by Leo Tolstoy
Levin tried but failed to understand and always looked on him and on his life as a living riddle.
He and Levin were friends, and therefore Levin allowed himself to probe Sviyazhsky, to try to get at the very foundations of his view of life; but it was always in vain. Each time Levin tried to penetrate further than the doors to the reception rooms of Sviyazhsky's mind, which were open to everyone, he noticed that Sviyazhsky became slightly embarrassed; his eyes showed a barely noticeable fear, as if he was afraid that Levin would understand him, and he gave a good-natured and cheerful rebuff.
Now, after his disappointment with farming, Levin found it especially pleasant to visit Sviyazhsky. Apart from the fact that the mere sight of these happy doves in their comfortable nest, so pleased with themselves and with everyone, had a cheering effect on him, he now wanted, since he felt so displeased with his own life, to get at the secret in Sviyazhsky which gave him such clarity, certainty and cheerfulness in life. Besides that, Levin knew that at Sviyazhsky's he would meet neighbouring landowners, and he was now especially interested in talking, in listening to those very farmers' conversations about crops, hiring help, and the like, which he knew were normally regarded as something low, but were now the only thing he found important. 'This may not have been important under serfdom, or may not be important in England. In both cases the conditions themselves are defined; but with us now, when all this has been overturned and is just beginning to settle, the question of how these conditions ought to be settled is the only important question in Russia,' thought Levin.
The hunting turned out worse than Levin had expected. The marsh had dried up and there were no snipe. He walked all day and brought back only three, but to make up for it he brought back, as always with hunting, an excellent appetite, excellent spirits, and that aroused state of mind which with him always accompanied strong physical movement. And while it would seem that he was not thinking of anything as he hunted, he again kept recalling the old man and his family, and it was as if this impression called not only for attention to itself, but for the resolution of something connected with it.
That evening over tea, in the company of two landowners who had come on some matter of custody, the interesting conversation that Levin had been hoping for sprang up.
Levin was sitting beside the hostess at the tea table and had to carry on a conversation with her and the sister-in-law, who sat facing him. The hostess was a short, round-faced, fair-haired woman, all beaming with smiles and dimples. Levin tried through her to probe for the answer to that important riddle which her husband represented for him; but he did not have full freedom of thought, because he felt painfully awkward. He felt painfully awkward because the sister-in-law sat facing him in a special dress, put on for his sake, as it seemed to him, cut in a special trapezoidal shape on her white bosom. This rectangular neckline, despite the fact that her bosom was very white, or precisely because of it, deprived Levin of his freedom of thought. He fancied, probably mistakenly, that this neckline had been made on his account, and considered that he had no right to look at it and tried not to look at it; but he felt that he was to blame for the neckline having been made at all. It seemed to Levin that he was deceiving someone, that he had to explain something, but that it was quite impossible to explain it, and therefore he blushed constantly, felt restless and awkward. His awkwardness also communicated itself to the pretty sister-in-law. But the hostess seemed not to notice it and purposely tried to draw her into the conversation.
'You say,' the hostess continued the conversation they had begun, 'that my husband cannot interest himself in things Russian. On the contrary, he may be cheerful abroad, but never so much as here. Here he feels in his element. There's so much to be done, and he has the gift of being interested in everything. Ah, you haven't been to our school?'
'I've seen it... That little vine-covered house?'
'Yes, it's Nastya's doing,' she said, pointing to her sister.
'Do you teach in it yourself?' asked Levin, trying to look past the neckline, but feeling that wherever he looked in that direction, he would see nothing else.
'Yes, I have taught and still do, but we have a wonderful young woman for a teacher. And we've introduced gymnastics.'
'No, thank you, I won't have more tea,' said Levin, and, feeling that he was being discourteous, but unable to continue the conversation any longer, he stood up, blushing. 'I hear a very interesting conversation,' he added and went to the other end of the table, where the host sat with the two landowners. Sviyazhsky was sitting sideways to the table, leaning his elbow on it and twirling a cup with one hand, while with the other he gathered his beard in his fist, put it to his nose as if sniffing it, and let it go again. His shining dark eyes looked straight at the excited landowner with the grey moustache, and he was obviously finding what he said amusing. The landowner was complaining about the peasantry. It was clear to Levin that Sviyazhsky had an answer to the landowner's complaints that would immediately destroy the whole meaning of what he said, but that from his position he was unable to give this answer, and therefore listened, not without pleasure, to the landowner's comic speech.
The landowner with the grey moustache was obviously an inveterate adherent of serfdom, an old countryman and passionate farmer. Levin saw tokens of it in his clothes - the old-fashioned, shabby frock coat, to which the landowner was obviously unaccustomed - and in his intelligent, scowling eyes, his well-turned Russian speech, his peremptory tone, obviously acquired through long experience, and the resolute movements of his big, handsome, sunburnt hands with a single old engagement ring on the ring-finger.
XXVII
'If only I wasn't sorry to drop what's been started... so much work has gone into it ... I'd wave my hand at it all, sell it and go like Nikolai Ivanych ... to hear Helene,'[22] the landowner said, a pleasant smile lighting up his intelligent old face.
