530 531
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 Gemman expert in bookkeeping from Moscow, who
for a consideration of five hundred roubles had investigated the man-
agement 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 Gemman had worked it out to the fraction of
a farthing.
The gray-whiskered landowner smiled at the mention of the prof-
its 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 raspber-
ries are lasting this year.”
And in the happiest frame of 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 diffi-
culty 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 inde-
pendently 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 stud-
ied,” he said. “The relic of barbarism, the primitive commune with
each guarantee for all, will disappear of itself; serfdom has been abol-
ished—there remains nothing but free labor, and its fomms are fixed
and ready made, and must be adopted. Permanent hands, day-labor-
ers, 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 con-