These matters, along with the rest of the farming, which had been left in his hands, along with the study-work on his book, so occupied Levin’s summer that he hardly ever went hunting. He learned at the end of August, from the man who brought back the side-saddle, that the Oblonskys had returned to Moscow. He felt that by not answering Darya Alexandrovna’s letter, by his impoliteness, which he could not recall without a flush of shame, he had burned his boats and could never visit them again. He had done the same with the Sviyazhskys by leaving without saying goodbye. But he would never visit them again either. It made no difference to him now. The business of his new system of farming occupied him as nothing ever had before in his life. He read the books Sviyazhsky gave him, and, ordering what he did not have, also read books on political economy and socialism concerned with the same subject and, as he expected, found nothing that related to the business he had undertaken. In the politico-economic books - in Mill,30 for instance, whom he studied at first with great fervour, hoping at any moment to find a solution to the questions that preoccupied him - he found laws deduced from the situation of European farming; but he simply could not see why those laws, not applicable in Russia, should be universal. He saw the same in the socialist books: these were either beautiful but inapplicable fantasies, such as he had been enthusiastic about while still a student, or corrections, mendings of the state of affairs in which Europe stood and with which Russian agriculture had nothing in common. Political economy said that the laws according to which European wealth had developed and was developing were universal and unquestionable. Socialist teaching said that development according to these laws led to ruin. And neither the one nor the other gave, not only an answer, but even the slightest hint of what he, Levin, and all Russian peasants and landowners were to do with their millions of hands and acres so that they would be most productive for the common good.
Once he got down to this matter, he conscientiously read through everything related to his subject and planned to go abroad in the autumn to study the matter on site, so that the same thing would not happen to him with this question as had happened so often with various other questions. Just as he was beginning to understand his interlocutor’s thought and to explain his own, he would suddenly be told: ‘And what about Kauffmann, and Jones, and Dubois, and Miccelli?31 You haven’t read them? You should - they’ve worked out this whole question.’
He now saw clearly that Kauffmann and Miccelli had nothing to tell him. He knew what he wanted. He saw that Russia had excellent land, excellent workers, and that in some cases, as with the muzhik half-way there, workers and land produced much, but in the majority of cases, when capital was employed European-style, they produced little, and that this came only from the fact that the workers wanted to work and to work well in the one way natural to them, and that their resistance was not accidental but constant and rooted in the spirit of the peasantry. He thought that the Russian peasantry, called upon to inhabit and cultivate vast unoccupied spaces, consciously kept to the methods necessary for it until all the lands were occupied, and that these methods were not at all as bad as was usually thought. And he wanted to prove it theoretically in his book and in practice on his estate.
XXX
At the end of September lumber was delivered for the building of the cattle-yard on the land allotted to the association, and the butter from the cows was sold and the profits distributed. The practical side of the farming was going excellently, or at least it seemed so to Levin. Now, to explain the whole thing theoretically and to finish his book, which, according to Levin’s dreams, was not only to bring about a revolution in political economy but was to abolish that science altogether and initiate a new science - of the relation of the peasantry to the land - the only thing necessary was to go abroad and study on site everything that had been done there in that direction and to find convincing proofs that everything done there was not what was needed. Levin was waiting only for the delivery of the wheat, so as to get the money and go abroad. But rain set in, which prevented the harvesting of the remaining grain and potatoes and put a stop to all work, even the delivery of the wheat. Mud made the roads impassable; two mills were washed away by floods, and the weather was getting worse and worse.
On September 30th, the sun came out in the morning and, hoping for good weather, Levin resolutely began to prepare for departure. He ordered the wheat to be measured out, sent the steward to the merchant to get the money and went round the estate himself to give final orders before his departure.