'Yes, but you don't drop it,' said Nikolai Ivanovich Sviyazhsky, 'which means it adds up to something.'
'All it adds up to is that I live at home, don't buy anything, don't rent anything. And one keeps hoping the peasantry will see reason. Otherwise you wouldn't believe it - the drunkenness, the depravity! Everybody's separate, not a horse, not a cow left. He may be starving to death, but hire him to work and he'll do his best to muck it up, and then go and complain to the justice of the peace.'[23]
'But you'll complain to the justice of the peace as well,' said Sviyazhsky.
'I'll complain? Not for anything in the world! There'd be so much talk, I'd be sorry I ever did! Look at that mill - they took the down-payment and left. And the justice of the peace? He acquitted them. It's all held together by the communal court and the headman. That one will give him a good old-fashioned whipping. If it wasn't for that - drop everything! Flee to the ends of the world!'
Obviously, the landowner was teasing Sviyazhsky, but Sviyazhsky not only did not get angry, but clearly found it amusing.
'Yes, and yet we carry on our farming without these measures,' he said, smiling, 'me, Levin, him.'
He pointed to the other landowner.
'Yes, things are going well for Mikhail Petrovich, but ask him how! Is it rational farming?' the landowner said, obviously flaunting the word 'rational'.
'My farming is simple,' said Mikhail Petrovich. 'Thank God. My method is just to make sure that the cash to pay the autumn taxes is there. The muzhiks come: Father, dear, help us out! Well, they're all neighbours, these muzhiks, I feel sorry for them. So I give them enough to pay the first third, only I say: Remember, boys, I helped you, so you help me when there's a need - sowing oats, making hay, harvesting -well, and I talk them into so much work for each tax paid. There's some of them are shameless, it's true.' Levin, who had long known these patriarchal ways, exchanged glances with Sviyazhsky and interrupted Mikhail Petrovich, addressing the landowner with the grey moustache again.
'Then what do you think?' he asked. 'How should farming be done now?'
'Why, the same way Mikhail Petro
vich does it: either let the land for half the crop, or rent it to the muzhiks. It can be done, but that way the common wealth of the state is ruined. Where with serf labour and good management my land produced ninefold, it will produce threefold when let for half the crop. The emancipation[24] has ruined Russia!'
Sviyazhsky glanced at Levin with smiling eyes and even gave him a barely noticeable mocking sign, but Levin did not find the landowner's words ridiculous - he understood them better than he did Sviyazhsky. And much of what the landowner went on to say, proving why Russia had been ruined by the emancipation, seemed to him very true, new and irrefutable. The landowner was obviously voicing his own thought, which happens rarely, and this thought had not been arrived at by a desire to somehow occupy an idle mind, but had grown out of the conditions of his own life, had been hatched out in his country solitude and considered on all sides.
'The point, kindly note, is that all progress is achieved by authority alone,' he said, apparently wishing to show that he was no stranger to education. 'Take the reforms of Peter, Catherine, Alexander.[25] Take European history. The more so with progress in agricultural methods. Take the potato - even it was introduced here by force. The wooden plough hasn't always been in use either. It was probably introduced before the tsars, and also introduced by force. Now, in our time, under serfdom, we landowners carried on our farming with improvements. Drying kilns, winnowers, the carting of dung, and all the tools - we introduced everything by our authority, and the muzhiks first resisted and then imitated us. Now, sirs, with the abolition of serfdom, our authority has been taken away, and our farming, where it was brought to a high level, is bound to sink to the most savage, primitive condition. That's how I understand it.'
'But why so? If it's rational, you can carry it on with hired help,' said Sviyazhsky.
'There's no authority. Who will I carry it on with, may I ask?'
'There it is - the work force, the chief element in farming,' thought Levin.
'With paid workers.'
'Workers don't want to do good work or to do good work with tools. Our worker knows one thing only - how to get drunk as a pig, and while drunk to break everything you give him. He'll overwater the horses, snap good harness, dismount a wheel with a tyre and sell it for drink, put a pintle into the thresher so as to break it. He loathes the sight of things that aren't to his liking. That causes the whole level of the farming to sink. Plots are abandoned, overgrown with wormwood or given up to muzhiks, and where millions of bushels used to be produced, now it's a few hundred thousand - the common wealth is diminished. If the same thing was done, only with calculation ...'
And he began developing his own plan of liberation, which would have eliminated these inconveniences.
That did not interest Levin, but when he finished, Levin went back to his first proposition and said, addressing Sviyazhsky and trying to provoke him to voice his serious opinion:
'That the level of farming is sinking and that, given our relation to the workers, it is impossible to engage in rational farming profitably, is perfectly correct,' he said.
'I don't find it so,' Sviyazhsky retorted, seriously now. 'I only see that we don't know how to go about farming and that, on the contrary, the level of farming we carried on under serfdom was in fact not too high but too low. We have neither machines, nor good working stock, nor real management, nor do we know how to count. Ask any farm owner - he won't know what's profitable for him and what isn't.'
'Italian bookkeeping,' the landowner said ironically. 'No matter how you count, once they break everything, there won't be any profit.'
