542 543
save you trouble, and we should be more free.” Moreover the same
peasants kept putting off, on various excuses, the building of a cattleyard
and barn on the land as agreed upon, and delayed doing it till the
winter.
It is true that Shuraev would have liked to let out the kitchen
gardens he had undertaken in small lots to the peasants. He evidently
quite misunderstood, and apparently intentionally misunderstood, the
conditions upon which the land had been given to him.
Often, too, talking to the peasants and explaining to them all the
advantages of the plan, Levin felt that the peasants heard nothing but
the sound of his voice, and were firmly resolved, whatever he might say,
not to let themselves be taken in. He felt this especially when he
talked to the cleverest of the peasants, Ryezunov, and detected the
gleam in Ryezunov’s eyes which showed so plainly both ironical amuse-
ment at Levin, and the firm conviction that, if any one were to be taken
in, it would not be he, Ryezunov. But in spite of all this Levin thought
the system worked, and that by keeping accounts strictly and insisting
on his own way, he would prove to them in the future the advantages
of the arrangement, and then the system would go of itself.
These matters, together with the management of the land still left
on his hands, and the indoor work over his book, so engrossed Levin
the whole summer that he scarcely ever went out shooting. At the end
of August he heard that the Oblonskys had gone away to Moscow,
from their servant who brought back the side-saddle. He felt that in
not answering Darya Alexandrovna’s letter he had by his rudeness, of
which he could not think without a flush of shame, burned his ships,
and that he would never go and see them again. He had been just as
rude with the Sviazhskys, leaving them without saying good-bye. But
he would never go to see them again either. He did not care about that
now. The business of reorganizing the farming of his land absorbed
him as completely as though there would never be anything else in his
life. He read the books lent him by Sviazhsky, and copying out what he
had not got, he read both the economic and socialistic books on the
subject, but, as he had anticipated, found nothing bearing on the scheme
he had undertaken. In the books on political economy—in Mill, for
instance, whom he studied first with great ardor, hoping every minute
to find an answer to the questions that were engrossing him—he found
laws deduced from the condition of land culture in Europe; but he did
not see why these laws, which did not apply in Russia, must be general.
He saw just the same thing in the socialistic books: either they were
the beautiful but impracticable fantasies which had fascinated him
when he was a student, or they were attempts at improving, rectifying
the economic position in which Europe was placed, with which the
system of land tenure in Russia had nothing in common. Political
economy told him that the laws by which the wealth of Europe had
been developed, and was developing, were universal and unvarying.
Socialism told him that development along these lines leads to ruin.
And neither of them gave an answer, or even a hint, in reply to the
question what he, Levin, and all the Russian peasants and landown-
ers, were to do with their millions of hands and millions of acres, to
make them as productive as possible for the common weal.
Having once taken the subject up, he read conscientiously every-
thing bearing on it, and intended in the autumn to go abroad to study
land systems on the spot, in order that he might not on this question be
confronted with what so often met him on various subjects. Often, just
as he was beginning to understand the idea in the mind of anyone he
was talking to, and was beginning to explain his own, he would sud-
denly be told: “But Kauffmann, but Jones, but Dubois, but Michelli?