forced on him by authority. If no system of husbandry answered at all
without these improvements, you would be quite right. But the only system
that does answer is where laborer is working in accordance with his habits,
just as on the old peasant’s land half-way here. Your and our general
dissatisfaction with the system shows that either we are to blame or the
laborers. We have gone our way—the European way—a long while,
without asking ourselves about the qualities of our labor force. Let us try to
look upon the labor force not as an abstract force, but as the Russian
peasant with his instincts, and we shall arrange our system of culture in
accordance with that. Imagine, I ought to have said to him, that you have
the same system as the old peasant has, that you have found means of
making your laborers take an interest in the success of the work, and have
found the happy mean in the way of improvements which they will admit,
and you will, without exhausting the soil, get twice or three times the yield
you got before. Divide it in halves, give half as the share of labor, the
surplus left you will be greater, and the share of labor will be greater too.
And to do this one must lower the standard of husbandry and interest the
laborers in its success. How to do this?—that’s a matter of detail; but
undoubtedly it can be done.”
This idea threw Levin into a great excitement. He did not sleep half the
night, thinking over in detail the putting of his idea into practice. He had not
intended to go away next day, but he now determined to go home early in
the morning. Besides, the sister-in-law with her low-necked bodice aroused
in him a feeling akin to shame and remorse for some utterly base action.
Most important of all—he must get back without delay: he would have to
make haste to put his new project to the peasants before the sowing of the
winter wheat, so that the sowing might be undertaken on a new basis. He
had made up his mind to revolutionize his whole system.
Chapter 29
The 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.
