War And Peace полностью

Although he had been forced into farming to begin with, he soon became so enthusiastic that it became his favourite occupation to the exclusion of almost everything else. Nikolay was a farmer of the old school; he didn’t like new-fangled ideas, especially the English ones that were coming in at that time. He laughed at theoretical studies of estate management, and had little time for factory processing, expensive production methods, or seed that cost a fortune. And he refused to specialize in anything, preferring to keep an eye on the overall estate rather than any of its parts. And on the estate itself what mattered most to his mind was not the nitrogen or oxygen content of the soil or air, not a new kind of plough or manure, but the vital agencies that made the hydrogen, the oxygen, the plough and the manure work effectively, and that meant the peasants who did the work. When Nikolay took up farming, and began to investigate its different branches, it was the peasant that claimed most of his attention. He saw the peasant as something more than a useful tool; he was an end in himself and a source of good judgement. He began by closely observing the peasants in an attempt to understand what they wanted, and what they considered good and bad practice. He went through the motions of making arrangements and giving out orders, but what he was really doing was learning from the peasants by following their methods, their language and their notions of what was good and bad. And it was only when he came to understand the peasants’ appetites and aspirations, when he had learnt their way of speaking and the hidden meaning behind their words, when he felt a kind of kinship with them, that he began to manage them with confidence, in other words to fulfil the obligation towards them that was demanded of him. And Nikolay’s management produced the most brilliant results.

The first thing Nikolay did when he took over the estate was to make three faultless appointments that came to him in a flash of inspired insight; he chose a bailiff, a village elder and a peasant representative, all of whom would have been elected by the peasants themselves if the choice had been theirs, and these leading figures were never replaced. Before researching the chemical properties of manure, or ‘dabbling in debits and credits’ (his description of book-keeping), he found out how many cattle the peasants possessed and tried everything he could think of to get the numbers up. He kept the peasants together in large family groupings and wouldn’t allow them to split up into separate households. He was equally hard on the lazy, the dissolute and the feckless, and tried to have them ejected from the community. When it came to sowing and reaping the hay and corn, he took as much care over the peasants’ fields as he did over his own. And few landowners achieved what Nikolay did in terms of early sowing and reaping, and the overall yield.

He wouldn’t have anything to do with the house serfs because he saw them as scroungers, and everybody said he spoilt them by neglect. When a decision had to be taken and a house serf was involved, especially if one of them had to be punished, he could never make his mind up and consulted the entire household, but whenever it was possible to send a house serf for conscription instead of a peasant he did that with no compunction. In all his dealings with the peasants he never experienced the slightest hesitation. Every order he gave would, to his certain knowledge, be approved by a massive majority.

He never allowed himself either to dole out extra work or punishment just because he felt like it or to let people off or give them rewards out of personal preference. He couldn’t have said what his standards were when judging what to do and what not to do, but standards there were, firmly fixed in his heart and mind.

Whenever anything went wrong or someone made a mess of things he would complain long and hard about ‘these Russian peasants of ours’, and he himself thought he couldn’t stand them, but actually he loved ‘these Russian peasants of ours’ and their way of life with every fibre of his being, and it was only by loving them that he found and adopted the only way of doing things on the estate that was guaranteed to produce good results.