The gentleman with the gray whiskers was obviously an inveterate
adherent of serfdom and a devoted agriculturist, who had lived all his life in
the country. Levin saw proofs of this in his dress, in the old-fashioned
threadbare coat, obviously not his everyday attire, in his shrewd, deep-set
eyes, in his idiomatic, fluent Russian, in the imperious tone that had become
habitual from long use, and in the resolute gestures of his large, red,
sunburnt hands, with an old betrothal ring on the little finger.
Chapter 27
“If I’d only the heart to throw up what’s been set going … such a lot of
trouble wasted … I’d turn my back on the whole business, sell up, go off
like Nikolay Ivanovitch … to hear La Belle Hélène,” said the landowner, a
pleasant smile lighting up his shrewd old face.
“But you see you don’t throw it up,” said Nikolay Ivanovitch Sviazhsky;
“so there must be something gained.”
“The only gain is that I live in my own house, neither bought nor hired.
Besides, one keeps hoping the people will learn sense. Though, instead of
that, you’d never believe it—the drunkenness, the immorality! They keep
chopping and changing their bits of land. Not a sight of a horse or a cow.
The peasant’s dying of hunger, but just go and take him on as a laborer,
he’ll do his best to do you a mischief, and then bring you up before the
justice of the peace.”
“But then you make complaints to the justice too,” said Sviazhsky.
“I lodge complaints? Not for anything in the world! Such a talking, and
such a to-do, that one would have cause to regret it. At the works, for
instance, they pocketed the advance-money and made off. What did the
justice do? Why, acquitted them. Nothing keeps them in order but their own
communal court and their village elder. He’ll flog them in the good old
style! But for that there’d be nothing for it but to give it all up and run
away.”
Obviously the landowner was chaffing Sviazhsky, who, far from
resenting it, was apparently amused by it.
“But you see we manage our land without such extreme measures,” said
he, smiling: “Levin and I and this gentleman.”
He indicated the other landowner.
“Yes, the thing’s done at Mihail Petrovitch’s, but ask him how it’s done.
Do you call that a rational system?” said the landowner, obviously rather
proud of the word “rational.”
“My system’s very simple,” said Mihail Petrovitch, “thank God. All my
management rests on getting the money ready for the autumn taxes, and the
peasants come to me, ‘Father, master, help us!’ Well, the peasants are all
one’s neighbors; one feels for them. So one advances them a third, but one
says: ‘Remember, lads, I have helped you, and you must help me when I
need it—whether it’s the sowing of the oats, or the haycutting, or the
harvest’; and well, one agrees, so much for each taxpayer—though there are
dishonest ones among them too, it’s true.”
Levin, who had long been familiar with these patriarchal methods,
exchanged glances with Sviazhsky and interrupted Mihail Petrovitch,
turning again to the gentleman with the gray whiskers.
“Then what do you think?” he asked; “what system is one to adopt
nowadays?”
“Why, manage like Mihail Petrovitch, or let the land for half the crop or
for rent to the peasants; that one can do—only that’s just how the general
prosperity of the country is being ruined. Where the land with serf-labor
and good management gave a yield of nine to one, on the half-crop system
it yields three to one. Russia has been ruined by the emancipation!”
Sviazhsky looked with smiling eyes at Levin, and even made a faint
gesture of irony to him; but Levin did not think the landowner’s words
absurd, he understood them better than he did Sviazhsky. A great deal more
of what the gentleman with the gray whiskers said to show in what way
Russia was ruined by the emancipation struck him indeed as very true, new
to him, and quite incontestable. The landowner unmistakably spoke his own
individual thought—a thing that very rarely happens—and a thought to
which he had been brought not by a desire of finding some exercise for an
idle brain, but a thought which had grown up out of the conditions of his
life, which he had brooded over in the solitude of his village, and had
considered in every aspect.
“The point is, don’t you see, that progress of every sort is only made by
the use of authority,” he said, evidently wishing to show he was not without
culture. “Take the reforms of Peter, of Catherine, of Alexander. Take
European history. And progress in agriculture more than anything else—the
potato, for instance, that was introduced among us by force. The wooden
plough too wasn’t always used. It was introduced maybe in the days before
the Empire, but it was probably brought in by force. Now, in our own day,
we landowners in the serf times used various improvements in our
husbandry: drying machines and thrashing machines, and carting manure
and all the modern implements—all that we brought into use by our
authority, and the peasants opposed it at first, and ended by imitating us.
Now, by the abolition of serfdom we have been deprived of our authority;
and so our husbandry, where it had been raised to a high level, is bound to
sink to the most savage primitive condition. That’s how I see it.”
“But why so? If it’s rational, you’ll be able to keep up the same system
with hired labor,” said Sviazhsky.
“We’ve no power over them. With whom am I going to work the system,
allow me to ask?”
