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

mind Sviazhsky got up and walked off, apparently supposing the conversation to have ended at the very point when to Levin it seemed that it was only just beginning.

Having lost his antagonist, Levin continued the conversation with the gray-whiskered landowner, trying to prove to him that all the difficulty arises from the fact that we don’t find out the peculiarities and habits of our laborer; but the landowner, like all men who think independently and in isolation, was slow in taking in any other person’s idea, and particularly partial to his own. He stuck to it that the Russian peasant is a swine and likes swinishness, and that to get him out of his swinishness one must have authority, and there is none; one must have the stick, and we have become so liberal that we have all of a sudden replaced the stick that served us for a thousand years by lawyers and model prisons, where the worthless, stinking peasant is fed on good soup and has a fixed allowance of cubic feet of air.

“What makes you think,” said Levin, trying to get back to the question, “that it’s impossible to find some relation to the laborer in which the labor would become productive?”

“That never could be so with the Russian peasantry; we’ve no power over them,” answered the landowner.

“How can new conditions be found?” said Sviazhsky. Having eaten some junket and lighted a cigarette, he came back to the discussion. “All possible relations to the labor force have been defined and studied,” he said. “The relic of barbarism, the primitive commune with each guarantee for all, will disappear of itself; serfdom has been abolished⁠—there remains nothing but free labor, and its forms are fixed and ready made, and must be adopted. Permanent hands, day-laborers, rammers⁠—you can’t get out of those forms.”

“But Europe is dissatisfied with these forms.”

“Dissatisfied, and seeking new ones. And will find them, in all probability.”

“That’s just what I was meaning,” answered Levin. “Why shouldn’t we seek them for ourselves?”

“Because it would be just like inventing afresh the means for constructing railways. They are ready, invented.”

“But if they don’t do for us, if they’re stupid?” said Levin.

And again he detected the expression of alarm in the eyes of Sviazhsky.

“Oh, yes; we’ll bury the world under our caps! We’ve found the secret Europe was seeking for! I’ve heard all that; but, excuse me, do you know all that’s been done in Europe on the question of the organization of labor?”

“No, very little.”

“That question is now absorbing the best minds in Europe. The Schulze-Delitsch movement.⁠ ⁠… And then all this enormous literature of the labor question, the most liberal Lassalle movement⁠ ⁠… the Mulhausen experiment? That’s a fact by now, as you’re probably aware.”

“I have some idea of it, but very vague.”

“No, you only say that; no doubt you know all about it as well as I do. I’m not a professor of sociology, of course, but it interested me, and really, if it interests you, you ought to study it.”

“But what conclusion have they come to?”

“Excuse me.⁠ ⁠…”

The two neighbors had risen, and Sviazhsky, once more checking Levin in his inconvenient habit of peeping into what was beyond the outer chambers of his mind, went to see his guests out.

XXVIII

Levin was insufferably bored that evening with the ladies; he was stirred as he had never been before by the idea that the dissatisfaction he was feeling with his system of managing his land was not an exceptional case, but the general condition of things in Russia; that the organization of some relation of the laborers to the soil in which they would work, as with the peasant he had met halfway to the Sviazhskys’, was not a dream, but a problem which must be solved. And it seemed to him that the problem could be solved, and that he ought to try and solve it.

After saying good night to the ladies, and promising to stay the whole of the next day, so as to make an expedition on horseback with them to see an interesting ruin in the crown forest, Levin went, before going to bed, into his host’s study to get the books on the labor question that Sviazhsky had offered him. Sviazhsky’s study was a huge room, surrounded by bookcases and with two tables in it⁠—one a massive writing-table, standing in the middle of the room, and the other a round table, covered with recent numbers of reviews and journals in different languages, ranged like the rays of a star round the lamp. On the writing-table was a stand of drawers marked with gold lettering, and full of papers of various sorts.

Sviazhsky took out the books, and sat down in a rocking-chair.

“What are you looking at there?” he said to Levin, who was standing at the round table looking through the reviews.

“Oh, yes, there’s a very interesting article here,” said Sviazhsky of the review Levin was holding in his hand. “It appears,” he went on, with eager interest, “that Friedrich was not, after all, the person chiefly responsible for the partition of Poland. It is proved.⁠ ⁠…”

And with his characteristic clearness, he summed up those new, very important, and interesting revelations. Although Levin was engrossed at the moment by his ideas about the problem of the land, he wondered, as he heard Sviazhsky: “What is there inside of him? And why, why is he interested in the partition of Poland?” When Sviazhsky had finished, Levin could not help asking: “Well, and what then?” But there was nothing to follow. It was simply interesting that it had been proved to be so-and-so. But Sviazhsky did not explain, and saw no need to explain why it was interesting to him.

“Yes, but I was very much interested by your irritable neighbor,” said Levin, sighing. “He’s a clever fellow, and said a lot that was true.”

“Oh, get along with you! An inveterate supporter of serfdom at heart, like all of them!” said Sviazhsky.

“Whose marshal you are.”

“Yes, only I marshal