Читать книгу Anna Karenina - 2 Classic Unabridged Translations in one eBook (Garnett and Maude translations) - Leo Tolstoy - Страница 105

LEVIN felt intolerably bored by the ladies that evening. He was more than ever excited by the thought that the dissatisfaction with work on the land which he now experienced was not an exceptional state of mind, but the result of the condition of agriculture in Russia generally, and that some arrangement that would make the labourers work as they did for the peasant at the halfway-house was not an idle dream but a problem it was necessary to solve. And he felt that it could be solved, and that he must try to do it.

Having said good-night to the ladies and promised to stay a whole day longer in order to ride with them and see an interesting landslide in the State forest, Levin before going to bed went to his host’s study to borrow the books on the labour question which Sviyazhsky had offered him. Sviyazhsky’s study was an enormous room lined with book cupboards. There were two tables in it, one a massive writing-table, the other a round one on which lay a number of newspapers and journals in different languages, arranged as if they were mats round the lamp in the centre. Beside the writing-table was a stand with gold-labelled drawers containing various business papers.

Sviyazhsky got down the books and settled himself in a rocking-chair.

‘What is it you are looking at?’ he asked Levin, who, having stopped at the round table, was looking at one of the journals.

‘Oh, there is a very interesting article there,’ he added, referring to the journal Levin held in his hand. ‘It turns out that the chief agent in the Partition of Poland was not Frederick at all,’ he added with gleeful animation. ‘It turns out …’

And with characteristic clearness he briefly recounted these new and very important and interesting discoveries. Though at present Levin was more interested in agriculture than in anything else, he asked himself while listening to his host, ‘What is there inside him? And why, why does the Partition of Poland interest him?’ And when Sviyazhsky had finished he could not help asking him, ‘Well, and what of it?’ But Sviyazhsky had no answer to give. It was interesting that ‘it turns out’, and he did not consider it necessary to explain why it interested him.

‘Yes, and I was greatly interested by that cross old landowner,’ said Levin with a sigh. ‘He is intelligent and said much that is true.’

‘Oh, pooh! He is secretly a rooted partisan of serfdom, like all of them!’ said Sviyazhsky.

‘Whose Marshal you are …’

‘Yes, but I marshal them in the opposite direction,’ said Sviyazhsky, laughing.

‘What interests me very much is this,’ said Levin: ‘he is right when he says that our rational farming is not a success and that only money-lending methods, like that quiet fellow’s, or very elementary methods, pay, … Whose fault is it?’

‘Our own, of course! but it is not true that it does not pay. Vasilchikov makes it pay.’

‘A factory… .’

‘I still cannot understand what you are surprised at. The people are on so low a level both of material and moral development that they are certain to oppose what is good for them. In Europe rational farming answers because the people are educated; therefore we must educate our people — that’s all.’

‘But how is one to educate them?’

‘To educate the people three things are necessary: schools, schools, schools!’

‘But you yourself just said that the people are on a low level of material development: how will schools help that?’

‘Do you know, you remind me of the story of the advice given to a sick man: “You should try an aperient.” — “I have, and it made me worse.” “Try leeches.” — “I have, and they made me worse.” “Well, then you had better pray to God.” — “I have, and that made me worse!” It is just the same with us. I mention political economy; you say it makes things worse. I mention Socialism; you say, “still worse”. Education? “Worse and worse.” ’

‘But how will schools help?’

‘By giving people other wants.’

‘Now that I never could understand,’ replied Levin, hotly. ‘How will schools help the peasants to improve their material conditions? You say that schools and education will give them new wants. So much the worse, for they won’t be able to satisfy them. And in what way knowing how to add and subtract and to say the catechism will help them to improve their material condition, I never could understand! The other evening I met a woman with an infant in her arms and asked her where she was going. She replied that she had been to see the “wise woman” because her boy was fractious, and she took him to be cured. I asked her what cure the wise woman had for fractiousness. “She puts the baby on the perch among the fowls and says something.” ’

‘Well, there is your answer! Education will stop them from carrying their children to the roosts to cure them of fractiousness,’ said Sviyazhsky with a merry smile.

