Anna Karenina - Part 3

Having once taken the subject up, he read conscientiously

everything 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 suddenly be told: "But Kauffmann, but

Jones, but Dubois, but Michelli? You haven't read them: they've

thrashed that question out thoroughly."

He saw now distinctly that Kauffmann and Michelli had nothing to

tell him. He knew what he wanted. He saw that Russia has

splendid land, splendid laborers, and that in certain cases, as

at the peasant's on the way to Sviazhsky's, the produce raised by

the laborers and the land is great--in the majority of cases

when capital is applied in the European way the produce is small,

and that this simply arises from the fact that the laborers want

to work and work well only in their own peculiar way, and that

this antagonism is not incidental but invariable, and has its

roots in the national spirit. He thought that the Russian people

whose task it was to colonize and cultivate vast tracts of

unoccupied land, consciously adhered, till all their land was

occupied, to the methods suitable to their purpose, and that

their methods were by no means so bad as was generally supposed.

And he wanted to prove this theoretically in his book and

practically on his land.