Anna Karenina

he carrying out of Levin’s plan presented many difficulties; but he
struggled on, doing his utmost, and attained a result which, though not
what he desired, was enough to enable him, without self-deception, to
believe that the attempt was worth the trouble. One of the chief
difficulties was that the process of cultivating the land was in full
swing, that it was impossible to stop everything and begin it all again
from the beginning, and the machine had to be mended while in motion.

When on the evening that he arrived home he informed the bailiff of his
plans, the latter with visible pleasure agreed with what he said so
long as he was pointing out that all that had been done up to that time
was stupid and useless. The bailiff said that he had said so a long
while ago, but no heed had been paid him. But as for the proposal made
by Levin—to take a part as shareholder with his laborers in each
agricultural undertaking—at this the bailiff simply expressed a
profound despondency, and offered no definite opinion, but began
immediately talking of the urgent necessity of carrying the remaining
sheaves of rye the next day, and of sending the men out for the second
ploughing, so that Levin felt that this was not the time for discussing
it.

On beginning to talk to the peasants about it, and making a proposition
to cede them the land on new terms, he came into collision with the
same great difficulty that they were so much absorbed by the current
work of the day, that they had not time to consider the advantages and
disadvantages of the proposed scheme.

The simple-hearted Ivan, the cowherd, seemed completely to grasp
Levin’s proposal—that he should with his family take a share of the
profits of the cattle-yard—and he was in complete sympathy with the
plan. But when Levin hinted at the future advantages, Ivan’s face
expressed alarm and regret that he could not hear all he had to say,
and he made haste to find himself some task that would admit of no
delay: he either snatched up the fork to pitch the hay out of the pens,
or ran to get water or to clear out the dung.

Another difficulty lay in the invincible disbelief of the peasant that
a landowner’s object could be anything else than a desire to squeeze
all he could out of them. They were firmly convinced that his real aim
(whatever he might say to them) would always be in what he did not say
to them. And they themselves, in giving their opinion, said a great
deal but never said what was their real object. Moreover (Levin felt
that the irascible landowner had been right) the peasants made their
first and unalterable condition of any agreement whatever that they
should not be forced to any new methods of tillage of any kind, nor to
use new implements. They agreed that the modern plough ploughed better,
that the scarifier did the work more quickly, but they found thousands
of reasons that made it out of the question for them to use either of
them; and though he had accepted the conviction that he would have to
lower the standard of cultivation, he felt sorry to give up improved
methods, the advantages of which were so obvious. But in spite of all
these difficulties he got his way, and by autumn the system was
working, or at least so it seemed to him.

At first Levin had thought of giving up the whole farming of the land
just as it was to the peasants, the laborers, and the bailiff on new
conditions of 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 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 anyone 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 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.”

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.