Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 27
“That the standard of culture is falling, and that with our present relations to the
peasants there is no possibility of farming on a rational system to yield a profit–that’s
perfectly true,” said he.
“I don’t believe it,” Sviazhsky replied quite seriously; “all I see is that we don’t
know how to cultivate the land, and that our system of agriculture in the serf days
was by no means too high, but too low. We have no machines, no good stock, no efficient
supervision; we don’t even know how to keep accounts. Ask any landowner;
he won’t be able to tell you what crop’s profitable, and what’s not.”
“Italian bookkeeping,” said the gentleman of the gray whiskers ironically. “You
may keep your books as you like, but if they spoil everything for you, there won’t be
any profit.”
“Why do they spoil things? A poor thrashing machine, or your Russian presser,
they will break, but my steam press they don’t break. A wretched Russian nag they’ll
ruin, but keep good dray-horses–they won’t ruin them. And so it is all round. We
must raise our farming to a higher level.”
“Oh, if one only had the means to do it, Nikolay Ivanovitch! It’s all very well for
you; but for me, with a son to keep at the university, lads to be educated at the high
school–how am I going to buy these dray-horses?”
“Well, that’s what the land banks are for.”
“To get what’s left me sold by auction? No, thank you.”
“I don’t agree that it’s necessary or possible to raise the level of agriculture still
higher,” said Levin. “I devote myself to it, and I have means, but I can do nothing.
As to the banks, I don’t know to whom they’re any good. For my part, anyway,
whatever I’ve spent money on in the way of husbandry, it has been a loss: stock–a
loss, machinery–a loss.”
“That’s true enough,” the gentleman with the gray whiskers chimed in, positively
laughing with satisfaction.
“And I’m not the only one,” pursued Levin. “I mix with all the neighboring
landowners, who are cultivating their land on a rational system; they all, with rare
exceptions, are doing so at a loss. Come, tell us how does your land do–does it
pay?” said Levin, and at once in Sviazhsky’s eyes he detected that fleeting expression
of alarm which he had noticed whenever he had tried to penetrate beyond the
outer chambers of Sviazhsky’s mind.
Moreover, this question on Levin’s part was not quite in good faith. Madame Sviazhskaya
had just told him at tea that they had that summer invited a German expert
in bookkeeping from Moscow, who for a consideration of five hundred roubles had
investigated the management of their property, and found that it was costing them
a loss of three thousand odd roubles. She did not remember the precise sum, but it
appeared that the German had worked it out to the fraction of a farthing.
The gray-whiskered landowner smiled at the mention of the profits of Sviazhsky’s
famling, obviously aware how much gain his neighbor and marshal was likely to be
making.
“Possibly it does not pay,” answered Sviazhsky. “That merely proves either that
I’m a bad manager, or that I’ve sunk my capital for the increase of my rents.”
311