Levin, who had long been acquainted with these patriarchal methods, exchanged a glance with Sviyazhsky, and, interrupting Michael Petrovich, addressed the landowner with the grey moustache.
‘How then, in your opinion, should one carry on at present?’
‘Why, carry on the way Michael Petrovich does: either pay the peasants in kind, or rent it to them! That is quite possible, but the wealth of the community as a whole is ruined by such methods. Where my land used to yield ninefold under serfdom with good management, it only now yields threefold when the labourers are paid in kind. Russia has been ruined by the emancipation of the peasants.’
Sviyazhsky looked at Levin with smiling eyes, and even made a just perceptible sarcastic sign to him ridiculing the old man, but Levin did not consider the landowner’s words ridiculous, he understood him better than he did Sviyazhsky. Much of what the landowner said subsequently, to prove that Russia was ruined by the Emancipation, even appeared to him to be very true, new, and undeniable. The landowner was evidently expressing his own thoughts — which people rarely do — thoughts to which he had been led not by a desire to find some occupation for an idle mind, but by the conditions of his life: thoughts which he had hatched in his rural solitude and considered from every side.
‘The fact of the matter is, you see, that progress can only be achieved by authority,’ he said, evidently wishing to show that education was not foreign to him. ‘Take, for instance, the reforms of Peter the Great, Catherine, and Alexander. Take European history. In the realm of agriculture it is still more so. To name only potatoes, they even had to be introduced by force into this country. Our primitive ploughs you know have not been always used. They must have been introduced at the time of the Rurik Princes, and doubtless by force. Now in our case we landlords under serfdom applied improved methods of agriculture: we introduced the winnowing machines and all sorts of tools, organized the carting of manure — all by our authority, and the peasants at first resisted and afterwards copied us. Now that serfdom has been abolished and the power taken out of our hands, our agriculture where it has been brought to a high level must descend to a savage and primitive condition. That is how I look at the matter.’
‘But why? If your farming is rational you can carry it on with hired labour,’ said Sviyazhsky.
‘I have no power. By means of whose labour am I to carry it on?’
‘Here we have it! The labour-power is the chief element of agriculture,’ thought Levin.
‘Hired labourers,’ replied Sviyazhsky.
‘Hired labourers don’t want to work well with good tools. Our labourers understand one thing only: to get drunk like swine, and when drunk to spoil everything you put into their hands. They’ll water the horses at the wrong time, tear good harness, change a wheel with an iron tyre for one without, or drop a bolt into the threshing machine in order to break it. They hate to see anything that is beyond them. That is why the level of agriculture has gone down. The land is neglected, overgrown with wormwood or given to the peasants, and where eight million bushels used to be produced they now only produce eight hundred thousand. The wealth of the nation has decreased. If the same step had been taken with due consideration …’
And he began to develop his plan of emancipation, which might have prevented this dislocation.
But it did not interest Levin, and, as soon as the landlord had finished, Levin returned to the first proposition, and, trying to get Sviyazhsky to express his views seriously, said to him:
‘The fact that our agriculture is sinking, that it is impossible, our relation to the peasants being what it is, to carry on our rational farming profitably, is quite true.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Sviyazhsky, now quite serious. ‘All I see is that we do not know how to farm, and that our farming in the days of serfdom was not at too high but on the contrary at too low a level. We have no machines, no good horses, no proper management, and we do not know how to keep accounts. Ask any farmer; he cannot tell you what is profitable for you and what is not.’
‘Italian bookkeeping!’ said the landowner scornfully. ‘Keep your accounts as you will — if they spoil everything you have got, you won’t have a profit!’
‘Why spoil everything? They will break your inferior Russian threshers, but they cannot break my steam threshing-machine. The poor Russian hack, what d’you call it? … of the breed that you have to drag along by the tail, can be spoiled; but if you keep Flemish drays or good Russo-Danish horses, they won’t spoil them. And it’s by such means that we must raise agriculture to a higher level.’
‘Yes, if one can afford it, Nicholas Ivanich! It is all very well for you, but I have a son at the university to keep, and to pay for the little ones’ education at the secondary school, so that I cannot buy Flemish drays.’
‘We have got banks for such cases.’
‘Yes, and finish by being sold up by auction! … No, thank you!’
‘I do not believe that it is either advisable or possible to raise the level of agriculture,’ said Levin. ‘I go in for it, and have means, but I never could do anything. I do not know to whom banks are useful. I at any rate never spent money on improvements without loss. Expensive cattle bring me a loss, and machinery too.’
‘Yes, that is quite true,’ said the landowner with the grey moustache, and he even laughed with pleasure.
‘And I am not the only one,’ continued Levin. ‘I can refer you to many farmers who carry on rational farming, and with rare exceptions they all make a loss on it. You just tell us, is your farming profitable?’ said Levin, and at once noticed a momentary expression of fright which he had observed before on Sviyazhsky’s face, when he tried to penetrate beyond the reception rooms of his mind. Besides, this question was not quite honest. His hostess had told him at tea that they had engaged that summer a German from Moscow, an expert bookkeeper, and paid him five hundred roubles to audit their accounts; and he found that they lost three thousand roubles-odd a year on their farming. She did not remember the exact figure, though the German had calculated it down to a quarter of a kopeck.
The landowner smiled when the profits of Sviyazhsky’s farming were mentioned, evidently aware of the sort of profits that his neighbour the Marshal of the Nobility was able to make.
‘It may be unprofitable,’ answered Sviyazhsky, ‘but that only shows that I am either a bad farmer or that I spend capital to raise the rent.’
‘Oh dear! The rent!’ exclaimed Levin, quite horrified. ‘There may be such a thing as rent in Europe, where the land has been improved by the labour put into it, but with us the land gets poorer by the labour put into it, that is, by being ploughed up. Therefore there can be no such thing as rent.’
‘No rent? Rent is a natural law.’
‘Then we are outside that law: rent does not explain anything in our case, but on the contrary only causes confusion. But you had better tell us how the theory of rent can be …’
‘Would you like some curds and whey? Mary, send us some curds and whey or some raspberries here,’ said Sviyazhsky to his wife. ‘This year the raspberries are lasting an extraordinarily long time,’ and Sviyazhsky got up cheerfully and moved away, evidently regarding the conversation as finished at the very point where to Levin it seemed to be just beginning.
Having lost his interlocutor Levin continued the conversation with the landowner, trying to prove to him that all our difficulties arise from the fact that we do not wish to understand the characteristics and habits of our labourers; but the landowner, like everybody who thinks individually and in solitude, was obtuse to other thoughts and tenacious of his own.
He insisted that the Russian peasant was a pig and loved piggishness, and that, to lead him out of