muzhiks—the laborers—and over seer on the new conditions of association. But very soon he found that this was impracticable; and he made up his mind to divide the management of the estate. The cattle, the garden, the kitchen-garden, the hay-fields, and some lands fenced off into several lots were to be reckoned as special and separate divisions.
Ivan, the simple-minded herdsman, who seemed to Levin better fitted than any one else, formed an artel, or association, composed of members of his family, and took charge of the cattle-yard. A distant field, which for eight years had been lying fallow, was taken by the shrewd carpenter Feodor Rezunof, who joined with him seven families of muzhiks; and the muzhik Shuraef entered into the same arrangements for superintending the gardens. All the rest was left as it had been; but these three divisions constituted the beginning of the new arrangement, and they kept Levin very busy.
It was true that matters were not carried on in the cattle-yard any better than before, and that Ivan was obstinate in his opposition to giving the cows a warm shelter, and to butter made of sweet cream, asserting that cows kept in a cold place required less feed, and that butter made of sour cream was made quicker; and he demanded his wages as before, and he was not at all interested in the fact that the money that he received was not his wages but his share of the profits of the association.
It was true that Rezunof and his associates did not give the field a second plowing, as they had been advised to do, and excused themselves on the ground that they had no time. It was true that the muzhiks of this company, although they had agreed to take this work under the new conditions, called this land, not common land, but shared land, and the muzhiks and Rezunof himself said to Levin: "If you would take money for the land it would be less bother to you and that would let us out."
Moreover, these muzhiks kept putting off under various pretexts the building of the cattle-yard and barn, and did not get it done till winter, though they had agreed to build it immediately.
It was true that Shuraef tried to exchange for a trifle with the muzhiks the products of the gardens which he had undertaken to manage. He evidently had a wrong notion and a purposely wrong notion of the conditions under which he had taken the land.
It was true that often in talking with the muzhiks and explaining to them all the advantages of the undertaking, Levin was conscious that all they heard was the sound of his voice, that they were firmly convinced that they were too shrewd to let him deceive them. He was especially conscious of this when talking with the cleverest of the muzhiks, Rezunof. He noticed in the man's eye a gleam which betrayed evident scorn for Levin and a firm conviction that if any one was to be cheated it was not he—Rezunof.
But, in spite of all these drawbacks, Levin felt that he was making progress, and that if he rigorously kept his accounts and persevered he should be able to show his associates at the end of the year that the new order of things could bring excellent results.
All this business, together with his work in connection with the rest of his estate, which still remained in his own hands, and together with his work in the library on his new book, so filled his time during the summer that he scarcely ever went out, even to hunt.
Toward the end of August he learned through the man that brought back the saddle that the Oblonskys had returned to Moscow. By not having replied to Darya Aleksandrovna's letter, by his rudeness which he could not remember without a flush of shame, he felt that he had burnt his ships and he never again could go to them. In exactly the same way he owed apologies to Sviazhsky for having left his house without bid ding him good-by. Neither would he again dare to go to Sviazhsky's. But now all this was a matter of indifference to him. He was more interested and absorbed in his new scheme of managing his estate than in anything that he had ever attempted.
He finished the books which Sviazhsky had lent him, and others on political economy and socialism, which he had sent for. In the books on political economy, in Mill, for example, which he studied first with eagerness, hoping every minute to find a solution of the questions which occupied him, he found laws deduced from the position of European husbandry; but he could not see how these laws could be profitably applied to Russian conditions. He found a similar lack in the books of the socialist writers. Either they were beautiful but impracticable fancies, such as he dreamed when he was a student, or modifications of that situation of things applicable to Europe, but offering no solution for the agrarian question in Russia.
Political economy said that the laws by which the wealth of Europe was developed and would develop were universal and fixed; socialistic teachings said that progress according to these laws would lead to destruction; but neither school gave him any answer or as much as a hint on the means of leading him and all the Russian muzhiks and agriculturists, with their millions of hands and of desyatins, to more successful methods of reaching prosperity.
As he was already involved in this enterprise, he conscientiously read through everything that bore on the subject and decided in the autumn to go abroad and study the matter on the spot, so that he might not have with this question the experience that had so often met him with various questions in the past. How many times in a discussion he had just begun to understand his opponent's thought and to expound his own, when suddenly the question would be asked: "But Kaufmann, Jones, Du Bois, Mitchell? You have not read them? Read them, they have worked out this question."
He saw clearly now that Kaufmann and Mitchell could not tell him anything. He knew what he wanted. He saw that Russia possessed an admirable soil and admirable workmen, and that in certain cases, as with the muzhik by the roadside, the land and the laborers could produce abundantly, but that in the majority of cases when capital was spent upon them in the European manner, they produced little, and that this resulted entirely from the fact that the laborers like to work, and work well only in their own way, and that this contrast was not the result of chance, but was permanent and based on the very nature of the people. He thought that the Russian people, which was destined to colonize and cultivate immense unoccupied spaces, would consciously, until all these lands were occupied, hold to these methods as necessary to them, and that these methods were not so bad as they were generally considered. And he wanted to demonstrate this theoretically in his book, and practically on his estate.
- ↑ Khozyaïstvo.