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structing 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 organi-
zation 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.
Chapter 28.
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 excep-
tional 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 half-way 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.