Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 27
a yield of nine to one, on the half-crop system it yields three to one. Russia has been
ruined by the emancipation!”
Sviazhsky looked with smiling eyes at Levin, and even made a faint gesture of
irony to him; but Levin did not think the landowner’s words absurd, he understood
them better than he did Sviazhsky. A great deal more of what the gentleman with
the gray whiskers said to show in what way Russia was ruined by the emancipation
struck him indeed as very true, new to him, and quite incontestable. The landowner
unmistakably spoke his own individual thought–a thing that very rarely happens–
and a thought to which he had been brought not by a desire of finding some exercise
for an idle brain, but a thought which had grown up out of the conditions of his
life, which he had brooded over in the solitude of his village, and had considered in
every aspect.
“The point is, don’t you see, that progress of every sort is only made by the use of
authority,” he said, evidently wishing to show he was not without culture. “Take the
reforms of Peter, of Catherine, of Alexander. Take European history. And progress
in agriculture more than anything else–the potato, for instance, that was introduced
among us by force. The wooden plough too wasn’t always used. It was introduced
maybe in the days before the Empire, but it was probably brought in by force. Now,
in our own day, we landowners in the serf times used various improvements in
our husbandry: drying machines and thrashing machines, and carting manure and
all the modern implements–all that we brought into use by our authority, and the
peasants opposed it at first, and ended by imitating us. Now, by the abolition of
serfdom we have been deprived of our authority; and so our husbandry, where it had
been raised to a high level, is bound to sink to the most savage primitive condition.
That’s how I see it.”
“But why so? If it’s rational, you’ll be able to keep up the same system with hired
labor,” said Sviazhsky.
“We’ve no power over them. With whom am I going to work the system, allow
me to ask?”
“There it is–the labor force–the chief element in agriculture,” thought Levin.
“With laborers.”
“The laborers won’t work well, and won’t work with good implements. Our laborer
can do nothing but get drunk like a pig, and when he’s drunk he ruins everything
you give him. He makes the horses ill with too much water, cuts good harness,
barters the tires of the wheels for drink, drops bits of iron into the thrashing machine,
so as to break it. He loathes the sight of anything that’s not after his fashion. And
that’s how it is the whole level of husbandry has fallen. Lands gone out of cultivation,
overgrown with weeds, or divided among the peasants, and where millions
of bushels were raised you get a hundred thousand; the wealth of the country has
decreased. If the same thing had been done, but with care that...”
And he proceeded to unfold his own scheme of emancipation by means of which
these drawbacks might have been avoided.
This did not interest Levin, but when he had finished, Levin went back to his
first position, and, addressing Sviazhsky, and trying to draw him into expressing his
serious opinion:–
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