770 771
Chapter 15.
They had just come back from Moscow, and were glad to be alone.
He was sitting at the writing table in his study, writing. She, wearing
the dark lilac dress she had worn during the first days of their married
life, and put on again today, a dress particularly remembered and loved
by him, was sitting on the sofa, the same old-fashioned leather sofa
which had always stood in the study in Levin’s father’s and grandfather’s
days. She was sewing at broderie anglaise. He thought and wrote,
never losing the happy consciousness of her presence. His work, both
on the land and on the book, in which the principles of the new land
system were to be laid down, had not been abandoned; but just as
formerly these pursuits and ideas had seemed to him petty and trivial
in comparison with the darkness that overspread all life, now they
seemed as unimportant and petty in comparison with the life that lay
before him suffused with the brilliant light of happiness. He went on
with his work, but he felt now that the center of gravity of his attention
had passed to something else, and that consequently he looked at his
work quite differently and more clearly. Formerly this work had been
for him an escape from life. Formerly he had felt that without this work
his life would be too gloomy. Now these pursuits were necessary for
him that life might not be too uniformly bright. Taking up his manu-
script, reading through what he had written, he found with pleasure
that the work was worth his working at. Many of his old ideas seemed
to him superfluous and extreme, but many blanks became distinct to
him when he reviewed the whole thing in his memory. He was writing
now a new chapter on the causes of the present disastrous condition of
agriculture in Russia. He maintained that the poverty of Russia arises
not merely from the anomalous distribution of landed property and
misdirected reforms, but that what had contributed of late years to this
result was the civilization from without abnormally grafted upon Rus-
sia, especially facilities of communication, as railways, leading to cen-
tralization in towns, the development of luxury, and the consequent
development of manufactures, credit and its accompaniment of specu-
lation—all to the detriment of agriculture. It seemed to him that in a
normal development of wealth in a state all these phenomena would
arise only when a considerable amount of labor had been put into
agriculture, when it had come under regular, or at least definite, condi-
tions; that the wealth of a country ought to increase proportionally, and
especially in such a way that other sources of wealth should not out-
strip agriculture; that in harmony with a certain stage of agriculture
there should be means of communication corresponding to it, and that
in our unsettled condition of the land, railways, called into being by
political and not by economic needs, were premature, and instead of
promoting agriculture, as was expected of them, they were competing
with agriculture and promoting the development of manufactures and
credit, and so arresting its progress; and that just as the one-sided and
premature development of one organ in an animal would hinder its
general development, so in the general development of wealth in Rus-
sia, credit, facilities of communication, manufacturing activity, indubi-
tably necessary in Europe, where they had arisen in their proper time,
had with us only done harm, by throwing into the background the chief