Anna Karenina - Part 3

Levin, who had long been familiar with these patriarchal methods,

exchanged glances with Sviazhsky and interrupted Mihail

Petrovitch, turning again to the gentleman with the gray

whiskers.

"Then what do you think?" he asked; "what system is one to adopt

nowadays?"

"Why, manage like Mihail Petrovitch, or let the land for half the

crop or for rent to the peasants; that one can do--only that's

just how the general prosperity of the country is being ruined.

Where the land with serf-labor and good management gave a yield

of nine to one, on the half-crop system it yields three to one.

Russia has been ruined by the emancipation!"

Sviazhsky looked with smiling eyes at Levin, and even made a

faint gesture of irony to him; but Levin did not think the

landowner's words absurd, he understood them better than he did

Sviazhsky. A great deal more of what the gentleman with the gray

whiskers said to show in what way Russia was ruined by the

emancipation struck him indeed as very true, new to him, and

quite incontestable. The landowner unmistakably spoke his own

individual thought--a thing that very rarely happens--and a

thought to which he had been brought not by a desire of finding

some exercise for an idle brain, but a thought which had grown up

out of the conditions of his life, which he had brooded over in

the solitude of his village, and had considered in every aspect.

"The point is, don't you see, that progress of every sort is only

made by the use of authority," he said, evidently wishing to show

he was not without culture. "Take the reforms of Peter, of

Catherine, of Alexander. Take European history. And progress in

agriculture more than anything else--the potato, for instance,

that was introduced among us by force. The wooden plough too

wasn't always used. It was introduced maybe in the days before

the Empire, but it was probably brought in by force. Now, in our

own day, we landowners in the serf times used various

improvements in our husbandry: drying machines and thrashing

machines, and carting manure and all the modern implements--all

that we brought into use by our authority, and the peasants

opposed it at first, and ended by imitating us. Now, by the

abolition of serfdom we have been deprived of our authority; and

so our husbandry, where it had been raised to a high level, is

bound to sink to the most savage primitive condition. That's how

I see it."

"But why so? If it's rational, you'll be able to keep up the

same system with hired labor," said Sviazhsky.