At first Levin thought of letting the whole of his farm as it stood to the peasants, to the labourers, and to his steward, on the new co-partnership lines, but he very soon saw that this was impossible and decided to divide up the different parts. The cattle-yard, the fruit and vegetable gardens, the meadows and the cornfields, divided into several parts, should come under different sections. The naïve Ivan, who, it seemed to Levin, best understood the plan, formed an artel [workman’s profit-sharing association with mutual responsibility] consisting chiefly of his own family, and became partner in the dairy section. The far field that had lain fallow for eight years was, with the aid of the intelligent carpenter Theodore Rezunov, taken up by six peasants’ families on the new cooperative lines, and the peasant Shuraev rented the vegetable gardens on similar terms. The rest remained as before; but these three sections were the beginning of a new order and fully occupied Levin.
It is true that the dairy farm did not as yet go on any better than before, and Ivan strongly opposed heating the cowsheds and making butter from fresh cream, maintaining that cows required less food when kept in the cold and that butter made from sour cream went further; and that he expected his wages to be paid as before, not being at all interested to know that they were not wages but an advance on account of profits.
It was true that Theodore Rezunov’s group did not plough the corn land twice with the English plough as they had agreed to do, pleading lack of time. It was true that the peasants of that group, though they had agreed to farm the land on the new conditions, did not speak of it as cooperatively held land, but as land held for payment in kind; and that the members of that group and Rezunov himself said to Levin: ‘If you would only accept money for the land it would be less trouble for you, and we should feel freer.’ Moreover, these peasants, on all sorts of pretexts, kept putting off the building of the cattle-sheds and granary they had agreed to put up on this land, and dragged the matter on till winter.
It was true that Shuraev had taken steps to sublet the kitchen garden in small lots to the other peasants; he evidently quite misunderstood, and apparently intentionally misunderstood, the conditions on which the land was let to him.
It was true that often when talking to the peasants, and explaining to them the advantages of the plan, Levin felt that they were only listening to the sound of his voice and were quite determined, whatever he might say, not to let themselves be taken in. He felt this especially when talking to the most intelligent of them, Rezunov, and noticing the play in his eyes, which clearly indicated his derision of Levin and a firm resolve that if anyone was taken in it should not be Rezunov.
But in spite of this, Levin thought matters were getting on, and that by keeping strict accounts and insisting on having his way he would eventually be able to prove to the peasants the advantage of these new arrangements, and that things would then go on of themselves.
These affairs, added to the rest of the farming which remained on his hands, and the indoor work on his book, so filled Levin’s whole summer that he hardly ever made time to go out shooting. At the end of August he heard from a servant who brought back the side-saddle that the Oblonskys had gone back to Moscow. He felt that by not having answered Dolly Oblonskaya’s letter (a rudeness he could not remember without blushing) he had burned his boats and could never visit there again. He had treated the Sviyazhskys just as badly, having left their house without saying goodbye. But neither would he ever visit them again. That made no difference to him now. The rearrangement of his farming interested him more than anything had ever done in his life. He read through the books lent him by Sviyazhsky, and having ordered various others that he required, he read books on political economy and socialistic books on the same subject, but, as he had expected, he found nothing in them related to his undertaking. In the works on political economy — in Mill for instance, which he studied first and with great ardour, hoping every moment to find a solution of the questions that occupied him — he found various laws deduced as governing the state of agriculture in Europe, but he could not see why these laws, inapplicable to Russia, should be considered universal! It was the same with the socialistic books: they were either beautiful but inapplicable fancies which had carried him away when he was still at the university, or they were improvements and patchings-up of the order existing in Europe, with which agricultural affairs in Russia have nothing in common. Political economy maintained that the laws by which the wealth of Europe had developed and is developing are universal and unquestionable laws. The socialistic teaching declared that development on those lines leads to ruin. But neither the one set of books nor the other so much as hinted at explaining what Levin, and all the Russian peasants and landowners with their millions of hands and acres, should do to make them as productive as possible for the general welfare.
Having taken up this question he conscientiously read everything relating to it; and he purposed going abroad in the autumn to study the question further there, so that what had often happened to him with other questions should not be repeated. Often, just as he was beginning to understand the idea in his interlocutor’s mind and to explain his own, he would suddenly be asked: ‘And what about Kauffmann and Jones, and Dubois and Michelli? Have you not read them? You should do so: they have elucidated the question!’
He now clearly saw that Kauffmann and Michelli had nothing to tell him. He knew what he wanted. He saw that Russia had splendid soil and splendid labourers, and that in some cases (such as that of the peasant at the halfway-house) the labourers and land produced much: but that in the majority of cases, when capital was expended in the European way, they produced little, and that this happened simply because the labourers are only willing to work and work well, in the way natural to them, and that their opposition was not accidental but permanent, being rooted in the spirit of the people. He thought that the Russian people whose mission it is to occupy and cultivate enormous unoccupied tracts of land, deliberately, as long as any land remains unoccupied, kept to the methods necessary for that purpose and that those methods are not at all as bad as is generally thought. This he wanted to prove theoretically in his book and practically by his farming.
Chapter 30
BY the end of September the timber for the buildings to be erected on the land let to the peasant-group was carted, the butter was all sold and the profits divided. Everything on the estate was going well practically, at least Levin thought so. To elucidate matters theoretically and to finish his book, which, according to his dreams, would not only revolutionize political economy but completely abolish that science and lay the foundation of a new science (that of the relation of the people to the land) it was only necessary to go abroad and there study what had been done on the subject and find convincing proofs that what had been done there was not what was needed. Levin was only waiting for the wheat to be delivered and to get paid for it, before leaving for abroad. But rain set in, making it impossible to get in what remained of the corn and potatoes, stopped all the work, and even prevented the delivery of the wheat. The mud made the roads impassable: two mills had been carried away by floods, and the weather was getting worse and worse.
On the thirtieth of September the sun showed itself in the morning, and, in hopes of fine weather, Levin began seriously preparing for his departure. He gave orders that the grain was to be got ready for carting and sent the steward to the merchant to collect the money for the wheat, while he himself went round to give final instructions before leaving.
Having got through all his business, soaked by the streams of water that had run in at the neck of his leather coat and at the top of his high boots, but in the most buoyant and animated spirits, he returned home in the evening. The weather grew still worse toward evening, and the frozen sleet beat the whole body of his drenched horse so painfully that it shook its head and ears and went sideways. But Levin under his hood felt comfortable; he looked cheerfully round, now at the turbid streams that ran down the ruts, now at the drops that hung from every bare twig, now at the white spots of unthawed sleet that lay on the planks of the bridge or on the heaps of still juicy willow leaves lying in a thick layer round a denuded tree. Notwithstanding the gloomy aspect of nature around him he felt peculiarly elated. His conversation with the peasants of the outlying village showed that they were beginning to get used to the new conditions.