‘Oh, not at all!’ said Levin, crossly. ‘That treatment seems to me just a parallel to treating the peasants by means of schools. The people are poor and ignorant, this we know as surely as the woman knows that the child is fractious because it cries. But why schools should cure the ills of poverty and ignorance is just as incomprehensible as why hens on their perches should cure fractiousness. What needs to be cured is their poverty.’

‘Well, in this at least you agree with Spencer, whom you dislike so much; he too says that education may result from increased well-being and comfort — from frequent ablutions, as he expresses it — but not from the ability to read and reckon …’

‘Well, I am very glad, or rather very sorry, that I coincide with Spencer; but it is a thing I have long known. Schools are no remedy, but the remedy would be an economic organization under which the people would be better off and have more leisure. Then schools would come.’

‘Yet all over Europe education is now compulsory.’

‘And how do you agree with Spencer yourself in this matter?’

A frightened look flashed up in Sviyazhsky’s eyes and he said with a smile:

‘Yes, that cure for fractiousness is splendid! Did you really hear it yourself?’

Levin saw that he would not succeed in finding a connection between this man’s life and his thoughts. It was evidently all the same to him what conclusions his reasoning led to: he only needed the process itself, and he did not like it when the process of reasoning led him up a blind alley. That he disliked and evaded by turning the conversation to something pleasantly jocular.

All the impressions of that day, beginning with the impression of the peasant at the halfway-house which seemed to serve as a foundation for all the other impressions and ideas, agitated Levin greatly. There was this amiable Sviyazhsky, who kept his opinions only for social use, and evidently had some other bases of life which Levin could not discern, while with that crowd, whose name is legion, he directed public opinion by means of thoughts foreign to himself; and that embittered landowner with perfectly sound views he had wrung painfully from life, but wrong in his bitterness toward a whole class, and that the best class in Russia; and Levin’s own discontent with his own activity, and his vague hope of finding a remedy for all these things — all this merged into a feeling of restlessness and expectation of a speedy solution.

Left alone in the room assigned to him, and lying on a spring mattress which bounced unexpectedly whenever he moved a leg or an arm, it was long before Levin could sleep. Not one of the talks he had had with Sviyazhsky, though much that was clever had been said by the latter, interested him; but the landowner’s arguments required consideration. Levin involuntarily remembered all that the man had said, and corrected in imagination the answers he himself had given.

‘I ought to have said to him: “You say that our farming is not a success because the peasants hate all improvements and that these should be introduced by force; and if farming did not pay at all without these improvements, you would be right. But it succeeds where and only where (as in the case of the man at the halfway-house) the labourers act in conformity with their habits. Your and our common dissatisfaction with farming shows that we, and not the peasants, are at fault. We have long pushed on in our own way — the European way — without considering the nature of the labour force available. Let us consider the labourer not as an abstract labour force but as a Russian peasant with his own instincts, and let us arrange our farming accordingly. Imagine,” I ought to have said to him, “that your farming is conducted like that old man’s: that you have found means to interest the labourers in the results of their work, and have found improvements which they must recognize as such — then, without impoverishing the soil, you will get double and treble the crops you get now. Divide equally and give half the produce to labour, and the share left for you will be larger, and the labour force will receive more. And to do this we must lower the level of cultivation and give the peasants an interest in its success. How this can be done is a question of details, but it is certainly possible.” ’

This thought strongly excited Levin. He lay awake half the night considering the details necessary for carrying his thought into effect. He had not meant to leave next day, but now decided to go away early in the morning. Moreover there was the sister-in-law with the square-cut bodice, who occasioned in him a feeling akin to shame and repentance caused by the commission of a bad action. Above all he had to get away immediately to propose his new plan to the peasants before the winter corn was sown, so that the work might be done on the new conditions. He decided completely to reverse his former methods of farming.