“There it is—the labor force—the chief element in agriculture,” thought
Levin.
“With laborers.”
“The laborers won’t work well, and won’t work with good implements.
Our laborer can do nothing but get drunk like a pig, and when he’s drunk he
ruins everything you give him. He makes the horses ill with too much
water, cuts good harness, barters the tires of the wheels for drink, drops bits
of iron into the thrashing machine, so as to break it. He loathes the sight of
anything that’s not after his fashion. And that’s how it is the whole level of
husbandry has fallen. Lands gone out of cultivation, overgrown with weeds,
or divided among the peasants, and where millions of bushels were raised
you get a hundred thousand; the wealth of the country has decreased. If the
same thing had been done, but with care that….”
And he proceeded to unfold his own scheme of emancipation by means
of which these drawbacks might have been avoided.
This did not interest Levin, but when he had finished, Levin went back to
his first position, and, addressing Sviazhsky, and trying to draw him into
expressing his serious opinion:—
“That the standard of culture is falling, and that with our present relations
to the peasants there is no possibility of farming on a rational system to
yield a profit—that’s perfectly true,” said he.
“I don’t believe it,” Sviazhsky replied quite seriously; “all I see is that we
don’t know how to cultivate the land, and that our system of agriculture in
the serf days was by no means too high, but too low. We have no machines,
no good stock, no efficient supervision; we don’t even know how to keep
accounts. Ask any landowner; he won’t be able to tell you what crop’s
profitable, and what’s not.”
“Italian bookkeeping,” said the gentleman of the gray whiskers ironically.
“You may keep your books as you like, but if they spoil everything for you,
there won’t be any profit.”
“Why do they spoil things? A poor thrashing machine, or your Russian
presser, they will break, but my steam press they don’t break. A wretched
Russian nag they’ll ruin, but keep good dray-horses—they won’t ruin them.
And so it is all round. We must raise our farming to a higher level.”
“Oh, if one only had the means to do it, Nikolay Ivanovitch! It’s all very
well for you; but for me, with a son to keep at the university, lads to be
educated at the high school—how am I going to buy these dray-horses?”
“Well, that’s what the land banks are for.”
“To get what’s left me sold by auction? No, thank you.”
“I don’t agree that it’s necessary or possible to raise the level of
agriculture still higher,” said Levin. “I devote myself to it, and I have
means, but I can do nothing. As to the banks, I don’t know to whom they’re
any good. For my part, anyway, whatever I’ve spent money on in the way
of husbandry, it has been a loss: stock—a loss, machinery—a loss.”
“That’s true enough,” the gentleman with the gray whiskers chimed in,
positively laughing with satisfaction.
“And I’m not the only one,” pursued Levin. “I mix with all the
neighboring landowners, who are cultivating their land on a rational system;
they all, with rare exceptions, are doing so at a loss. Come, tell us how does
your land do—does it pay?” said Levin, and at once in Sviazhsky’s eyes he
detected that fleeting expression of alarm which he had noticed whenever
he had tried to penetrate beyond the outer chambers of Sviazhsky’s mind.
Moreover, this question on Levin’s part was not quite in good faith.
Madame Sviazhskaya had just told him at tea that they had that summer
invited a German expert in bookkeeping from Moscow, who for a
consideration of five hundred roubles had investigated the management of
their property, and found that it was costing them a loss of three thousand
odd roubles. She did not remember the precise sum, but it appeared that the
German had worked it out to the fraction of a farthing.
The gray-whiskered landowner smiled at the mention of the profits of
Sviazhsky’s farming, obviously aware how much gain his neighbor and
marshal was likely to be making.
“Possibly it does not pay,” answered Sviazhsky. “That merely proves
either that I’m a bad manager, or that I’ve sunk my capital for the increase
of my rents.”
“Oh, rent!” Levin cried with horror. “Rent there may be in Europe, where
land has been improved by the labor put into it, but with us all the land is
deteriorating from the labor put into it—in other words they’re working it
out; so there’s no question of rent.”
“How no rent? It’s a law.”
“Then we’re outside the law; rent explains nothing for us, but simply
muddles us. No, tell me how there can be a theory of rent?…”
“Will you have some junket? Masha, pass us some junket or raspberries.”
He turned to his wife. “Extraordinarily late the raspberries are lasting this
year.”
And in the happiest frame of mind Sviazhsky got up and walked off,
apparently supposing the conversation to have ended at the very point when
to Levin it seemed that it was only just beginning.
Having lost his antagonist, Levin continued the conversation with the
gray-whiskered landowner, trying to prove to him that all the difficulty
arises from the fact that we don’t find out the peculiarities and habits of our
laborer; but the landowner, like all men who think independently and in
isolation, was slow in taking in any other person’s idea, and particularly
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.
“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 forms 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.”
