Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy [books to read in your 30s .txt] 📗

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:⁠—

“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.”

“Oh, rent!” Levin cried with horror. “Rent there may be in Europe, where land has been improved by the labor put into it, but with us all the land is deteriorating from the labor put into it⁠—in other words they’re working it out; so there’s no question of rent.”

“How no rent? It’s a law.”

“Then we’re outside the law; rent explains nothing for us, but simply muddles us. No, tell me how there can be a theory of rent?⁠ ⁠…”

“Will you have some junket? Masha, pass us some junket or raspberries.” He turned to his wife. “Extraordinarily late the raspberries are lasting this year.”

And in the happiest frame of