Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 29
of which he could not think without a flush of shame, burned his ships, and that he
would never go and see them again. He had been just as rude with the Sviazhskys,
leaving them without saying good-bye. But he would never go to see them again
either. He did not care about that now. The business of reorganizing the farming of
his land absorbed him as completely as though there would never be anything else
in his life. He read the books lent him by Sviazhsky, and copying out what he had
not got, he read both the economic and socialistic books on the subject, but, as he
had anticipated, found nothing bearing on the scheme he had undertaken. In the
books on political economy–in Mill, for instance, whom he studied first with great
ardor, hoping every minute to find an answer to the questions that were engrossing
him–he found laws deduced from the condition of land culture in Europe; but he
did not see why these laws, which did not apply in Russia, must be general. He
saw just the same thing in the socialistic books: either they were the beautiful but
impracticable fantasies which had fascinated him when he was a student, or they
were attempts at improving, rectifying the economic position in which Europe was
placed, with which the system of land tenure in Russia had nothing in common.
Political economy told him that the laws by which the wealth of Europe had been
developed, and was developing, were universal and unvarying. Socialism told him
that development along these lines leads to ruin. And neither of them gave an answer,
or even a hint, in reply to the question what he, Levin, and all the Russian
peasants and landowners, were to do with their millions of hands and millions of
acres, to make them as productive as possible for the common weal.
Having once taken the subject up, he read conscientiously everything bearing on
it, and intended in the autumn to go abroad to study land systems on the spot, in
order that he might not on this question be confronted with what so often met him
on various subjects. Often, just as he was beginning to understand the idea in the
mind of anyone he was talking to, and was beginning to explain his own, he would
suddenly be told: “But Kauffmann, but Jones, but Dubois, but Michelli? You haven’t
read them: they’ve thrashed that question out thoroughly.”
He saw now distinctly that Kauffmann and Michelli had nothing to tell him. He
knew what he wanted. He saw that Russia has splendid land, splendid laborers, and
that in certain cases, as at the peasant’s on the way to Sviazhsky’s, the produce raised
by the laborers and the land is great–in the majority of cases when capital is applied
in the European way the produce is small, and that this simply arises from the fact
that the laborers want to work and work well only in their own peculiar way, and
that this antagonism is not incidental but invariable, and has its roots in the national
spirit. He thought that the Russian people whose task it was to colonize and cultivate
vast tracts of unoccupied land, consciously adhered, till all their land was occupied,
to the methods suitable to their purpose, and that their methods were by no means
so bad as was generally supposed. And he wanted to prove this theoretically in his
book and practically on his land.
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