After wavering between reminiscences and stories about shooting, about dogs, about previous hunts, the conversation hit upon a subject that interested them all. Prompted by Vasenka’s repeated expressions of delight at the charm of the night and the smell of the hay, at the charm of the broken cart (it seemed broken to him because its front end had been detached), the affability of the muzhiks who had given him vodka, the dogs who lay each at its master’s feet, Oblonsky told about the charm of the hunting at Malthus’s place, which he had taken part in during the past summer. Malthus was a well-known railway magnate. Stepan Arkadyich told about the marshlands this Malthus had bought up in Tver province, and how he kept them as a reserve, and what carriages - dog-carts - the hunters drove in, and the tent they set up for lunch by the marsh.
‘I don’t understand you,’ said Levin, sitting up on his hay. ‘How is it you’re not disgusted by those people? I understand that Lafite with lunch is very agreeable, but aren’t you disgusted precisely by that luxury? All those people make their money, as our old tax farmers3 used to, in a way that earns them people’s contempt. They ignore it and then use their dishonestly earned money to buy off the former contempt.’
‘Absolutely right!’ responded Vasenka Veslovsky. ‘Absolutely! Of course, Oblonsky does it out of
‘Not a bit of it,’ Levin sensed Oblonsky’s smile as he said it. ‘I simply don’t consider him more dishonest than any other wealthy merchant or nobleman. He and they both make money by the same hard work and intelligence.’
‘Yes, but where’s the hard work? Is it work to get a concession and resell it?’
‘Of course it’s work. It’s work in this sense, that if it weren’t for him and others like him, there wouldn’t be any railways.’
‘But it’s not the same as the work of a muzhik or a scholar.’
‘Granted, but it is work in the sense that it produces a result - railways. But then you think railways are useless.’
‘No, that’s another question. I’m prepared to admit they’re useful. But any acquisition that doesn’t correspond to the labour expended is dishonest.’
‘But who defines the correspondence?’
‘Acquisition by dishonest means, by cunning,’ said Levin, feeling that he was unable to draw a clear line between honest and dishonest, ‘like the acquisitions of banks,’ he went on. ‘This evil, the acquisition of huge fortunes without work, as it used to be with tax farming, has merely changed its form.
‘Yes, all that may be true and clever ... Lie down, Krak!’ Stepan Arkadyich called to the dog, who was scratching and churning up all the hay. He was obviously convinced of the justice of his theme, and therefore spoke calmly and unhurriedly. ‘But you haven’t drawn the line between honest and dishonest work. That I receive a higher salary than my chief clerk, though he knows the business better than I do - is that dishonest?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, then I’ll tell you: that you get, say, a surplus of five thousand for your farm work, while the muzhik here, our host, however hard he works, will get no more than fifty roubles, is as dishonest as my getting more than my chief clerk, and Malthus getting more than a railway engineer. On the other hand, I see some hostile, absolutely unfounded attitude of society towards those people, and it seems to me there’s envy here ...’
‘No, that’s unjust,’ said Veslovsky. ‘There can be no envy, and there’s something unclean in this whole business.’
‘No, excuse me,’ Levin went on. ‘You say it’s unjust that I get five thousand and a muzhik gets fifty roubles. That’s true, it is unjust, and I feel it, but...’
‘Indeed it is. Why do we eat, drink, hunt, do nothing, while he’s eternally, eternally working?’ said Vasenka, apparently thinking about it clearly for the first time in his life, and therefore quite sincerely.
‘Yes, you feel it, and yet you don’t give him your property,’ said Stepan Arkadyich, as if deliberately provoking Levin.
Lately some sort of secret antagonism had been established between the two brothers-in-law: as if a rivalry had arisen between them, since they had married two sisters, as to whose life was set up better, and that antagonism now showed itself in the conversation, which was beginning to acquire a personal nuance.
‘I don’t give it to him because no one demands it of me, and I couldn’t if I wanted to,’ replied Levin, ‘and there’s nobody to give it to.’
‘Give it to this muzhik; he won’t refuse.’
‘Yes, but how am I going to give it to him? Shall I go and draw up a deed of purchase with him?’
‘I don’t know, but if you’re convinced that you have no right...’
‘I’m not at all convinced. On the contrary, I feel that I don’t have the right to give it up, that I have responsibilities to the land and to my family.’
