‘All it adds up to is that I live at home, don’t buy anything, don’t rent anything. And one keeps hoping the peasantry will see reason. Otherwise you wouldn’t believe it - the drunkenness, the depravity! Everybody’s separate, not a horse, not a cow left. He may be starving to death, but hire him to work and he’ll do his best to muck it up, and then go and complain to the justice of the peace.’23
‘But you’ll complain to the justice of the peace as well,’ said Sviyazhsky.
‘I’ll complain? Not for anything in the world! There’d be so much talk, I’d be sorry I ever did! Look at that mill - they took the down-payment and left. And the justice of the peace? He acquitted them. It’s all held together by the communal court and the headman. That one will give him a good old-fashioned whipping. If it wasn’t for that - drop everything! Flee to the ends of the world!’
Obviously, the landowner was teasing Sviyazhsky, but Sviyazhsky not only did not get angry, but clearly found it amusing.
‘Yes, and yet we carry on our farming without these measures,’ he said, smiling, ‘me, Levin, him.’
He pointed to the other landowner.
‘Yes, things are going well for Mikhail Petrovich, but ask him how! Is it rational farming?’ the landowner said, obviously flaunting the word ‘rational’.
‘My farming is simple,’ said Mikhail Petrovich. ‘Thank God. My method is just to make sure that the cash to pay the autumn taxes is there. The muzhiks come: Father, dear, help us out! Well, they’re all neighbours, these muzhiks, I feel sorry for them. So I give them enough to pay the first third, only I say: Remember, boys, I helped you, so you help me when there’s a need - sowing oats, making hay, harvesting - well, and I talk them into so much work for each tax paid. There’s some of them are shameless, it’s true.’
Levin, who had long known these patriarchal ways, exchanged glances with Sviyazhsky and interrupted Mikhail Petrovich, addressing the landowner with the grey moustache again.
‘Then what do you think?’ he asked. ‘How should farming be done now?’
‘Why, the same way Mikhail Petrovich does it: either let the land for half the crop, or rent it to the muzhiks. It can be done, but that way the common wealth of the state is ruined. Where with serf labour and good management my land produced ninefold, it will produce threefold when let for half the crop. The emancipation24 has ruined Russia!’
Sviyazhsky glanced at Levin with smiling eyes and even gave him a barely noticeable mocking sign, but Levin did not find the landowner’s words ridiculous - he understood them better than he did Sviyazhsky. And much of what the landowner went on to say, proving why Russia had been ruined by the emancipation, seemed to him very true, new and irrefutable. The landowner was obviously voicing his own thought, which happens rarely, and this thought had not been arrived at by a desire to somehow occupy an idle mind, but had grown out of the conditions of his own life, had been hatched out in his country solitude and considered on all sides.
‘The point, kindly note, is that all progress is achieved by authority alone,’ he said, apparently wishing to show that he was no stranger to education. ‘Take the reforms of Peter, Catherine, Alexander.25 Take European history. The more so with progress in agricultural methods. Take the potato - even it was introduced here by force. The wooden plough hasn’t always been in use either. It was probably introduced before the tsars, and also introduced by force. Now, in our time, under serfdom, we landowners carried on our farming with improvements. Drying kilns, winnowers, the carting of dung, and all the tools - we introduced everything by our authority, and the muzhiks first resisted and then imitated us. Now, sirs, with the abolition of serfdom, our authority has been taken away, and our farming, where it was brought to a high level, is bound to sink to the most savage, primitive condition. That’s how I understand it.’
‘But why so? If it’s rational, you can carry it on with hired help,’ said Sviyazhsky.
‘There’s no authority. Who will I carry it on with, may I ask?’
‘There it is - the work force, the chief element in farming,’ thought Levin.
‘With paid workers.’
‘Workers don’t want to do good work or to do good work with tools. Our worker knows one thing only - how to get drunk as a pig, and while drunk to break everything you give him. He’ll overwater the horses, snap good harness, dismount a wheel with a tyre and sell it for drink, put a pintle into the thresher so as to break it. He loathes the sight of things that aren’t to his liking. That causes the whole level of the farming to sink. Plots are abandoned, overgrown with wormwood or given up to muzhiks, and where millions of bushels used to be produced, now it’s a few hundred thousand - the common wealth is diminished. If the same thing was done, only with calculation ...’
And he began developing his own plan of liberation, which would have eliminated these inconveniences.
