Emma Watson Pussy
Books:
Anna Karenina
War And Peace
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that Im a bad manager, or that Ive sunk my
capital for the increase of my rents."
"Oh, rent!" Levin cried with horror. "Rent there may be in
Europe, where land has been improved by the labor put into it,
but with us all the land is deteriorating from the labor put into
it--in other words theyre working it out; so theres no
question of rent."
"How no rent? Its a law."
"Then were outside the law; rent explains nothing for us, but
simply muddles us. No, tell me how there can be a theory of
rent?..."
"Will you have some junket? Masha, pass us some junket or
raspberries." He turned to his wife. "Extraordinarily late the
raspberries are lasting this year."
And in the happiest frame of mind Sviazhsky got up and walked
off, apparently supposing the conversation to have ended at the
very point when to Levin it seemed that it was only just
beginning.
Having lost his antagonist, Levin continued the conversation with
the gray-whiskered landowner, trying to prove to him that all the
difficulty arises from the fact that we dont find out the
peculiarities and habits of our laborer; but the landowner, like
all men who think independently and in isolation, was slow in
taking in any other persons idea, and particularly partial to
his own. He stuck to it that the Russian peasant is a swine and
likes swinishness, and that to get him out of his swinishness one
must have authority, and there is none; one must have the stick,
and we have become so liberal that we have all of a sudden
replaced the stick that served us for a thousand years by lawyers
and model prisons, where the worthless, stinking peasant is fed
on good soup and has a fixed allowance of cubic feet of air.
"What makes you think," said Levin, trying to get back to the
question, "that its impossible to find some relation to the
laborer in which the labor would become productive?"
"That never could be so with the Russian peasantry; weve no
power over them," answered the landowner.
"How can new conditions be found?" said Sviazhsky. Having eaten
some junket and lighted a cigarette, he came back to the
discussion. "All possible relations to the labor force have been
defined and studied," he said. "The relic of barbarism, the
primitive commune with each guarantee for all, will disappear of
itself; serfdom has been abolished--there remains nothing but
free labor, and its forms are fixed and ready made, and must be
adopted. Permanent hands, day-laborers, rammers--you cant get
out of those forms."
"But Europe is dissatisfied with these forms."
"Dissatisfied, and seeking new ones. And will find them, in all
probability."
"Thats just what I was meaning," answered Levin. "Why
shouldnt we seek them for ourselves?"
"Because it would be just like inventing afresh the means for
constructing railways. They are ready, invented."
"But if they dont do for us, if theyre stupid?" said Levin.
And again he detected the expression of alarm in the eyes of
Sviazhsky.
"Oh, yes; well bury the world under our caps! Weve found the
secret Europe was seeking for! Ive heard all that; but, excuse
me, do you know all thats been done in Europe on the question of
the organization of labor?"
"No, very little."
"That question is now absorbing the best minds in Europe. The
Schulze-Delitsch movement.... And then all this enormous
literature of the labor question, the most liberal Lassalle
movement...the Mulhausen experiment? Thats a fact by now, as
youre probably aware."
"I have some idea of it, but very vague."
"No, you only say that; no doubt you know all about it as well as
I do. Im not a professor of sociology, of course, but it
interested me, and really, if it interests you, you ought to
study it."
"But what conclusion have they come to?"
"Excuse me..."
The two neighbors had risen, and Sviazhsky, once more checking
Levin in his inconvenient habit of peeping into what was beyond
the outer chambers of his mind, went to see his guests out.
Chapter 28
Levin was insufferably bored that evening with the ladies; he was
stirred as he had never been before by the idea that the
dissatisfaction he was feeling with his system of managing his
land was not an exceptional case, but the general condition of
things in Russia; that the organization of some relation of the
laborers to the soil in which they would work, as with the
peasant he had met half-way to the Sviazhskys, was not
Anna Karenina page 193 Anna Karenina page 195
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