That did not interest Levin, but when he finished, Levin went back to his first proposition and said, addressing Sviyazhsky and trying to provoke him to voice his serious opinion:
‘That the level of farming is sinking and that, given our relation to the workers, it is impossible to engage in rational farming profitably, is perfectly correct,’ he said.
‘I don’t find it so,’ Sviyazhsky retorted, seriously now. ‘I only see that we don’t know how to go about farming and that, on the contrary, the level of farming we carried on under serfdom was in fact not too high but too low. We have neither machines, nor good working stock, nor real management, nor do we know how to count. Ask any farm owner - he won’t know what’s profitable for him and what isn’t.’
‘Italian bookkeeping,’ the landowner said ironically. ‘No matter how you count, once they break everything, there won’t be any profit.’
‘Why break? A worthless thresher, that Russian treadle of yours, they will break, but not my steam thresher. A Russian horse - what’s that breed? the Tosscan, good for tossing cans at - they’ll spoil for you, but introduce Percherons, or at least our Bitiugs,26 and they won’t spoil them. And so with everything. We must raise our farming higher.’
‘If only we could, Nikolai Ivanych! It’s all very well for you, but I have a son at the university, the younger ones are in boarding school - I can’t go buying Percherons.’
‘That’s what banks are for.’
‘So that the last thing I have falls under the hammer? No, thank you!’
‘I don’t agree that the level of farming must and can be raised higher,’ said Levin. ‘I’m engaged in it, and I have the means, and I’ve been unable to do anything. I don’t know what use the banks are. With me, at least, whatever I’ve spent money on in farming has all been a loss - the livestock were a loss, the machinery a loss.’
‘That’s true,’ the landowner with the grey moustache confirmed, even laughing with pleasure.
‘And I’m not the only one,’ Levin went on. ‘I can refer to all the farmers who conduct their business rationally; every one of them, with rare exceptions, operates at a loss. Tell me, now, is your farming profitable?’ said Levin, and he immediately noticed in Sviyazhsky’s eyes that momentary look of fear that he noticed whenever he wanted to penetrate beyond the reception rooms of Sviyazhsky’s mind.
Besides, on Levin’s part the question had not been asked in good conscience. Over tea the hostess had just told him that they had invited a German from Moscow that summer, an expert in bookkeeping, who for a fee of five hundred roubles had done the accounts of their farm and discovered that they were operating at a loss of three thousand and some roubles. She did not recall the exact figure, but it seems the German had it calculated down to the quarter kopeck.
The landowner smiled at the mention of the profits of Sviyazhsky’s farming, apparently knowing what sort of gains his neighbour and marshal might have.
‘Maybe it’s not profitable,’ Sviyazhsky replied. ‘That only proves that I’m a bad manager, or that I spend the capital to increase the true rent.’
‘Ah, the true rent!’ Levin exclaimed with horror. ‘Maybe true rent exists in Europe, where the land has been improved by the labour put into it; but with us the land all becomes worse from the labour put into it - that is, from being ploughed - and so there’s no true rent.’
‘What do you mean, no true rent? It’s a law.’
‘Then we’re outside the law. True rent won’t clarify anything for us; on the contrary, it will confuse things. No, tell us, how can the theory of true rent ...’
‘Would you like some curds? Masha, send us some curds here, or raspberries,’ he turned to his wife. ‘This year the raspberries went on remarkably late.’
And in a most pleasant state of mind, Sviyazhsky got up and left, apparently assuming that the conversation had ended, at the very place where Levin thought it was just beginning.
Deprived of his interlocutor, Levin went on talking with the landowner, trying to prove to him that all the difficulty came from our not knowing the properties and habits of our worker; but the landowner, like all people who think originally and solitarily, was slow to understand another man’s thought and especially partial to his own. He insisted that the Russian muzhik was a swine and liked swinishness, and that to move him out of swinishness, authority was needed, and there was none, a stick was needed, and we suddenly became so liberal that we replaced the thousand-year-old stick with some sort of lawyers and lock-ups, in which worthless, stinking muzhiks are fed good soup and allotted so many cubic feet of air.
‘Why do you think,’ said Levin, trying to return to the question, ‘that it’s impossible to find relations with the workforce that would make work productive?’
‘That will never be done with the Russian peasantry without a stick! There’s no authority,’ the landowner replied.
