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.
Chapter 27
‘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