'Why break? A worthless thresher, that Russian treadle of yours, they will break, but not my steam thresher. A Russian horse - what's that breed? the Tosscan, good for tossing cans at - they'll spoil for you, but introduce Percherons, or at least our Bitiugs,[26] and they won't spoil them. And so with everything. We must raise our farming higher.'
'If only we could, Nikolai Ivanych! It's all very well for you, but I have a son at the university, the younger ones are in boarding school -I can't go buying Percherons.'
'That's what banks are for.'
'So that the last thing I have falls under the hammer? No, thank you!'
'I don't agree that the level of farming must and can be raised higher,' said Levin. 'I'm engaged in it, and I have the means, and I've been unable to do anything. I don't know what use the banks are. With me, at least, whatever I've spent money on in farming has all been a loss - the livestock were a loss, the machinery a loss.'
'That's true,' the landowner with the grey moustache confirmed, even laughing with pleasure.
'And I'm not the only one,' Levin went on. 'I can refer to all the farmers who conduct their business rationally; every one of them, with rare exceptions, operates at a loss. Tell me, now, is your farming profitable?' said Levin, and he immediately noticed in Sviyazhsky's eyes that momentary look of fear that he noticed whenever he wanted to penetrate beyond the reception rooms of Sviyazhsky's mind.
Besides, on Levin's part the question had not been asked in good conscience. Over tea the hostess had just told him that they had invited a German from Moscow that summer, an expert in bookkeeping, who for a fee of five hundred roubles had done the accounts of their farm and discovered that they were operating at a loss of three thousand and some roubles. She did not recall the exact figure, but it seems the German had it calculated down to the quarter kopeck.
The landowner smiled at the mention of the profits of Sviyazhsky's farming, apparently knowing what sort of gains his neighbour and marshal might have.
'Maybe it's not profitable,' Sviyazhsky replied. 'That only proves that I'm a bad manager, or that I spend the capital to increase the true rent.'
'Ah, the true rent!' Levin exclaimed with horror. 'Maybe true rent exists in Europe, where the land has been improved by the labour put into it; but with us the land all becomes worse from the labour put into it - that is, from being ploughed - and so there's no true rent.'
'What do you mean, no true rent? It's a law.'
'Then we're outside the law. True rent won't clarify anything for us; on the contrary, it will confuse things. No, tell us, how can the theory of true rent.. .'
'Would you like some curds? Masha, send us some curds here, or raspberries,' he turned to his wife. 'This year the raspberries went on remarkably late.'
And in a most pleasant state of mind, Sviyazhsky got up and left, apparently assuming that the conversation had ended, at the very place where Levin thought it was just beginning.
Deprived of his interlocutor, Levin went on talking with the landowner, trying to prove to him that all the difficulty came from our not knowing the properties and habits of our worker; but the landowner, like all people who think originally and solitarily, was slow to understand another man's thought and especially partial to his own. He insisted that the Russian muzhik was a swine and liked swinishness, and that to move him out of swinishness, authority was needed, and there was none, a stick was needed, and we suddenly became so liberal that we replaced the thousand-year-old stick with some sort of lawyers and lock-ups, in which worthless, stinking muzhiks are fed good soup and allotted so many cubic feet of air.
'Why do you think,' said Levin, trying to return to the question, 'that it's impossible to find relations with the workforce that would make work productive?'
'That will never be done with the Russian peasantry without a stick! There's no authority,' the landowner replied.
'How can new forms be found?' said Sviyazhsky, who, having eaten his curds and lit a cigarette, again came over to the arguers. 'All possible relations to the workforce have been defined and studied,' he said. 'That leftover of barbarism - the primitive community with its mutual guarantees - is falling apart of itself, serfdom is abolished, there remains only free labour, and its forms are defined and ready, and we must accept them. The hired worker, the day-labourer, the farmhand - you won't get away from that.'
'But Europe is dissatisfied
with these forms.'
'Dissatisfied and searching for new ones. And she'll probably find them.'
'That's just what I'm talking about,' replied Levin. 'Why shouldn't we search for them on our own?'
'Because it's the same as inventing new ways of building railways. They're invented and ready.'
'But what if they don't suit us? What if they're stupid?' said Levin.
And again he noticed the look of fear in Sviyazhsky's eyes.
'Yes, right: we'll win at a canter, we've found what Europe's searching for! I know all that, but, pardon me, do you know what's been done in Europe about the question of workers' conditions?'
'No, very little.'
'This question now occupies the best minds in Europe. The Schulze-Delitsch tendency. . . Also all the vast literature on the workers question, on the most liberal Lassalle tendency... The Mulhouse system is already a fact, you surely know that.'[27] 'I have an idea, but a very vague one.'
'No, you only say so; you surely know it all as well as I do. Of course, I'm no social professor, but it once interested me, and if it interests you, you really should look into it.'
'But what did they arrive at?'
'Excuse me ...'
The landowners got up, and Sviyazhsky, again stopping Levin in his unpleasant habit of prying beyond the reception rooms of his mind, went to see his guests off.
