Leo Tolstoy - Leo Tolstoy - The Complete Novels (The Greatest Novelists of All Time – Book 4)

In the evening at tea, two landowners who had come about some business connected with a wardship were of the party, and the interesting conversation Levin had been looking forward to sprang up.

Levin was sitting beside his hostess at the tea table, and was obliged to keep up a conversation with her and her sister, who was sitting opposite him. Madame Sviazhskaya was a round-faced, fair-haired, rather short woman, all smiles and dimples. Levin tried through her to get a solution of the weighty enigma her husband presented to his mind; but he had not complete freedom of ideas, because he was in an agony of embarrassment. This agony of embarrassment was due to the fact that the sister-in-law was sitting opposite to him, in a dress, specially put on, as he fancied, for his benefit, cut particularly open, in the shape of a trapeze, on her white bosom. This quadrangular opening, in spite of the bosom’s being very white, or just because it was very white, deprived Levin of the full use of his faculties. He imagined, probably mistakenly, that this low-necked bodice had been made on his account, and felt that he had no right to look at it, and tried not to look at it; but he felt that he was to blame for the very fact of the low-necked bodice having been made. It seemed to Levin that he had deceived someone, that he ought to explain something, but that to explain it was impossible, and for that reason he was continually blushing, was ill at ease and awkward. His awkwardness infected the pretty sister-in-law too. But their hostess appeared not to observe this, and kept purposely drawing her into the conversation.

“You say,” she said, pursuing the subject that had been started, “that my husband cannot be interested in what’s Russian. It’s quite the contrary; he is always in cheerful spirits abroad, but not as he is here. Here, he feels in his proper place. He has so much to do, and he has the faculty of interesting himself in everything. Oh, you’ve not been to see our school, have you?”

“I’ve seen it…. The little house covered with ivy, isn’t it?”

“Yes; that’s Nastia’s work,” she said, indicating her sister.

“You teach in it yourself?” asked Levin, trying to look above the open neck, but feeling that wherever he looked in that direction he should see it.

“Yes; I used to teach in it myself, and do teach still, but we have a first-rate schoolmistress now. And we’ve started gymnastic exercises.”

“No, thank you, I won’t have any more tea,” said Levin, and conscious of doing a rude thing, but incapable of continuing the conversation, he got up, blushing. “I hear a very interesting conversation,” he added, and walked to the other end of the table, where Sviazhsky was sitting with the two gentlemen of the neighborhood. Sviazhsky was sitting sideways, with one elbow on the table, and a cup in one hand, while with the other hand he gathered up his beard, held it to his nose and let it drop again, as though he were smelling it. His brilliant black eyes were looking straight at the excited country gentleman with gray whiskers, and apparently he derived amusement from his remarks. The gentleman was complaining of the peasants. It was evident to Levin that Sviazhsky knew an answer to this gentleman’s complaints, which would at once demolish his whole contention, but that in his position he could not give utterance to this answer, and listened, not without pleasure, to the landowner’s comic speeches.

The gentleman with the gray whiskers was obviously an inveterate adherent of serfdom and a devoted agriculturist, who had lived all his life in the country. Levin saw proofs of this in his dress, in the old-fashioned threadbare coat, obviously not his everyday attire, in his shrewd, deep-set eyes, in his idiomatic, fluent Russian, in the imperious tone that had become habitual from long use, and in the resolute gestures of his large, red, sunburnt hands, with an old betrothal ring on the little finger.

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“If I’d only the heart to throw up what’s been set going…such a lot of trouble wasted…I’d turn my back on the whole business, sell up, go off like Nikolay Ivanovitch…to hear La Belle Hélène ,” said the landowner, a pleasant smile lighting up his shrewd old face.

“But you see you don’t throw it up,” said Nikolay Ivanovitch

Sviazhsky; “so there must be something gained.”

“The only gain is that I live in my own house, neither bought nor hired. Besides, one keeps hoping the people will learn sense. Though, instead of that, you’d never believe it—the drunkenness, the immorality! They keep chopping and changing their bits of land. Not a sight of a horse or a cow. The peasant’s dying of hunger, but just go and take him on as a laborer, he’ll do his best to do you a mischief, and then bring you up before the justice of the peace.”

“But then you make complaints to the justice too,” said

Sviazhsky.

“I lodge complaints? Not for anything in the world! Such a talking, and such a to-do, that one would have cause to regret it. At the works, for instance, they pocketed the advance-money and made off. What did the justice do? Why, acquitted them. Nothing keeps them in order but their own communal court and their village elder. He’ll flog them in the good old style! But for that there’d be nothing for it but to give it all up and run away.”

Obviously the landowner was chaffing Sviazhsky, who, far from resenting it, was apparently amused by it.

“But you see we manage our land without such extreme measures,” said he, smiling: “Levin and I and this gentleman.”

He indicated the other landowner.

“Yes, the thing’s done at Mihail Petrovitch’s, but ask him how it’s done. Do you call that a rational system?” said the landowner, obviously rather proud of the word “rational.”

“My system’s very simple,” said Mihail Petrovitch, “thank God. All my management rests on getting the money ready for the autumn taxes, and the peasants come to me, ‘Father, master, help us!’ Well, the peasants are all one’s neighbors; one feels for them. So one advances them a third, but one says: ‘Remember, lads, I have helped you, and you must help me when I need it—whether it’s the sowing of the oats, or the haycutting, or the harvest’; and well, one agrees, so much for each taxpayer—though there are dishonest ones among them too, it’s true.”

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.