“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.
Chapter 28
Levin was insufferably bored that evening with the ladies; he was stirred
as he had never been before by the idea that the dissatisfaction he was
feeling with his system of managing his land was not an exceptional case,
but the general condition of things in Russia; that the organization of some
relation of the laborers to the soil in which they would work, as with the
peasant he had met half-way to the Sviazhskys’, was not a dream, but a
problem which must be solved. And it seemed to him that the problem
could be solved, and that he ought to try and solve it.
After saying good-night to the ladies, and promising to stay the whole of
the next day, so as to make an expedition on horseback with them to see an
interesting ruin in the crown forest, Levin went, before going to bed, into
his host’s study to get the books on the labor question that Sviazhsky had
offered him. Sviazhsky’s study was a huge room, surrounded by bookcases
and with two tables in it—one a massive writing-table, standing in the
middle of the room, and the other a round table, covered with recent
numbers of reviews and journals in different languages, ranged like the rays
of a star round the lamp. On the writing-table was a stand of drawers
marked with gold lettering, and full of papers of various sorts.
Sviazhsky took out the books, and sat down in a rocking-chair.
“What are you looking at there?” he said to Levin, who was standing at
the round table looking through the reviews.
“Oh, yes, there’s a very interesting article here,” said Sviazhsky of the
review Levin was holding in his hand. “It appears,” he went on, with eager
interest, “that Friedrich was not, after all, the person chiefly responsible for
the partition of Poland. It is proved….”
And with his characteristic clearness, he summed up those new, very
important, and interesting revelations. Although Levin was engrossed at the
moment by his ideas about the problem of the land, he wondered, as he
heard Sviazhsky: “What is there inside of him? And why, why is he
interested in the partition of Poland?” When Sviazhsky had finished, Levin
could not help asking: “Well, and what then?” But there was nothing to
follow. It was simply interesting that it had been proved to be so and so. But
Sviazhsky did not explain, and saw no need to explain why it was
interesting to him.
“Yes, but I was very much interested by your irritable neighbor,” said
Levin, sighing. “He’s a clever fellow, and said a lot that was true.”
“Oh, get along with you! An inveterate supporter of serfdom at heart, like
all of them!” said Sviazhsky.
“Whose marshal you are.”
“Yes, only I marshal them in the other direction,” said Sviazhsky,
laughing.
“I’ll tell you what interests me very much,” said Levin. “He’s right that
our system, that’s to say of rational farming, doesn’t answer, that the only
thing that answers is the money-lender system, like that meek-looking
gentleman’s, or else the very simplest…. Whose fault is it?”
“Our own, of course. Besides, it’s not true that it doesn’t answer. It
answers with Vassiltchikov.”
“A factory….”
“But I really don’t know what it is you are surprised at. The people are at
such a low stage of rational and moral development, that it’s obvious
they’re bound to oppose everything that’s strange to them. In Europe, a
rational system answers because the people are educated; it follows that we
must educate the people—that’s all.”
“But how are we to educate the people?”
“To educate the people three things are needed: schools, and schools, and
schools.”
“But you said yourself the people are at such a low stage of material
development: what help are schools for that?”
“Do you know, you remind me of the story of the advice given to the sick
man—You should try purgative medicine. Taken: worse. Try leeches. Tried
them: worse. Well, then, there’s nothing left but to pray to God. Tried it:
worse. That’s just how it is with us. I say political economy; you say—
worse. I say socialism: worse. Education: worse.”
“But how do schools help matters?”
“They give the peasant fresh wants.”
“Well, that’s a thing I’ve never understood,” Levin replied with heat. “In
what way are schools going to help the people to improve their material
position? You say schools, education, will give them fresh wants. So much
the worse, since they won’t be capable of satisfying them. And in what way
a knowledge of addition and subtraction and the catechism is going to
improve their material condition, I never could make out. The day before
yesterday, I met a peasant woman in the evening with a little baby, and
asked her where she was going. She said she was going to the wise woman;
her boy had screaming fits, so she was taking him to be doctored. I asked,
‘Why, how does the wise woman cure screaming fits?’ ‘She puts the child
on the hen-roost and repeats some charm….’”
“Well, you’re saying it yourself! What’s wanted to prevent her taking her
child to the hen-roost to cure it of screaming fits is just….” Sviazhsky said,
smiling good-humoredly.
“Oh, no!” said Levin with annoyance; “that method of doctoring I merely
meant as a simile for doctoring the people with schools. The people are
poor and ignorant—that we see as surely as the peasant woman sees the
baby is ill because it screams. But in what way this trouble of poverty and
ignorance is to be cured by schools is as incomprehensible as how the hen-
roost affects the screaming. What has to be cured is what makes him poor.”
“Well, in that, at least, you’re in agreement with Spencer, whom you
dislike so much. He says, too, that education may be the consequence of
greater prosperity and comfort, of more frequent washing, as he says, but
not of being able to read and write….”
“Well, then, I’m very glad—or the contrary, very sorry, that I’m in
agreement with Spencer; only I’ve known it a long while. Schools can do
no good; what will do good is an economic organization in which the
people will become richer, will have more leisure—and then there will be
schools.”
“Still, all over Europe now schools are obligatory.”
“And how far do you agree with Spencer yourself about it?” asked Levin.
But there was a gleam of alarm in Sviazhsky’s eyes, and he said smiling:
“No; that screaming story is positively capital! Did you really hear it
yourself?”
Levin saw that he was not to discover the connection between this man’s
life and his thoughts. Obviously he did not care in the least what his
reasoning led him to; all he wanted was the process of reasoning. And he
did not like it when the process of reasoning brought him into a blind alley.
That was the only thing he disliked, and avoided by changing the
conversation to something agreeable and amusing.
All the impressions of the day, beginning with the impression made by
the old peasant, which served, as it were, as the fundamental basis of all the
conceptions and ideas of the day, threw Levin into violent excitement. This
dear good Sviazhsky, keeping a stock of ideas simply for social purposes,
and obviously having some other principles hidden from Levin, while with
the crowd, whose name is legion, he guided public opinion by ideas he did
not share; that irascible country gentleman, perfectly correct in the
conclusions that he had been worried into by life, but wrong in his
exasperation against a whole class, and that the best class in Russia; his
own dissatisfaction with the work he had been doing, and the vague hope of
finding a remedy for all this—all was blended in a sense of inward turmoil,
and anticipation of some solution near at hand.
Left alone in the room assigned him, lying on a spring mattress that
yielded unexpectedly at every movement of his arm or his leg, Levin did
not fall asleep for a long while. Not one conversation with Sviazhsky,
though he had said a great deal that was clever, had interested Levin; but the
conclusions of the irascible landowner required consideration. Levin could
not help recalling every word he had said, and in imagination amending his
own replies.
“Yes, I ought to have said to him: You say that our husbandry does not
answer because the peasant hates improvements, and that they must be
