Anna Karenina - Part 3

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 amusement 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 landowners, were to do with their millions of hands

and millions of acres, to make them as productive as possible for

the common weal.