Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 15
Chapter 15
THEY had just come back from Moscow, and were glad to be alone. He was sitting
at the writing table in his study, writing. She, wearing the dark lilac dress she
had worn during the first days of their married life, and put on again today, a dress
particularly remembered and loved by him, was sitting on the sofa, the same oldfashioned
leather sofa which had always stood in the study in Levin’s father’s and
grandfather’s days. She was sewing at broderie anglaise. He thought and wrote, never
losing the happy consciousness of her presence. His work, both on the land and on
the book, in which the principles of the new land system were to be laid down, had
not been abandoned; but just as formerly these pursuits and ideas had seemed to
him petty and trivial in comparison with the darkness that overspread all life, now
they seemed as unimportant and petty in comparison with the life that lay before
him suffused with the brilliant light of happiness. He went on with his work, but he
felt now that the center of gravity of his attention had passed to something else, and
that consequently he looked at his work quite differently and more clearly. Formerly
this work had been for him an escape from life. Formerly he had felt that without this
work his life would be too gloomy. Now these pursuits were necessary for him that
life might not be too uniformly bright. Taking up his manuscript, reading through
what he had written, he found with pleasure that the work was worth his working
at. Many of his old ideas seemed to him superfluous and extreme, but many blanks
became distinct to him when he reviewed the whole thing in his memory. He was
writing now a new chapter on the causes of the present disastrous condition of agriculture
in Russia. He maintained that the poverty of Russia arises not merely from
the anomalous distribution of landed property and misdirected reforms, but that
what had contributed of late years to this result was the civilization from without
abnormally grafted upon Russia, especially facilities of communication, as railways,
leading to centralization in towns, the development of luxury, and the consequent
development of manufactures, credit and its accompaniment of speculation–all to
the detriment of agriculture. It seemed to him that in a normal development of
wealth in a state all these phenomena would arise only when a considerable amount
of labor had been put into agriculture, when it had come under regular, or at least
definite, conditions; that the wealth of a country ought to increase proportionally,
and especially in such a way that other sources of wealth should not outstrip agriculture;
that in harmony with a certain stage of agriculture there should be means
of communication corresponding to it, and that in our unsettled condition of the
land, railways, called into being by political and not by economic needs, were premature,
and instead of promoting agriculture, as was expected of them, they were
competing with agriculture and promoting the development of manufactures and
credit, and so arresting its progress; and that just as the one-sided and premature
development of one organ in an animal would hinder its general development, so
in the general development of wealth in Russia, credit, facilities of communication,
manufacturing activity, indubitably necessary in Europe, where they had arisen in
their proper time, had with us only done harm, by throwing into the background the
chief question calling for settlement–the question of the organization of agriculture.
While he was writing his ideas she was thinking how unnaturally cordial her husband
had been to young Prince Tcharsky, who had, with great want of tact, flirted
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