Anna Karenina

partial to his own. He stuck to it that the Russian peasant is a swine and
likes swinishness, and that to get him out of his swinishness one must have
authority, and there is none; one must have the stick, and we have become
so liberal that we have all of a sudden replaced the stick that served us for a
thousand years by lawyers and model prisons, where the worthless, stinking
peasant is fed on good soup and has a fixed allowance of cubic feet of air.
"What makes you think," said Levin, trying to get back to the question,
"that it's impossible to find some relation to the laborer in which the labor
would become productive?"
"That never could be so with the Russian peasantry; we've no power over
them," answered the landowner.
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"How can new conditions be found?" said Sviazhsky. Having eaten some
junket and lighted a cigarette, he came back to the discussion. "All possible
relations to the labor force have been defined and studied," he said. "The
relic of barbarism, the primitive commune with each guarantee for all, will
disappear of itself; serfdom has been abolished--there remains nothing but
free labor, and its fomms are fixed and ready made, and must be adopted.
Permanent hands, day-laborers, rammers--you can't get out of those forms."
"But Europe is dissatisfied with these forms."
"Dissatisfied, and seeking new ones. And will find them, in all probability."
"That's just what I was meaning," answered Levin. "Why shouldn't we seek
them for ourselves?"
"Because it would be just like inventing afresh the means for constructing
railways. They are ready, invented."
"But if they don't do for us, if they're stupid?" said Levin.
And again he detected the expression of alarm in the eyes of Sviazhsky.
"Oh, yes; we'll bury the world under our caps! We've found the secret
Europe was seeking for! I've heard all that; but, excuse me, do you know all
that's been done in Europe on the question of the organization of labor?"
"No, very little."
"That question is now absorbing the best minds in Europe. The
Schulze-Delitsch movement.... And then all this enormous literature of the
labor question, the most liberal Lassalle movement...the Mulhausen
experiment? That's a fact by now, as you're probably aware."
"I have some idea of it, but very vague."
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"No, you only say that; no doubt you know all about it as well as I do. I'm
not a professor of sociology, of course, but it interested me, and really, if it
interests you, you ought to study it."
"But what conclusion have they come to?"
"Excuse me..."
The two neighbors had risen, and Sviazhsky, once more checking Levin in
his inconvenient habit of peeping into what was beyond the outer chambers
of his mind, went to see his guests out.
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