Anna Karenina

partnership; but he was very soon convinced that this was impossible, and
determined to divide it up. The cattle-yard, the garden, hay fields, and
arable land, divided into several parts, had to be made into separate lots.
The simple-hearted cowherd, Ivan, who, Levin fancied, understood the
matter better than any of them, collecting together a gang of workers to
help him, principally of his own family, became a partner in the cattle-yard.
A distant part of the estate, a tract of waste land that had lain fallow for
eight years, was with the help of the clever carpenter, Fyodor Ryezunov,
taken by six families of peasants on new conditions of partnership, and the
peasant Shuraev took the management of all the vegetable gardens on the
same terms. The remainder of the land was still worked on the old system,
but these three associated partnerships were the first step to a new
organization of the whole, and they completely took up Levin's time.
It is true that in the cattle-yard things went no better than before, and Ivan
strenuously opposed warm housing for the cows and butter made of fresh
cream, affirming that cows require less food if kept cold, and that butter is
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more profitable made from sour cream, and he asked for wages just as
under the old system, and took not the slightest interest in the fact that the
money he received was not wages but an advance out of his future share in
the profits.
It is true that Fyodor Ryezunov's company did not plough over the ground
twice before sowing, as had been agreed, justifying themselves on the plea
that the time was too short. It is true that the peasants of the same company,
though they had agreed to work the land on new conditions, always spoke
of the land, not as held in partnership, but as rented for half the crop, and
more than once the peasants and Ryezunov himself said to Levin, "If you
would take a rent for the land, it would save you trouble, and we should be
more free." Moreover the same peasants kept putting off, on various
excuses, the building of a cattleyard and barn on the land as agreed upon,
and delayed doing it till the winter.
It is true that Shuraev would have liked to let out the kitchen gardens he
had undertaken in small lots to the peasants. He evidently quite
misunderstood, and apparently intentionally misunderstood, the conditions
upon which the land had been given to him.
Often, too, talking to the peasants and explaining to them all the advantages
of the plan, Levin felt that the peasants heard nothing but the sound of his
voice, and were firmly resolved, whatever he might say, not to let
themselves be taken in. He felt this especially when he talked to the
cleverest of the peasants, Ryezunov, and detected the gleam in Ryezunov's
eyes which showed so plainly both ironical amusement at Levin, and the
firm conviction that, if any one were to be taken in, it would not be he,
Ryezunov. But in spite of all this Levin thought the system worked, and
that by keeping accounts strictly and insisting on his own way, he would
prove to them in the future the advantages of the arrangement, and then the
system would go of itself.
These matters, together with the management of the land still left on his
hands, and the indoor work over his book, so engrossed Levin the whole
summer that he scarcely ever went out shooting. At the end of August he
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heard that the Oblonskys had gone away to Moscow, from their servant
who brought back the side-saddle. He felt that in not answering Darya
Alexandrovna's letter he had by his rudeness, of which he could not think
without a flush of shame, burned his ships, and that he would never go and
see them again. He had been just as rude with the Sviazhskys, leaving them
without saying good-bye. But he would never go to see them again either.
He did not care about that now. The business of reorganizing the farming of
his land absorbed him as completely as though there would never be
anything else in his life. He read the books lent him by Sviazhsky, and
copying out what he had not got, he read both the economic and socialistic
books on the subject, but, as he had anticipated, found nothing bearing on
the scheme he had undertaken. In the books on political economy--in Mill,
for instance, whom he studied first with great ardor, hoping every minute to
find an answer to the questions that were engrossing him--he found laws
deduced from the condition of land culture in Europe; but he did not see
why these laws, which did not apply in Russia, must be general. He saw
just the same thing in the socialistic books: either they were the beautiful
but impracticable fantasies which had fascinated him when he was a
student, or they were attempts at improving, rectifying the economic
position in which Europe was placed, with which the system of land tenure
in Russia had nothing in common. Political economy told him that the laws
by which the wealth of Europe had been developed, and was developing,
were universal and unvarying. Socialism told him that development along
these lines leads to ruin. And neither of them gave an answer, or even a
hint, in reply to the question what he, Levin, and all the Russian peasants
and landowners, were to do with their millions of hands and millions of
acres, to make them as productive as possible for the common weal.
Having once taken the subject up, he read conscientiously everything
bearing on it, and intended in the autumn to go abroad to study land
systems on the spot, in order that he might not on this question be
confronted with what so often met him on various subjects. Often, just as
he was beginning to understand the idea in the mind of anyone he was
talking to, and was beginning to explain his own, he would suddenly be
told: "But Kauffmann, but Jones, but Dubois, but Michelli? You haven't
read them: they've thrashed that question out thoroughly."
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He saw now distinctly that Kauffmann and Michelli had nothing to tell him.
He knew what he wanted. He saw that Russia has splendid land, splendid
laborers, and that in certain cases, as at the peasant's on the way to
Sviazhsky's, the produce raised by the laborers and the land is great--in the
majority of cases when capital is applied in the European way the produce
is small, and that this simply arises from the fact that the laborers want to
work and work well only in their own peculiar way, and that this
antagonism is not incidental but invariable, and has its roots in the national
spirit. He thought that the Russian people whose task it was to colonize and
cultivate vast tracts of unoccupied land, consciously adhered, till all their
land was occupied, to the methods suitable to their purpose, and that their
methods were by no means so bad as was generally supposed. And he
wanted to prove this theoretically in his book and practically on his land.
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