‘How can new forms be found?’ said Sviyazhsky, who, having eaten his curds and lit a cigarette, again came over to the arguers. ‘All possible relations to the workforce have been defined and studied,’ he said. ‘That leftover of barbarism - the primitive community with its mutual guarantees - is falling apart of itself, serfdom is abolished, there remains only free labour, and its forms are defined and ready, and we must accept them. The hired worker, the day-labourer, the farmhand - you won’t get away from that.’
‘But Europe is dissatisfied with these forms.’
‘Dissatisfied and searching for new ones. And she’ll probably find them.’
‘That’s just what I’m talking about,’ replied Levin. ‘Why shouldn’t we search for them on our own?’
‘Because it’s the same as inventing new ways of building railways. They’re invented and ready.’
‘But what if they don’t suit us? What if they’re stupid?’ said Levin.
And again he noticed the look of fear in Sviyazhsky’s eyes.
‘Yes, right: we’ll win at a canter, we’ve found what Europe’s searching for! I know all that, but, pardon me, do you know what’s been done in Europe about the question of workers’ conditions?’
‘No, very little.’
‘This question now occupies the best minds in Europe. The Schulze-Delitsch tendency ... Also all the vast literature on the workers question, on the most liberal Lassalle tendency ... The Mulhouse system is already a fact, you surely know that.’27
‘I have an idea, but a very vague one.’
‘No, you only say so; you surely know it all as well as I do. Of course, I’m no social professor, but it once interested me, and if it interests you, you really should look into it.’
‘But what did they arrive at?’
‘Excuse me ...’
The landowners got up, and Sviyazhsky, again stopping Levin in his unpleasant habit of prying beyond the reception rooms of his mind, went to see his guests off.
XXVIII
Levin was insufferably bored with the ladies that evening: he was troubled as never before by the thought that the dissatisfaction he now felt with farming was not his exceptional situation but the general condition of things in Russia, that to establish relations with workers so that they would work like the muzhik he had met half-way there was not a dream but a problem that had to be solved. And it seemed to him that this problem could be solved and that he must try to do it.
Having taken leave of the ladies and promised to stay the whole of the next day so that they could go together on horseback to look at an interesting landslide in the state forest, Levin stopped at his host’s study before going to bed to take some books on the workers question that Sviyazhsky had offered him. Sviyazhsky’s study was a huge room lined with bookcases and had two tables in it - one a massive desk that stood in the middle of the room, and the other a round one on which the latest issues of newspapers and magazines in different languages were laid out in a star-like pattern around a lamp. By the desk was a stand with boxes of all sorts of files marked with gilt labels.
Sviyazhsky got the books out and sat down in a rocking chair.
‘What are you looking at?’ he said to Levin, who stood by the round table looking through a magazine.
‘Ah, yes, there’s a very interesting article in it,’ Sviyazhsky said of the magazine Levin was holding. ‘It turns out,’ he added with cheerful animation, ‘that the chief culprit in the partition of Poland was not Frederick at all.28 It turns out ...’
And, with his particular clarity, he briefly recounted these new, very important and interesting discoveries. Despite the fact that Levin was now most occupied with the thought of farming, he kept asking himself as he listened to his host: ‘What’s got into him? And why, why is he interested in the partition of Poland?’ When Sviyazhsky finished, Levin involuntarily asked: ‘Well, what then?’ But there was nothing. The only interesting thing was that ‘it had turned out’. But Sviyazhsky did not explain or find it necessary to explain why he found it interesting.
‘Yes, but I was very interested in the angry landowner,’ Levin said with a sigh. ‘He’s intelligent and said many right things.’
‘Ah, go on! An inveterate secret serf-owner, as they all are!’ said Sviyazhsky.
‘Of whom you are the marshal ...’
‘Yes, only I’m marshalling them in the other direction,’ Sviyazhsky said, laughing.
‘What interests me so much is this,’ said Levin. ‘He’s right that our cause, that is, rational farming, doesn’t work, that only usurious farming works, as with that silent one, or else the simplest kind. Who is to blame for that?’
‘We are, of course. And besides, it’s not true that it doesn’t work. At Vassilchikov’s it works.’
‘A mill...’
‘But all the same I don’t know what you’re surprised at. The peasantry stand at such a low level of both material and moral development that they apparently must oppose everything foreign to them. In Europe rational farming works because the peasantry are educated; which means that with us the peasantry have to be educated - that’s all.’
